Personality

Psyc week 9

Personality

  • Personality: an individual’s characteristic style of behaving, thinking, and feeling

  • The study of personality – developing explanations of the basis for psychological differences among people

    • Psychologists explain personality differences by thinking in terms of prior and anticipated events that affect personality or reveal personality characteristics

Measuring personality: self-report

  • Personality inventories rely on self-reporting (e.g. multiple choice or forced choice)

  • self-report: a questionnaire (or interview) that asks people to indicate the extent to which sets of statements/adjectives describe their own behaviour or mental state

    • response bias?

      • Social desirability

  • Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory: MMPI-2-RF – type of clinical questionnaire assessing personality and psychological problems

Measuring personality: projective techniques

  • Projective test: uses standard series of ambiguous stimuli designed to elicit unique responses that reveal inner aspects of an individual’s personality

    • Designed to circumvent limitations of self-report

    • Relies on analysis of ambiguous info

    • Open to subjective interpretation

      • E.g. Rorschach Inkblot test: individual interpretations of the meaning of a set of unstructured inkblots are analyzed to identify respondents’ inner feelings and interpret their personality structure

      • E.g. thematic apperception test (TAT): respondents reveal underlying motives, concerns, and the way they see the social world through the stories they make up about ambiguous pictures of people

        • Has a set of themes (success or failure, competition/jealousy, conflict with parents and siblings, aggression, sexuality)

    • Not much reliability or validity around these tests

      • Question if they can tell us much about personality

Measuring personality: use of technology

  • E.g. Smartphones, wearable devices, real-time analysis of social media posts

  • RQ: are women more talkative than men?

  • RQ: can we determine someone’s personality from their SM posts?

Traits

  • Trait: relatively stable disposition to behave in a particular and consistent way

    • a trait may be a preexisting disposition that causes a person’s behaviour (personality inventories), or the motivation that guides the behaviour (projective tests)

    • researchers have described and measured hundreds of traits over the decades e.g. authoritarianism

The big five personality traits

  • five factor model

    • accounts for variability without overlap, multiple observer agreeability, and is reliable across ages, cultures, and languages (i.e. may be universal)

    • are associated with predictable patterns of behaviour and social outcomes

    • overall stable across lifespan

    • acronym for the “Big 5” that makes up Personality

      • OCEAN or CANOE (Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Openness (to experience), Extroversion)

How to measure Big 5 Traits and Facets

  • NEO Personality Inventory-Revised: Self-report

Individual Uniqueness

  • Categorical/ discontinuous

    • Introvert vs. extrovert

  • Dimensional/ continuous (introvert <--------> extrovert scale)

  • Have our own individual fingerprint on the Big 5

Stability of Personality

  • People are relatively consistent in their thoughts, feelings, and actions across situations and over time

  • Behaviours can adapt and change

Perceiving personality

  • A target was video taped engaging in regular conversation

  • Completed the NEO personality inventory

  • Rated by perceivers

  • The targets level of agreeableness was accurately identified after 20s (ppl are generally good at detecting other peoples behaviour

  • Personality predicts:

    • Student GPA (high level of conscientiousness)

    • Career success (high conscientiousness, low neuroticism)

    • Career type

  • Risk factor for:

    • Depression (high neuroticism, low extraversion)

    • Why?

      • Personality influence emotions, cognitions and behaviours

Activity

  • What are 5 fav letter of alphabet?

    • A, D, S, L, R

  • On scale 0-5 rate how much you like the word January (repeat for months)

    • Jan – 3

    • Feb – 2

    • March – 3

    • April – 4

    • May – 4

    • June- 5

    • July – 5

    • Aug – 5

    • Sept – 2

    • Oct – 3

    • Nov – 4

    • Dec – 3

The self: personality in the mirror

  • We are able to recognize ourselves in mirrors by 18 months

  • Self-recognition in mirrors:

    • Enables reflexive thinking

    • Directs attention to our own thoughts, feelings, and actions

    • Enables us to construct ideas about our own personality

  • Self-recognition leads to:

    • Self-concept: what we think about ourselves,, and

    • Self- esteem: how we feel about ourselves

Self- Concept

  • A person’s explicit knowledge of their own behaviours, traits, and other personal characteristics

    • Affects behaviour throughout life

    • Develops from social experiences

      • Sense of self is largely constructed through relationships

      • E.g. feedback from parents, teachers, siblings, friends

    • Organized in 2 ways: (don’t rlly need to know)

