Psychology of Personality - Unit 3

Evolutionary Psychology:

• We tend to have personality characteristics that phylogenetically helped our ancestors reproduce

• How we have morphed genetically over time

• If our ancestors were more successful at reproducing, then they were more successful in spreading their traits via genetics

• This led to us

How do we select mates?

• Inclusive fitness

• We look for mates who will increase our chance for survival and survival of relatives

  • Good parenting skills

  • Altruistic behavior

Kin altruism:

• We are attracted to people who favor relatives -> promotes successful passing of genes

  • Defending the dna

  • Meeting the potential family is important

  • Helping genetic relatives, ensuring survival of shared genes

Reciprocal Altruism:

• Helping unrelated people 

  • The risk of helping another is less than the benefit of being helped by the social network formed

  • Norm of reciprocity: if i do something good for you, you will do something good for me

  • Promotes successful passing of genes

Cheaters/Freeloders:

• People who will not help as much as they are helped

• Not reciprocating

The value of family:

• The classic framing effect is found in humans

• Live in family of 600 infected by disease

  • Guarantee 200 live

  • ⅓ chance all live, ⅔ chance all die

  • People select guarantee

• Now you live in a family of 60 infected by disease

  • Doesn’t matter how question is asked

  • People select risky option because phylogenetically, a clan of reduced numbers had decreased probability of surviving and passing DNA

• Framing Effect: Aidas Tversky and Daniel Khaneman 

  • Get people to respond different to question based on how it is framed

Because environments/societies have changed, some of our current traits have little value (and can be problematic)

• Food selection: take advantage of food while possible, sweets + high caloric foods

  • No advantage of eating a lot ad once or caloric for survival

• Personality: aggression and extreme jealousy 

  • Ensuring fidelity of mate

Many things are functional:

• Negative affect (fear of)

  • Snakes

  • Strangers 

  • Heights

• Positive affect

  • Helps lead us to goals

  • Laughing indicates safety, enhances bonds with group

Emotions:

• Accurately perceiving and expressing emotions are critical to social bonding and to reproduction

• Allow us to adjust our behavior to solidify social ties

  • See needs of others, allowing us to share our goods and strengths with them

  • Cooperate to protect against threat

  • Social support improves immune function

    • Giving and receiving

Evolved Psychological Mechanisms:

• Processes which evolved to solve particularly problems associated with survival/production

  • Sexual jealousy

  • Sexual attraction based on appearance

  • Sexual attraction based on male’s ability to provide

  • Sexual attraction based on youth – Imitation

Sexual Attraction Based on Man’s Ability to Provide:

• Given that women have a fairly limited opportunity to reproduce (relative to men), they want to ensure that offspring are cared for 

  • Historically, children with fathers present were more likely to survive 

    • Affluence, to a degree, also predicts survival rates

Jealousy:

• Men are more jealous of sexual infidelity

• Women tend to be more jealous of emotional bonding between partners with other women

  • Want to make sure father continues to support the family 

Sexual Attraction Based on Physical Appearance:

• Good looks are a signal of health

• Men and women prefer bodies, faces that are symmetrical

  • suggestive of “good” DNA and proper neural development 

• Men prefer a low waist: hip ratio (~.7) 

  • Optimal for reproduction 

• Women prefer strong chin and cheekbone structure

  • Indicative of high testosterone levels, defensive against threats

Physical Attraction Based on Youth: 

• Men generally prefer younger women 

  • Greater number of reproductive days lay ahead

Imitation:

• Children, as part of play, imitate adults

• They practice and learn adult behavior

• This helps them utilize behavioral tendencies that have been successful from one generation to the next

Cultural Transmission (very Jungian):

• Cultural “laws” are passed down from generation to generation

  • Not all biological 

• Culture is passed down via: – Stories – Religion – Tools – Technologies – Social organizations

Temperament

Biological Predisposition for Personality-

•  twin studies show this to be highly heritable and highly consistent across the life span

  • Emotionality

  • Activity

  • Sociability

  • self-regulation

• identical twins more similar than fraternal twins

Babies - Thomas and Chess Research

• How do babies handle the stress of parents leaving when given new toys?

