Completing the Psychobiological Architecture of Human Personality Development: Temperament, Character, and Coherence

Abstract

Three models of personality and its development are described in terms of their psychobiological mechanisms. Personality is the organization within the individual of the psychobiological processes by which we adapt to experience. Personality as temperament involves individual differences in heritable traits that influence the salience of stimuli to which we attend selectively. Temperament is superseded by a model of self that includes temperament and character. The organization of self is described by three character dimensions, which correspond to executive, legislative, and judicial functions. The development of these higher cortical functions is experience-dependent and influenced by social and cultural learning. Temperament and character together can account for some of the self-organizing characteristics of personality development but are incomplete models of human personality and intellectual development. They cannot explain uniquely human characteristics, such as creativity, freedom of will, or spirituality, which involve individual differences in personality coherence. Personality coherence refers to mind as a complex adaptive system functioning as a unified whole, much like the quantum coherence of superfluids. This hierarchy of models is discussed in relation to Baltes’s (1997) hypothesis about the incompleteness of human ontogeny when limited to its first two levels.