List of Different Theories for Personality

[strangeling]

What are the different ways that people look at personality? I don't know that much and I'm sure there's a lot I'm unaware of. I think it might be interesting to compare the benefits and drawbacks of each one as well.

For example,
I think Socionics is supposed to be a cognitivist model. This seems good in that it would consider someone's nature in relating a personality, but bad in that it doesn't seem to include how someone's changing behavior would affect their personality, nor does it allow for constructivist or functionalist theories to different differences in personality. So it seems like sometimes parts of functionalism get tied to cognitive functions in socionics, but make the mistake in thinking that people with the same cognitive function would have the same functionalist understanding; for example, Si seems generally explained as a cognitive function that seeks out what is understood by socionics as comfortable, but then there are Si-leading types that can find comfort in things that other Si types find uncomfortable. Then when socionics tries to describe the comforts that Si types seek out, it's trying to apply the same functionalist understanding to all people of a given type, even though people can and often do have different functionalist perceptions/understandings.

*P.S. If this has already been discussed, link please

[mu4]

Socionics is cognitivism and I think purely constructist and functionalist theorys are a bit not applicable to psychology.

I would say that socionics would call personality, a construct that emerges from the human mind.

There's a lot of personality theories.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_psychology

Socionics is a type theory but it has psycho-dynamic as a integral part of its theory. This I think makes both the type side and psycho-dynamic side a bit stronger. It's basically a good combo. Type in socionics has a high potential basis for it's differentiations, which is differences in information preference relating to quality of inter-type relations. There are already plenty of studies in information preference relating to movies, advertising, and various other marketing trends and techniques. Socionics deals with long term compatibility between individuals in close relationships, this is of course a very interesting area of study.

This is fairly out of vogue right now but I see a lot of the same constructs in cognitive psychology but under different terms.

[kadda1212]

Besides Socionics and MBTI I also got in touch with the DISC personality theiry and with CORE. Though I doubt anybody here would know that last one. It's quite popular at my church, putting people into four categories (Captain, Observer, Relationship-oriented and Encourager).
Then Enneagram, the classical four temperaments, astrology, blood types (very popular in Japan), physiognomics...