PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT
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Personality Development
Introduction
Ted Bundy was one of the most notorious serial killers and rapists in the 1970s whose
murder activities shocked everyone. Before been executed in 1989 by an electric chair, Bundy
admitted and plead guilty to killing 36 people ("Ted Bundy," 2020). However, this was not the
true case scenario as further investigations found Bundy to have been involved in more than 100
hundred deaths with all been women. Bundy's troubles started when he was young after her
mother, who was from a religious family, made him believe that he was his sister hence lacked
the emotional connection with her mother. Bundy was very intelligent in school, but his social
skills were not good, which led to the family noticing some behavior change during his teenage
years when he showed a weird fascination with knives.
Despite his lack of social skills and a weird fascination with knives, Bundy attended the
University of Washington, where he attained a psychology degree in 1972 ("Ted Bundy," 2020).
He met his first love in college, but the relationship did not last, leading to a devastating breakup.
It was not long after the first breakup that Bundy was suspected of performing his first murders
due to the missing women reports at the time. Also, all the women Bundy raped and killed
seemed to resemble her college girlfriend, signifying their breakup as Bundy's breaking point.
Personality Development
A person's personality defines us and determines how we react and interact with the
world. According to Soto (2016), even the five big traits Extraversion, Agreeableness.
Neuroticism, Activity, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience are impacted by
interaction with our genetics and the upbringing of a child. Therefore all personality factors can
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be influenced and impacted by a person's environment, which may lead to the development of
dysfunctional personality patterns that may develop into personality disorders in the future.
According to Freud, a person's behavior and personality we all influenced by
psychological forces that operated in three different levels of awareness: the preconscious,
conscious, and unconscious. In his theory, our unconscious thoughts and emotions influence our
behavior even though we may not be aware. According to Tsikandilakis, the unconscious mind
leads to developments in our behavior, which sometimes we refer to as "error in our ways" as we
are not even aware of the reason behind us reacting that way
Childhood experiences are very vital in a person's personality development. According to
Perez, adverse childhood experiences, which can either comprise of maltreatment or upbringing
in dysfunctional household environments, affect a child in various ways. Critical periods in a
person's childhood may have a stronger impact on later outcomes by affecting the child's Big five
personality traits (Specht, 2017). As leaned earlier, personality changes are not fixed and can be
altered by one's environment or current situation. Many research pieces have shown that many
people, at one point in life, want to change their personality traits. However, according to
Hudson,