Handbook of Personality Assessment
Chapter One
HISTORY OF PERSONALITY
ASSESSMENT
Personality assessment, as studied and practiced today, has evolved from long-standing
recognition that people differ from each other in how they think, feel, and act and are generally
disposed to behave in particular ways. Awareness of individual differences among
people is almost as old as civilization itself, and the great literature of the world, from
the Greek tragedies to modern fiction, contains vivid descriptions of men and women with
distinctive personality characteristics. (Was there ever a meaner person than Dickens's
Scrooge, or a more decent person after he underwent a change of heart?) Literary depictions
of distinctive personality patterns predated by far the emergence of psychology as a
recognized field of study, and attention to individual differences was brought early into the
beginnings of formal psychological science and practice.
The advent of formal psychological science is customarily dated to the establishment
of Wundt's laboratory in Leipzig in 1879 (see Fuchs & Millar, 2003). ... read full excerpt from Handbook of Personality Assessment ebook
