12.1 Theories of Personality

• Personality: A person’s unique and relatively stable patterns of thinking, emotions, and behaviors.

• Temperament: General pattern of attention, arousal, and mood that is evident from birth.

• Self-concept: The perception of concepts of one’s own personality traits.

• Self-esteem: Regarding oneself as a worthwhile person; a positive evaluation of oneself.

  Human Diversity and Self-Esteem

• Personality theory: A system of concepts, assumptions, ideas, and principles used to understand and explain personality.

  Psychoanalytic Theory

• Psychoanalytic theory: Freudian theory of personality that emphasizes unconscious forces and conflicts.

  Personality Structures

• Dynamic system directed by three mental structures: the id, the ego, and the superego

  The Id

• Id: Component of Freud’s Personality theory containing primitive drives present at birth.

• Pleasure principle: According to Freud, the id’s drive to avoid pain and seek what feels good.

• Psyche: The mind, mental life, and personality as a whole.

• Libido: In Freudian theory, the force, primarily pleasure oriented, that energizes the personality.

• Eros: Freud’s name for the “life instincts.”

• Thanatos: The death instinct postulated by Freud.

  The Ego

• Ego: According to Freud, the decision-making part of personality that operates on the reality principle.

• Reality principle: Delaying action (or pleasure) until it is appropriate.

  The Superego

• Superego: According to Freud, the part of personality that represents moral conscience.

  Levels of Awareness

• Unconscious: Contents of the mind that are beyond awareness, especially impulses and desires.

• Conscious: The region of the mind that includes all mental contents that a person is aware of at any given moment.

• Preconscious: An area of the mind containing information that can be voluntarily brought to awareness.

  Personality Development

• Psychosexual stages: How Freud classifies a period of development.

• Erogenous zone: Any body area that produces pleasurable sensations.

• Fixation: A lasting conflict developed as a result of frustration or overindulgence.

  Expansion of Psychoanalytic Theory

• Alfred Adler (1870-1937)

• Striving for superiority: According to Alfred Adler, this basic drive propels us toward perfection.

• Inferiority Complex: Arises when feelings of inferiority become overwhelming; negative pattern characterized by a chronic lack if self-wroth along with self-doubt.

• Karen Horney (1885-1952)

• Basic anxiety: A primary form of anxiety that arises from living in a hostile world.

• Carl Jung (1875-1961)

• Persona: The “mask” or public self presented to others.

• Personal unconscious: A mental storehouse for an individual’s unconscious thoughts.

• Collective unconscious: According to Carl Jung, a mental storehouse for unconscious ideas and images shared by all humans.

• Archetype: According to Carl Jung, a universal idea, image, or pattern found in the collective unconscious.

  Learning Theories

• Behavioral personality theory: Any model of personality that emphasizes learning and observable behavior.

  Personality Structure and Dynamics

• Habit: A deeply ingrained, learned pattern of behavior.

• Situational determinants: External conditions that strongly influence behavior.

  Expansion of Learning Theories

• Social learning theory: A theory that combines learning principles with cognitive process, socialization, and modeling, to explain behavior, including personality.

  Social Learning Theory

• Psychological situation: A situation as it is perceived and interpreted by an individual, not as it is exists objectively.

• Expectancy: Anticipation about the effect that a response will have, especially regarding reinforcement.

• Self-efficacy: Belief in your capacity to produce a desired results.

• Reinforcement value: The subjective value that a person attaches to a particular activity or reinforcer.

• Self-reinforcement: Praising or rewarding oneself for having made a particular response (such as completing a school assignment).

  Personality Development

• Social reinforcement: Praise, attention, approval, and/or affection from others.

• Gender roles: Pattern of behaviors regarded as “male” or “female” within a culture.

• Identification: Feeling emotionally connected to a person and seeing oneself as like him or her.

• Imitation: An attempt to match one’s own behavior to another person’s behavior.

  Humanistic Theory

• Humanism: An approach that focuses on human experience, problems, potentials, and ideals.

• Free will: The ability to freely make choices that are not controlled by genetics, learning, or unconscious forces.

• Human nature: Those traits, qualities, potentials, and behavior patterns most characteristic of the human species.

• Subjective experience: Reality as it is perceived and interpreted, not as it exists objectively.

  Key Theorists

• Abraham Maslow:

• Self-actualization: The process of fully developing personal potentials.

• Suggestions to the journey of self-actualization

  1. Be willing to change

  2. Take responsibility

  3. Examine your motives

  4. Experience honestly and directly

  5. Use your positive experiences

  6. Be prepared to be different

  7. Get involved

  8. Assess your progress

• Carl Rogers:

• Fully functioning person: A person living in harmony with her or his deepest feeling, impulses, and intuitions.

