Psychology of Personality - Exam 2!

Why Does Personality Judgement Matter?

• They happen all the time → new people and new information about people we already know

• They have important consequences → opportunities (dating, interviews), behavior (self-fulfilling prophecy)

Opportunities

• Reputation affects opportunities and expectancies

• Opportunities: job hiring, shy people perceived as cold and aloof - affects life in negative ways and part of a  cycle that perpetuates shyness

Intellectual Expectancy Effects

• High-expectancy students perform better because teacher treat them differently in four ways

  • Climate: warmer attitude

  • Feedback: more differentiated - varying according to correctness

  • Input: teachers attempt to teach more and more difficult material

  • Output: extra opportunities to show what they have learned

Social Expectancy Effects

• Social: attractive women are expected to be warm and friendly and are treated in such a manner that they respond that way

  • Our behavior with others is influenced by how they expect us to act, sometimes based on superficial clues such as what we look like

Expectancy Effects in Real Life

• Suggest studying expectancy effects in real life to assess how powerful they are

  • Expectancy effects are especially strong when more than one important person in an individual’s life holds the expectancy for a long time

    • Ex: mother and father overestimate tendency to abuse alcohol

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

• When someone elicits behavior from a target person that confirms their beliefs about the target 

  • Someone else influences how they act, social pressure

Accuracy of Personality Judgements

• There is no perfect criterion for judging the accuracy of personality judgments

  • Funder’s second law: there are no perfect indicators of personality

  • Cannot actually see personality, cannot prove accuracy

• Evaluating a personality judgment: gather information and make best determination you can, although accuracy of outcome will always be uncertain

Constructivism

• Reality, as a concrete entity does not exist, only constructions of reality

  • No way to regard one interpretation of reality as accurate and another as inaccurate because all interpretations are “social constructions”

• Critical Realism: the absence of perfect criteria for determining the truth does not mean that all interpretations of reality are equally correct

Convergent Validity

• An accurate judgment should show convergent validity

  • Achieved by assembling diverse pieces of information that converge on a common conclusion; more diverse information=more confident

  • 2 primary converging criteria:

    • Interjudge agreement: do the judgements agree with one another?

    • Behavioral prediction: can they predict actual behavior?

Accuracy vs. Consensus

• More information (longer observation) does NOT improve interjudge agreement/consensus, only increases accuracy

• At first, forced to use stereotypes, appearance etc. = all similar

The Realistic Accuracy Model

• Relevance → Availability → Detection → Utilization

• Implications;

  • Accurate personality judgment is difficult - all four hurdles overcome

  • Moderators of accuracy must be a result of something that happens at one or more of these four stages

  • Accuracy of personality judgment can be improved in four different ways

• RAM can also be used to explain the basis of self-knowledge, especially at the relevance, detection, and utilization stages. 

Relevance

• Target must behave in a way that indicates their personality. 

  • Related to the characteristic trying to judge

Availability

• Judge must have access to this information. 

  • Perform in the presence of judge

Detection

Judge must notice this information

Utilization

• Judge must interpret this information correctly.

  • Use information appropriately, know behaviors are indicative of trait

Moderators of Accuracy

• good judge

• good target

• good trait

• good information

Good Trait

• More accuracy for traits that produce easy-to-observe behaviors

• Easy to see (detection) - more linked to external cues

  • Ex: Extraversion > Neuroticism → E is easier to make accurate judgment

• Displayed in a wide range of contexts (availability)

  • Ex: Talkativeness >  adventurousness → opportunity to display in either most situations or only narrow set of circumstances

Good Target

• High judgeability, like an open book – very easy to tell who they are

  • Stable and well organized, or psychologically well adjusted

  • Typically extraverted and agreeable

• More accurate for people who act in line with their personality

  • Increased relevance

  • Ex: suppression; people who self-monitor=less of a good target

• More accurate for people who behave consistently across situations

  • Increased availability

  • Ex: in vs. out of class; people who tailor/context-specific=less of a good target

