Theory  

A systematic way of organizing and explaining observations which include a set of propositions, or statements about the relationships among various phenomena  

And or 

A set of statements designed to explain a set of phenomena; more encompassing than a[n] hypothesis. 

Hypothesis – a statement that can be tested 

Hypothesis's... 

• Can be exploratory 

• Are typically more focused than theories  

What separates psychology from other non-sciences is that we use the scientific method to test hypotheses to see if they are supported, or not supported, by appropriate information (or data) 

Broken windows theory 

If someone walks past a building with one smashed window people are more likely to smash other windows. Makes people care less about the building. 

Psychopathy is a behavior of lack of interest in others. 

How do we know that the results for one group are different enough that we can be confident they dot just look different? 

Statistics  

As psychological scientists, we are happy to say that a result is sufficiently unlikely that it's probably not due to chance – if there's less than a 5% likelihood that it is due to chance 

Correlations

A correlation is a number that represents the size and direction of the relationship between two things. 

Correlation = r  

Types of variables  

1. The type of statistic 

2. The "degrees of freedom" (an indication of sample size) 

3. The value of the test statistic 

4. The probability of getting this result  

Cannot prove hypothesis but can support it 0.001 does not equal 0 there is still a possibility it's up to chance. 

William james – father of psycology  

• Set up first laboratory inteneted for teaching psycology  

Michael Wilhelm – also considered father of psycology  

• Also established psycological laboratory – frist research laboratory – more impoirtnat  

B.F Skinner  

• Important in history of psychology because he is strongly associated with the school of psychological behaviourism – because we can't reach into people's heads and objectively view their thoughts, we can't objectively understand the content of peoples thoughts. We shouldn’t concern ourselves with the content of the way people think. Instead we should treat the humans mind as a black box and focus solely on the inputs, the things that happen in the environment and the outputs, the things we do in response to those changes in the environment.   

• This was a tremendously influential movement   

• Skinner box 

  • Training a rat to behave in a particular way in response to reinforcement 

  • Might set it up so when light goes green and the rat presses a lever it gets something to eat 

  • One of the most important tools in early behaviorism  

Phits  

• Fictional forensic psycologist   

• Psycologist who works In legal contexts uses the science of psycology to track down people who have comitted horrendous crimes.   

Stanley Milgram   

• One of the most divisive characters in the history of social psycology  

• Associated with one of the most potenitally immoral psyscholgical studies of all time   

• Social psychology is the application of social psychological knowledge, theory, research and methods to understanding the social world. It's about understanding how the social world acts, and the way we think, feel and behave, but also how we influence the social context in which we fit through the way we think feel and behave.  

Eric Albert  

• Important in contempory clinical psycology  

• One of the contributions he made was the delvelopement of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)  

• Therapy that can be used with people who experience a wide range of different typs of psycological distress ie depressed, anxious.     

• Focuses on helping people identify the links between their cognition (thinking) and behaviour  

• The things we do are related to the thoughts we have   

• While this sounds like common sense, the reality is that many people who are experiencing mental distress, – they find it very had to see that  

John A.  

• Clinical psychologist 

Abraham Maslow 

• Championed humanism – wanted to locate the person at the center of psychology 

• Started carrier working with chimpanzees as a research assistant – observations he saw there are what inspired him to develop a theory about the things that motivate human beings 

  • Hirachy of needs is a pyramid where we have things at the bottom which are immediate needs for our survival, at the top is lofty aspirations like being the best person we can be.  

  • Maslow argued that its really difficult to be the best person you can be when you are worrying about not having the necessities  

Dr Phil 

• Clinical psychologist  

Sigmund Freud 

• Not a psychologist – psychology ≠ psychiatry 

• Important is history of psychology for proposing a number of really important ideas that psychological scientists have gone onto test and use in practice 

• Specialized in neurology  

• Psychologist work with people to reduce and resole their mental stress primarily through talk therapies whereas psychiatrists adopt a medical model of mental distress – ie if someone has a cold then we tend to identify the problem as a medical one since something has gone into the body and caused a problem 

• Many things associated with mental distress are rooted deep in our unconscious  

Psychology is relatively young however the ideas that are considered important date back to has long as there's been people 

Trepanation – drilling holes into people's skulls as a for of therapy 

This early definition of psychology has taken a number of times throughout time, along the way, we have seen nativism versus empiricism. 

