| Wen Yiduo(1899-1946) was a famous Chinese poet, scholar, seal carver, and democracy fighter in the twentieth century. His words and characters were recorded in biographies and articles, but his personality has never been completely and systematically analysed in the perspective of psychology. Based on personality theories, the present study comparatively systematically examined his personalities and the determinants, using both qualitative and quantitative methods of psychobiography.Methods and processes: Firstly, 158 articles and 20 biographies on Wen Yiduo were selected. Authors of the above documents were then categorised into family members, friends, students, comrades, colleagues, and researchers. According to Wen’s lifetime and relevant documents, his life can be divided into 6 phases(childhood, studying at Tsinghua, studying in America, seven years back in China, teaching at Tsinghua, staying in south China during the war). Secondly, I selected and statistically analysed the adjectives of personalities. According to the 248 PersonalityAdjectives Table(Zheng, 1997) and the 562 Trait-Adjectives Table(Huang & Zhang, 1992), I read the above documents and selected all the adjectives that described Wen’s personalities, resulting in 290 words as the Personality-Adjectives Table of Wen Yiduo. I counted the frequencies of the above adjectives describing personalities, and analysed the patterns appeared among different authors’ writing and throughout different phases of Wen’s lifetime. Thirdly, I calculated the inter-rater reliability based on the adjectives selected by 3 different raters from 16 articles and 2 biographs that randomly chosen(the Kendall coefficient of concordance for each document was between 0.3 to 0.8). Finally, I explored the determinants of Wen’s personalities, utilising the Critical Incident Method.Result:(1) 290 adjectives of Wen’s personalities were found, and the top ten frequent ones were passionate, respected, patriotic, angry, brave, assertive, outstanding, emotional, positive, and happy.(2) Wen’s family members, friends, students, comrades, colleagues, and researchers commonly thought that Wen’s most salient trait was passionate, and descriptions such as patriotic, assertive, brave, and strong were less salient. However, his family members and friends regarded him as a kind, selfless, energetic and tired person; his students felt his genuineness, approachableness, humility, and uprightness; his colleagues saw his steadfastness and extreme; researchers thought Wen as a proud, innocent, faithful, matured, bold, straightforward, sharp, contradictory, anxious, and solitary person.(3) throughout Wen’s 6 phases, seriousness, devotedness, assertiveness, positive, passion, and happiness were stable among his personalities, but each phase assumed distinctive characters. Specifically, he was quiet, reserved, elegant, and sophisticated during his childhood; he was innocent, obedient, versatile, and persistent when he studies in Tsinghua; he was solitary, agitated, self-respected, rebellious when he was studying in the USA; he was contradictory, hesitated, satisfied, and humble when he returned and worked in China; he was laid-back, morally upright, humble, and approachable; and he was generous and positive when he moved to south China during the war.(4) Determinants of Wen’s personality mainly include: the osmosis of ideal personality in Chinese traditional culture; Wen identified himself with the determined examples with high moral status in history; Wen learnt from his teachers, other people with seniority, and students during their interactions; While developing his self-regulatory system, this system regulated other components in his personality, so that a harmonious relationship among his psychological aspects was formed. Notably, Wen’s public-self and private-self showed an obvious difference. Different authors regarded Wen’s public-self as a good one; Wen, however, stated his private-self was ugly, showing the conflict between “bad me” and “good me”.This study has following implications as regards to the personality-fostering education: fostering passionate and positive personality will enhance adolescent patriotism, constructing self-regulatory system will promote the well-being of adolescent personality, and managing adolescent models will transform external educational forces into their inner growth.With multiple perspectives and levels, this study analyses the personality of Wen Yiduo, from his different lifetime phases, from people with different relationships. This is an innovation and contribution to research methodology. The study has following limitations: Wen simultaneously defined himself as a traitor and an ideal character(junzi), but the psychological dynamics of such behaviour is unknown; further research is needed to answer questions such as the source of the conflict between private-self and public-self. Moreover, due to my own limitations of knowledge, the interpretations of Wen’s personality might be unsophisticated.Conclusions:Patriotism was an important personality of Wen Yiduo, but passion and positivity were salient and unneglectable characters from his childhood to mid-life.The conflict between Wen’s public-self and private-self did not cause him unhappiness. Instead, he often expressed his “good” aspects with pride and excitement when he mentioned his “bad self”. It can be seen that the seeming conflict did not split his personality.Among the determinants of Wen’s personality, cultural osmosis, examples, interactions between teachers and students were all important. Furthermore, the selfregulatory system played a more important role in the process that its sub-systems, self-experience and self-control, throughout many ups and downs, achieved a higher level with another sub-system, self-cognition, completing and integrating Wen’s personality. |
PDF Full Text Request