• 40% easy - happy and interactive even in amidst of stranger anxiety

• 15% slow to warm up - withdrew and seemed mildly distressed

• 10% difficult - withdrew, were irritable -> in the future, high risk for psychiatric symptoms in childhood

• Rest are variable

• Research indicative of temperament

Jerome Kagan’s model:

• Other People tried to make study more variable

• 21 month old children with their mothers

  • Younger, older experimenters, male come into room to offer new toys and play to see if babies behave similarly

• Fairly reliability, children would either play or cling to mothers

  • Inhibited type: clinged

  • Uninhibited type: engaged with researcher to play with toy

Jerome Kagan’s findings on Heritability:

• Found that heritability of temperament is 0.5

• Inhibited children show increased arousal of the amygdala

  • Fear center of brain using EEG

• Environment plays a role

  • Defining events may shape personality

    • Inherited genetic profile: genotype

    • Observed generic characteristics: phenotype

The Brain and Personality:

• Amygdala: fear

• Left frontal lobe: positive affect/approach emotion, causes us to engage with others

• Right frontal lobe: negative affect/withdrawal emotion, causes disengage

Arousal Regulation (Pavlov):

• Able to tolerate very strong stimuli without (ex: salivating) too much

  • Strong nervous system (muted response)

• Measures:

  • Sweat response - Electrodermal (EDA)

  • Heart rate (EKG)

• Reacted intensely to only minor stimuli

  • Weak nervous system 

Eysenck:

• Data collection

  • Questionnaires

  • Ratings by others: First person to look at readings by others who say what person is like

  • Physiological

  • Objective (behavioral)

• His traits (PEN)

  • Psychoticism (creativity, social deviance, nonconformity)

  • Extroversion-introversion

  • normality- neuroticism (arousal)

  • intelligence

PEN

• Psychoticism

  • Tend towards nonconformity / social deviance

  • Habituate to strong emotional stimuli (violence) quickly 

  • Greater parasympathetic arousal

• Extraversion

  • Strong vs weak nervous systems

  • People with little reaction to stimuli  seeks stimuli more (act like extraverts)

  • Extraverts have low arousal from stimuli, need more stimulus, so engage with more people

• Neuroticism

  • Higher baseline arousal

Parasympathetic nervous system

drives arousal down

Physiological/Biological Underpinnings:

• Relates to theory of psychopathology

  • Anxiety = high neuroticism and introversion

  • Antisocial = high psychoticism and extroversion

Eysenck’s Hypothesis:

• Hypothesis: introverts react more strongly to stimuli relative to extroverts

• After hearing a tone, introverts experience increased brain arousal reactivity

• Extroverts also choose louder background noise

Other Theories about How Biology Affects Personality: Jeffrey Gray

Behavioral Activation System (BAS)

Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS)

Behavioral Activation System (BAS)

• Left frontal mediation

• High BAS, reactive to rewards ->  impulsive behavior

• Low BAS, don’t seek rewards- >  depression 

• BAS generally associated with positive affect

Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS)

• right frontal mediation

• High BIS -> prone for anxiety disorders 

• Low BIS -> greater risk-taking 

• BIS generally associated with negative affect

BAS > BIS:

• Greater left-frontal arousal

• Tend to experience more positive affect throughout the day

• Have a positive affective bias for neutral information 

The Rules of Behaviorism:

• Explanation of observable behavior is the most important aspect of psychology

• Psychology should be reductionistic, less complex

• The most basic explanation of behavior is through environment

• Learning is the most important process to people

• learn via experimentation
  

The Rules of Behaviorism:

• Explanation of observable behavior is the most important aspect of psychology

• Psychology should be reductionistic, less complex

• The most basic explanation of behavior is through environment

• Learning is the most important process to people, how it impacts behavior

• learn via experimentation - what’s rewarded/ punished

Overall Disagreement with Personality Psychology:

• Personality Psychology

  • general/everywhere = what you bring to table

  • enduring = long-lasting

  • largely functional = based on what you learned

• Behaviorism

  • Personality is specific 

  • Temporary 

  • Largely functional

How do We Learn:

• Classical Conditioning: environment elicits a response

  • US -> UR

  • CS, US -> UR

  • CS -> CR

• Often used to explain emotional reactions, like fear

  • Mugged in a dark alley -> fear dark alley

  • Lost of alleys without mugging -> extinction

    • Extinction -> take away fear

Instrumental (Operant) Conditioning

• person acts and the environmental reaction follows

• Pragmatic side of behaviorism

  • Do what elicits a positive reaction

  • Law of effect: people learn due to their effect on their environment

  • Types of Reinforcers: positive and negative, pleasure is a reinforcer, escaping pain too

  • Punishment: decreases unwanted behavior, pain is a punishment

Law of effect:

