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.

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.

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 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.

It is time for a psychology of giftedness—time to recognize the developmental differences, personality traits, lifespan development, particular issues and struggles of the gifted, as well as the consequences of not being acceptable. The focus on eminence ignores the exceptionally gifted, the twice exceptional, underachievers, gifted preschoolers, women who chose parenting as the main expression of their gifts, gifted teachers, gifted elders, self-actualizing volunteers—the gifted whose names shall never be known. Gifted babies tend to be responsive infants, sometimes smiling early, which elicits the best from their parents. As the concept of mental age has been abandoned in psychology, there is little awareness that gifted children’s friendship patterns and social conceptions are more related to their mental age than their chronological age. Acceleration and home-schooling can ameliorate the social alienation of exceptionally gifted children. And gifted children demonstrate higher intrinsic than extrinsic motivation.

Evolutionary psychologists argue that passionate love is innate to human nature and is based on biological processes that are universal, applying to people of all cultures. However, it is possible that people fall in love more or less often depending on their culture's social organization and ideology. Research has found that some of the antecedents of falling in love are reciprocal liking, appearance, personality traits, similarity, familiarity and isolation. Even if romantic love occurs in many or even all cultures of the world, it is still reasonable to assume that the experience of being in love is colored by one's cultural values and the society to which one belongs. The emic approach gives us quite a different picture of what people considers love to be from that obtained with the etic approach.