Name of Student: SHIELA S.

BADIANG
Course: ADVANCED THEORIES OF PERSONALITY
Activity: CRITIQUE PAPER #3

Title: Integrating Personality Structure, Personality Process, and

Personality Development

Introduction:

Personality psychology as a subfield of psychology is the scientific study of psychological

individuality. The directive of this subfield in the psychology discipline is to explain the totality of one’s
personality, which aims to understand the person as an integrated biological/psychological/cultural
organism who, by human nature, shares many features with other persons and yet who is, at the same
time, unique (McAdams, 2013). It is by this goal where personality psychologists aim to provide
comprehensive yet parsimonious descriptions about personality. While there are presented various
perspectives in personality such as psychodynamic, humanistic/existential, dispositional,
biological/evolutionary, and learning-cognitive (Feist et. al., 2018), personality researchers also attempted
to provide a holistic approach in understanding the wholeness of personality covering all possible
underlying factors possibly in one framework, just like the intention of this article.

Article Summary:
The article contents the importance of using the integrated approach of studying the personality
structure, personality processes, and personality development. In this context, integration means is to
examine the interrelationship of structure, processes, and development of personality. The article mainly
intends to explain why integration is essential, to convey what achieving this means, and to offer
preliminary ideas and suggestions concerning the form it might take, along with a proposed research
agenda for completing the integration process. This article is organized into three parts. In part I is
providing the main arguments, part II is reviewing some of the past approaches at (partial) integration,
part III is outlining conclusions of how future personality psychology should progress towards complete
integration.