• people learn due to their effect on their environment

Positive Reinforcment

increases frequency of behavior

Negative Reinforcement

 increases frequency of behavior by taking away negative stimulus

Punishment

decreases unwanted behavior

Types of Reinforcers:

• Primary Reinforcement: 

• Secondary Reinforcement:

Primary Reinforement

• innate reinforcers, like food

• Or having pain taken away

Secondary Reinforcement

• Rewards that are learned to be valued, like money

How we Learn/Teach new things if behaviors must precede reinforcement

• Shaping

• Generalization

• Discrimination

• Superstitious Behavior

Shaping

•  use of successive approximations (teaching dog to roll over)

Generalization

•  take learning from one environment and bring it to other similar environments (bringing a pen to class)

Discrimination

•  doing a behavior in certain circumstances

  • Driving differently when police are present

Superstitious Behavior

• Learning from random reinforcement may impact personality 

Schedules of Reinforcement:

• Continuous Reinforcement

  • Fastest learning: everytime you do something, you get something in return

  • Quickest extinction

  • Fixed ratio: 1

• Partial Reinforcement

  • Slower learning but more resistant to extinction

Partial Reinforcement

• Slower learning but more resistant to extinction

• Fixed ratio

• Variable ratio: most resistant to extinction

• Fixed interval:

• Variable Interval:

Fixed Ratio

• receive reward for X behaviors, X is fixed

  • Ex: every ten lever presses, receive food

• least resistant to extinction

Variable Ratio

•  most resistant to extinction

  • On average (10,8, 13) 

• Unpredictable amount of responses 

• Ex: slot machine

Fixed interval

• time, receive reward for first behavior after Y time

  • Ex: ten minutes of waiting to receive reward 

• third most resistant to extinction

Variable Interval:

•  after ten minutes on average, get reward 

• 2nd most resistant to extinction

• Unpredictable amount of time

• Ex: email checking

Prepared Learning

• Some things are easier to learn than others, perhaps due to phylogenetic reasons

• Evidence:

  • Taste aversion rather than other senses

  • Fear of spiders/snakes quickly learned

    • Not electrical outlet or doors

    • not biological

Dollard and Miller:

• In 1950, wrote Personality and Psychotherapy

  • Translation of psychotherapy into learning

• Both worked with behaviorist Clark Hull at Yale who emphasized unobservables (drives) rather than observable environments

  • Drives originate in the environment or in the person (hunger)

2 Types of Drives:

• Primary

  • Physiological drives (pain + hunger)

• Secondary

  • Acquired on the basis of associating event with satisfaction/frustration of the primary drives

    • Fear from a painful stimulus

• Behaviors are reinforced to the degree that drives are reduced

Cues:

• Discriminative stimuli that informs how, when, and how quickly a response is made

  • Sights, smells, even internal dialogue

  • Based on environment

• Responses

  • We have a multitude of possible responses to a given situation

    • The most likely response is called dominant response

• Rewards

  • Again, primary and secondary rewards 

The gradient of (effects of) Reward

• The quicker reward is given following a desirable behavior, the more likely the behavior will be strengthened

  • Immediate versus delayed gratification
    

Anticipatory Response:

• We learn to behave more quickly in response to reward or punishment

• Poor at removing hand from electrical cord, gets better at time with anticipation

• Applies to relationships

The Learning Process:

• The Learning Dilemma

  • If the dominant response reduces our drives, no additional learning will occur

  • If it does not, or if we don’t like the dominant response, we have a dilemma

  • Ex: not liking planes

• To create new learning, a situation to promote a desire response must be arranged

  • May need to coax the desired response verbally or via modeling

    • Confront issue of planes and go on them to extinguish it

  • Undesired responses can be punished or at least not rewarded

Extinction and Spontaneous Recovery

• Undesired responses that are not met with reward will eventually be extinguishes

• However, the response can occasionally reoccur after time (spontaneous recover)

  • They re-extinguish more quickly this time, when they are met without reward or with punishment

Critical Training Periods in Childhood

• Feeding

• Cleanliness Training

• Early Sex Training

• Anger-Anxiety Conflicts

Feeding

• Primary reinforcer: milk

• Secondary reinforcer: attention of parent 

• What behavior, when hungry, gets reinforced: cries

• Children who are not fed when crying learn to be apathetic and apprehensive

Cleanliness Training

• Initially learns full bladder and bowels require urination

• But then needs to learn a more complex behavior, seeing bathroom, feeling toilet on legs, etc)

• If this process is rushed, child may learn to avoid bathroom for fear of punishment