• People who conceal a lot or put on a facade may lead to isolation, tiring

Good Judge

• More accurate judgments by people who are intelligent and conscientious

  • Good at utilization (knowing how to use cues)

• More accurate judgments by people who are invested in interpersonal relationships; “communion”

  • Good at detection

  • More interest = paying attention more

• Women’s better understanding of the average person→ better judges overall

• People who are more positive in general are better judges

• People can usually tell the difference between people they can and cannot judge accuracy → meta-accuracy

• More important to understand normal people than usual people because most people are normal

Good Information

• More information generally leads to better judgments

  • Increased availability and detection

  • Ex: informant-ratings vs. stranger ratings

• Better information generally leads to better judgments

  • Strong vs. weak situations

  • Social norms can constrain behavior

  • Learn something extra about a person in difficult or emotional situation

  • Best situation is one that brings out the trait you want to judge

Strong vs. Weak Situations

• Strong norms: tell you how you should act = less accurate, actions not determined by personality, social norms restrict what people do

• A strong situation exerts pressure to behave in a certain way, which leads to similar behavior across people. (ex: red light)

• Weak situations contain little pressure as to appropriate behavior. People’s reactions diverge and are largely guided by individual traits. (ex: parties)

First Impressions

•  Emotional expression or posture, websites, social networking sites, music/books/tv, offices, bedrooms, clothing and appearance

Zero-acquaintance Paradigms

• A situation in which one person observes another, but has had no or minimal direct exposure to that target

• Ex: 5 or 30 minute video of a person

Behavioral Residue

• Unconscious leaking

• Physical traces of activities that are relevant to personality

• Interior residue

  • Reflects activities conducted in that space (ex: papers from studying)

• Exterior residue

  • Reflects activities conducted outside that space (ex: ski pass)

Identity Claims

• Symbolic statements about identity, motivation behind items

• Conscious crafting

• Self directed

  • To reinforce their own self-views

• Other-directed

  • To communicate to others how they want to be seen

• May manifest in similar ways but different underlying motivations

  • Could reference same item but for different reasons

Single-Trait Approach

• Attempts to identify all of the behaviors and life outcomes that a particular personality trait predicts

• Focus on a single trait of special importance

• What do people like [trait] do?

• Examples: Conscientiousness, Narcissism, Self-Monitoring

Many-Trait Approach

• Attempts to identify all of the personality traits that predict a particular behavior or life outcome

• Who does [trait]?

• Example: Adult political orientation & preschool personality

  • More careful/controlled, easily offended/victimized, inhibited, fearful → more likely to be a conservative adult

Essential-Trait Approach

• Attempts to identify the set of traits that are generally most important for describing and predicting behavior.

• Example: The Big Five model

• What is the right number?

  • Too few vs. too many

Typological Approach

• Attempts to identify groups of people with distinct combinations of personality characteristics.

• Focuses on patterns of traits that characterize whole persons and sorting these patterns, thinking of people in terms of types characterized by patterns

• Qualitative, rather than quantitative difference

  • Comparing apple & oranges on a scale of appleness

• Three types:

  • Well-adjusted: adaptable, flexible, resourceful, interpersonally successful

  • Maladjusted overcontrolling: too uptight, deny own pleasure, difficult to deal with on interpersonal level

  • Maladjusted under controlling: too impulsive, prone to be involved in unsafe activities, wreak havoc on others and herself

• Limitations: personality type does not predict behavior or life outcomes, normalized sample determined by cutoff score → misleading

Narcissism

• excessive self-love

• Use a survey - choose between two sentences that describe N

  • Predicts: 

    • charming and funny

    • attractive and intelligent

    • arrogance, superiority, entitlement

    • fragile self esteem → on the outside, come across brave/confident, inside easily impacted by others

  • Good first impression, but deteriorates over time, charm wears off

  • Feel superior to others but may still not feel good about themselves

  • Hard to build long-term relationships

Self-Monitoring

• Extent to which a person intentionally varies their behavior across situations to influence how others perceive them. 