Nativism is the idea that we are born with every faculty that we ultimately exhibit. We have been able to do the things that we end up doing throughout our lives. This is empiricism. It has a number of different meanings, but in the context of the history of psychology, it means that everything we can do, we have to learn to do.  

ISM is the idea that the totality of human experience is made up of a whole bunch of smaller elements and vote, and the students went on to try and develop ways that we could take apart human experience to identify those individual characteristics. He developed an approach called introspection, which involves training people to try and break down the sensory experiences. The things I see, hear, smell, touch into the individual elements color, shape, sheer intensity.  

• Functionalism, on the other hand, was James's idea that our rights or our minds have specialized faculties, specialized organs that had particular functions. 

  • James argued that there are functions, there are things in the brain that have specific functions, and these two arguments have played off against each other throughout the history of and subsequently. 

• what are the things that already be apparent when it comes from this idea of nativism versus empiricism is the argument about nature versus naurture. 

• Psyche means body or mind or soul. 

 Phrenology is the identification of a person's personality based on the characteristics of the shapes of the skull Phrenologists would take their calipers are measured the size and shape of people's heads and make judgments about their personality characteristics on the basis of that. 

Now, there's a problem with chronology in that if your only sample of skulls that you are measuring comes from criminals, there's an absence of what we call the control group. You might identify, for example, particular characteristics that seem to be fairly common across all of the criminals. But how do you know that they are different from people who are known criminals? 

Nurture 

• Locke argued that we are born as a tabula rasa that's Latin for a blank slate. So when we are born, we are a book that is white waiting to be written upon everything we learn Locke says, I learned to do. We have to learn from scratch. We are born with nothing innate. 

• There is an important developmental phase during our early lives where we're not exposed to sufficient stimulation or things like language, It becomes increasingly hard to develop those things. We are a product of the formative experiences that we have. 

Jeremy Bentham 

• He proposed the idea of the Panopto. He argued that we are born evil. We are born with a burning desire to get all the goodies for ourselves. And as a result, he said, if we don't believe social and institutional structure, social structures that will prevent us from doing that, then we will behave in ways that are criminal. 

Sheldon made the argument for what he called Soma Times the idea that our personalities reflect the shapes of our bodies and dwarfs, he said. 

Francis Galton 

• He argued that the extent to which the way that we always inherit from our parents and our environment. That must be because they themselves have parents who had these characteristics better people, he suggested, had better parents. People who have more positive person and social outcomes do so because they've inherited them from their parents.  

• Eugenics - is the practice of trying to eliminate undesirable psychological, physiological or other characteristics from population by wiping out people who have those characteristics to prevent them from passing onto their kids. 

Robert Rosenthal 

• Is a social psychologist or developmental psychologist 

• responsible for coined the terms of descriptors the Pygmalion, the government effects, the start, the Pygmalion. The outcomes that children and other things organisms, people, adults exhibit are sometimes a product of the way that they're treated. If you treat it as if you are important, as if you can learn to do other things, if you a small valuable, then you're more likely to ultimately achieve outcomes that reflect that. The Gollum effect is the reverse. 

Albert Bandura 

• Badger is the most cited, psychologist in the history of psychology. 

• Study for which he is most important is a study about the importance of how observing violence impacts on behavior. 

We have a lot of common wisdom that reflects these intuitive ideas that the way that we behave is the product of nature or the product of nurture. 

Norman Triplett Hypothesis: that individuals performance is facilitated by others 

Social facilitation – the positive effect of observers on an individual performance  

This experiment illustrates 

• an experiment that simulates  real life situation 

• Concealment of ultimate aim of the experiment 

• Impact of mere presence of others 

Social facilitation become one of the major topics of social psychology for three decades 

Conformity (of major influence) 

They will say the same thing as the people before them  

Why do people conform? 

Motivation: 

People may conform for one, other, or both of 

• Wanting to be right 

• Wanting to make a good impression 

• Leading to... 

  • Informational Influence. 

    • E.g., Di Vesta (1959) - conformity increased if there were more neutral trials at the start (more evidence that confederates were competent). 

  • Normative Influence. 

    • E.g., Increasing interdependence of participants by promising a reward to most accurate groups a conformity doubled. 

Different types of conformity: 

• Informational Influence  

• Conversion 

• Normative Influence 

• Compliance 

Compliance - Conformity primarily because of concern about how they will be perceived, while privately disagreeing. 

