Personality (4.4, 4.5a, 4.5b, 4.6a, 4.6b, 4.6c)

Personality

an individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting

Classic perspectives on personality

Psychodynamic theories + humanistic theories + trait theories (explores one’s traits, social context, and even thinking) 

• Freud believed that the psychodynamic theory proposed that childhood sexuality and unconscious motivation can influence personality 

• Psychodynamic perspective focuses on the unconscious and childhood experiences (e.g., Freud).

• Humanistic perspective emphasizes personal growth and self-fulfillment (e.g., Maslow, Rogers).

• Trait perspective focuses on identifying and measuring individual personality characteristics (e.g., Big Five traits)

Free Association

• a method of exploring the unconscious in which the person relaxes and says whatever comes to mind, no matter how trivial or embarrassing 

  • he thought that the thoughts revealed from free association he could trace back to the patients’ unconscious (painful memories then could be retrieved, reviewed, and released) 

Id, Ego, Superego

Id: a reservoir of unconscious psychic energy that, according to Freud, strives to satisfy basic sexual, and aggressive drives (pleasure principle → contains our libido) 

Ego: the partly conscious, “executive” part of personality that, according to Freud, mediates among the demands of the id, the superego, and reality →  (reality principle → the “executive” that weighs a decision risk and rewards)

• Protects itself with defense mechanisms (tactics that reduce or redirect anxiety by distorting reality)

• Some examples → regression, reaction formation, projection, rationalization, displacement, sublimation, denial  

Superego: The part of personality that represents internalized moral standards and ideals. It acts as the conscience, striving for perfection and judging actions as right or wrong

• One with a weak superego may be outrageously self-indulgent and remorseless

Repression

the basic defense mechanisms that banishes from consciousness anxiety – arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories 

• often incomplete, repressed urges may appear as symbols in dreams or as slips of the tongue in casual conversation 

Freud’s Psychosexual Stages

Erogenous zones: Oral (0-18 months), Anal (18-36 months), Phallic (3-6 years → Oedipus complex) Latency (6 years to puberty), Genital puberty on)

• He thought that personality was brought up from a conflict between impulse and restraint → between our aggressive, pleasure-seeking biological urges vs. our internalized social controls 

Identification

Identification is a psychological process whereby the individual assimilates an aspect, property, or attribute of the other and is transformed wholly or partially by the model that other provides.

• person unconsciously adopts the characteristics, values, or behaviors of another person or group, often someone they admire or see as a role model

Fixation

an obsessive drive that may or may not be acted on involving an object, concept, or person

when a person becomes “stuck” at a particular psychosexual stage because conflicts during that stage were not properly resolved. This can lead to behaviors or traits in adulthood that reflect unresolved issues from that stage.

• Someone with an oral fixation (from the oral stage) might overeat, smoke, or chew pens.

• Sigmund Freud, a fixation is a persistent focus of the id's pleasure-seeking energies at an early stage of psychosexual development.

Oedipus Complex

During the phallic stages Freud thought that boys or girls would display jealousy over their opposite sex parent in fear or protection

• in psychoanalytic theory, a desire for sexual involvement with the parent of the opposite sex and a concomitant sense of rivalry with the parent of the same sex

Defense Mechanisms

The ego protects itself with defense mechanisms (unconscious strategies/ tactics that reduce or redirect anxiety by distorting reality)

• Regression, (regressing to the past)—> rtreating to an earlier Psychosexual stage where the psychic energy remains fixed

• reaction formation, → switching unacceptable impulses into their opposites

• projection —> disguising one’s own threatening impulses by attributing them to others

• rationalization, —> offering self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening unconscious reasons for one’s actions

• displacement, —> shifting sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person

• sublimation, —> transferring of unacceptable impulses into socially valued motives

• denial  —> refusing to believe or even perceive painful realities

Neo-Freudians

They adopted Freud’s interviewing techniques and accepted his basic ideas: the personality structures of I'd, ego, superego —> BUT they broke away in that they 1) emphasized the conscious mind’s role in interpretation and 2) the doubted that sex and aggression were all-consuming motivations

• they all believed that childhood social—not sexual—tensions are crucial for personality formation

  • Horney (view that women are emotional creatures and incapable responsibility and independence is the work of the masculine tendency)

  • Adler (the individual feels at home in life as long as he is useful to others and is overcoming feelings of inferiority)

  • Jung —> Collective Unconscious: Carl Jung’s concept of a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species’ history

Modern views on Freud

Modern concept of unconscious mind

• Many psychologists now think of the unconscious not as a mass of seething passions and repressive censoring but as a form of information processing that occurs without our awareness 

• Our lives mostly live on autopilot→ guided by out-of-sight, unconscious processing 

• Research supports Freud’s idea that we unconsciously defend ourselves against anxiety  → one source if terror resulting from our awareness of vulnerability and death 

Projective Tests

Projective Test: a personality test, like the TAT or Rorschach, that provides ambiguous images designed to trigger projection of one’s inner dynamics and explore the preconscious and unconscious mind 