Early Sex Training

• Masturbation is often met with punishment

  • Leads to approach-avoid anxiety

• Child may become anxious when experiencing sexual feelings

Anger-Anxiety Conflicts

• Children are often frustrated by lack of skill, sibling rivalry, etc -> anger

• Anger is often met with punishment

• Anger becomes very anxiety-provoking

  • Anger should be motivating, not simply labeled as bad and repressed

Approach-Avoidance Conflicts

• If one end state is positive with little negative, it is easy to make the decision

  • Go for it

• Similarly, if one end state is clearly negative with little positive

  • Get out

• 4 Conflicts:

  • Avoidance-Avoidance Conflict (often difficult)

  • Approach-Approach Conflict (not too bad)

  • Approach-Avoidance Conflict

Avoidance-Avoidance Conflict (often difficult)

• Choosing between 2 undesirable end-states (going to dentist to get root canal)

• Movement in either direction increases anxiety

• To get a change, one could increase or decrease the punishment of one of them

Approach-Approach Conflict (not too bad)

• Choosing between two positive end-states

• Any movement in one direction will make it easier to attain

Approach-Avoidance Conflict

• Choosing whether to approach or avoid an end-state with positive and negative attributes

  • Ex: work party

• At the point of “cross-over,” there is much anxiety

  • Relaxation training may be helpful to persons who have difficulty with such situations (which abound in our society)

Double Approach-Avoidance Conflict

• Choosing between two end-states, each with positive and negative aspects

• After the choice has been made, sometimes people “waffle” at the cross-over point and no longer approach the goal 

  • Again, relaxation training may be helpful

Frustration-aggression hypothesis:

• Frustration is necessary and sufficient condition for aggression

• Frustration: any interruption of a goal-directed behavior

• Too strong, but has survived in a weaker form:

  • Frustration that is intense or arbitrarily imposed increases aggression

Aggression:

• Is often rewarded

  • You may get what you want (at least initially)

• Is often elicited by cues in one’s environment

  • Observe others in the environment and sense what they expect to do

• May be learned

  • From television and the like

Similar application to therapy:

• Personality may be viewed in terms of habits

  • Links between stimuli and responses established by learning

• All behavior normal or pathological is established via drive-reduction learning (do stuff to make us feel better)

  • Learn to fear dog because previously bitten

  • Learning response is initially adaptive: dog -> fear -> run -> less fear

• Therapy

  • Involves replacing problematic habits

  • Place in room with puppies to reduce fear (extinguish)

Repression in Freud vs Dollard/Miller

• Freud

  • Repression is motivated

  • Ideas are banished to unconscious

• Dollard and Miller

  • Repression is not thinking about a topic and being reinforced for not thinking about it (decreased anxiety)

Regression in Freud vs Dollard/Miller

• Freud

  • A more primitive defense mechanism to reduce anxiety

• Dollard and Miller

  • Animal and human research shows that enhanced drive motivation disrupts poorly learned responses and facilitates well-learned responses

  • Habits acquired in early life are better learned

Freud vs Dollard/Miller in Psychosexual Development

• Freud: conflict during psychosexual stages leads to neurotic personalities

• Dollard and miller: parents can produce conflict in the areas of hunger, elimination, sex, and aggression by punishing child’s attempt at drive reduction

Applications of Instrumental Conditioning: Parent Training

• Catch them being good

  • Avoid accidentally rewarding bad behavior

• Use mild punishment for bad behaviors

  • Actively ignore bad behavior 

  • Use time outs to minimize positive reinforcement

• Social skills training

  • Helps to increase rewards from social world

• Token economy

  • Earn and lose for good and bad behavior, respectively

Applications of Classical Conditioning: Therapy

• Flooding – Repeated pairing of aversive stimuli with reinforcement

  • Relaxation training (deep breathing, progressive muscle relaxation)

    • You cannot be relaxed and tense at the same time!! 

• Systematic Desensitization

  • Make hierarchy

  • Relaxation training

• Aversion Therapy

  • Repeated pairing of undesirable pleasurable stimuli with punishment 

• Sensate Focus – Touch with goal of pleasure; relax with touch

Modeling - Processes in Observational Learning

Modeling:

• Processes in Observational Learning

  • Attention

  • Retention

  • Motor processes

  • Motivation

Attentional Processes

Model

•  – Age & Sex – 

• Prestige & Status 

  • the higher the better!

