Personality

Type A behavior

A cluster of characteristics such as being excessively competitive, driven, compatient, and hostile

Type B behavior

A cluster of characteristics such as being relaxed and easygoing

Personality

A pattern of enduring distinctive thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that characterize the way an individual adapts to the world

Psychodynamic Theories

Focus on the inner workings or personality, especially internal conflicts and struggles

Free association

Relax and say what comes to mind- no matter how trivial or embarrassing- used to get to your unconscious

ID

Unconscious drives and is the individual’s reservoir of sexual energy

• Immoral/vile urges pressing for expression

• No contact with reality

Pleasure Principle

The idea that the ID always seeks pleasure and pleasure seeking urges of all kinds are freely expressed

Ego

“The executive” directs energy supplied by the ID

• Related the desires of the ID to the external reality

Reality Principle

Delays actions until it is appropriate Harsh internal judge of our behavior

Superego

Harsh internal judge of our behavior

Defense Mechanisms

Tactics the ego uses to reduce anxiety produces by the ID-superego conflict

• Unconsciously distort reality

• Reduces tension for individual even if it means using self deceptions

Denial

The refusal to acknowledge unwanted beliefs or actions

Displacement

Directing unacceptable impulses at a less threatening target

Repression

Memories that provoke too much anxiety to deal with are pushed into the unconscious

Regression

Reverting to childish behavior

Reaction Formation

Reverse directions of a disturbing desire to make the desire more socially acceptable (express the opposite of how you feel)

Projection

Defend yourself against your own unconscious impulses by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others

Rationalization

Creating logical excuses for emotional or irrational behavior

Sublimation

The redirection of aggressive feelings into more socially acceptable outlet

Freud’s Psychosexual Stages of Personality Development

• One’s personality is essentially set during childhood

• Stage theory: not continuous

• 4/5 stages: each stage is names for a body part from which people derive sexual pleasure

• Broadened use of sexual to any source of physical pleasure

Fixation

Believed that personality traits traced to fixations or unresolved conflicts or hang ups cause by an overindulgence or by a frustration happens at any and all of the stages

Oral Stage

• Pleasure center is the mouth

• Chewing, sucking, and biting

• Reduce tension

• If overfed or frustrated oral traits may created like smoking, kissing, nail biting, overeating, alcoholism

Anal Stage

• Toilet training

• Pleasure in “holding on” or “letting go”

• Anal retentive- neat, precise, stingy and orderly

• Anal expulsive- messy or disorderly

Phallic Stage

Pleasure focuses on the genitals as the child realizes self-stimulation is enjoyable

Penis Envy

A girl’s desire for a penis

Latency Period

• Repression: child sets aside all sexual feelings out of conscious awareness

• Turn their attention to other issues like starting school

• Development is dormant or interrupted

Genital Stage

• People remain in this stage for the rest of their lives

• Starts with responsible social sexual relationships and ends with mature capacity for love and full adult sexuality

Karen Horney’s Sociocultural Approach

Horney insisted that social and cultural influences were more import ant than biological ones

Freud’s Criticisms

• Little empirical evidence supports his theory

• Little predictive power- can only look back not forward

• Sexuality not the pervasive force behind personality

• First five years not as crucial to personality development

• Feminists don’t like penis envy- were envious of male’s advantages in society

Womb Envy

Men are jealous of women’s reproductive abilities

Basic Anxiety

Feeling of being alone in an unfamiliar world is the theme of childhood

Carl Jung’s Analytical Theory

Says the unconscious is made of two parts

Personal Unconsious

Comprised of repressed memories and clusters of thoughts the person does not want to confront

Collective Unconscious

Behavior and memory are common to all humans and explains similarities between cultures

Archetypes

Universal concepts we all share as part of the human species

Persona

Your public image

Shadow

Evil side of personality

Anima/animus

Anima: Female side to personality

Animus: Male side to personality

Self

A force the balances the opposing forces and desires of the mind

Alfred Adler’s individual psychology

• Childhood is crucial formative years

• Inferiority because of size and level of competence

• People are motivated by a fear of failure (inferiority) and the desire to succeed (superiority)

• Importance of birth order (middle is best)

Inferiority complex

Constant feelings of inadequacy or insecurity in your daily life due to a belief that you are physically or mentally inferior to others

Projective Test

Presents individuals with an ambiguous stimulus and asks them to describe it or tell a story about it

Rorschach inkblot test

• Look at 10 inkblots and describe what you see

• Obvious differences in content (like a severed head not a butterfly) help identify conflicts and fantasies.

• BUT more importantly- what part of the inkblot you look at and how the image is organized- this helps to view the ways in which a person perceives the world and to detect emotional disturbances

Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

• 20 sketches depicting various scenes and life situations

• Make up a story about each picture and the people in it

• Analyze the context of the stories focusing on how people feel, how they interact, what events lead up to the incidents in the sketch, and how the story will end

Humanistic Perspectives

Stress a person’s capacity for personal growth and positive human qualities

• See human nature as inherently good and seeks ways for our potentials to emerge

• Emphasis on immediate subjective experience and feelings

• Emphasis on free will

Maslow’s Approach

• Focus on self-actualizers because they have obtained full potential

• Tolerant of others, sense of humor, pursue the greater good

Carl Rogers’s Approach

• Personal growth and self-determination

• All born with the raw ingredients of a fulfilling life

• Need right conditions to thrive

• Natural capacities for growth and fulfillment

Unconditional positive regard

Rodger’s terms for being accepted, valued, and treated positively regardless of behavior

Self-concept

Our conscious representation of who we are and who we wish to be

Incongruence

When the self image becomes more unrealistic, true self becomes confused, vulnerable, dissatisfied

Trait Theories

Attempt to lean what traits make up personality and how they relate to actual behavior

Nomothetic Approach (universal)

People’s unique personalities can be understood as them having relatively greater or lesser amounts of traits that are consistently across people

Idiographic

Each person have a unique but basic set number of traits

Big five factors of personality

The five most basic dimensions of personality

• Openness to experience

• Conscientiousness

• Extraversion

• Agreeable

• Neuroticism

Factor Analysis

Used to get to the core dimensions of personality

Raymond Cattell- 16 PF

16 personality factor questionnaire (infp)

Gordon Allport

3 dispositions (Cardinal, central, secondary)

Self-Report Inventories

Pencil and paper tests (more objective than interviews)

MMPI-2

Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory

• 567 true/false questions

• Questions reduce to ten factors

Myers-Briggs Type Indicators

Four preferences

• Extraversion and introversion

• Sensing and Intuition

• Thinking and Feeling

• Judging and Perceiving

Social cognitive perspectives

Attribute differences in personality to socialization, expectations, and mental processes

Reciprocal determinism

Process of influencing and being influenced by our environment

Self efficiency

Optimistic about your ability to get things done

Julian Rotter Social Cognitive Theory

A theory in which a person's behavior was controlled by their personality's response to the environment

Internal Locus of Control

The degree to which we expect that a reinforcement or outcome of our behavior is contingent on our behavior or personal characteristics

External Locus of Control

The degree to which we expect that a reinforcement or outcome of our behaviors is a functions of luck or fate, is under the control of others or is unpredictable