Author Description

We have devoted our lives to the study of personality and believe this field is one of the most exciting in all of psychology. Thus we were enormously gratified to see the volume of e-mails, letters, and comments from satisfied consumers. At the same time, preparing the seventh edition proved to be a humbling experience. The cascade of exciting publications in the field of personality is formidable, requiring not merely updating but also the addition of major sections of new material. Moreover, in important ways our first edition proved prescient. Rather than organize our text around the traditional grand theories of personality, we devised a framework of six important domains of knowledge about personality functioning. These six domains are the dispositional domain (traits, trait taxonomies, and personality dispositions over time), the biological domain (physiology, genetics, evolution), the intrapsychic domain (psychodynamics, motives), the cognitive-experiential domain (cognition, emotion, and the self), the social and cultural domain (social interaction, gender, and culture), and the adjustment domain (stress, coping, health, and personality disorders). We believed these domains of knowledge represented the contemporary state of affairs in personality psychology, and progress in the field since publication of our first edition has continued to bear out that belief