AP PSYCH: Unit 1: Personality

The Psychoanalytic Perspective

• Exploring the Unconscious

• The Neo-Freudian and Psychodynamic Theories

• Assessing Unconscious Processes

• Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective

The Humanistic Perspective

• Abraham Maslow’s Self-Actualizing Person

• Carl Roger’s Person-Centered Perspective

• Assessing the Self

• Evaluating the Humanistic Perspective

The Trait Perspective

• Exploring Traits

• Assessing Traits

• The Big Five Factors

• Evaluating the Trait Perspective

The Social-Cognitive Perspective

• Reciprocal Influences

• Personal Control

• Assessing Behavior in Situations

• Evaluating the Social-Cognitive Perspective

Exploring the Self

• The Benefits of Self-Esteem

• Self-Serving Bias

Psychodynamic Perspective

Freud’s clinical experience led him to develop the first comprehensive theory of personality, which included the unconscious mind, psychosexual stages, and defense mechanisms.

Psychoanalysis

The process of free association (chain of thoughts) leads to painful, embarrassing unconscious memories. Once these memories are retrieved and released (treatment: psychoanalysis) the patient feels better.

Model of Mind

The mind is like an iceberg. It is mostly hidden, and below the surface lies the unconscious mind. The preconscious stores temporary memories.

Personality Structure

Personality develops as a result of our efforts to resolve conflicts between our biological impulses (id) and social restraints (superego).

Psychosexual Stage: Oral

0-18 months; pleasure focuses on mouth—sucking, biting, chewing

Psychosexual Stage: Anus

18-36 months; pleasure focuses on bowel and bladder elimination; coping with demands for control

Psychosexual Stage: Phallic

3-6 years; pleasure zone is the genitals; coping with incestuous sexual feelings

Psychosexual Stage: Latency

6 to puberty; dormant sexual feelings

Psychosexual Stage: Genital

puberty on; maturation of sexual interests

Regression

leads an individual faced with anxiety to retreat to a more infantile psychosexual stage.

Reaction Formation

causes the ego to unconsciously switch unacceptable impulses into their opposites. People may express feelings of purity when they may be suffering anxiety from unconscious feelings about sex.

Projection

leads people to disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others.

Rationalization

offers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one’s actions.

Displacement

shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person, redirecting anger toward a safer outlet.

The Neo-Freudians: Alfred Adler

Believed in childhood tensions. However, these tensions were social in nature and not sexual. A child struggles with an inferiority complex during growth and strives for superiority and power

The Neo-Freudians: Karen Horney

Believed in the social aspects of childhood growth and development. She countered Freud’s assumption that women have weak superegos and suffer from “penis envy.”

The Neo-Freudians: Carl Jung

Believed in the collective unconscious, which contains a common reservoir of images derived from our species’ past. This is why many cultures share certain myths and images, such as the mother being a symbol of nurturance.

Projective Tests: Criticisms

Critics argue that projective tests lack both reliability (consistency of results) and validity (predicting what they are supposed to predict).

1. When evaluating the same patient, even trained raters come up with different interpretations (reliability).

2. Projective tests may misdiagnose a normal individual as pathological (validity).

Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective: Modern Research

1. Personality develops throughout life and is not fixed in childhood.

2. Freud underemphasized peer influence on the individual, which may be as powerful as parental influence.

3. Gender identity may develop before 5-6 years of age.

4. There may be other reasons for dreams besides wish fulfillment.

5. Verbal slips can be explained on the basis of cognitive processing of verbal choices.

6. Suppressed sexuality leads to psychological disorders. Sexual inhibition has decreased, but psychological disorders have not.

The Modern Unconscious Mind

1. schemas that automatically control perceptions and interpretations

2. the right-hemisphere activity that enables the split-brain patient’s left hand to carry out an instruction the patient cannot verbalize

3. parallel processing during vision and thinking

4. implicit memories

5. emotions that activate instantly without consciousness

6. self-concept and stereotypes that unconsciously influence us

Humanistic Perspective

Abraham Maslow: theoretical perspective (hierarchy of needs)

Carl Rogers: theraputic perspective (person-centered therapy)

Self-Actualizing Person

Maslow proposed that we as individuals are motivated by a hierarchy of needs. Beginning with physiological needs, we try to reach the state of self-actualization—fulfilling our potential.

Assessing the Self

In an effort to assess personality, Rogers asked people to describe themselves as they would like to be (ideal) and as they actually are (real). If the two descriptions were close the individual had a positive self-concept.

Evaluating the Humanistic Perspective: Criticisms

1. Concepts in humanistic psychology are vague and subjective and lack a scientific basis.

2. The individualism encouraged can lead to self-indulgence, selfishness, and an erosion of moral restraints. 

3. Humanistic psychology fails to appreciate the reality of our human capacity for evil. It lacks adequate balance between realistic optimism and despair.

Factor Analysis

Hans and Sybil Eysenck suggested that personality could be reduced down to two polar dimensions, extraversion-introversion and emotional stability-instability.

Biology and Personality

1. Brain-imaging procedures show that extraverts seek stimulation because their normal brain arousal is relatively low. 

2. Genes also influence our temperament and behavioral style. Differences in children’s shyness and inhibition may be attributed to autonomic nervous system reactivity.

Personality inventories

are questionnaires (often with true-false or agree-disagree items) designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors, assessing several traits at once.

Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)

is the most widely researched and clinically used of all personality tests. It was originally developed to identify emotional disorders

The Big Five Factors (OCEAN)

Openness (imaginative or practical), conscientiousness (careful or careless), extraversion, agreeableness (trusting or suspicious), neuroticism (stable or unstable)

The Person-Situation Controversy

Trait theorists argue that behavior in a situation may differ, but average behavior remains the same. Therefore, traits matter.

Social-Cognitive Perspective

Albert Bandura (1986, 2001, 2005) believes that personality is the result of an interaction that takes place between a person and their social context.

Personal Control

Social-cognitive psychologists emphasize our sense of personal control, whether we control the environment or the environment controls us.

• External locus of control refers to the perception that chance or outside forces beyond our personal control determine our fate.

• Internal locus of control refers to the perception that we can control our own fate.

Learned Helplessness

When unable to avoid repeated adverse events, an animal or human learns helplessness.