• High self-monitoring → harder to judge personality

  • Search for clues about how to act & adjusts accordingly

  • Look to the environment; flexible 

• Low self-monitoring → better target, open book

  • Behavior guided more by their inner personality

  • Look within; consistent, rigid

• Test using Personal Reaction Inventory

• What does high self-monitoring predict?

  • Popularity, acceptance → more important to them

  • Job interview performance (read room and adjust expectation)

  • Willingness to lie

  • Manipulated by external cues

    • Ex: humor and laugh tracks, attraction and fake heart beat; high SM find funnier with LT and felt attracted when high HR, low SM are unaffected by these cues

Ego Resilience

• psychological adjustment

• People high in ego resilience can adjust their level of control from high to low and back again as circumstances warrant

Ego Control

• impulse control

• Overcontrolled people (high in ego-control) inhibit impulses

• Undercontrolled individuals (low in ego-controls) more prone to act on them 

• If things are safely available, better to be undercontrolled, but if risky, self-control is better

California Q-set/Q-sort

• 100 phrases - describe aspects of personality that might be important for characterizing a particular individual

  • “Has a wide range of interests” 

• Sorted into one of 9 bins

  • Ranging from highly characteristic to highly uncharacteristic 

• Forced, normal distribution (set # in each bin) 

  • Most in the middle, fewer towards the ends

• Forces judge to compare all of the items directly against each other

• Restricted to identifying only a few items as being most important

The Big Five

• The Big Five helped create a unified taxonomy of traits

  • Most personality tests and models can be classified in big five terms

  • “Big Five” because so broad

  • Supposed to be orthogonal - score on one does not predict the others, however not as originally hoped → factors stability and plasticity

The Big Five and Specific Behaviors

• Sampled undergraduates who completed BFI, frequency of behaviors using EAR

• Results: self-reports of personality significantly associated with many objectively coded behaviors

• Extraversion: more frequent conversations, more words spoken, less time alone

• Agreeableness: fewer swear words

• Conscientiousness: more time spent in class

• Neuroticism: More frequent arguments

• Openness to experience: more time spent in coffee shops

• Correlations are not really that high - Big Five gives some insights but not perfect

What does Conscientiousness Predict?

• Job performance, academic success

• Health and longevity

• Takes on extra responsibilities

• Well-being tied to work, guilty if they do not live up to expectations

• Conscientiousness and punctuality study

  • Effect of situation: arrive late if morning appt, on-time/early if afternoon

  • Effect for trait: high C people arrived earlier than the low C

  • Effect of traits may appear small in any specific situation but accumulate over time (e.g., 2 hrs. of work missed in a month)

What does Agreeableness Predict?

• Peer acceptance, dating satisfaction

• Sense of humor, forgiveness

• Psychologically well-adjusted

• Lower criminal behavior

• People could take advantage of niceness

• Agreeable people don’t agree to absolutely everything

What does Neuroticism Predict?

• Higher risk for mental illness

• Sensitive to stressors

• Poor coping skills

• Experience more negative emotion, unhappy

• Problems in work and relationships

• Family problems, criminal behavior

• Can be motivational, but too much could be bad

What does Openness Predict?

• Politically liberal

• Play a musical instrument

• Belief in supernatural

• Substance abuse

What does Extraversion Predict?

• High social status, popular, attractive

• Experience more positive emotion, happiness

• Leadership positions, involved in community

• Health, longevity (less than C)

• Can be argumentative, control too much, seen as annoying

How are the Big Five Useful?

• Most trait scales can be conceptualized in terms of the Big Five 

• The Big Five give a quick and easy way to describe others and compare people in five dimensions 

• All Big Five dimensions are important in daily life

  • Predicts behaviors and life outcomes

  • Serves as risk or protective factors

Big Five Limitations and Problems

• Uncertain whether they are really most essential, more than just 5 traits

  • Other models (e.g., HEXACO; honesty-humility) 

• May lose the essence of certain personality traits

  • e.g., Narcissism (just high E, low A, low C, & low O?) 

