The term personality has several different meanings. It is a reasonably distinctsubfield of academic psychology that encompasses a large number of different andoften conflicting theoretical perspectives. Furthermore, it is a discipline that seeksto establish better ways of understanding persons through the use of variousresearch strategies. In later chapters, we will describe many specific examples ofhow ideas, assumptions, and principles proposed by personologists to explainhuman behavior have been tested in empirical research. Another distinguishingfeature of personality psychology is its emphasis on assessment methods to study,understand, predict, and make valid decisions about individuals. Among thesemethods are interviewing, administering psychological tests, observing andmonitoring behavior, measuring physiological responses, and analyzing biographicaland personal documents. Virtually every perspective on personality that willbe addressed in this text uses some assessment technique or another. Accordingly,we have devoted a part of the next chapter and portions of the theoreticalchapters to personality assessment. Finally, as you will see in the pages to come,personality is a field of inquiry that has provided the groundwork for understandingand treating abnormal behavior. In fact, several personality perspectives (suchas psychodynamic, cognitive, and phenomenological) suggest ways to think aboutand deal with behavioral disorders. Nonetheless, modern personality psychologyshould not be confused with abnormal or clinical psychology. To oversimplifysomewhat, personologists are much more inclined to focus attention on normalrather than abnormal functioning. Beyond this, personality psychology has traditionallydistinguished itself from other disciplines within psychology by emphasizingindividual differences in persons. Even though personologists recognize thatthere are similarities in the ways people behave, they are primarily concernedwith generating explanations of how and why people differ from one another.In addition to being a field of study, personality is an abstract concept whichintegrates the many aspects that characterize what the person is like. Such aspectsinclude emotions, motivations, thoughts, experiences, perceptions, and actions.However, we should not equate personality as a concept with whatever aspect ofthe individuals functioning it is meant to describe. Instead, the conceptual meaningof personality is multifaceted, encompassing a wide spectrum of internal,mental processes that influence how the person acts across different situations.Given such a complex meaning, no one can expect to find simple definitions ofpersonality as a concept. Even within the field of psychology we will find nogenerally agreed-upon single definition of the term. There may be as manydifferent definitions of the concept of personality as there are psychologists whohave tried to define it.