Conversion - Conformity primarily because of belief that others are right then they have changed their own private opinion. 

Public vs Private context 

What affects conformity? 

Competing contexts: 

• Private 

• Public 

  • Normative influence is more important in producing conformity because responses given publicly are more likely to show conformity than responses given privately. 

Group membership 

• If people feel they belong with others a behavior of those others becomes a norm that is internalized and relevant for behavior as a group member. 

• Conformity ↓ when the source of influence identified as an outgroup member (someone from a group to which the participant did not belong). 

Consistency within the group 

• If confederates are unanimous then conformity is higher. 

• If single confederate acts as a supporter (give correct answer) conformity dropped to 5.5% 

• Conformity declined even if the dissenting confederate was obviously wrong (but disagreed with the majority). 

• Effect of group consistency only applies in unambiguous situations. 

Conformity increases as groups size increases (to a maximum) - Asch (1951) ran variations with majorities of between 1 and 16. 

"Social psychology is the scientific attempt to understand and explain how the thought, feeling and behaviour of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others." (Gordon Allport, 1954) 

Adolf Eichmann 

• Final solution 

• Only defense was I was following orders 

When we conform it feels like what we need to do. Obedience is when you're being told to do something. 

One explanation was that of the 'Authoritarian Personality provided by Adomo, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford (1950). 

• The authoritarian personality was theorised as originating in childhood in response to excessively harsh and disciplinarian parenting intended to produce emotional dependence and obedience in the child. 

• The child  develops ambiguity (love and hate) towards parents 

• Frear and guilt mean the child cannot act on his anger towards the parents 

• The anger is displaced onto weaker others, while parents/power they represent are idealized  

  • Underestimates situational and cultural factors in blind obedience – a situation that Milgram's work addressed  

The teacher was required to administer a shock for each incorrect answer, with shocks increasing in severity  

Learner behavior  

• 75-105 start responding 

• 120 banging on the desk/complaining 

• 300 want to get out 

• 345 unconscious  

Experimental group study 

62.5% continued to administer shocks at the highest level 

368 volts was the average shock level administered 

Why did they obey? 

The abided because they were visually distressed  

Factors affecting obedience 

Milgrim (1974) reports a series of 18 experiments manipulating various situational factors to investigate factors influencing obedience  

Immediacy/proximity (physical and emotional) of all the victim  

Proximity of the victim was manipulated under four conditions 

• Victim pounds of thick wall separating Teacher and learner 

• Victim heard crying through thick wall 

• Subject ad victim in same room 

• Subject required to hold victims hand to shock plate  

When experiment was conducted in a less prestigious setting maximum obedience decreased 

 There are a variety of different subsets or sub areas of psychology that deal with issues relating to culture. 

• Cultural psycology – studies the way which people are affected by their culture  

  • We look specifically within cultural groups to see how their culture relates to their psychology 

• Cross-cultural psychology tries to distinguish universal psychological processes from those that are specific to particular cultures. 
   

Emic vs Etic 

• Emic approaches to research and make approaches are those that focus primarily primarily within a cultural context 

• Etic approaches look at psychological questions, ideally informed by cross-cultural perspectives. So not assuming that the viewpoint of any one culture is going to be relevant in answering a particular question. 

  • Cultures refers to the shared rules that govern behavior, a filter through which we see and understand our current reality. Cultures are things that a set of unwritten rules, things that we may not even be able to articulate that guide the way that we see the world, but also govern behaviour that we see as appropriate or inappropriate in our particular cultural context. - Primarily learned 

  • indigenous psychology promotes psychologies Is that not imposed, that are influenced by the cultural context in which people live, that are developed from within a culture and that results in locally relevant psychological knowledge. 

 Universal biasses 

We see something happen in the world we attribute a cause to it 

• Correspondence Bias (Tendency to attribute other’s behaviour to internal dispositions rather than situational constraints) 

• Self-Serving Bias (Tendency to attribute our own positive outcomes to internal, stable ‘causes’, and negative outcomes to external, unstable factors) 

Criticism of milligrams procedure class answers 

• Didn’t administer any electroshocks  

• Ethics – psychological trauma – think they really badly injure someone  

• Weren't given complete right to withdraw 

• Everyone was male in original experiment - impacts generalization  

• Age – brain development isn't complete until 20  

• Seniority - cultural norms in childhood whether or not to obey  

• Behavior of researcher 

• Ethics - Mislead about what the study is  

Criticism of milligrams procedure – teachers answers 

• Situation involved conflicting cures 

  • Teacher overhead experiment telling learner that there would be no lasting damage versus the lack of response from learner after 345 volts  

Ethics? 