• Descriptive, not explanatory

  • Empirically derived-based on data → factor analysis, not based on theory 

• Overly simplified & potentially misleading

  • Solutions: facet level, McAdams article (life story)

Taxonomy of Traits

• Broadest: Factor - Extraversion

• Lower: Facet – Sociability

• Lowest: Habits or specific behaviors – smiling, telling a joke

• Each of the big five divided into six lower-level facets

  • Openness facets: ideas, fantasy, aesthetics, feelings, actions, values

  • Useful to consider facets to be able to predict things well, some facets are more relevant than others

DeYoung’s Metatraits

Metatraits (broadest level): Stability and Plasticity

Stability

• Desire to maintain a sense of order in their lives, greater impulse control

• Associated Big Five Domains:

  • Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability (N-)

• Linked to serotonin - biological basis

  • Regulating/inhibiting neurotransmitter

Plasticity

• Desire to engage in the world, constantly soaking up novelty from the environment

• Associated Big Five Domains:

  • Extraversion and Openness

• Linked to dopamine

  • Activating neurotransmitter

Photo Study (Physical Appearance)

• Gathered self and informant reports of the target’s Big Five personality traits

• Observers made ratings of that person in both Standardized (told to stand the same way) and Spontaneous conditions (pose however they want)

  • Need cues for good judgment, more expressive=easier

• Static appearance: clothing, hairstyle

• Expressive appearance: facial expression, posture/stance  → more accurate

• What traits can be judged accurately?

  • Extraversion (.42)

  • Openness (.35)

  • Agreeableness (.20)

• What cues are effective?

  • E → energetic stance, stylish, smiling

  • O → looking away, distinctive & messy

  • A → relaxed stance, smiling

Bedroom Study

• People (occupants) provided self-ratings of their personality

• Observers (judges) then went into their bedrooms and made rating based on what they saw

• Consensus: judges generally agreed on what they saw (r=0.34)

• Accuracy: judges were also fairly accurate (r=0.37), varied across different traits

• Better than zero-acquaintance (watching video of them)

  • Avg. consensus: r = .12; avg. accuracy: r = .25

  • Can monitor/control in interaction, other factors, judge might influence

• Observers were able to accurately judge the Big Five based only on the target’s living environment 

• However, accuracy varied across trait dimensions

  • High: Openness (.65)

  • Moderate: Neuroticism (.36) and Conscientiousness (.33)

  • Low: Extraversion (.22) and Agreeableness (.20)

Lens Model

• Cues in the environment serves as lens

• Underlying Construct vs. Observer Judgment → functional achievement (observer accuracy)

• Cue validity: link to trait (good information)

  • Is the cue actually linked to the construct?

• Cue utilization: link to judgment (meaning systems)

  • What the observer is actually using

• RAs coded cues in the bedrooms

Valid Cues in Bedrooms

• Conscientiousness

  • Clean, neat, organized, not cluttered

• Openness to experience

  • Distinctiveness of the room

  • Having a wide variety of books, magazines, and CDs

Cue Distractors (Invalid Cues) in Bedrooms

• Cues that people think are helpful and valid in judging personality, but are not 

• Openness to experience

  • High quantity of books and magazines 

• Neuroticism

  • Darkness, Staleness (vs. freshness)

• Extraversion

  • Lots of decoration, slight clutter

• Agreeableness

  • Cheerful, Colorful, Comfortable, Inviting

Regional Differences in the Big Five

• Most robust clusters are Agreeable people in South and Neurotic people in Northeast

• Openness: higher near NYC, LA, SF, Miami

  • Why? Cities have more things to do, more diversity, these cities cultivate more openness/mold personality

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

• 16 types:

  • Extraversion-Introversion 

  • Sensing-Intuition 

  • Thinking-Feeling 

  • Judging-Perceptive

• Low validity for prediction, not often used by personality psychologists

• Normal distribution, not reliable, no evidence that can predict occupation

• Used so commonly because:

  • No matter what is said, can feel good about, a lot easier to tell someone vs. Big 5

• What do we know about personality types?

