Bernard attempts to explain human behavior by integrating the Psychodynamic, Humanistic, Social-Cognitive and the Trait theorist to understand human differences.

Sigmund Freud postulates that our mind can be divided in three levels via the conscious, pre- conscious and the unconscious. Our mind becomes conscious when activated. Apparently our conscious mind is bombarded with a multitude of stimuli from the environment. We select and respond to the stimuli that we perceive can satisfy our personal goals. When we select the stimuli two mental processes take place. One takes in the stimuli using our five senses. Another takes in stimuli, process it and see many possibilities of responding to them. These stimuli are subsequently stored as information in the pre-conscious level and they become our experiences. Our experiences are either good or bad. Good experiences give us good feelings while bad ones give us bad feelings. When we respond and act on the stimuli two mental activities take place. One is to act on the stimuli using our feelings by retrieving the information from our past experiences at the pre-conscious level. The other is to use our thinking (intellect) at the conscious level to process the stimuli see and many alternatives of responding to them. Apparently, when people act on a particular situation using their feelings, they do not have a choice. Alternatively, when they use their thinking (mental faculty), they have many choices of responding to it. Freud attempts to explain abnormal behavior. When we experience extreme pains, we tend to push these pains deeper and buried them into the unconscious level. When this takes place a tremendous amount of negative psychic energy is generated and directed to the conscious mind short-circuiting and destroying its logical component.

The stimulus- response theorists posit that behavior is a function of our past experiences. They use classical and operant conditioning to understand animal and human behavior. Numerous experiments have been carried out using animals as a subject through the use of punishment and reward. They observed that when an animal is rewarded with pleasurable experiences, it behaves positively. On the contrary, when the animal is punished with painful experiences, it behaves negatively. Base on the deductions from their experiments, they found that they are some similarities in human and animal behavior. Hence they arrive at the conclusion that pleasurable experiences develop our positive traits while painful experiences develop our negative traits. Our behavior can be repeated reinforced or diminished through the use reward and punishment. It explains why certain parts of our personality are dominant while other parts are weak.

The social cognitive theorist proposes that behavior is a function of the environment. We learn from our experiences. Apparently, we learned that both pleasurable and painful experiences can lead to positive and negative outcomes. The old axiom of pleasure begets pleasure and pain begets pain becomes unresolved and mooted. We begin to use our intellect to process the stimuli and anticipates the outcomes of our behavior before we respond to pains and pleasures. For example, when a person gives us a pleasurable stimulus, we create a gap to give time to our intellect to analyze the motive of the person. Then we generate alternative responses and anticipate the outcomes of each response before we act on the stimulus.

The Humanistic theorist advocates that a conducive environment is the foundation to help people to self-actualize. Self-actualization can be defined as the process of learning, growing, becoming and being a perfect person. When we replace positive traits with negative traits in our learning process we self-actualize. Counseling is a tool to help people to self-actualize through self-realization to change for the better. Evidently, a fully self-actualized person is a perfect being. Human beings are imperfect. We have both positive and negative traits. A toxic environment deactualizes a person. Deactualization is the process of changing and becoming a lesser being. Past, current and future experiences determines whether a person to self-actualizes or deactualizes.

The trait theorists attempt to explain human differences using scientific methods by breaking behavior into units. Like a chemist who breaks compound into elements or a physicist who breaks atom into electron, proton and neutron and assemble them meaningfully to explain its processes, the trait theorist breaks human behavior into units known as traits and assemble them using adjectival descriptors to explain human behavior. A trait is defined as the smallest unit that describes a human quality or characteristic. The quality of a human being is determined by how a person thinks feels and does.

Bernard believes that our needs motivate behavior. When we need food we use all means to get it; when we need to be safe we lock our gates and doors, when we are lonely we need friends to interact, when we want to show off, we buy branded stuff, and when we want to improve our quality of life, we seek competencies towards achieving our goals.

Base on this belief, Bernard develop a five dimensional model of personality profile. He uses the acronym KYKO (Know Yourself, Know Other) to name his model. Hence, his personality profile is known as KYKO Personality Profile.

KYKO Personality Profile attempts to integrate the above personality theories to explain human behaviror based on the theoretical construct of the need theorists. His first premise states human behavior is motivated by needs. Base on this premise he clusters human traits objectively into five need clusters via

• Ego need trait cluster which forms a dimension of our personality known as the Egocentric Self – The need for power, image and control
• Sociocentric need trait cluster which forms the second dimension of our personality known as the sociocentric self – the need for love, care, companionship and affiliation
• Security need trait cluster which forms the third dimension of our personality known as the Security Self – The need for safety, system, structure, order and protection
• Self-Actualizing need trait cluster which forms the fourth dimension of our personality known as the Self-Actualizing Self – the need for growth, progress, self development, achievement and fulfillment
• Survival need traits cluster, which forms the fifth dimension of our personality known as the Manipulative Self – the need to adapt, change and be flexible to survive in a turbulent dynamic environment