page_title: Hypostatic model of personality
section_title: Towards a contemporary integration
hierarchical_section_title: Hypostatic model of personality / Historical background / Towards a contemporary integration
caption_attribution_description: English: Cloninger's model of personality
context_page_description: The hypostatic model of personality is a view asserting that humans present themselves in many different aspects or hypostases, depending on the internal and external realities they relate to, including different approaches to the study of personality. It is both a dimensional model and an aspect theory, in the sense of the concept of multiplicity. The model falls into the category of complex, biopsychosocial approaches to personality.
  The term hypostasis can cover a wide range of personality-related entities usually known as type, stage, trait, system, approach. The history of the concept can be traced back to Peirce's hypostatic abstraction, or personification of traits. Different authors have described various dimensions of the self, personality dimensions and subpersonalities. Contemporary studies link different aspects of personality to specific biological, social, and environmental factors.
  The work on subpersonalities was integrated into a hypostatic model. The model describes personality aspects and dimensions, as well as intra- and interpersonal relations.
context_section_description: Differentiation between various mental states and behavior patterns on the basis of their relation with brain and social environment became commonplace in contemporary psychology and sociology.  
  On the biopsychological side, functional MRI studies have shown that different behavioral and mental activities involve specific patterns of brain activation, corresponding to psychological states. C. Robert Cloninger defines three independent dimensions of personality, which are related to heritable variation in patterns of response to specific types of environmental stimuli; variation in each dimension is strongly correlated with activity in a specific central monoaminergic pathway: 
  novelty seeking, with frequent exploratory activity and intense excitement in response to novel stimuli, and with low basal dopaminergic activity;
  harm avoidance, with intense responses to aversive stimuli and a tendency to learn to avoid punishment, novelty, and non-reward passively, and with high serotonergic activity;
  reward dependence, with intense responses to reward and succorance and a tendency to learn to maintain rewarded behavior, and with low basal noradrenergic activity. These neurobiological dimensions interact to give rise to integrated patterns of differential responses to punishment, reward, and novelty.
  On the social-environmental side, role theory defines the role as a set of connected behaviors, rights and obligations as conceptualized by actors in a social situation. Thus, roles can be:
  cultural roles: roles given by culture (e.g. priest);
  social differentiation: e.g. teacher, taxi driver;
  situation-specific roles: e.g. eyewitness;
  bio-sociological roles: e.g. as human in a natural system;
  gender roles: as a man, woman, mother, father, etc.
  Intersectionality is a methodology of studying "the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relationships and subject formations".
  Roberto Assagioli uses the term "subpersonalities" for the social roles the person plays in different groups, roles that are mere "characters" played by the person, being different from her central inner Self.
  As a core idea of his transactional analysis, Eric Berne asserts that there are at least three "persons" in each of us, calling them our "ego states": the Child (the emotional in us), the Adult (the rational in us), and the Parent (the authoritarian in us).
  As functioning as a “society of mind”, the self is populated by a multiplicity of “self-positions” that have the possibility to entertain dialogical relationships with each other.
  Internal Family Systems Model combines systems thinking with the view that mind is made up of relatively discrete subpersonalities each with its own viewpoint and qualities.
caption: Cloninger's biological dimensions of personality
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