  • People can’t be neatly separated into mutually exclusive categories

  • Some combinations of traits may be more likely than others (prototypes, or “fuzzy” types)

    • Example: undercontrollers, overcontrollers, resilients

  • Type membership doesn’t increase prediction beyond traits

    • But types still may be a useful way to label a bunch of traits

    • Quick and easy way to communicate, why still exists

Cattell’s 16 Factors

• Cattell’s 16 Essential Traits: based on factor analysis of many behaviors from 35 clusters

  • Too many, Overextraction? others could not replicate, wanted to maintain nuance

Eysenck’s “Giant 3”

• Eysenck’s “Giant 3” Superfactors

  • Psychoticism (P)

    • Aggressive, impulsive, self-indulgent

    • Combination of low A and low C

    • Not mentally ill!

      • Lacks constraint (Tellegen’s term)

  • Extraversion (E) 

  • Neuroticism (N)

  • Most people think too few, linked to biological factors

Personality in Non-Human Animals

• Does personality exist in animals?

  • Judgments agree with each other

  • Judgments predict behavior and outcomes

• What dimensions exist in other species?

  • 12 species examined (pigs, dogs, octopodes) 

• Evidence of each of the Big 5

  • E most common (sociability, bold vs. avoidant)

  • A and N also common (low hostility; fearful)

  • O common in all but 4 species (curiosity/play)

  • C only in chimpanzees (goal-directedness)

Plaster Hypothesis

• Personality traits are assumed to be stable over short periods, but can they change in the long run? 

• William James (1890)

  • “In most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.”

• Costa and McCrae (1994)

  • “Somewhere between age 21 and age 30 personality appears to take its final, fully developed form. . . . James’s observation has considerable empirical support.”

• Led to a wave of research testing the plaster hypothesis—that personality traits don’t change after early adulthood

• Ex: Suzy, interviewed at age 21 and 42; increase in E, A, C, O, decrease N, more friendly, thinking of others, become mom and a partner

• Personality stability could be due to 3 things: birth order (last child more rebellious), early experience (better family environment=better outcomes), person-environment transactions (respond/seek out environments compatible with personality)

Mean Level Change

• Mean-level change occurs when the average score on a trait increases or decreases with age 

  • Directly observed in longitudinal data 

  • Inferred from cross-sectional data

  • Different average scores at different ages indicate mean-level change

    • Shows how personality typically changes with age

  • What have we learned?

    • Substantial mean-level age differences across the life span, even after 30

    • Late childhood and adolescence are key periods

      • Pronounced and curvilinear age trends (A & C)

      • Emergence of gender differences (N)

Rank-Order Change

• Rank-order change occurs when the ordering of individuals on a trait changes with age

  • Relative positioning to each other

  • Rank-order change can only be examined with longitudinal data

    • Need to follow the same people as they age

  • Simplest method is retest correlation

• Each type of change can occur without the other

Longitudinal Studies

• Longitudinal studies follow a single group over time 

  • Better overall for studying development, can directly monitor change as person gets older

  • Difficult and take long time to do

Cross Sectional Study

• Cross-sectional studies compare groups of people that differ in age

  • Could be due to cohort effects

  • Found that people at different ages show different mean levels of the Big 5

Meta-Analysis

• Meta-analysis: combine data from other projects

  • Conducted for both mean-order and rank-order change

  • Statistically combined results from previous longitudinal studies

  • Very high sample sizes 

Retest Correlation

• Correlation of 1.00 indicates perfect rank-order stability (no change in order)