• Kind of Behavior Performed 

  • Complex are less imitated, if you are modeling something people have trouble doing, they are more likely not to do it

Observer

• Self-confidence and esteem

• Past reinforcement

  • If previously reinforced then more likely to imitate

Motor Reproduction and Motivation

• Can you do it

• Do you want to do it

  • Can be external or vicarious reinforcement (feel good doing it) (much self-reinforcement: set standards and give rewards to self)

    • The latter is related to self-efficacy and standards. If standards are too high = depression

    • take small steps, not giant steps

Self-Efficacy

• Belief that one can organize and execute given courses of action required to deal with prospective situations

• 4 sources:

  • Performance attainment: previous successes and failures

  • Vicarious Experiences: seeing others succeed or fail

  • Verbal persuasion: others telling you can/can’t do it

  • Physiological arousal: level of fear/calm

    • Yerkes-dodson curve, y-axis = function, and arousal (heart rate) = x-axis

Internal Locus of Control

• More influence on environment

• Study harder and receive higher grades

• Greater self-control

• Fewer relapses when quitting smoking

• More likely to engage in exercise to lose weight

• More likely to wear seatbelts

• Preventive dental care

• Tend to see this increase over time as age increases

Measure of Perceived Control:

• Associated with self-efficacy

• external/internal locus of control

Cognitive Social Learning Theory (CSLT)

• Walter Mischel and Albert Bandura

• Cognitive model- about how people think and interact with world

• Stresses important of personality and environment

  • Stresses importance of mental representations of world

• Focuses on process of learning

Consistency Paradox:

• Intuitively see people as consistent but research suggest they are not

• Correlation between personality traits and behavior is r= 0.3 maximum (personality coefficient)

  • Behavior doesn’t consistently predict personality 

• Behavior is largely situation-specific

• CSLT doesn’t expect behavior to be consistent across situations, but depends on rewards/punishment it produces in that situation

Why do you believe people are consistent in personality traits:

Mischel argues that it is in the eye in the beholder

• Self-fulfilling prophecy: our belief in traits make us see people similarly

• We are the situation

  • Helps us see consistency

• We see people in similar situations

• Want to make things simple

Consistency is only expected if:

• Same behavior is reinforced across environments

• Learning history dictates when and how a person acts in a given situation

• If a person can’t discriminate between environments

  • Fits into personality theory because people who can discriminate between situations are well-adapted

Traits According to Mischel and Bandura:

• Traits are not causes but summary labels for multiple behavioral situations

• Traits do not explain

Situational Context for Behavior:

• Mischel and Wright (1988)

• People hedge their statements with conditions with people they know well (person does X when Y)

  • Ex: grace will cry if she is too hot

• Think about contingencies when we know people well (environment that produces that behavior)

Hartshorne and May

• Children were placed in different situations where they could lie, cheat, or steal

  • Correlation between behavior was only 0.3

  • Called personality coefficient

• Conclusion: traits are not useful to a psychologist who wishes to describe an individual

  • Are you the same at parties and funerals?

Cognitive Person Variables, not Traits:

• Things that explain differences in behavior

• Encoding strategies: style of representing info, which is different between people

• Environment influences behavior but we all differentially interpret environment because of:

  • Different learning histories

  • Different encoding strategies: interpretations of behavior

  • Different competencies (how might someone who is blind interpret different situations)

Prototypes:

• Behaviorism research used a clear stimulus to signify environment

  • Low tone for punishment and high tone for reward

• If environment is less clear

  • In between tone = rats act differently

  • People are difficult to easily categorize

    • extrovert/introvert dependent on how they interact with world

Competencies: 

• Cognitive and behavioral competencies

• Think about what types of competencies one needs to be president, proffesor, athlete, etc

Cognitive Person Variables- Expectancies:

• Behavior-Outcome

  • Will my behavior have an effect?

  • Will studying help me get an ‘A’ or does the professor “have it in for me”? 

• Self-Efficacy 

  • Can I perform a desired behavior?

  •  If I need to run a 5-minute mile to make the team, should I even try out? 

• Stimulus Outcome 

  • What does the environment predict and how will that influence my behavior? 

  • Does Amy’s yelling signify that she will soon slap me (RUN!!) or is this tantrum just for show?

Cognitive Person Variables- Subjective Values

• Are results desirable?

Cognitive Person Variables- Self-Regulatory systems

• Distraction, delay gratification

• Helps us to overcome stimulus control (the influence of the environment) 

• Freedom from Distractibility 

  • ADHD 

• Self-Appraisal

I ran a 5 minute mile. Am I happy, or should I have done better? Is it ok if I couldn’t run a 5-minute mile?