• Did the end justify the means (was the result important enough?) 

• Were the subjects free to terminate the experiment? 

• Did the subjects consent freely to participate? 

With the assistance of a psychiatrist Milgram interviewed the participants years later: 

• 83.7% were glad, or very glad, to have participated 

• 1.3% were sorry or very sorry to have participated 

I doubt I'd ever get permission to replicate Milgram's research now but, hopefully, we don't need to because we're all nicer people now... 

Standford prison experiment  

This study was intended to evaluate the causes of problems in Navy prisons 

Like Milgram's study, 24 participants were recruited from respondents to a newspaper advert, and were paid US$15 a day to participate in a two-week simulation of a prison. 

Participants were allocated roles of guard and prisoner based on the toss of a coin. Zimbardo took the role of superintendent. 

The study was ended early, six days into the fourteen planned... ...after Christine Malach (a graduate student) convinced Zimbardo that the study was dangerous. 

More than 50 people had acted as observers by the time Malach raised her concerns. 

• Depersonalisation (switch to group-level self-categorization) seeing themselves as the groups they belong to - guard, prisoner 

• Deindividuation (loss of self-awareness in groups) 

Adorno et al (1950) argued that some people are prejudiced at the personality level, displaying a constellation of characteristics including: 

• Conventionalism - world shouldn’t change  

• Authoritarian submission – you should do what your told 

• Authoritarian aggression – if you don’t do what your told its okay that you get beat up 

• Anti-intraception 

• Superstition and stereotypy 

• Power and "toughness" 

• Destructiveness and cynicism 

• Projectivity 

• Sex 

People who are more authorities are most likely to follow through  

The authoritarian personality  

We find that even people who are liberal still find themselves with high f scale despite different political leanings  

The Right-Wing Authoritarian 

• Authoritarian Submission 

  • People should do as they're told by legitimate authorities 

• Authoritarian Aggression 

  • If people don't do as they're told, they should be punished 

• Conventionalism 

  • Have a preference for tradition in social relationships 

Punitive socialism > Social conformity > Dangerous world belief > Authoritarianism 

If parents negatively reinforced and punish kids too often, the child develops a controlling personality, and consequently a dangerous world belief  

The authoritarian perspective 

1. People do get what they deserve in life 

2. Some people are treated very unfairly  

If you weren't an authoritarian you would agree with the top statement. The authoritarian are often contradictory  

Behavior = the person + the situation 

Obedience is the power of the situation 

The people that are most likely to be obedient are the authoritarian  

These people will do things because they are told to 

Leon Festinger  

"Social influence processes and some kinds of competitive behavior are both manifestations of the same socio-psychological process...[namely,] the drive for self evaluation and the necessity for such evaluation being based on comparison with other persons." 

What is cognitive dissonance 

...the feeling of uncomfortable tension which comes from holding two conflicting thoughts in the mind at the same time. 

Dissonance increases with: 

• The importance of the subject. 

• Strength of the conflict between dissonant thoughts. 

• Our inability to rationalize and explain away the conflict. 

Dissonance is often strong when we believe something about ourselves but our behaviour is inconsistent with that belief. The discomfort often feels like a tension between the two opposing thoughts. 
Tension may be released by... 

• Changing behaviour. 

• Justifying behaviour by changing the conflicting cognition. 

• Justifying behaviour by adding new cognitions. 

Dissonance is most powerful when it is about our self-image. 

 Ethics and integrity  

Ethics is important is all areas of research – especially people or things that can feel pain 

Ethics is partially important is social psychology 

Little albert 

Process of reinforcement – we are required for doing things people are wanting us to do punished for things people don’t want us to do 

• White rat and loud noise 

  • After a while baby starts crying just because of presence of rat – no longer need the noise that goes along with it  

  • If behaviours is not reinforced over time will became distinguished 

• Ethics – mortality – difference between right and wrong 

  • Ethics are the institutionalisation of mortality –rules we establish to decide what's right and wrong. 

