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Behavioral Perspectives on Personality

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences

  • 342 Accesses

Synonyms

Radical behaviorism; Reinforcement; Relational frame theory; Rule-governed behavior

Overview

The American Psychological Association defines personality as “individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving” (Kazdin 2000). Many undergraduate psychology textbooks include reviews of various theories of personality, including psychoanalytic, neo-analytic, biological, cognitive, social-cognitive, trait, humanistic, existential, positive, and person-situation interactionist (see Friedman and Schustack 2012, as an example). Although many texts omit learning theory or behavior analytic positions, contemporary behavioral science has a well-articulated stance on what constitutes an individual’s personality repertoire. Other texts that do include behavioral explanations tend to use an overly simplistic and outdated critique wrought with misconceptions (Arntzen et al. 2010). For example, Friedman and Schustack (2012) consistently refer to radical...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, MS, USA

    S. Kathleen Bishop, James W. Moore & Marshall P. Lundy

  2. Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL, USA

    Mark R. Dixon

Authors
  1. S. Kathleen Bishop
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  2. Mark R. Dixon
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  3. James W. Moore
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  4. Marshall P. Lundy
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to James W. Moore .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Oakland University, Rochester, USA

    Virgil Zeigler-Hill

  2. Oakland University, Rochester, USA

    Todd K. Shackelford

Section Editor information

  1. University of North Carolina-Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA

    Charlie Reeve

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Bishop, S.K., Dixon, M.R., Moore, J.W., Lundy, M.P. (2016). Behavioral Perspectives on Personality. 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_962-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_962-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Behavioral Science and PsychologyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences

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