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:
Neurosis is a term mainly used today by followers of Freudian thinking to describe mental disorders caused by past anxiety, often that has been repressed. This concept is more usually known today as psychological trauma.
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, family constellation and birth order set him apart from Freud and other members of the Vienna 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, the inferiority complex, an isolating element which plays a key role in personality development. Alfred Adler considered a human being as an individual whole, and therefore he called his psychology "Individual Psychology".
A sibling is a relative that shares at least one parent with the subject. A male sibling is a brother and a female sibling is a sister. A person with no siblings is an only child.
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. He also made contributions to comparative psychology. He argued that studying the social behavior of humans alongside the behavior of other species, is essential to our understanding of the general laws of social behavior. An example of his viewpoint is his work with cockroaches that demonstrated social facilitation, evidence that this phenomenon is displayed regardless of species. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Zajonc as the 35th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. He died of pancreatic cancer on December 3, 2008 in Palo Alto, California.
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.
A spoiled child or spoiled brat is a derogatory term aimed at children who exhibit behavioral problems from being overindulged by their parents or other caregivers. Children and teens who are perceived as spoiled may be described as "overindulged", "grandiose", "narcissistic" or "egocentric-regressed". When the child has a neurological condition such as autism, ADHD or intellectual disability, observers may see them as "spoiled”. There is no specific scientific definition of what "spoiled" means, and professionals are often unwilling to use the label because it is considered vague and derogatory. Being spoiled is not recognized as a mental disorder in any of the medical manuals, such as the ICD-10 or the DSM-IV, or its successor, the DSM-5.
An only child is a person with no siblings, by birth or adoption.
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.
Walter Mischel was an Austrian-born American psychologist specializing in personality theory and social psychology. He was the Robert Johnston Niven Professor of Humane Letters in the Department of Psychology at Columbia University. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Mischel as the 25th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
In psychology, an affectional bond is a type of attachment behavior one individual has for another individual, typically a caregiver for her or his child, in which the two partners tend to remain in proximity to one another. The term was coined and subsequently developed over the course of four decades, from the early 1940s to the late 1970s, by psychologist John Bowlby in his work on attachment theory. The core of the term affectional bond, according to Bowlby, is the attraction one individual has for another individual. The central features of the concept of affectional bonding can be traced to Bowlby's 1958 paper, "The Nature of the Child's Tie to his Mother".
Frank Jones Sulloway is an American psychologist. 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.
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 belief that middle children are excluded, ignored or even outright neglected because of their birth order. This alleged effect is supposed to occur because the first child is more prone to receiving privileges and responsibilities, while the youngest in the family is more likely to receive indulgences. The second child no longer has their status as the baby and is left with no clear role in the family, or a feeling of being "left out".
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.
