Disposition, temperament, temper, complexion, character, personality, individuality are comparable when they mean the prevailing and dominant quality or qualities which distinguish or identify a person or group.
Disposition applies to the predominating bent or constitutional habit of one’s mind or spirit.
Temperament applies to the sum total of characteristics that are innate or inherent and the result of one’s physical, emotional, and mental organization.
Temper (compare temper under MODERATE vb) implies a combination of the qualities and especially those acquired through experience which determine the way one (as a person, a people, an age) meets the situations, difficulties, or problems that confront him.
Unlike the foregoing terms temper may suggest an acquired or transient state of mind controlling one’s acts and decisions.
Complexion implies some fundamentally distinctive quality based on mood, attitude, and ways of thinking that determines the impression one produces on others.
Character applies to the aggregate of qualities, especially moral qualities, which distinguish an individual at any one time in his development, which constantly tend to become more or less fixed, and which must be taken as a whole into consideration in any ethical judgment of him
Often character means such an aggregate of qualities brought to a high state of moral excellence by right principles and right choices and by the rejection of anything that weakens or debases.
Personality also applies to the aggregate of qualities which distinguish an individual, but the term differs from character in that it implies his being distinguished as a person rather than as a moral being.
In general personality may be said to be revealed in unconscious as well as in conscious acts or movements, in physical and emotional as well as in mental and moral behavior, and especially in a person’s relations to others; thus, one may know very little about the character of an acquaintance, yet have a very definite idea of his personality.
Therefore personality is qualified not as good or bad but by an adjective implying the extent to which it pleases, displeases, or otherwise impresses the observer.
Hence personality often distinctively means personal magnetism or charm.
Individuality implies a personality that distinguishes one from all others; often it connotes the power of impressing one’s personality on others.