 Bioethical principals 

1. Respect for autonomy  

   1. When people participate should be on their own autonomy – they decide if they want to participate or not  

2. Beneficence 

   1. When you do something you should be doing it for good 

3. Non-maleficence 

   1. When you do something it shouldn’t be for evil 

4. Justice  

   1. Should be trying to do things that maintain a just world rather than things that cause evil, pain, inequalities etc 

Code of ethics – need to be followed in New Zealand 

Kaupapa Māori 

• Whanaungatanga 

  • People should get to know each other 

• Manangatanga 

  • We should be generous hosts of people for who we engage with for research or therapy  

• Aroha 

  • We should do it with a sense of love for our participants  

• Mahaki 

• Mana 

  • We should do the best that we can and not diminish them 

• Titiro, whakaronga 

  • Stop and listen to research participants - people are the best at knowing about their own lives  

• Kia tupato 

• He kanohi kitea 

 Social facilitation, social loafing and Prosociality  

• "Social facilitation is an improvement in the performance of well-learned/easy tasks and a deterioration in the performance of poorly learned/difficult tasks in the mere presence of members of the same species" 

People are more obedient and confirmative in bigger groups – if we keep making the group #bigger what happens to performance. 

Depends if were looking at output of total group or the Individual's 

Efficiently of different size groups if animals/people performing agricultural tasks.  

Eg. Young men (alone or in groups of 2,3,or 8 pulling rope) 

Result - Force exerted per person decreased as function of group size – the Ringelmann effect 

Possible explanations: 

• Stronger if had chance to strategize, induvial only had to strategize with themself  

• Every group has a leader – 45 seconds isn't long enough for this to happen  

• Awkward when in group with people you don’t know  

• Co-ordination relation reasons – not having strategy's, hands banging together – coordination loss – challenges to do with performing individual activities as a group 

• Control condition: individual pulling alone  

• Real groups: groups of subjects actually pulling together  

• Pseudo-groups: individuals subject at front pulling with group of confederates (instructed to pretend to pull)  

Can't be coordination loss with pseudo lost because only one people is pulling – must be motivation 

Two possibilities – pseudo group is only motivation loss, difference between pseudo group and real groups is coordination loss. 

...same pattern of results, and coined "social loafing:  

• "a reduction in individual effort when working on a collective task (in which one's outputs are pooled with those of other group members) compared to when working either alone or coactively" (Williams, Karau & Bourgeois, 1993, p.131)  

Social loafing is a 'robust and pervasive phenomenon" (Vaughan & Hogg, 1995, p. 150) across:  

• Different situations  

• Cultures  

Real world example: 

• Attack to 30 minutes 

• Struggled and escaped several times 

• When police arrived next day 38 people allegedly admitted that they heard the struggle but did not help or call police 

Bystander affect – the finding that a lone bystander is more likely to give them aid than any one of several bystanders. 

Eg. Male subjects completed questionnaires in a waiting room alone, or with a fried, or confederate. Subjects hear a women in an adjacent room having difficulty with a filing cabinet. Crash! 

Results:  

• Subjects alone -70% helped 

• Pairs of subjects -40% helped 

• Subject plus passive confederate - 7% helped 

(In a further refinement they found that pairs of friends helped 70% of the time) 

The hypothesis: that in emergency people will look to others before deciding with to do.  

results: 

• alone - 75% took positive action with two strangers   

• 38% took positive action with confederates  

• 10% took positive action 

Conclusion: 

...the presence of others inhibits people's response in an emergency - the more people, the slower the response. 

Why do people demonstrate bystander affect  

Factors contributing to this "bystander effect" 

Latané and others have identified a number of processes that may inhibit the giving of assistance in these types of situations: 

• Diffusion of Responsibility - Similar to social loafing - the presence of others provides an opportunity to transfer the responsibility to act onto someone else. The more someone-else's there are, the greater the diffusion. 

• Audience inhibition - The presence of others makes people self-conscious of an intended action (sometimes referred to as fear of social blunders) 

• Social Influence - Other onlookers serve as models for action, and Pluralistic Ignorance-Unworried others dissuade/discourage individual intervention even if they're worried. 

• Strangers vs friends - if other onlookers are strangers then helping is inhibited (communication is slower) 

However inhibition is decreased even among strangers if it is known that there will be future opportunities to interact (and possibly explain their motives). 

