Personality and Behaviour Perspectives

PT 1 - Personality

What is Personality?

• Personality - an enduring set of internally based characteristics that create uniqueness and consistency in a person’s thoughts and behaviours

• Personality Trait: internally based characteristic that make up one’s personality

  • durable disposition to behave in a particular way in a variety of situations

Three Distinct Elements

1. Uniqueness - personality traits are specific to each person

2. Consistency - Looking at an individuals behaviour across time in similar situations, looking at patterns

3. Personality provides an explanation to account for the expression of the behaviour

The Psychodynamic Perspective

• Psychodynamic theorists look for the causes of behaviour in a dynamic interplay of inner forces that conflict with one another

Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory

• Focused on:

  • early childhood experiences

  • unconscious conflicts

  • Sexual and aggressive urges - internal forces

• Powerful influence on behaviour

  • Physical symptoms appear without a physical cause - conversion hysteria

Important Concepts

• Psychic Energy

  • Internal forces generated by instinctual drives

  • Discharged directly (acting on urges) or indirectly (vent energy in an unrelated way)

• Mental Events

  • Conscious - things we are aware of

  • Preconscious - things we are not aware of but can be easily recalled

  • Unconscious - things we are not aware of

The Structure of Personality

• Like an iceberg

  • Conscious stuff is at the top - stuff we can easily recall and remember, stuff we are aware of (Super-Ego)

  • Pre-Conscious stuff is in the middle - not currently being thought about, but easy enough to get to (Ego)

  • Unconscious stuff is at the bottom - unavailable to awareness (infantile memories, repressed wishes and conflicts) (Id)

• The Id

  • Exists within the unconscious mind

  • Develops first

  • The innermost core of the personality

  • The source of all psychic energy

  • The only structure present at birth

  • No direct contact with reality, and functions in a totally irrational manner

  • Controlled by the Pleasure Principle

    • Seeks immediate gratification or release

    • Regardless of rational considerations and environmental realities

    • “Want…take!”

• The Ego

  • Functions at a primarily at a conscious level

  • Develops second

  • Functions to keep impulses of id in control

  • Decision making component

    • delays gratification

    • Imparts self control

  • Operates according to the Reality Principle

    • Tests reality to decide when (and under what conditions) the id can safely discharge its impulses and satisfy its needs

    • Secondary Process Thinking - How can we maximize gratifications without the negative consequences of acting against society’s expectations

• The Super Ego

  • The last personality structure to develop

  • The moral aspect of personality

  • Controls the impulses of id with external control

  • Develops by the age of four or five

  • Repository for the ideals and values of society

Conflict, Anxiety, and Defence

• Ego can’t always control id = conflict

  • Anxiety when impulses of id threaten to get out of control

• Defence Mechanisms

  • Weapon of Ego

  • Are distortions of reality

  • Operate unconsciously

  • Cause of maladaptive behaviour

Stages of Psychosexual Development

• Series of Stages

  • Focuses on specific pleasure sensitive areas of the body

  • Adult personality is a function of progressing through these stages

• Fixation

  • Arrested development where instincts focused on particular area

Evaluation of Psychoanalytic Theory

• Difficult to test

  • Result genuine or result “defence mechanism”?

• Unconscious processes

  • Non conscious processes have been developed

• Psychosexual stages

  • Concept of childhood sexuality rejected

  • Issue = importance of early experiences and emotional attachment

Neo Freudian Perspectives - After Freud

• Jung’s Analytical Perspective

  • Personal Unconsciousness: Freud’s idea of Unconsciousness, except Jung named it differently

  • Collective Unconsciousness: unconscious store of the experiences of past generations of different people throughout the world

    • Ancestral knowledge, aka archetypes

  • Evidence: universal knowledge; tendencies that people share; archetypes

  • Archetypes: Universal thought patterns, images and behaviour rituals triggered by specific situations, symbols and images representing certain people, ideas, or beliefs

Adler’s Individual Perspective

• Striving for Superiority

  • Universal to drive, to adapt, improve oneself, and master life’s challenges

  • Feelings of inferiority push us to be our better selves

    • Inferiority complex - when feelings of inferiority are extreme

  • Compensation: efforts to overcome imagines or real inferiorities by developing your abilities

    • Overcompensation to hide inferiority complex

• Birth order and Personality?

