Functions of personality. The concept and status of personality

2024 Author: Miguel Ramacey | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 06:11

In modern society, it is customary to consider a person a civil subject, which is a well-established formed unit of society. This is in the past, many years before our era, in primitive communities people were not determined by personal qualities. Then the concept of personality did not exist as such. And today the public needs individuals. After all, everyone is unique in their own way, different from others. And every person who is conscious and participates in the development of society is a person.

The concept of personality and its constitutional legal status

Today, there are many interpretations of this concept. It is revealed in the context of a psychological, sociological or scientific context, considered in a broad sense or in a narrow one. But in all cases, the main idea is that a person is a person who owns consciousness and participates in social relationships. She doesn'tmay be an infant or a mentally unbalanced patient, unable to control himself and fulfill his social role.

There are several specific signs and traits that characterize a person as a person:

• belonging to a social group and fulfilling one's role in society;
• possession of a bright mind and pure consciousness;
• determination not by physiological or genetic properties, but specifically by the psycho-emotional state and connection with the surrounding society;
• protection by a person of himself as the author of his life, that is, self-control and possession of his own "I".

The views of scientists, psychologists and sociologists regarding the definition of the described concept differ. Many of them believe that every person is already a person, since everyone has a total set of stable qualities, has a certain type of temperament and specific character traits. The rest are deeply convinced that one cannot be born as a person, one must become one. Only the one who knows how to control his life and perform his public functions, the one who is responsible for himself and for his actions, can rightfully be called a person.

Every modern person has a set of constitutionally guaranteed rights and freedoms with the assignment of certain duties to society. Such a set of free and mandatory factors is called the constitutional and legal status of the individual. It assumes a fundamental belonging to today's democratic state in the inalienability and guarantee of a freechoice of actions, equality, unity and communications of each representative of the current society. The constitutional and legal status of an individual puts the interests of a person and the protection of his rights before the public in the first place.

The structure of personality and its content

Like all significant systems of social life and all laws of nature, a conscious person has his own personal structure. This structure is multi-level, and each level characterizes it in terms of different moral qualities of a person:

• The biological level includes natural qualities that are common in origin (body structure, gender and age characteristics, temperament, etc.).
• The psychological level combines the psychological characteristics of a person (feelings, will, memory, thinking).
• The social level lies in a specific lifestyle, communication style, justified beliefs, social roles. This includes family, educational, philosophical, financial, authoritative factors that reveal the moral qualities of a person.

Each level reveals the individual components of the personal baggage as a whole. In addition to the level context, the personality structure is considered from the standpoint of its constituent elements. These include:

• reasonableness is a person's ability to think, develop, learn, acquire skills and competence;
• psycho-emotionality - a set of feelings, desires, impulses, motives and other factors opposed to rationality;
• worldview - the perception of the world and the definition of one's attitude to it by any representative of society: a man or a woman, an adult or a child, a realist or a mystic;
• orientation - the integration of character in the ability of a person to independently choose their values and life priorities;
• experience - skills, abilities, knowledge, habits accumulated over time, brought to automatism, habits;
• ability is perhaps the most important tool of the individual, which determines its ability to perform useful activities;
• psychotype - protection of character, behavioral patterns and a person's reaction to what is happening around him;
• temperament - a manifestation of a specific type of temperament, the energy and dynamic component of the manifestation of brightness, speed, strength of emotional response;
• body drawing - a person's supply of his outer shell in a favorable perspective for him.

Varieties of functions

In addition to the structure, an important role in the formation of human consciousness is played by the functions of the individual in society. They involve specific actions performed to achieve the result necessary for a person. Types of personality functions are represented by three main areas: cognitive, affective, motor.

Cognitive functions include all kinds of conscious activity and have nothing to do with the emotional underpinnings of human psychology. They relate to the rational function of the human brain, are aimed atthinking, consideration, mental development and include:

• ability to make decisions;
• manifestation of will;
• subconscious aspiration;
• memory integration;
• the ability to manage memory, memories;
• mindfulness;
• perception of the environment.

Based on the above, it can be noted that the cognitive functions of the individual include everything conscious and unconscious, without sensitivity and emotional manifestations.

Affective functions, on the contrary, abstract from the abilities of the mind and are aimed solely at the manifestation of a person's emotional feelings. By itself, affect, or emotion, is a powerful type of sensitive reaction to a particular action or phenomenon. A manifestation of affect is intensely flowing emotional upheavals. These are outbursts of anger, and outbursts of rage, and overwhelming horror, and an overwhelming sense of joy, and a feeling of deep grief, despair. The affective functions of the personality cover its psyche, connecting the main influencing stimulus with adjacent ones, which entails a complex reaction to what is happening as a whole. Therefore, a person is able to respond and show his feelings and emotional sensations in response to a particular action.

Motor functions of the personality make the main emphasis on the impulses supplied to the motor system of the body and aimed at the implementation of certain movements by the body. The sense of touch sends a signal to the brain to perform an action, the motor system receives it and turns it intomaneuver. Thus, motor skills involve a complex of coordination actions of the nervous, muscular and skeletal systems that ensure the motor work of the fingers, hands, legs, neck, head, body as a whole.

