This is the very first book that I've ever had and read page by page when I first stepped into taking my psychology major. Thanks to our psychology major teacher, I was able to discover this wonderful book.

Theories and its terms are understandable and well explained, also a good background check on who are the Psychology Theorists behind every theory.

Had to read this cover to cover to look for hints of hope for boards. Well, it did help. A lot! The back stories of each theorist helped me understand more about their theories. I've made a mental note (*and I'm publishing it here so that I'll remember) to reread this next year so that I'll unearth more and more about the theories that suspends the psychological perspective of life into existence.

After reading this, I learned to respect Maslow a lot.

The critique for each theory at the end part of each chapter is awesome. Parsimoniously explained and well-related to current views. Updated researches on the theories are also included.

A very well-organized, comprehensive introduction to theories of personality that covered both abstract, philosophical ideas on humanity and human nature, some of which are empirically defined, and those that were not as per the confines of scientific measurements, still offered deep insights into human nature. A great book for the novice and intermediate students that will introduce them to the science and philosophy of human personality, as well as for the advanced students who are looking for a refresher, to see the ideas and insights from an organized, non-pretentious framework.

Been reading this Theories of Personality. Well, badly needed, anyway, though this is academic book, Feist and Feist made a comprehensive some up of Theories. Very organized and understandable. Though lengthy, well very informative anyway!

i forgot to log(?) this but i passed this course and am now a sophomore!!! hooray !!! thank you feist&feist !!!

Complete theories and history. simple language. could be a guidance for personality theories.

At page 366 I had to drop this book. After pushing through page and page of unscientific bs I had enough. There were practically less than five pages of actual science in the first half of this book. It focuses so much on psychodynamic "theories" that I began suspecting I was reading a textbook on the archaic history of personality psychology.

Karl Popper developed the principle of Falsifiability in order to distinguish the pseudoscience of Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler from real science like the theory of relativity by Albert Einstein.
The book starts with the theories of those two and only gets worse. One can read so much about infants wanting to kill their fathers and fuck their mothers before calling it quits.

Its ideas such as psychodynamic theory that marginalized psychology to be considered part of the humanities. Thus it greatly saddens me that an undergrad text should spend so much time celebrating these men and their armchair speculations.

If you wish to learn about personality psychology I suggest you start with David Buss's text on personality. It starts with the Big Five and the HEXACO model, The prevailing paradigm of current personality research. This is in sharp contrast to Feist's rather historic text.

This is a textbook about the various theories of personality in psychology. For the purposes of the book and for purposes of psychological study, personality as a construct is defined as "a pattern of relatively permanent traits and unique characteristics that give both consistency and individuality to a person's behavior" (p. 4). The textbook I read is the seventh edition (it has since been updated, and I will soon read that for a course), which covers the following kinds of personality theories: psychodynamic, humanistic/existential, dispositional, and learning theories.

One of the benefits of this textbook is that the author Jess Feist evaluates each theory at the end of every chapter according to how useful it has been as a theory and also in terms of the theory's overarching view of human nature. The criteria the author looks at for whether the theory is useful is (1) how well it has generated research, (2) whether the theory is falsifiable (that is, whether it could in principle be disproven), (3) its organization of data (integrating well what is currently known about human behavior and personality development coherently), (4) its guide to action (that is, the theory's relevance to other areas outside of the psychological domain, including with parents, teachers, politicians, and so on), (5) its internal consistency (that is, a theory that has premises that are logically compatible with its other premises), and (6) its parsimony (how simple and straightforward the theory would be to explain phenomena as compared to other theories in terms of simplicity and straightforwardness). The dimensions of human nature that the author looks at for each theory revolve around various philosophical issues, issues related to (1) free will v. determinism for thought and behavior, (2) pessimism v. optimism vis-a-vis human beings, (3) causality v. teleology in the explanation of human behavior, (4) biological v. social influences in shaping personality, (5) a focus on conscious elements v. unconscious elements determining human thought and behavior, and (6) the focus on uniqueness v. similarities among human beings and making judgments about human beings. You can read for yourself as to how the theories stack up based on the above criteria for usefulness of the theories and in terms of the pictures of human nature they create.

Although I enjoyed the textbook and the author's honesty, regarding the theoretical criteria, in many respects the fact that this textbook contains so many theories about personality that are false looks to me to be embarrassingly bad. Imagine opening up a physics textbook and having upward to a few hundred passages devoted to Greek theories of bodies in motion and bodies at rest. Imagine reading page after page of descriptions that have such principles as the following: (1) Bodies fall toward the ground because near the ground is where a body's natural position is. (2) Bodies fall more quickly as they get closer to the ground because they are more excited to be near the ground as they get closer to it. The first principle I just gave is essentially meaningless. The second is false and attributes human intentions to falling bodies. Reading this textbook about personality theories was, for me, much like reading those principles I just wrote. Many of the personality theories advocate false or meaningless principles, some advocate principles that are neither provable nor disprovable, some advocate principles based on little empirical evidence, and so on. The state of personality theory in psychology is embarrassingly bad if so much of this bad philosophy can still dominate the arena of how we think about personality. It's like physics, pre-Newton.

Excellent

A good introduction which compares many perspectives on Personality. Very expensive.

Really good over view of some of the main theories of personality. It’s not too in depth but it’s a solid introduction as the title says.

I read this as a textbook for psych 356 intro to personality

Mystery