• Thematic Apperception Test (TAT): (Henry Murray) a projective test in which people express their inner feelings and interests through the tories they make up about ambiguous scenes 

• Rorschach inkblot test: a projective tests designed by Hermann Rorschach → that seeks to identify people’s inner feelings by analyzing how they interpret 10 inkblots

Terror-management theory

a theory of death-related anxiety → explores people’s emotional and behavioral responses to reminders of their impending death

Humanistic Needs

theories that view personality with a focus on potential for healthy personal growth 

• Maslow Hierarchy of Needs

self-actualization and self-transcendence

Self-Actualization: one of the ultimate psychological needs that arises after basic psychical and psychological needs are met and self-esteem is achieved → the motivation to fulfill one’s potential 

Self-Transcendence: (highest level) It involves going beyond the self—seeking meaning, purpose, and connection to something greater (like spirituality, altruism, or causes bigger than oneself)

Carl Rogers and unconditional positive regard

• Carl Rogers: he believed that a growth-promoting social climate provides: acceptance, genuineness, and empathy 

  • Unconditional Positive Regard: (unconditional regard) a caring, accepting, nonjudgmental attitude → Carl Rogers believed would help people develop self-awareness and self-acceptance 

Self Concept

all our thoughts and feelings about ourselves, in answer to the question, “Who am I?

Traits

a characteristic pattern of behavior or a disposition to feel and act in certain ways, as assessed by self-report inventories and peer reports

Factor Analysis (Eysenck)

a statistical method used to describe variability among observed variables in terms of fewer unobserved variables called factors

• It helps identify clusters or groups of related items on psychological tests.

Personality inventories

a questionnaire on which people respond to items designed to gauge a wide range of feeling and behaviors; used to assess selected personality traits

Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)

• the most widely researched and clinically used of all personality tests

  • Originally developed to identify emotional disorders → the test is now used for for many other screening purposes

Empirically derived test

a test (such as the MMPI) created by selecting a pool of items those that discriminate between groups

“Big Five” Factors

• five traits that describe personality (five factor model) OCEAN

• Created by Robert McCrae and Paul Costa → the test specifics your score or percentage on all five traits 

  • openness, → imaginative, independent, practical, prefers routine

  • conscientiousness, → carless, impulsive, careful, organized 

  • extraversion, → sociable, sober, reserved, disciplined 

  • agreeableness, → ruthless, incorporative, soft-hearted, trusting 

  • neuroticism → anxious, insecure, secure, self-satisfied

    • The sie and thickness of the brain does correlate with several Big Five Traits → those high on conscientiousness tend to have a large frontal lobe aread that aids in planning and controlling behavior

Person-Situation Controversy

• With age personality traits become more stable, as reflecting in the strong correlation of trait scores with follow-up scores 7 years later 

  • Interests and careers may change over time but most people come to recognize and accept who they are 

  • We can see preferences in our personality through music, written communications, and online and personal spaces → yet when we’re in unfamiliar spaces we tend to keep our traits hidden as we carefully attend social cues 

Social-cognitive perspective

a view of behavior as influenced by the interaction between people’s traits (including their thinking) and their social context

Behavioral approach

focuses on the effects of learning on our personality development

Reciprocal determinism

• the interacting loop of influences of behavior, internal cognition, and environment

  • Different people choose different environment 

  • Our personalities shape how we interpret and react to events

  • Our personalities help create situations to which we react

Major Personality Theories

• Psychoanalytic (Freud) → personality consists of pleasure-seeking implies (id) a reality-oriented executive (ego) and an interrelated set of idea.s (superego) 

• Psychodynamic (Alder, Horney, Jung) → the dynamic interplay of conscious and unconscious motives and conflicts shapes our personality 

• Humanistic (Maslow, Rogers) → our basic humans needs are met, we will strive for self-actualization 

• Trait (Allport, Costa, Eysenck, McCrae)  → isolation of dimensions of personality due to scientific studies, the Big Five Traits 

• Social-cognitive (Bandura) → conditioning and observational learning interact with cognition to create behavior patterns. Our behavior in one situation is best predicted by considering our past behavior in similar situations

Major Personality Research Methods

Case study - psychoanalytic and humanistic,

survey - trait, social cognitive,

projective tests - psychodynamic (TAT, Rorschach inkblot),

personality inventories - trait (MMPI),

observation - social-cognitive,

experimentation - social cognitive

Self

in modern psychology assumed to be the center of our personality, the organized of our thoughts, feelings, and actions

Spotlight Effect

overestimating others’ noticing and evaluating our appearance, performance, and blunders (as if we presume a spotlight shines on us)

Self-esteem vs Self-efficacy

Self-esteem: our feelings of high or low self-worth

Self-Efficacy: our sense of competence and effectiveness

Self-Serving Bias

a readiness to perceive ourselves favorably 

Narcissism

excessive self-love and self-absorption (extreme! Center of the world vibe) 

Individualism

a cultural pattern that emphasizes people’s own goals over group goals and defines identity mainly in terms of unique personal attributes

Collectivism

 a cultural pattern that prioritizes the goals of important groups (often one’s extended family or work group)