Personality psychology is a branch of psychology that examines personality and its variation among individuals. It aims to show how people are individually different due to psychological forces. Its areas of focus include:
An incest taboo is any cultural rule or norm that prohibits sexual relations between certain members of the same family, mainly between individuals related by blood. All known human cultures have norms that exclude certain close relatives from those considered suitable or permissible sexual or marriage partners, making such relationships taboo. However, different norms exist among cultures as to which blood relations are permissible as sexual partners and which are not. Sexual relations between related persons which are subject to the taboo are called incestuous relationships.
Alfred Adler was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology. His emphasis on the importance of feelings of belonging, relationships within the family, and birth order set him apart from Freud and others in their common circle. He proposed that contributing to others was how the individual feels a sense of worth and belonging in the family and society. His earlier work focused on inferiority, coining the term inferiority complex, an isolating element which he argued plays a key role in personality development. Alfred Adler considered a human being as an individual whole, and therefore he called his school of psychology "Individual Psychology".
A sibling is a relative that shares at least one parent with the other person. A male sibling is a brother, and a female sibling is a sister. Somebody with no siblings is an only child.
Imaginary friends are a psychological and a social phenomenon where a friendship or other interpersonal relationship takes place in the imagination rather than physical reality.
Birth order refers to the order a child is born in their family; first-born and second-born are examples. Birth order is often believed to have a profound and lasting effect on psychological development. This assertion has been repeatedly challenged. Recent research has consistently found that earlier born children score slightly higher on average on measures of intelligence, but has found zero, or almost zero, robust effect of birth order on personality. Nevertheless, the notion that birth-order significantly influences personality continues to have a strong presence in pop psychology and popular culture.
Robert Bolesław Zajonc was a Polish-born American social psychologist who is known for his decades of work on a wide range of social and cognitive processes. One of his most important contributions to social psychology is the mere-exposure effect. Zajonc also conducted research in the areas of social facilitation, and theories of emotion, such as the affective neuroscience hypothesis.
Judith Rich Harris was an American psychology researcher and the author of The Nurture Assumption, a book criticizing the belief that parents are the most important factor in child development, and presenting evidence which contradicts that belief. Harris was a resident of Middletown Township, New Jersey.
An only child is a person with no siblings, by birth or adoption.
Fraternal birth order, also known as the older brother effect, has been correlated with male sexual orientation, with a significant volume of research finding that the more older brothers a male has from the same mother, the greater the probability he will have a homosexual orientation. Ray Blanchard and Anthony Bogaert first identified the association in the 1990s and named it the fraternal birth order effect. Scientists have attributed the effect to a prenatal biological mechanism, since the association is only present in men with older biological brothers, and not present among men with older step-brothers and adoptive brothers. The mechanism is thought to be a maternal immune response to male fetuses, whereby antibodies neutralize male Y-proteins thought to play a role in sexual differentiation during development. This would leave some regions of the brain associated with sexual orientation in the 'female typical' arrangement – or attracted to men. Biochemical evidence for this hypothesis was identified in 2017, finding mothers with a gay son, particularly those with older brothers, had heightened levels of antibodies to the NLGN4Y Y-protein than mothers with heterosexual sons.
Sibling rivalry is a type of competition or animosity among siblings, whether blood-related or not.
The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do is a 1998 book by the psychologist Judith Rich Harris. Originally published 1998 by the Free Press, which published a revised edition in 2009. The book was a 1999 Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Frank Jones Sulloway is an American psychologist and historian of science. He is a visiting scholar at the Institute of Personality and Social Research at the University of California, Berkeley and a visiting professor in the Department of Psychology. After finishing secondary school at Moses Brown School in Providence, Rhode Island, Sulloway studied at Harvard College and later earned a PhD in the history of science at Harvard. He was a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Sexual orientation is an enduring pattern of romantic or sexual attraction to persons of the opposite sex or gender, the same sex or gender, or to both sexes or more than one gender, or none of the aforementioned at all. The ultimate causes and mechanisms of sexual orientation development in humans remain unclear and many theories are speculative and controversial. However, advances in neuroscience explain and illustrate characteristics linked to sexual orientation. Studies have explored structural neural-correlates, functional and/or cognitive relationships, and developmental theories relating to sexual orientation in humans.
Sibling deidentification is a cognitive identity-formation process that increases the extent to which one sibling in a sibling dyad defines his or her identity in terms of difference from other sibling. Although extremely common, not all siblings deidentify. Deidentification, as a process of difference, is in direct competition with processes that cause similarity in siblings, such as modeling and a shared environment. In most sibling relationships, all of these effects will exert influence on identity formation, some causing identification and some causing deidentification.
Siblings play a unique role in one another's lives that simulates the companionship of parents as well as the influence and assistance of friends. Because siblings often grow up in the same household, they have a large amount of exposure to one another, like other members of the immediate family. However, though a sibling relationship can have both hierarchical and reciprocal elements, this relationship tends to be more egalitarian and symmetrical than with family members of other generations. Furthermore, sibling relationships often reflect the overall condition of cohesiveness within a family.
Niche picking is a psychological theory that people choose environments that complement their heredity. For example, extroverts may deliberately engage with others like themselves. Niche picking is a component of gene-environment correlation.
Middle child syndrome is the idea that the middle children of a family, those born in between siblings, are treated or seen differently by their parents from the rest of their siblings. The theory believes that the particular birth order of siblings affects children's character and development process because parents focus more on the first and last-born children. The term is not used to describe a mental disorder. Instead, it is a hypothetical idea telling how middle children see the world based on their subconscious upbringing. As a result, middle children are believed to develop different characteristics and personality traits from the rest of their siblings, as well as experiencing household life differently from the rest of their siblings.
A firstborn is the first child born to in the birth order of a couple through childbirth. Historically, the role of the firstborn child has been socially significant, particularly for a firstborn son in patriarchal societies. In law, many systems have incorporated the concept of primogeniture, wherein the firstborn child inherits their parent's property. The firstborn in Judaism, the bechor, is also accorded a special position.
Toni Falbo is a social psychologist known for her research on power dynamics in relationships, sibling status, and development of only children. She is a professor of Educational Psychology and Faculty Research Affiliate of the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