• Correlation less than 1.00 indicates rank-order change

• Different people’s personalities changed in different ways

Cohort Effect

• Possibility that surveying people born in different years and grew up in different social and physical environments might make a difference

• Important to keep in mind when evaluating cross-sectional studies

Conscientiousness Age Differences

• In adulthood, females slightly higher C than males

  • C slowly increases across adulthood

• Major changes in C before adulthood

  • Drops in early adolescence and then increases in late adolescence

Agreeableness Age Differences

• Similar pattern to C: large drop then recovers in late adolescence

• Gradually increases in adulthood

Neuroticism Age Differences

• Females report higher N than males in mid-life

  • Gradual decline across adulthood

• Gender differences emerges in adolescence

  • Girls increase in N but boys do not

Mean-Level Changes in Big Five

• Meta-analysis found mean-level changes in all of the Big Five

  • Conscientiousness and Agreeableness - both continue to increase in adulthood

  • Neuroticism decreases then levels off in old age

  • Openness remains constant in early adulthood then drops in old age

Rank-Level Changes in Big Five

• Individual differences in personality change (meta-analysis of rank-order change)

  • Moderate stability in early life, increases as age gets older

  • Some (but far from perfect) rank-order stability, even in infancy and childhood 

  • Rank-order stability never reaches 1.00

    • Even late in life, some people’s personalities change in unique ways

Why do people’s personalities change?

• Caused by social roles and experiences

  • See shifts wherever role changes (ex: married, have kids)

• Caused by biological factors

  • Programmed to fill those roles, see shifts at certain age no matter if roles change or not

• Still debated, unclear why these changes occur

Maturity Principle

• Adult changes are mostly positive

• As we mature, our personality becomes “better version,” more refined

• Traits needed to perform adult roles effectively increase with age

• Increases in A and C, emotional stability, decreases in N

Cumulative Continuity Principle

• Rank-order stability increases with age, more set in personality

• Individual differences in personality become more consistent as one gets older 

• Lowest in infancy, highest in late middle age 

• Some support for a “soft” plaster hypothesis: less change, not no change

Volitional Personality Change

• Most people want to change their personality traits

  • E, C, and N most common targets in undergrads 

• Many intervention programs aimed at important life outcomes, some successful targeted intervention programs tailored for personality traits

• Consistent state-level changes → trait level changes

  • Not just about desire to change, need to do the work

• Successfully completing Big 5 challenges (not for O) → more likely to change

  • E: Say hello to a cashier

  • A: Hold the door open for someone

  • C: Organize and clean up your desk

• Used smartphone app PEACH, implementation intentions (if-then plans)

• According to this theoretical model, the first steps are to want to change, and to believe change is possible. Then one can begin to perform the necessary new behaviors, which, over time, become habitual and lead to lasting personality change.

Humanism

• Humanistic psychology focuses on the unique aspects of the human mind

  • Differences from objects and nonhuman animals 

  • Human mind is aware

Positive Psychology

• Focuses on optimal human functioning, flourishing

  • Human strengths vs. weaknesses

    • Focus on human strengths instead of faults; 6 virtues

  • Health is more than the absence of disease (vs. clinical psychology)

  • Satisfying and meaningful life involves happiness → comes from overcoming important challenges

Shared Themes between Humanism and Positive Psychology

• Three shared themes:

  • Consciousness

  • Meaning

  • Subjective well-being

• Why do we often fail?

