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Temporal Dynamics

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Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences
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Synonyms

Idiographic personality; Personality processes

Definition

The patterns and regularities with which personality-related thoughts, feelings, and behavior fluctuate across time and interact with the environment.

Introduction

The concept of personality as a collection of stable immutable traits that characterize and determine our behavior, feelings, and thoughts across time and contexts has long been replaced by a concept of personality as a system of processes and mechanisms that continuously prepare, interact, and respond to an individual’s environment, creating characteristic ways with which individuals navigate their world (Mischel and Shoda 1998). The inherent context-specific nature of these interactions gives rise to considerable within-person variation in behavior. As elucidated by the seminal work of Fleeson (e.g., Fleeson 2004), the personality of an individual can be captured in the form of a multivariate distribution that expresses the habitual tendency and range of...

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Correspondence to Peter Kuppens .

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Kuppens, P. (2018). Temporal Dynamics. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_862-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_862-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

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