PT 3 - Humanistic Perspectives

The Humanistic Approach

Reaction to Freud and Behaviourist

• Emphasis on the role of the conscious, creative potential, self actualization

• Humanism emphasizes the importance of what makes humans

• Tenants of the Humanistic Approach

  • People can overcome their biological urges

  • People are conscious and rational beings

  • A persons subjective view is more important than the objective reality

    • we interpret stuff through lenses of past experiences

    • Embrace the Phenomenological Approach - we look at how we interpret a stimulus based on a bunch of things

Roger’s Person-Centered Theory

Central concept is the self

• Self Concept - organized consistent set of perceptions and beliefs about oneself

  • Our own mental picture of our nature, our unique qualities, our behavioural tendencies

  • May not be accurate to reality

    • Dunning Kruger Effect - when someone has a lack of knowledge or ability, and that lack of knowledge leads them to overestimate how good they are at that thing

  • Once this is established, there is a tendency to maintain it

• Self Consistency: matching among components of self concept

• Congruence: consistency between self concept and experience

• Incongruence: inconsistency between self concept and experience

• Threat: occurs when experience is inconsistent with self concept

  • leads to anxiety

  • In response to this anxiety, individuals can

    • modify self concept to match experience

    • distort reality to match self concept

• Self verification - motivated to confirm self concept

  • easier to recall things that are consistent to self descriptions

  • seek out self confirming relationships

• Self Enhancement - strong tendency to gain and preserve positive self image

  • Contributes to psychological well being

• How does the Self develop?

  • Need for Positive Regard: innate need for sympathy, love and acceptance

  • Unconditional positive regard: love is independent of behaviour

  • Conditional positive regard: love is dependent of behaviour

  • Positive self regard: experience of being understood and valued gives us freedom to grow

Maslow’s Self Actualization Theory

• Self Actualization: total realization of one’s human potential

  • Human need/part of human nature where we believe that we can become the best that we could be

  • Can be ambiguous because each person has their own idea of what they can achieve and what their full potential is

• Described two categories of needs:

  • Deficiency Needs: things concerned with physical and social survival, basic requirements to survive as a human. Can include need to social security and interaction

  • Growth Needs: unique to humans; things that push us to develop our potential

Evaluating Humanistic Theories

• Too much reliance on self reports

• How do we define the self actualization theory? It is very abstract.

• Contribution to psychotherapy approaches:

  • Characteristic of therapist

  • Discrepancies between perceived self and ideal self.

PT 4 - Biological Perspectives

Biological Foundations of Personality Traits

Nature and nurture influence development

• Focus on role of

  • Nervous system

  • Genetics

  • Evolution

Factor Analysis

• Statistical approach where the goal is to find correlations among many measured variables

  • Analyzed to identify closely related clusters of behaviours

  • Each cluster or factor reflects a basic dimension of behaviour or trait

The Five Factor Model

• Extraversion

  • Sociable vs retiring

  • fun loving vs calm and not boisterous

  • affectionate vs reserved

• Neuroticism

  • Worried vs calm

  • Insecure vs secure

  • Self pitying vs self satisfied

• Openness to Experience

  • Imaginative vs down to earth

  • Preference for variety vs preference for routine

  • Independent vs conforming

• Agreeableness

  • Soft hearted vs ruthless

  • Trusting vs suspicious

  • Helpful vs uncooperative

• Conscientiousness

  • Well organized vs disorganized

  • careful vs careless

  • self disciplined vs weak willed

Not all of these second qualities are bad things! We can see positives in them as well.

Eyesneck’s Theory

Personality is structured from a hierarchy of traits

• Three high-order trait continua

  • Extraversion - Introversion

  • Neuroticism - Stability

  • Psychoticism - Self Control

    • Psycoticism vs Neuroticism - External behaviour/stability vs internal mood state/stability

  • Leads to basic traits

  • Strong genetic influence

Cattell’s Sixteen Personality Factors

1. Relaxed vs Tense

2. Less intelligent vs More intelligent

3. Affected by feelings vs emotionally stable

4. Submissive vs Dominant

5. Serious vs Happy go Lucky

6. Expident vs Conscientious

and etc…. (rest of them are on slides)

Trait and Behaviour Prediction

• 5 Factor Model and Eyesneck’s Prediction

  • Good at predicting behaviours across broad range

• Cattel’s 16 Factors

  • Predict behaviours more specifically

Behavioural Genetics and Personality

• Twin Studies of “Big Five” personality traits

  • Identical twins more similar than fraternal twins

• Twin Studies: allow researchers to determine the proportion that a characteristic or behaviour is due to genetics (nature) or upbringing (nurture)

• Concordance rate: the degree to which a characteristic, trait or disease that occurs in one twin similarly occurs in the other twin

Neuroscience and Personality

• Extroversion and Introversion

  • Brains of extreme introverts = over active

    • seek to minimize stimulation

  • Brains of extreme extroverts = under active

    • Seek to maximize stimulation

• Stability and Instability

  • Difference in the autonomic nervous system arousal

    • Individuals who are more stable less likely to have extreme spikes in reactivity

    • Individuals who are unstable have more bursts of reactions to stimulation

• Novelty Seeking

  • Related to levels of dopamine

    • seeking levels of dopamine, seeking more external situations where dopamine is released

Neurological Perspective

• Neurological Perspective: examines the extent to which various physiological factors and brain activity determine the expression or certain personality characteristics

• Testosterone: male sex hormone associated with dominance, aggression, persistence, sensation seeking, and high risk behaviours

• Serotonin: inhibitory neurotransmitter; low levels of this are associated with a greater willingness to engage in thrill seeking activities

• Ascending Reticular Activating System

  • Comes out through our hind and mind brain, and sends signals throughout the cortex

  • As information comes in through our senses/bodies, all of that information enters the spinal cord and heads up toward the brain

  • Function: Acts as a filter; regulates arousal in the brain

    • Linked with introversion - extroversion

      • If this system is not filtering the irrelevant stimuli, we end up being overstimulated - linked to introversion

      • If this system is filtering out everything, then we have very few stimuli coming through, under stimulated - extroversion

Stability of Personality Traits

• Traits show both stability and change

  • Some traits remain stable over time

    • ex) introvert-extrovert, emotionality, activity level

  • Cognitive processes and learning from experience can lead to change

    • ex) Optimism vs Pessimism

Evolutionary Perspective

• Account for differences in personality using evolutionary theory

• Traits that contribute to survival make individuals more likely to survive and those traits are passed on to their offspring

  • Conscientiousness - more likely to engage in health promoting behaviours and avoid risks

  • Optimism - more likely to have fewer symptoms of death in the long run, avoiding expecting the worse.

• Hostile Type A personality = negative personality characteristic

• Women - negative emotions associated with increased sexual activity

• Men - self confidence, extraversion, and social assertiveness associated with increased sexual activity

Stability of Behaviour

• Behaviour shows little stability across situations

• Difficult to predict behaviour because of 3 factors:

  • Traits interact with other traits

    • traits can overlap/work together

  • Importance of trait influences consistency

  • Variation in ‘self monitoring’ - making decisions based on cognitive reasons

    • High = attentive to social clues

    • Low = attentive to internal beliefs

    • Extreme = people who behave differently in different situations

Evaluating Biological Perspectives

• Strengths

  • Emphasis on biological factors to understand personality expression

  • There is empirical support for this perspective

• Limitations

  • Lack of understanding how certain biological processes are related to specific expressions of personality

  • Difficult to make specific predictions based on the complex interconnectedness of biological processes