Burnout and CPTSD 

Factor analysis – how things fit together in people's heads 

Emotional exhaustion  

• Ongoing state of physical/emotional depletion from excessive demands and continuous stress 

• Feeling emotionally exhausted and over-extended by work 

• Distances oneself from work 

Depersonalization 

• Often referred to as engaging in dehumanization; treating others like objects, or without regard for feelings 

• A negative shift in response to others; -ve or inappropriate attitudes to clients, loss if idealism, irritability 

• Is an attempt to distance oneself from clients/others 

Reduced personal accomplishment  

• A negative response towards oneself and one's accomplishments (also described as low mood, low morale, withdrawal, reduced productivity/ capability, inability to cope) 

• Is a function of exhaustion, cynicism, or both 

Consequences of burnout  

• Physical health: hypercholesterolemia, type two diabetes, coronary heart disease, hospitalisation due to cardiovascular disorder, musculoskeletal pain, changes in pain experiences, prolonged fatigue, headaches, gastrointestinal issues, respiratory problems, severe headaches mortality before 45 years.  

Psychological health  

• Insomnia, depressive symptoms, use of psychotropic and antidepressant medicine, hospitalisation for mental disorders and psychological ill-health symptoms  

Professional fallout 

• Job dissatisfaction, absenteeism and presenteeism, new disability pension  

Onces stress goes off other part of nervous system pushes down that result  

What causes burnout 

1. Workload 

• Plan 

• Prioritises  

• Delegate 

• Say no 

• Let go of perfectionism  

2. Perceived lack of control 

•  Identify why your feeling this way 

• Communicate how your feeling  

3. Reward 

• Something you get in return for doing something else ie money 

• Appreciation  

• I do this job because it makes a difference 

• Test  

• Ask for promotion or feedback, 

• Use what you have  

4. Community  

• Communicate 

• connect 

5. Fairness 

• Speak up 

• Ask for credit 

• Compare situations where people are treated fairly to where you are 

6. Values mismatch 

• How important is it 

• Seek congruence 

What is trauma 

• When an individual is exposed to actual or threatened death, serious injury or sexual violence 

What is personality  

• "...That pattern of characteristic thoughts, feelings, and behaviours that distinguishes one person from another and that persists over time and situations." (Phares, 1988) 

• "Consistent behaviour patterns and intrapersonal processes originating within the individual." (Burger, 1997) 

• ...The enduring characteristics and behavior that comprise a person's unique adjustment to life, including major traits, interests, drives, values, self-concept, abilities, and emotional patterns." (From the APA Dictionary of Psychology) 

  • Consistency and persevering over time 

  • Peoples consistent ways of moving through time 

Who are you 

Shakespeare's play 

• Idea Julius Caesar is presenting in segment is that he can judge something about people from the way they look. wants to be surrounded by fat men with sleek foreheads because he thinks that he doesn’t have to fear anything from the lazy or cowardly. Doesn't like people who have thin and hungry look because he assumes that they are people who are motivated by greed.  

• Physiognomy 

  • Dispositions follow bodily characteristics... physical appearance (face) is a window on the psyche. 

• Greek astrologers 

  • Used the stars as potential ways of looking at how people behave. The influences on people's behavior and how we might expect them to behave in given situations. 

• Babylonians  

  • Engaged in sacrifice, usually of animals through the trials, to try to work out what was going to happen in the future and what people are going to do. 

• Hypocrites  

  •  Lots of different coloured liquids that happened to go through people's bodies that he thought might be what he called the pillars of temperament. 

  • He identified a matrix of hot and cold fluids that might also be wet or dry. 

  • These in some way drive who we are. Fluid that was dominant in your body influenced personality type   

    • Blood = sanguine  

    • Black bile = melancholic  

    • Yellow bile = choleric  

    • Phlegm = phlegmatic  

• Christian Thomasius  

  •  Identify peoples personalities based on the information we could collect about them.  

  • Idea that we could identify traits that people have and score people on those traits.  

• Immanuel Kant 

  • Did work based off Hippocrates and Galens findings  

    • There are basic personality types – took those labels and tried to identify a set of characteristics which might be thought to characterize those different personality types.  

• Wundt  

  • Took basic labels Kant proposed and organized them into catergories above.  

  • Two primary dimensions – strong and weak, unchangeable temperaments, unchangeable temperments 

•  Lavater  

  • A basic resource in a gentleman's home, to be consulted with hiring staff, making friends and establishing business relations.  