Identity status

In addition to the structural and functional development of a person, social and legal status plays an important role in his formation as a person. It presupposes a central system of rights and duties of a person as a social unit coordinated within it and predetermines his activity in society. The status of a person is determined by the concepts of stability and duration, while the status can be both integral and partial. Fragmentally, it is connected with what exactly a person does in the course of his activity, what is the size of his income, what is his level of education, which ethnic group he belongs to, which gender he belongs to. The combination of individual types of status makes it possible to designate his general personality profile as a whole.

Determining the place of the individual in the social structure of society allows you to build a person's behavioral system. For the first time, the status is assigned to a person at the moment of birth, when, as a baby, he receives the status of his parents, their economic, legal, political and cultural position in society. After, when he begins to exist independently, when his own social and labor activity begins, he is assigned a personal status in society.

The most important and basic meaning of the socio-legal status of a personlies in the fact that thanks to him the formation takes place and the attitude of others around him is formed. For example, if a person occupies a good position, is a qualified specialist, a respected person among colleagues, a loving family man, then the attitude of the people around him will be appropriate, even if these people do not know him personally, but know him by hearsay, in absentia. And the status works inversely for a person otherwise: a young man who is known as a loafer, a boor, a hypocrite will never be respected in society, since his status as a poorly established representative of society will not allow people to think well of him.

Characteristic personality traits

The functions performed by a person predetermine the formation of his characteristic qualities. All of them are conditionally divided into internal and external.

Internal personality traits suggest spiritual richness of a person. These are the very qualities that are not visible to the eye, but are felt after communication. This includes caring, participation, free-thinking, a positive outlook, wisdom. In addition, internal features include self-improvement, which involves constructive thinking, a responsible attitude to everything, energy and purposefulness, as well as a love of order.

The external qualities of a person work to express his appearance. This includes artistry, attractive appearance, sense of style, beautiful even speech, facial expressions and gestures.

Personal temperament

Very often in the practice of private psychologytesting methodology is applied. It applies to most problematic issues that arise in patients in the field of psychology. The temperament test is no exception.

Temperament is a set of human properties that depend on his innate natural psychophysiological character traits. Temperament is considered in the context of those personality traits that predetermine his type from the side of the characteristics of the activity of his mental system within the framework of the intensity, speed, pace of psychological processes.

There are four types of temperament:

• phlegmatic - a person unhurried, unperturbed, having a steady desire and attitude, not showing his emotions and feelings; phlegmatic people are calm and balanced, show perseverance and perseverance in their activities;
• choleric - quick-tempered, fast, passionate, but at the same time completely unbalanced, changes his mood through emotional outbursts, as a result of which he is quickly depleted;
• sanguine person - a person leading an active lifestyle, characterized by liveliness, mobility, impressionability, quick reaction, frequent mood swings, an optimistic outlook on life and expressive facial expressions;
• melancholic - a person easily vulnerable, prone to constant experience of various events, too impressionable, little responsive to external factors.

Psychologically, a personality type test involves a series of specifically selected questions, the answers to which help to identifya person's belonging to one or another type of temperament. Regardless of what temperament a person has, each of its types has its positive and negative sides, so there is no objective opinion about which type of temperament is the best among the others.

Communicative function

From the point of view of the nature of the functions performed by a person, in addition to cognitive, affective and motor functions, it is common for him to perform communicative, educational, mental and social tasks.

The communicative function is the implementation of the exchange of information between people, during which people share their interests, feelings, emotions, attitudes with each other through communication. Its influence on the formation of a personality is very important, since in mutual communication between people a common understanding of the information received is developed, which is not only accepted by them, but also realized and thought over. That is why each process of communication is accompanied by the unity of representation of activity, communication and cognition. And in it the communicative function is a fundamental component of public communications.

Educational personality function

No less important, along with communicative, is the function of education. It is a huge contribution to the development of a person as a mentally developed unit of society and is responsible for instilling in a person a certain baggage of moral qualities, a formed sense of duty and responsibility for one's actions. The main task of the personality education function is to model its specific type - temperament - one that would correspond to social morality at a specific period of historical time.

In modern psychology, the educational function is defined as humanistic, because in the process of education a person is laid the concepts of responsibility, morality, conformity to his environment. Its main goal is aimed at the development, education, training and investment of knowledge in the head of every conscious citizen of society.

Psychic function

Any cognitive process or act performed by a person is called the mental function of the personality. The psyche as a specific property of the brain predetermines the reflection of external phenomena through specifically performed processes of brain activity. So, there are several basic mental functions of a person:

• perception is information taken into account and reflected subsequently in thought processes;
• thinking is the ability of a person to be aware and think about specific thoughts;
• memory is the ability of the human brain to consolidate, store and reproduce information about the outside world and its internal state for its further use;
• speech - the ability of a person to speak and share information with others;
• motivation is an incentive that gives a person an impetus to action;
• emotions - manifestations of feelings and psychological mood, state;
• consciousness - the ability to know what is happening around;
• will - striving for stability and patience;
• attention - the ability to focus and respond to external factors.

Social function

The relationship between people is determined by their dependence on each other. People existing within the same society must interact and perform a number of tasks called social. The social functions of the individual act as a kind of instructions for the performance of a number of specialized activities within the framework of the social division of labor. So, doctors carry out medical activities, teachers - teaching, accountants - accounting, etc.

The main meaning of social functions lies in the fact that each individual, performing various actions in the course of his existence, becomes necessary for another. And in view of this, the essence of the functional dependence of partners in the course of social interaction predetermines the stability of society as a whole. And what else does the state need if not unity and mutual respect between representatives of its social society.