  • Desire for personal growth not as strong as other concerns

  • Requires taking risks that many are unwilling to do, outside comfort zone

Phenomenology

• One’s conscious experience of the world

• Humanistic psychology states that phenomenology is psychologically more important than the world itself

• A broader reality might exist, but only the part of it that you perceive matters to you

• Individuals have free will and the only way to understand another person is to understand that person’s construal, or experience of the world

Conciousness

• An individual’s subjective experience of the world

  • We all experience the world differently, even in same objective situation

• Key themes

  • Mystery of human experience

    • Not just akin to computer-like information processing (input→output)

    • Even if same input, we have different experiences

  • Non-judgmental understanding

    • “Do not judge me until you have walked a mile in my shoes”

    • View world through their lens to understand/judge someone

    • No way to prove your view of reality right and others wrong

• Ignored by psychologists for several decades

  • e.g., Psychoanalytic (unconscious), Behaviorist (objective)

Construal

• Your particular experience of the world

• Forms the basis of how you live your life; goals, obstacles, opportunities

• Situational construals are related to both personality and gender

• Should question construals of reality because others are always possible

  • Your have the ability, right, and duty to choose your own

Personal Constructs

• Individual experience of the world is organized around unique set of personal constructs

  • Similar to scientific paradigms, ways to interpret events 

• Viewed people as scientists

  • Develop constructs based on personal experience, observations 

    • All have different constructs due to different experiences 

  • Make predictions (hypotheses) and test your ideas

    • Choose which theory to use

• Basis of modern cognitive approaches (e.g., CAPs) 

  • Active role in gathering and interpreting information

Role Construct Repertory (REP) Test

• Way to figure out people’s constructs

• Identify 3 important people in your life, compare how two are similar and different from the third

• Constructs revealed by how you discriminate among things

  • Bi-polar dimensions: scales ranging between one concept and its opposite (e.g., warm-cold)

• Particular constructs are more readily brought to mind → chronically accessible

• Showed how consciousness affects personal constructs

Existentialism

• Life’s questions:

  • Why are you here?

  • What should you be doing?  

• Usually pessimistic view of human nature, people do not like to answer these

• Can find meaning through:

  • Religion, Science, Art, Philosophy 

• No answers but the ones you come up with for yourself

  • No right answer, own personal journey of answering question

Living in “Bad Faith”

• Avoiding problems; head in the sand, try to avoid thinking about why you exist

• Following society’s conventions

  • See what others do/say → follow their lead

• Leading the “unexamined life” → never find meaning

• This is still a choice → either choose to engage or not

• There is no escaping the existential dilemma, hangs over all of us

Authentic Existence

• Courageously come to term with the facts: you are mortal, your life is short, and you are master of your own destiny within those limits

• Being honest, insightful, and morally correct

Self-Actualization

• Self-actualization is the process of improving toward one’s maximum potential 

• Rogers and Maslow proposed that…

  • Humans have an innate drive to self-actualize

  • Provides sense of meaning and purpose through trying to self-actualize

  • Existentialists believed that existence has no intrinsic goal

• Potential roadblocks

  • Conditions of worth (Rogers)

  • Needing to focus on other, more basic concerns (Maslow)

Hierarchy of Needs (Maslow)

• Bottom to Top:

  • Physiological (food, drink)

  • Safety (shelter, clothes)

  • Belongingness (friends, others like you)

  • Esteem (competence, self-worth)

  • Self-actualization 

• If one level is met, progress to the next level 

• If lower level is threatened, regress to that level

• Maslow believed that because you have to go through so many stages, it is rare to self actualize → only 1-2% of the population reaches true potential

Flow

• Flow experience is complete in an activity for its own sake

  • Balance between challenge and capability (high challenge, high skill)

  • Focused attention

  • Time passes quickly 

• What causes Flow Experiences?

  • Sports and games → “In the zone”

  • Musical performance →“In the groove” 

  • Work → Writing 

  • Religious and spiritual experiences → Zen meditation?

• Flow in Everyday Life

  • Examined frequency of flow experience for work vs. leisure activities 

  • Sample: 78 workers, wore a pager for 7 days, beeped 8 times per day 

  • Reported current activity, rated its challenge and skill levels

    • Flow = greater than your personal average on both (operationalize)

  • Amount of flow in work vs. leisure?

    • 54% of work and 17% of leisure

  • For both work and leisure activities, flow experiences characterized by greater motivation, concentration, and creativity 

  • What does flow feel like?

