Personality types and self-regulation effects for creativity

INTRODUCTION Classification does not explain the individual psyche. Nevertheless, an understanding of psychological types opens the way to a better understanding of human psychology in general.-C.G. Jung. People have distinctive and enduring personalities, still they constantly differ in what they do, feel and think in any particular situation. Personality is the combination of emotional, attitudinal, and behavioural response patterns of an individual in particular. It focuses on major psychological processes of how people are unique and how they are alike. It also refers to the pattern of thoughts, feelings, social adjustments, and behaviors consistently exhibited over time that strongly influences one's expectations, self-perceptions, values, and attitudes. Every individual thus possesses a dynamic and organized set of characteristics that uniquely influences his or her cognitions, interpersonal orientations, motivations, emotions and behaviours in different situations. Our reactions to people, problems and stress are thus influenced by our specific personality types. Personality, although a very commonly used term in all fields, indicates a much broader concept considering it in psychological terms. It comprises of an integration of physical, emotional, social, and intellectual composition of an individual which is expressed in behavior, experiences, outlook, values, beliefs, aspirations, interests, habits, nature and qualities. A traditional description of personality has been given by Gordon Allport (1937), ―Personality is the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine his unique adjustments to his environment.‖ In a more recent definition by Ciccarelli and Meyer (2007) ―Personality is an individual's unique and relatively stable patterns of behavior, thoughts and emotions.‖ Chaplin (1997) defined ―Personality as that pattern of characteristic thoughts, feelings, and behaviours that distinguishes one person from another and that persists over time and situations‖. The study of personality has an expansive and diverse history in psychology with a large quantity of theoretical perspectives. The major theories describing the concept of personality include dispositional (trait) perspective, psychodynamic, humanistic, biological, behaviorist, evolutionary and social learning perspective. However, many psychologists do not overtly categorize themselves with a particular perspective and instead take an eclectic approach,