How is each individual's unique personality formed? What is it about personality that can change, and why is change often so slow? Promising approaches to these perennial questions are suggested by the explosion of recent research in neuroscience and brain functioning. This timely volume presents a coherent, empirically based, and clinically useful framework for understanding personality. Jim Grigsby and David Stevens illuminate links between the organization of the brain and the unfolding of personality, and show how different aspects of personality are mediated by the brain's nonconscious learning and memory systems. Providing new insights for clinicians, students, and researchers, this book builds a critical bridge between existing psychological theories of personality and emerging knowledge in clinical neuroscience.
Jim Grigsby, PhD, is a research scientist at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, where he is Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Geriatrics, and Senior Researcher at the Center for Health Sciences and Policy Research. He attended the University of Kansas and the University of Regina (formerly University of Saskatchewan), and obtained his doctorate at the University of Colorado. The primary focus of his research has been on the neuropsychological capacity to regulate purposeful behavior.
David Stevens, PhD, a practicing clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, is Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. He is on the faculties of the Denver Institute for Psychoanalysis and the Minnesota Psychoanalytic Institute, where he teaches classes in comparative psychoanalytic theory. He is also an adjunct faculty member of the University of Denver doctoral program in child clinical psychology. He lives in Denver with his wife, Jan, and their children, Alex and Abbey.