Perfect Personality Profiles Read Online Free PDF

behaviour.
    Questionnaires designed for a broad level of description typically have between four and eight scales. Questionnaires that have narrower scales tend to have 16 to 30 scales to cover all aspects of personality, and they typically take longer to complete. When employers are deciding which personality questionnaire to use, they will try to choose one that will provide an appropriate level of description of the individual for the purpose in question, but when a broad level of description is appropriate it must be remembered that this can conceal some fine distinctions. Measuring at a fine level will require a longer questionnaire. Some broad traits are described in Chapter 4, along with some of the narrower traits that could be embedded within them.
    Types
    Some personality theorists disagree with a trait-based approach. One criticism of the approach is that it is purely descriptive – that is, it tells us how people behave or think but not why they do what they do. It cannot explain why some people develop in one way and others in another. Type theories of personality are also generally used in a descriptive manner, but they are often supported by an underlying theory of how types emerge and develop.
    In the discussion of traits above we looked at the four humours as personality traits. However, it might be better to characterize these as personality types. Although we could imagine a person who is both irritable and lethargic, the humours were actually conceived as personality types. People were not thought of as being moderately melancholic and moderately sanguine, very choleric but not at all phlegmatic. Rather, each person was thought to be of one particular humour. The rather strange names are because the humours were thought to be caused by excesses in different bodily fluids – for example, the sanguine personality was fed by the blood. The star signs are also types in that your birthdate determines the zodiac category you belong to. Even if you are born close to the cusp between two star signs it is the controlling sign at the time of birth that is most important. You are not a mixture of the two.
    One type theory of personality that is the basis for a commonly used personality questionnaire, the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator(®), is founded on the work of Carl Jung. He initially worked closely with Freud but over time developed his own theory of personality. He suggested that there are different modes of interacting with the world, and when we are quite young we develop preferences for certain of these modes. Because of these preferences we develop some modes more than others, and these become our typical behavioural style. For instance, we can focus on the here and now of what we see, hear and sense in other ways to gain a practical acquaintance with the world, or we can perceive things more indirectly through our understanding of what they are or their possibilities and potential. One person, for example, might experience a garden in terms of the colours and scents of the flowers, the sound of bird song and the feel of walking on grass. For another person the same garden might trigger a raft of thoughts – about the ecosystem as a whole, the signs of the impact of pollution or how symbolic it is of the interconnectedness of all living things. These two modes of perception, one with a practical focus on perception and the other with a more abstract focus on intuitions and possibilities, are not on a continuum: they are fundamentally different ways of approaching things.
    Having developed a preference for one of these modes we will tend to use it more than the other. We will, therefore, become more skilled and used to using that approach, and we will be more comfortable using that way of perceiving the world. It will become natural to us to adopt that approach rather than the other, and it will become our dominant way of perceiving things. We will still be able to use the alternate mode, but it will be