• Self: A continuously evolving conception of one’s personal identity.

• Self-image: Total subjective perception of one’s body and personality (another term for self-concept).

• Incongruence: A state that exists when there is a discrepancy between one’s experiences and self-image or between one’s self-image and ideal self.

• Ideal self: An idealized image of oneself (the person that one would like to be).

• Possible selves: A collection of thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and images concerning the person that one could become.

• Conditions of worth: Internal standards used to judge the value of one’s thoughts, actions, feelings, or experiences.

• Unconditional positive regard: Complete, unqualified acceptance of another person as he or she is.

• Positive self-regard: Thinking of oneself as a good, lovable, worthwhile person.

  12.2 Traits: The Building Blocks of Personality

• Personality trait: Stable quality that a person shows in most situations.

• Individual differences: Study of the variation that exists between people.

• Trait-situation interaction: The influence that external settings of circumstances have on the expression of personality traits.

  Classifying Traits

• Central traits: The core traits that characterize and individual personality.

• Secondary traits: Traits that are inconsistent or relatively superficial.

• Source traits (factors): Basic underlying traits, or dimensions, of personality; each source trait is reflected in a number of surface traits.

• Factor analysis: A statistical technique used to correlate multiple measurements and identify general underlying factors.

  The Big Five Model

• Big Five personality traits: Theory that only a handful of characteristics account for most individual differences in personality.

  Personality Traits in Everyday Life: Cruelty, Sadism, and Psychopathy

• Subclinical (traits): Qualities of individuals that are not extreme enough to merit a psychiatric diagnosis.

  Traits versus Types

• Personality type: A style of personality defined by a group of related traits.

  12.3 Personality Assessment

  Interviews

• Interview (personality): A face-to-fact meeting held for the purpose of gaining information about an individual’s personal history, personality traits, current psychological state, and so forth.

• Unstructured interview: An interview in which conversation is informal and topics are taken up freely as they arise.

• Structured interview: An interview that follows a prearranged plan, usually a series of planned questions.

• Halo effect: The tendency to generalize a favorable or unfavorable particular impression to unrelated details of personality.

  Direct Observation

• Direct observation: Assessing behavior through direct surveillance.

  Rating Scales and Behavioral Assessment

• Rating scale: A list of personality traits or aspects of behavior on which a person is rated.

• Behavioral assessment: Recording the frequency of various behaviors.

  Situational Testing

• Situational test: Stimulating real-life conditions so that a person’s reactions may be directly observed.

  Personality Inventories

• Personality inventory: A paper-and-pencil test consisting of questions that reveal aspects of personality.

• Objective test: A test that gives the same score when different people take it.

• Reliability: Stability of test scores over time.

• Validity: Degree to which a test measures the trait that it was designed to do.

• Norm: Standard used to compare an individual’s performance on a test with that of others.

• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory: A standardized test designed to identify problem areas of functioning in an individual’s personality.

  Projective Tests

• Projective tests: Personality tests that use ambiguous or unstructured stimuli.

• Rorschach Inkblot Test: Projective test that consists of complex, irregular monochromatic shapes.

• Thematic Apperception Test (TAT): A projective test consisting of 20 different scenes and life situations about which respondents make up stories.

  12.4 Factors Influencing Personality

• Behavioral genetics: The study of inherited behavioral traits and tendencies.

  12.5 Psychology and Your Skill Set: Leadership

  Promote Strong Relationships and Individual Talent

• Tips to Follow When Providing Assessments:

  • Give feedback that focuses on the person’s behavior rather than their character

  • Whenever possible, provide concrete examples that provide some basis for your comments so that people can see how you have drawn your conclusions

  • Be selective, a few well-chosen suggestions are more likely to be acted upon than a very large number, which people may find overwhelming

  • Present your suggestions so that they will invite a dialogue by stating your thoughts and askings for their reactions

  • Pay careful attention to people’s responses to your feedback, including nonverbal cues that might provide insight into their reactions to your suggestions.

Chapter In Review:

12.1 Theories of Personality

12.1.1 Define the term personality and distinguish it from temperament, self-concept, and self-esteem

Personality refers to a person’s consistent and unique patterns of thinking, emotion, and behavior. It is believed to emerge from infant’s temperament, which is the general pattern of attention, arousal, and mood that’s evident from birth. Behavior is influenced by self-concept, which is a perception of one’s own personality traits. Self-esteem (our evaluation of ourselves) stems directly from our self-concept: A positive self-concept leads to high self-esteem. Low self-esteem results from a negative self-concept and is associated with stress, unhappiness, and depression.