In part I, the three foci in personality and research such as structure, process, and development are
described and are substantiated in the proposed integrated approach in studying personality. Structure
refers to the manner where traits or states are organized concerning each other among individuals or states
organized within individuals. The model of personality dimensions such as of McCrae and Costa,
Eysenck, Cattel, Tellegen, and the more recently proposed of Ashton and Lee which is the HEXACO
model are the ones being referred to in this article in terms of personality structure. The process is to
identify the psychological and physiological processes involved in generating concrete behavior in
concrete situations. This mainly answers the questions concerning why individuals with different trait
levels behave differently in the same situation and why an individual with a particular trait level behaves
differently in different situations. Providing such explanations requires the articulation of causal or
functional relations. Development is understanding enduring changes in individual trait levels across the
lifespan, both normative changes as well as deviations from norms (Baumert et al., 2017).
The integration of personality structure, process, and development is substantiated using either
process-oriented research or process-oriented theories. The process-oriented research in personality
primarily addressed in explaining behavior, while the process-oriented theories describe ideas about the
particular intra-individual processes that guide behavior in transaction with situational cues and
affordances (Baumert et al., 2017)
In substantiating the personality structure, this article disagrees with the structural model
researchers who assumed that their structural approach to personality through statistical clusters of inter-
individual differences in behavior serve to reveal the underlying causes of behavior. Instead, the authors
of this article contend that structural models need to be systematically linked with process-oriented
approaches to personality, for two reasons:1.) broad traits cannot serve as explanations of inter-individual
differences in behavior if they are not defined independently of the behaviors they are used to explain; 2.)
causes of covariations among behaviors can be understood only by identifying the processes that generate
behavior and individual differences in behavior. On the other hand, personality development is
substantiated through structural and process-oriented research. To have a comprehensive understanding of
how and why behavior varies inter-individually within any given situation as well as intra-individually
across situations, the knowledge of the basic intra-individual processes together with how processes
unfold differently among individuals is deemed necessary. In addition, knowledge of the causal and
functional mechanisms of behavior is required for a full understanding of development. In summary, this
article argues that structure, process, and development are inherently connected (Baumert et al., 2017).
In part II, is the provision of preliminary ideas on how the integration process can be achieved
which is presented with formulated crucial questions. The first question is, what mechanisms and
processes can explain concrete behavior in concrete situations? This tries to explain individuals with
different trait levels behave differently in the same situation, and an individual with some trait level
behaves differently in different situations? With these inquiries, the article expounded upon cognitive,
affective, and motivational processes to explain the variation in behavior across individuals and across
situations. The second question is, what mechanisms and processes can explain the occurrence of
population-level covariation of inter-individual differences in behavior? This inquiry has led the authors
to stress out studying the psychological processes should be in combination with biological and
environmental constraints, including social constraints, explain the occurrence of broad dimensions of
human variability in behavioral patterns. It also claimed that the structure is an emergent property from a
more complex interaction of processes rather than correspondent property between causes of behavior and
personality traits. To explicitly answer the possibility that structure is an emergent property, the authors
highlighted the network approaches, learning-cognitive approaches, and functionalist approaches. The
third question is, what mechanisms and processes can explain enduring changes in relatively consistent
and stable patterns of behavior? This an inquiry to explain how the development is triggered and
perpetuated, in which this article presented approaches to integrate process and development which
concentrated on learning, self-regulation, and self-reflection processes. The assumption about the
enduring changes in personality structure is developed and directly influenced by learning, self-
regulation, and self-reflection (Baumert et al., 2017).
In part III, presented the conclusion, limitations, and future steps of this article. The main
proposition of this paper is that personality process, structure, and development are inherently
interconnected. It concluded that it is deemed necessary to identify the intra-individual psychological
processes that explain the variation of behavior across situations as well as the systematic inter-individual
differences in those processes that explain variation in behavior across individuals, to have a better and
comprehensive understanding of personality. This knowledge is necessary to get insight into how
personality structure emerges and how enduring changes in trait levels and personality structure across
the lifespan come about. Limitations of this article have also been presented: where biological processes
have been recognized, but there was no comprehensive discussion of these processes, their evolutionary
and genetic origins, and how they transmit and modulate thoughts, feelings, and desires was beyond the
scope of this article. The level of processes for the analysis is particularly suited for effective
interventions to change behaviors. Moreover, this article did not address interpersonal or intergroup
processes in the present paper, and such processes are without doubt important for a complete
understanding of personality. The alluded implication of this article is to present a framework to be used
for future personality research, which emphasizes the following viewpoints to consider such as
investigating processes in concert, linking macro-level and micro-level of assessment, the use of multi-
method assessments, and including the causal relations among processes (Baumert et al., 2017).
Critical Analysis:
 Central to this article is stressing out the vitality of integrated approach to advance understanding
of personality, which focuses on these components such as personality structure, process, and
development of personality. Specifically, the structure should be studied by integration with process-
orientation research to explain individual differences, where its process is primarily to explain behavior.
Relevantly, the causal mechanism of the structure is highly emphasized in this article rather than mere re-
descriptions, aggregations, and summaries of behaviors where structural models tend to be as they
postulate.
Contrary to the criticism of this article, in my viewpoint structural model did emphasize the inter-
individual and intra-individual differences across and same situations in terms of the degree of the traits
they possess, but the process of flexibility, change, and development of individual responses influenced
by specific traits are not well discussed by some structural models except for the process of biological and
physiological aspects of traits which is common to all structural models. In the case of the Five-Factor
Theory of McCrae and Costa, there is a clear explanation that though the basic tendencies of our traits are
strongly biological, since our character adaptations which are molded by our traits may have some
variability of responses due to external influences which we constantly interact and find ourselves in a
particular physical or social situation. This can be partly attributed to learning through social influences or
external influences. In addition, the emphasis on self-concept which is influenced by our character
adaptation by McCrae and Costa can be attributed to a psychological in nature process (Feist et. al.,
2018). In my viewpoint of McCrae and Costa's theory explains the causal mechanism and processes why
individuals with different trait levels behave differently in the same situation or why an individual with
some trait level behaves differently in different situations both psychological and biological processes,
but some important factors may not be enough.
The other important underlying factors which are not emphasized in structural models are
proposed in this article, that is accentuating cognitive, affective, and motivational processes (Baumert et
al., 2017). Though these concepts have been long acknowledged in numerous studies in psychology;
however, pointing this out as underlying factors is an exemplary illustration to explain the variation of
personality structures and behavior across individuals and across situations. In which to my assessment,
one of the strengths and/or good points of this article, which covers a distinct view about the study of the
variability of the structure (traits), this despite the consistency and stability of traits. Another strength of
this article that I would like to point out is the emphasis of the network approach, cognitive-learning
approaches, and functionalist approaches, which of course intensified the explanation of (between-person)
structure or the occurrence of population-level covariation of inter-individual differences in behavior.
This underscores the importance of psychological, biological, and environmental processes to explain the
broad dimensions of human variability in behavioral patterns. The third strength of this article is its
proposition to integrate process and development as an approach, which revolves around learning, self-
regulation, and self-reflection. With this approach, my valuation is intensifying the framework of
studying personality.
As my overall assessment of the article’s propositions, the personality perspectives which are
tackled partly in this context are dispositional theory (focuses on structural models – traits), biological
theory (emphasis of the physiological network, change, and adaptation of personality structure, and other
biological considerations), learning-cognitive theory (emphasis of learning in the variability of
personality), social-cognitive theory (emphasis of self-regulation and self-reflection during the process of
development). Its drawback is it fails to include psychodynamic and humanistic perspectives as part of
the psychological process as could be one of the underlying causal factors to the variability of personality
structures.

REFERENCES:

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Miller, L. C., Read, S. J., Roberts, B., Robinson, M. D., Wood, D., & Wrzus, C. (2017).
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