  • Identify peoples personality characteristics based on their faces – relates to physiognomy 

    • Sanguine = cheerful (or red) 

    • Melancholic = unhappy 

    • Choleric = bad tempered  

    • Phlegmatic = calm  

•  Francis Galton  

  • Went through dictionary to build comprehensive list of prospective personality characteristics... discovered correlation analysis along the way 

  • Organisms that do well in part because they’ve adapted to their environment.  

    • If a bird is in an environment where food is not easily accessible unless you've got a long beak, initially the birds which have the longest beaks, will be the ones who get food. The ones that don't have long beaks will die and after a while the long beaked birds will have children which will have long beaks.  

  • Words that people use to describe other people could be used to describe personality – reflect language we have.  

  • Discovered correlation analysis  

    • Different personality characteristics seem to vary. 

• Sigmund Frued 

  • Frued's topographic model  

    • The way we think can be broken down into three basic levels 

      • The conscious 

        • The things we have access to in the here and now  

      • The preconscious  

        • We can bring to mind with time and effort  

      • Unconscious  

        • Inaccessible to us  

  • Freud's structural model 

    • Iceberg in which the conscious and the pre conscious sit around about where the waterline is and the unconscious is underneath them 

  • Id  

    • hot, sweaty, bubbling urges that are inaccessible to us at any moment but drive up a lot of our behavior.  

    • Superego  

      • The preachy moralizing part of our personality that comes from an internalization of what we think of society says is important  

    • Ego 

      • Bit of our consciousness that mediates between these two. Tries to find middle path where we can try do some of the things that our hot sweaty urges are pushing us towards that our superego are trying to keep suppressed.  

• Carl Jung  

  • Collective unconscious, primordial images > archetypes, extroversion  

  • One of the things that becomes apparent looking across time, culture and history is that there are things that may reside in our unconscious mind that are innate. 

    • Things that have been written onto our unconscious.  

      • many symbols that transcend cultural boundaries and cultural time points that must reflect something that was burned into our collective unconscious. 

    • He also argued for what he called the importance of primordial images or archetypes of people or different types of personalities.  

      • One of the basic distinctions that he characterized in this term was between people who are extrovert and introvert. 

        • Two types of attitudes 

          • There is a whole class of men who at... a given situation at first draw back a little if with an invoiced 'no,' and only after that are able to react 

          • And there is another class who, in the same situation, come forward with an immediate reaction, apparently confident that their behavior is obviously right. 

        • Later added four basic functions 

          • Irrational (sensation, intuition) - reflecting perception 

          • Rational (thinking, feeling) - reflecting reason and judgment 

            • Relates to Myers Brigg 

• Gordon Allport  

  • "Psychologists would do well to give full recognition to manifest motives before probing the unconscious." 

  • Identified 4000 adjectives in the English language alone that describe personality. 

  • Challenge - to combine in some usable 'structure' - hence the quest for 'types' that could then be described using traits. 

  • The nomothetic approach - identification, measurement and description of common traits across individuals. 

    • What are the things that I have in common, with other people 

  • The ideographic approach - identification of the unique combinations of traits that account for an individual's personality. 

    •  Might share traits with other people but aren't the same as those other people 

• Raymond Cartel 

  • Factor analysis  

    • Factor analysis is a suite of statistical tools that allow you to look at which things go together, which things don't go together.  

Personality as trait dimensions  

• The dominant approach to personality sees a combination of all thoughts, views, ideas graphically. There are an unlimited set of personality traits that we all vary on. In combination they make up the unique indivual that we are.  

  • First need to identify a trait that can be represented as different points on a continuum – people differ in different levels of this trait  

  • Measure enough people, and we typically find a normal distribution – some people are at the extremes but most are in the middle.   

Big five (OCEAN Model) 

openness, consciousness, extraversion, agreeableness, Neuroticism  

DeYoung  

• Extraversion... linked to approach tendencies/reward: nucleus acumens, amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex 

• Neuroticism... sensitive to threat/punishment: amygdala, anterior/mid-cingulate gyrus, PFC 

• Agreeableness... prosociality vs callousness, aggression: superior temporal sulcus, temporoparietal junction, posterior cingulate cortex 

• Conscientiousness... impulse control: dorsal/ventral lateral PFC 

• Openness... abstraction and flexibility: dorsolateral PFC, front pole of anterior PFC, anterior parietal cortex. 

Personality over the lifespan  

• Doesn’t really change