12.1.2 Describe how psychoanalytic theories explain personality

Like other psychodynamic approaches, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory emphasizes unconscious forces and conflicts within the personality. In Freud’s theory, personality is made up of the Id, ego, and superego. The personality operates on three levels: the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. The Freudian view of personality development is based on a series of psychosexual stages: the oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital stages. According to Freud, fixation at any stage can leave a lasting imprint on personality. Neo-Freudian theorists accepted the broad feature of Freudian psychology but developed their own views.

12.1.3 Describe how behaviorists and social learning theorists explain personality

Behavioral theories of personality emphasize learning, conditioning, and immediate effects of the environment (situational determinants). Learning theorists Dollard and Miller consider habits the basic core of personality. Habits express the combined effects of drive, cue, responses, and rewards. Social learning theory adds cognitive elements, such as perception, thinking, and understanding to the behavioral view of personality. Social learning theory is exemplified by Julian Rotter’s concepts of the physiological situation, expectancies, and reinforcement value.

12.4 Describe how humanistic theories explain personality

Humanistic theories stress subjective experience, free will, self-actualization, and positive models of human nature. Abraham Maslow found that self-actualizers share characteristics that range from efficient perceptions of reality to frequent peak experiences. Carl Rogers viewed the self as an entity that emerges from personal experience. We tend to become aware of experiences that match our self-image and exclude those that are incongruent with it. The incongruent person has a highly unrealistic self-image, a mismatch between the self-image and the ideal self, or both. The congruent or fully functioning person is flexible and open to experiences and feelings. Like the ideal self, possible selves help us become the person we would like to become. As parents apply conditions of worth to children’s behavior, thoughts, and feelings, children begin to do the same. Internalized conditions of worth then contribute to incongruence that disrupts the organismic valuing process.

12.2 Traits: The Building Blocks of Personality

12.2.1 Describe what is meant by personality trait

Traits are characteristics related to thoughts, feelings, and behavior that differ among people and are relatively stable over a variety of situations and a fairly long period of time. Though they are assumed to be quite stable, traits can sometimes interact with the environment (situations) to explain our behavior.

12.2.2 Outline the history of the trait approach to understanding personality, including the work of Allport and Cattell

Trait theories identify qualities that are most lasting or characteristic of a person. Allport made a useful distinction between central and secondary traits. Cattell’s theory defines the existence of 16 underlying source traits (or dimensions) that are central to personality. Source traits are measured by the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16 PF).

12.2.3 Contrast the Big Five and HEXACO models of personality

The five-factor model (Big Five) attempted to reduce the number of personality dimensions outlined in Cattell’s research. Specifically, the Big Five model identifies five universal dimensions of personality: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. Work in cultures outside of the West supported the existence of the Big Five but also identified a sixth dimension of personality, honesty/humility. The HEXACO model of personality thus extends the Big Five to include this sixth factor.

12.2.4 Explain what is meant by personality type, and the weaknesses associated with this approach to classifying personality

Personality types group people into categories on the basis of shared traits. One significant weakness of this approach is that it oversimplifies people’s personalities because it classifies people as having/not having a particular trait instead of acknowledging that people may possess traits to a greater or lesser extent.

12.3 Personality Assessment

12.3.1 Outline four ways in which personality can be measured

Techniques typically used for personality assessment are interviews, observation, questionnaires, and projective tests. Structured and unstructured interviews provide much information, but they are subject to interviewer bias and misperceptions. The halo effect may also reduce the accuracy of an interview. Direct observation, sometimes involving situational tests, behavioral assessment, or the use of rating scales, allows evaluation of a person’s actual behavior. Personality questionnaires, such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2, are objective and reliable, but their validity is open to questions. Projective tests ask a person to project thoughts or feelings onto an ambiguous stimulus or unstructured situation. Two well-known examples are the Rorschach Inkblot Test and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). Projective tests are low in validity and objectivity. Nevertheless, they are considered useful by many clinicians, particularly as part of a test battery.

12.4 Factors Influencing Personality

12.4.1 Describe the results of behavioral genetics studies with regard to the role of genetic and environmental influences on personality

Behavioral genetics and studies of identical twins suggest that both heredity and environment contribute significantly to adult personality traits. Heredity appears to impact each of the Big Five Factors approximately equally.

12.5 Psychology and Your Skill Set: Leadership

12.5.1 Create a plan to improve your leadership abilities

Leadership skills are beneficial in the workplace because they can be used to promote organizational goals. Leadership skills also benefit your personal life, because taking on leadership roles can bring great personal satisfaction. To improve upon your leadership abilities, you need to help your teams commit to shared values, ask questions of your team members, seek feedback, welcome innovation, be a creative problem solver, be optimistic, and promote team success and individual talents. We hope that after reading this section, you’ll be better able to think about how you can use these strategies to help when you find yourself in a leadership position.