title: A functional perspective on personality.
abstract: Personality psychology has made enormous progresses over the years by accumulating empirical evidence on how patterns of stable individual differences in behaviours can be clustered systematically at different levels of abstraction (i.e. traits and facets) and how they can predict important consequential outcomes. At the same time, functionally orientated researchers have accumulated a vast body of knowledge on environment-behaviour relations and the underlying behavioural principles, that is, abstract descriptions of the way in which behaviour is a function of elements in the past and present environment. We explore a functional perspective on personality that attempts to bridge the two domains and to exploit the best of both worlds. From this functional perspective, personality refers to the impact of the individual on different types of environment-behaviour relations as well as on the way other factors moderate those relations. We discuss the potential of this functional perspective on personality to organise existing scientific knowledge and inspire future research.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Milan-Bicocca, Milano, Italy.
authors.forename: Marco
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Perugini
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Milan-Bicocca, Milano, Italy.
authors.forename: Giulio
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Costantini
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Gent, Belgium.
authors.forename: Sean
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Hughes
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Gent, Belgium.
authors.forename: Jan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: De Houwer
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D010551:Personality; D010554:Personality Disorders / Q000523:psychology*; D012931:Social Environment
keywords: Behaviour; Environment; Functional; Personality; Traits