Welcome to the Personality Analyst blog. I hope this forum will provide a place to discuss personality and personality-relevant information that is of interest to a great number of us. I'll discuss key personality traits like a person's need for excitement (sensation-seeking). I'll look at personality dynamics - including the processes that encourage us to act or help us to refrain from acting. I'll examine issues in personality testing, and other matters regarding personality that might catch our collective attention. I'll hope to use some examples from public personalities as I go along.
My name is John Mayer (not the well-known singer of today, I'm afraid, though I like to sing). I'm John D. Mayer, the psychologist (for a list of people with the name "John Mayer," try here).
When I was in high school, I occasionally read the psychology books my parents had at home. I read parts of those books trying to understand myself and others, but I am not sure how much I learned at that time that was of use. I was young, of course, and probably lacked mature judgment about myself and lacked any kind of special understanding of people in general. The psychology I read was limited as well. Psychologists had only a very approximate idea, at best, of how and why people did the things they did. Over time, however, I developed a habit and a language that was useful in starting to think about people's personalities. Since then, also, psychologists' knowledge of personality has increased dramatically.
I might have been described, at the time, as "psychologically minded." The term "psychological mindedness" was introduced by researchers at the Menninger Institute in the 1940s to describe certain individuals who seemed interested in thinking psychologically - interested in their own and others' thoughts, motives, and feelings. If you are psychologically minded, too (and you likely are if you are on the Psychology Today website), perhaps you will find this of interest.
Although my pulling psychology books off the shelf at home and looking at them when I was young indicated some psychological mindedness, my interest didn't go much further than that at first. I majored in various English-related topics at the University of Michigan (a double major, in Creative Writing and Literature and Dramatic Theory and Criticism). During my senior year, however, I became increasingly interested in psychology.
So after a couple of intriguing years as a writer, I returned to graduate school in clinical psychology. My original intention was to be a psychotherapist. But it wasn't to happen. I became much more interested in research and switched fields, beginning what would become a career-long fascination with personality. That switch occurred just as I finished my dissertation.
I won't bore you with the details of my career up-to-now, but I will say it has been a challenging and fun time. Now I would like to see if I might translate some of the insights I have had as a professor of psychology into something more accessible to others - something that people who are interested in themselves and other people but who are not necessarily psychologists can use to satisfy their own curiosity and, perhaps, improve their lives.
So, I hope you'll find some of the soon-to-come posts about the many aspects of personality intriguing: posts about personality and testing in the news, people in the news who bring such issues to light, and contemporary research. Enjoy!
© Copyright 2008 John D. Mayer
