An important individuality of a person is the expression of his face. It shows not only somatic but also psychological peculiarities of a person. When a person is said to have a meaningful expression of the face, or "he has cunning eyes" or "stubborn mouth", it is clear that it is not an anatomical peculiarity, but an expression in the mimicry of psychological peculiarities peculiar to the individual.
Individual psychological peculiarities distinguish one person from another. An industry of psychological science that studies the individual characteristics of different aspects of personality and mental processes is called differential psychology.
The most common dynamic structure of a personality is the generalization of all its possible individual-psychological features into four groups, forming the four main sides of the personality:
Biologically determined features (temperament, deposits, simple needs).
Socially conditioned features (orientation, moral qualities, outlook).
Individual features of various mental processes.
Experience (volume and quality of available knowledge, skills, abilities, and habits).
Not all individual psychological features of these aspects of the personality will be features of character. But all traits of character, understandably, are features of the personality.
First of all, it is necessary to say about the principal differences in character traits from the common features, which were discussed above.
First of all, character is only one of the substructures of personality, and the substructure is subordinate. A developed mature personality has a good command of its character and is able to control its manifestations. On the contrary, breakthroughs of character, when a person acts directly on the logic of what he or she is motivated by certain traits of character, are typical, say, for psychopaths. We mean adults. As for childhood and adolescence, this is a special conversation.
Thus, the character occupies a subordinate position, and actually the manifestations of character depend on what motives and goals these manifestations serve in a concrete case. That is, the traits of character are not something that acts in itself, is manifested in all situations.
Secondly, the essence of those features, which form the character, can be clarified through the mechanisms of character formation.
Before we talk about these mechanisms, let us fix the main myths that exist in relation to character:
The character is biologically defined, and nothing can be done about it;
The character can be fully brought up and any character can be formed at will under a specially organized system of influences;
There is such a very serious thing as a national character, that is, there are very different structures of character, inherent in different nations, which significantly affect the individual character of all representatives of a given nation.
Every myth has a share of truth, but only a share. There are indeed certain things in character that are related to biological factors. The biological basis of the character is the temperament that we really get from birth, and we have to live with it.
The character has, so to speak, a macrosocial basis. In the myth of the national character there is also a share of truth. There is a lot of debate in the literature about the national character. The main problem was: is there a national character or not? It turned out very clearly that there are, at least, very strong stereotypes about the national character, i.e. that the representatives of some nations demonstrate a fairly strong belief in the existence of certain complexes of features in other nations. Moreover, these stereotypes in the perception of the other nation directly depend on how the nation "behaves". Thus, several years ago in West Germany, research was conducted on the attitude towards the French. Two surveys were conducted at two-year intervals, but relations between Germany and France have deteriorated considerably over the past two years. In the second survey, the number of people who named light-mindedness and nationalism among the characteristics of the French sharply increased, and the number of those who attributed such positive qualities as charm and courtesy to the French sharply decreased.
Are there any real differences between nations? Yes, there is. But it turned out that, firstly, the differences always stand out in a small number of features compared to those in which similarity prevails, and, secondly, that the differences between different people within the same nation are much greater than the persistent differences between nations. Therefore, the sentence passed by the American psychologist T. Shibutani is fair: "The national character, despite the various forms of its study, is in many respects similar to a respectable ethnic stereotype acceptable, first of all, for those who are not sufficiently familiar with the people in question.
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