This chapter describes many of the theories that involve taxonomies. Most taxonomies of love begin in the same place: The language of love is examined, whether through an examination of film, literature, music, or firsthand accounts of people about their love life. The three primary love styles are eros, storge, and ludus. Eros is a passionate kind of love that is characterized by strong emotions and intense physical longing for the loved one. With storge, should the lovers break up, there is a greater chance than with other love styles that they remain friends. Ludus commonly is displayed by people who prefer to remain single and who see love as a game of conquest and numbers. A pragmatic lover hesitates to commit to a relationship until he or she feels confident of finding the right partner. The different love styles also correlate with some other personality traits.

This chapter links facets of personality, and other individual differences among people, to aspects of their sense of humor, including the way that they use comedy in their lives and the kinds of jokes they generate and appreciate. The study of personality back in the 1940s had grown quite convoluted. It had started in ancient times, when Hippocrates, of the legendary oath, proposed four temperaments. He thought that personality arose from different proportions of fluids in the body, creating a popular link between personality and physiology. By the late 1800s, Sir Francis Galton, brilliant half-cousin of Charles Darwin and noted polymath, reasoned that any important aspect of personality ought to make it into the language. He fashioned a taxonomy based on a dictionary. Humor and creativity relate to each other in curious ways. But both are also correlated with extraversion and intelligence.

Modern personality science has made considerable advances in terms of understanding the nature and distribution of core individual differences across people that offer a more nuanced understanding of personality than prescientific models such as the humoral theory. Nonetheless, current models of personality risk for depression share much in common with these ancient notions, including the proposition that personality and temperamental dispositions toward depressive disorders emerge from biological systems, the properties of which can vary across people, creating differences in their basic reactivity to important classes of stimuli. Depressive episodes are not characterized by disinhibition, but other elements of low constraint may be an outcome of depressive behaviors. Personality traits are important correlates of depressive disorders, and a rich tradition and large empirical literature indicate that traits relevant to basic emotional processes may predict risk for these conditions.

Stress is a central component of many lay conceptions of the causes of depression. The concept of stress, so ubiquitous and easily understood when used in common language to describe psychological distress and challenge, is actually a rather complex construct to measure and model for scientific study. There are a limited number of research designs that are actually adequate for exploring the role of stress in depressive disorders. A few studies have found that positive events may be related to recovery from depression, specifically positive events that represent an end to chronic stress or ongoing deprivation. Stress generation describes the ways in which individual differences in personality and behavior are intimately tied to the creation of stressful circumstances. Patients who are exposed to an environment characterized by high levels of “expressed emotion” by close others fare the worst over time.

This chapter describes that posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can have a significant negative effect on families. In spite of difficulties, it is possible for family members to band together and weather the storm of PTSD. When one member of a family suffers, it affects the entire family. They may not have experienced the traumatic event, but they live every day with the consequences. They are collateral damage. PTSD can affect all members of a survivor’s family: parents, spouses, and children. Divorce is twice as common in families with PTSD. Spouses are at increased risk for domestic violence. People with PTSD are easily startled; they have nightmares, which can interfere with their family members’ sleep; and they can’t handle many social situations, often isolating their families from contact with the outside world. PTSD can also significantly alter the personality, making an individual seem like a different person.

This chapter provides some ways to classify jokes into categories, discusses some theories about what makes something funny, and get into the caveats about why this work can be so difficult. This information can lay the groundwork for humor’s role in communication, personality, health, thought, and the like. Comedy alters mood, thought, stress, and pain. Jokes and laughter may play an important role in health, mental illness, marital bliss, education, and psychotherapy. Although a comprehensive model that explains every funny thing in the world would be quite complicated, humor definitely lends itself to study. Cynicism aside, experiments on comedy and mirth have generated amazing insights in the arts and sciences, leading to new ways to recognize, generate, and use funny material. As ubiquitous and intuitive as comedy seems to be, the grand theory and explanation of all humor remain elusive.

This chapter reviews the literature that shows how, and the extent to which, personality impacts our personal lives. Indeed, research indicates that healthy romantic relationships play a key role in fostering emotional well-being and physical health. Typically, psychologists have viewed nonphysical factors in interpersonal attraction as trivial in understanding initial attraction. It seems likely that the observer’s personality should influence interpersonal attraction. The chapter discusses the possibility of our personality affecting an arguably less obvious outcome, namely, our health. Several meta-analyses have also shown Neuroticism to be negatively related to health outcomes. Specifically, high neuroticism combined with high conscientiousness may lead to protective behaviors. The preferred term in psychology to refer to happiness is subjective well-being. It seems that factors such as health, income, educational background, and marital status account for only a small amount of the variance in well-being measures.

This chapter describes the main causal theories of personality, which deal with the question of why, that is, why people differ in various ways. It addresses the question of personality change and development, that is, whether people can change, and if so, the extent to which they actually do. The chapter also discusses the main factors that contribute to change. To tackle the question of why personality differences between people exist, psychologists have generally occupied three different fields of investigation: the genetic, the biochemical, and the evolutionary. Behavioral genetics is an area of psychology concerned with the assessment of the relative contribution of genetic and nongenetic influences on various individual variables of difference, including personality, intelligence, and psychological disorders. Behavioral geneticists distinguish between two types of environment: shared environment and nonshared environment. The structure of temperaments seems to differ from the adult personality structure.

This chapter discusses the effects of personality with respect to the other, that of getting ahead. The literature examining the impact of personality on career-related outcomes is vast and stretches back to the beginnings of psychology. The chapter reviews the most important research and paradigms concerning the areas of: academic achievement, work performance, leadership and entrepreneurship. Early reviews of the relationship between personality and job performance seemed to suggest that personality was a trivial or insignificant predictor of job performance. Psychological theories focusing on leaders’ personality or traits were influenced by Carlyle’s ‘Great Man‘ theory of leadership, which posited that ‘the history of the world was the biography of great men’. Over the past 20 years, an increasing amount of attention has been given to the area of bad leadership. The literature on personality and leadership suggests that a leader’s personality has a substantial influence on how the group performs.

This chapter reviews the literature that shows how personality influences what is traditionally seen as social and cultural phenomena, such as political attitudes and religious beliefs, and prosocial and antisocial behavior. Right-wing attitudes are thought to encompass right-wing authoritarianism, conservatism, and social dominance. Political attitudes are often seen as malleable, shaped by past experiences or the environment that a person has encountered. As with political attitudes, religious attitudes are socially learned. It is interesting to note the positive link between neuroticism and extrinsic religiosity, which corresponds to Freud’s notion of religiosity as an obsessive act. According to research, the most important personality correlates of prosocial behavior are Extraversion and Agreeableness. The negative link between Conscientiousness and antisocial behavior highlights the fact that conscientious individuals have a higher sense of morality and self-control, which is the tendency to suppress impulsive, risk-taking, and physical behaviors.