Personality from Biological, Cognitive, and Social Perspectives, T. Maruszewski, M. Fajkowska, M.W. Eysenck. Warsaw Lectures in Personality and Social Psychology.

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Chamorro-Premuzic, Tomas. 2010. Personality from Biological, Cognitive, and Social Perspectives, T. Maruszewski, M. Fajkowska, M.W. Eysenck. Warsaw Lectures in Personality and Social Psychology. Personality and Individual Differences, 49(8), p. 1015. ISSN 01918869 [Article]

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2010.07.027

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This edited volume by Maruszewski et al. covers three big areas of personality research, namely biological approaches (part 1 of the book), information-processing and cognitive functioning (part 2), and socio-cognitive aspects of personality (part 3). Of these sections, only the first provides what the typical student or scholar of individual differences may expect to find under the headings used by the editors. Indeed, part 1 – entitled “On some biological contributions to personality” – offers an up-to-date perspective on the neurobiology of personality, and the main strength of the four chapters in this section is their philosophical depth (quite unusual in this area). Part 2 of the book, which only includes two chapters, is entitled “Nourishment of personality: Information and external conditions”, and the chapters do not really succeed at clarifying what this rather obscure title means. In fact, the first chapter in this section deals with the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive decline (which suggests it could have been included in part 1 of the book), and the second chapter focuses on memory, attention, and auditory processes. Clearly, this part of the book is at odds with the rest and the chapters make a trivial contribution to the volume. On the other hand, part 3 (“Social context: From within persons to among persons”) includes a collection of chapters on sociopolitical attitudes (and their environmental and genetic determinants), prejudice, and brain correlates of social cognition. These are arguably the most innovative chapters in the book and they succeed at “bridging the gap” between social psychology and individual differences via their shared biological processes. Therefore, this book offers a good mix of philosophical chapters on the biology of personality and some interesting chapters on intra- and inter-individual differences in some classic social psychological constructs. More than a cohesive volume on “Personality from biological, cognitive, and social perspectives” (the book’s title), this book provides a somewhat scattered collection of essays that may appeal to individual differences students or researchers looking for “something else”, rather than a mainstream or state-of-the-art review of the three big approaches to personality mentioned in the title.

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Article

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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2010.07.027