    • Flow characterized by greater absorption and enjoyment (at least afterwards)

    • Caveat: if absorbed in flow, not feeling something until after

  • Recommends people maximize their time in flow

    • Intrinsically rewarding

Problems with Flow

• Could too much time in flow lead to problems? (Examples: Gaming)

  • Addicted to flow feeling → keep doing same thing → neglect other aspects of life (hygiene, social etc)

  • Someone in flow can be difficult to interact with

  • Person loses track of what’s going on around them, gives up conscious control of thoughts and activities

  • People can start doing dangerous things (ex: racing cars, motorcycles)

• Need to balance flow with other things

Client-Centered Therapy

• Individual = client (someone working with), not patient (neg disease, problem)

• Not about solving illness, but promoting health/actualization 

• Therapist helps remove obstacles preventing self-actualization→ encourage personal growth 

• Key features:

  • Unconditional positive regard

    • Will care/like you regardless of what you’ve done

    • Clients to feel comfortable sharing anything, open dialogue

  • Empathic understanding

    • Walk in their shoes, try to understand their perspective

  • Genuineness

    • Authentic, not phony responses, admit negatives are bad

Fully Functioning Person

• Clearly aware of reality and of yourself, perceive world accurately, take responsibility of your choices

• Faces world without fear, self doubt, or neurotic defenses

• Only possible if you have experienced unconditional positive regard from important people in your life, especially during childhood

Conditions of Worth

• Idea that we are taught that we are good and valuable people only if we fulfill certain criteria; young, healthy, good-looking, prosperous

  • Limit freedom to act and think

  • Person who has experienced unconditional positive regard does not develop these

3 Levels to McAdams Approach

1. Dispositional Traits

2. Personal Concerns

3. Identity as a life story

Level I: Dispositional Traits

• Relatively unconditional, decontextualized, generally linear, and implicitly comparative dimensions of personality that go by titles such as extraversion, dominance, and neuroticism

• Problems with traits: lack precision, don’t explain, disregard environment, apply only to groups

• Reliable and valid trait ratings provide an excellent first read on a person, information strangers quickly glean from one another

  • Comparative and relatively unconditional: two most valuable features of trait description but also two greatest limitations → as people get to know eachother better, they seek and obtain information that is noncomparative and highly conditional–more nuanced portrayal

Level II: Personal Concerns

• Motivational, developmental, or strategic terms, what people want, require context-particular place/time (temporal context)

• Motives, goals, strivings, plans - defined in terms of future ends

• Traits are not conceived in goal-directed terms

• Certain strivings, tasks, strategies, defense mechanisms, competencies, values, styles, and interests may be role specific

  • Ex: spouse, son/daughter, parent, sibling, worker, citizen

Level III: Identity as a life story

• Even after stages 1 and 2, you would not be able to comprehend identity - “who am I?”

• Must be made or discovered as people become what they are to become in time

• Only conceivable form for a unified and purposeful telling of a life is the story

• Continue to create and revise story across life

• Difficult to obtain in a casual social setting, only can obtain if have intimate relationship with the person

Self-Determination Theory

• Hedonia: more traditional way of seeking happiness

• Eudaimonia: more of a humanistic approach, better

Hedonia

• seeking happiness through the pursuit of pleasure and comfort

• Maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain (more traditional)

• the more one seeks hedonically to maximize pleasure and minimize pain to the exclusion of other goals, the more one risks living a life deprived of depth, meaning and community based on selfishness, materialism etc.

Eudaimonia

• seeking happiness through developing one’s full potential, helping others, and building community, pursing intrinsic goals (meaningful life)

• Finding and seeking goals that are valuable in their own right (intrinsic goals) rather than being a way of achieving an aim (extrinsic goals)

Universal Needs

• Autonomy (find your path, freedom of expression, authentic) 

• Competence (identify & improve strengths, what good at)

• Relatedness (form positive social bonds, connect with others)