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In this empirical yet deeply humanistic work, Golan Shahar investigates the dynamic relationship between personality and social factors in complex depression, identifying avenues for research and offering hope for sufferers and treatment providers. Shahar synthesizes research and clinical wisdom to enhance our understanding of complex depression, a mental illness defined by its chronicity, heterogeneity, and serious consequences including suicide. He focuses on Melanie Klein's object relations theory and depressive position, reconceptualizing both from a transtheoretical perspective, with an emphasis on four key factors: demeaning affect; affect regulation; maladaptive schemas and scripts; and a time axis consisting of past, current, and projected future experiences. Shahar also explores how individuals externalize self-critical feelings, in turn creating a malignant social environment and a vicious cycle of self-recrimination. To explain this toxic relationship, Shahar presents ecodynamics, a novel theory examining relationship patterns between the self and their social contexts. The book offers tools and procedures for assessing complex depression and guidelines for integrative psychotherapy. Case examples, including the author's profound personal investigation into his stepfather's suicide, vividly demonstrate the causes and consequences of complex depression.

This book provides a taxonomy of personality traits that are dark, or have maladaptive characteristics, and are connected to destructive behaviors and interpersonal problems. Adaptive features are also reviewed, as are clinical applications and future directions for research. Dark personality traits are connected to a host of behavioral and interpersonal problems. To better understand and address these problems, this book unites personality psychology and clinical psychology to provide an interdisciplinary taxonomy of dark personality traits.The Dark Side of Personality expands upon the'Dark Triad'—narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism—to encompass traits that have largely been ignored or not characterized as dark (e.g., spite, authoritarianism, and perfectionism). Drawing from recent research on the Big Five personality dimensions, each trait is presented as a complex spectrum of adaptive and maladaptive features with unique clinical implications.

The places where people live vary considerably in terms of their social, economic, political, climatic, and physical characteristics. These conditions affect how people from different regions behave and interact with their environments and each other. Geographical Psychology makes the case that understanding of psychological phenomena can be greatly informed by a cross-disciplinary perspective that investigates the spatial organization and geographical representation of such phenomena. The research described in this volume considers how ecological, climatic, and psychological factors contribute or are related to a variety of social indicators, providing a foundation for developing theory and research in this intriguing new field of study.

In Pathways to Individuality, veteran researcher and scholar Arnold Buss examines the personality traits we share with other animalsand those that set us apart from other animals, the social traits that make us distinctly human. Within those general social traits, theres much variability, as Buss explains in this new book, usually differentiated during the crucial periods of human developmentand thats what makes us individuals. Humans make up the only species that has an extended period of childhoodwe play and explore more than other animalsduring which our human traits become canalized and differentiated: Our early interactions with our social environment influence and sharpen the neural and behavioral pathways that distinguish our distinct individuality. In turn, we seek to influence those environments we are drawn to and that help shape our individuality. Drawing from his own published research over a half-century of teaching and writing on personality, Buss masterfully summarizes key theories and recent advances in the study of temperament (aggression, dominance, etc.), the self (self-conscious shyness, self-esteem, identity), and abnormal behavior and style as crucial dimensions in understanding personality and individual differences.