Personality Development Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Personality Development - Essay Example While some psychologists believe that cognition is the only way to explain or predict personality differences within people, others believe that our personalities develop in differing ways. Whichever theorist you side with, however, it remains that cognition does play a part in the development of the personality, how big a part depends on your views. Cognition, being the mental process of knowing, and dealing with such things as awareness, perception, and reasoning, among others, is an important part of who we are and how we develop. Our personalities come from this perception of our world, what we think, what we feel, how we cope; it all stems from our awareness and how we put this awareness to use. Environmental factors, such as where you live, what you eat, the quality of the air that you breathe, etc, and biological factors, such as your genetic makeup and your pre-natal development play a part in how you process your environment and therefore play a part in the makeup of your personality development. If you happen to have been born prematurely, for example, and your parents both carried a lot of recessive genes and they were passed on to you, and you lived in an area of town close to smokestacks or a lot of overhead wires, your development, and that of your personality would differ from someone born at full term, with no genetic problems, living out in the fresh country air. How you are raised and where you are raised, and your genetic blueprint all have a bearing on how you perceive your world, and hence, how your personality has formed. Evolutionary, biological and environmental factors can result in the development of an aggressive personality. In the study of evolutionary psychology, we learn that it is a combination of a lot of