  • Home environment for first born children very different than second born - have different predispositions

  • Different environment and treatment can effect personality

Horney’s Interpersonal Perspective

• Social Security - sense of feeling safe and loved in relationship with others

  • The motivational force that is underlying the expression of personality

• Basic Anxiety - feelings of anxiety due to lack of love, power, and safety in a relationship

• Basic hostility - feelings of anger and hostility people experience during insecurity

Pros and Cons of Neo-Freudian Perspective

Strengths

• Jung expanded emphasis on influence of the importance of the conscious and unconscious

• Adler and Horney expanded emphasis on importance of social relationship in the expression of personality

Limitations

• These are vague concepts that are difficult to measure

• Perspectives are based on biased samples of clinical observations

PT 2 - Behavioural Perspectives

Behaviourism

• Only overt (external) behaviour is worth studying

• Focus on external forces, interactions with external environment

  • Learning from experience

Skinner and Personality

• Operant conditioning: form of learning where likelihood of behaviour is determined by the consequences of engaging in that behaviour

  • when a child is learning to speak; getting praised for saying a word right and getting “consequenced” for saying a word wrong

• An individual’s personality is a collection of response tendencies that are tied to various environmental stimuli

  • Party example from slides

• What does this theory of operant conditioning tell us about personality?

  • Personality is continuing to develop and change as we gain experience

  • Can be explained externally

• How is this different from other perspectives?

  • No focus on internal and unconscious processes

  • Not broken down developmentally

Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory

• Famous for research on modelling and aggression (Bobo the Clown study)

  • Adults acts aggressively with the dolls. If a child sees the adult being scolded for being aggressive, are they more likely to be less aggressive when they are older?

  • Idea of learning from other people’s actions

• Cognitive behaviourist movement in 1960s

  • Issue with “pure” behaviourism

  • Humans are thinking, feeling, conscious

  • Also largely shaped by learning

  • Originally Social Learning Theory

• How does this theory compare to Skinner’s?

  • Bandura argues that in learning, people are not passive participants

    • Actively seek out information from the environment

    • Environment influences behaviour, but does not determine it

    • Reciprocal Determinism - determining effects, active participant in learning

  • Focus on information processing in terms of internal evaluations. Unobservable cognitive events can still be important in understanding why we engage in certain behaviours

• Reciprocal Determinism: internal mental events, external environments, and overt behaviour all influence each other

• Observational Learning: observing someone else’s behaviour and learning from the consequences of their actions

  • AKA Vicarious Conditioning

  • The model is an organism who’s behaviour is observed

• Self-efficacy: belief about your ability to do some kind of behaviour, which then leads to an expected outcome

  • High self efficacy - confident in your ability to execute the responses necessary to get what you want

  • Low self efficacy - concern that necessary responses are beyond your abilities

  • Determinations are subjective and specific

  • What influences Self-Efficacy

    • Performance experiences

    • Observational Learning

    • Verbul Persuasion

    • Emotional Arousal

The Person - Situation Controversy

• Focus on how much situational factors govern behaviour - Mischel

  • People make responses that lead to reinforcement in the situation at hand

    • Consistency Paradox - consistency in the behaviour of an individual is low

      • You will work hard if your boss gives compensation

    • People don’t behave as consistently as predicted

    • Sparked debate about importance of considering the person (what is learned) vs situation they are in (what they have learned)

Rotter’s Locus of Control

• Locus of Control: how much a person receives an outcome as being contingent on their own actions rather than on external forces

  • How much someone has control over a situation

  • Internal: events under personal control

    • Self determination, sense of personal effectiveness

    • They feel like they can make a genuine difference

  • External: external forces like luck, chance, powerful others

    • Less resistant to social powers

Evaluating Behavioural Perspectives

• What about cognition? Eventually considered

• Advanced our understanding of both internal and external factors

  • Skinner stressed role of environment

  • Bandura stressed importance of learning from other

  • Mischel stressed importance of situational factors

• Puts insights from other perspectives into cognitive behavioural concepts