      • 1) self-narrative: story we tell about ourselves

      • 2) self-schemas: sets of traits we find important and use to define ourselves

  • Self concept is stable and promotes consistency in behaviour

    • Self-verification: tendency to seek evidence to confirm the self-concept

Self-Esteem

  • Extent ot which one likes, values and accepts the self

    • High self esteem: highly agree with +ve statements and strongly disagree with -ve statements about themselves

  • Benefits of self-esteem include status, belongings, security

    • High: happier and healthier, better stress coping, persist at difficult tasks

    • Low: ambiguous feedback as rejection, eating disorder risk factor

  • Self-esteem could be a kind of ‘sociometer’

    • Belonging to groups is adaptive (evolutionary)

    • High self-esteem arises from being accepted and valued by others

    • Personal judgements also matter: especially comparisons to others

    • Areas of importance vary

  • Self-serving bias: people’s tendency to take credit for their success but downplay responsibility for their failures; protects self-esteem

  • Better-than-average effect: people tend to see themselves as better than average in most positive domains (80-90% of drivers)

  • Implicit egotism argues that people are generally unaware of their preference for things similar to themselves (e.g. own name)

  • Narcissism: trait that reflects a grandiose view of the self alongside a tendency to seek admiration from and exploit others

Personality Part 2a

The Humanistic-existential approach

  • Emphasizes individual’s inherent drive towards self-actualization (i.e. realizing one’s potential)

  • We are always striving to become the best version of ourselves that we can be

  • Humanistic and existential theorists focus on how healthy choices shape personality

    • Humanistic: emphasize a +ve, optimistic view of human nature; e.g. goodness and potential for growth

    • Existentialist: focus on the individual as a responsible agent, free to create his/her life while negotiating issues of meaning and the reality of death

Human needs and self-actualization

  • Self-actualizing tendency: human motive towards realizing inner potential

    • Major factor in personality development

    • Maslow’s hierarchy of needs recognizes this as a higher need

    • Individual personality differences arise from the environment (facilitations or blocks) that are attempts to satisfy psychological needs

      • Mismatch between your goals and your true nature and capabilities = unhappiness

Flow

  • Engagement in tasks that match our abilities, causing a state of focus and happiness

  • Full immersion in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity

  • Balance of anxiety and boredom

  • Being in the zone (or sometimes “on a roll”)

  • Skill-level isn’t intelligence, it’s time

  • Humanists believe that states of flow reflect the realization of one’s potential and represent the height of personality development

Personality as existence

  • Existential approach: regards personality as governed by an individual’s ongoing choices and decisions in the context of the realities of life and death

  • Awareness of our existence:

    • +ve side: bring richness and dignity to our life

    • -ve side: force us to confront realities that are difficult to face (e.g. human suffering, death)

    • Angst: the difficulties we face in life in finding meaning in life and death, and in accepting the responsibility of making free choices

Personality Part 3 – week 9

The social-cognitive approach

  • Views personality in terms of how we think about situations encountered in daily life and behave in response to them

    • How personality and situation interact to cause behaviour and shape personality further

    • How we experience and interpret situations

  • Person-situation controversy: is behaviour caused more by personality or by situational factors?

    • Personality traits may do little to predict behavior (average r = .30)

    • Behaviours may not transfer in different situations

    • Information about situation and about personality predicts behaviour

Personal constructs and goals

  • Personal constructs: dimensions people use in making sense of their experiences

    • Differences in perspective in the perceiver’s personality are key to personality differences

  • Perspective is also reflected in personal goals

    • Outcome expectancies: assumptions about likely consequences of a behaviour

      • Direct, vicarious (ex. mom walks you the long way around to get to school because of her fear of a dog, so now you have a fear), informational learning

      • Combine with goals to produce characteristic style of behaviour

    • Locus of control: person’s tendency to perceive the control of rewards as internal (healthier, less anxiety and stress) to the self or external (in the environment (e.g. chance/luck/result of others)

Biology of Personality

  • Genes, traits and personality

    • Behavioural genetics looks for correlations between monozygotic (100% genes - same egg shell) and dizygotic (50% genes) twins

      • The greater the overlap in genes, the greater similarity in personality

        • Reared-apart identical twins end up having just as similar personalities as those reared together

        • E.g. similar opinions and worldviews

      • Personality variability among individuals: 40% from genes; 60% from environment

        • Fairly stable across personality domains

        • Shared environmental factors show that these environments have little impact (e.g. a large change in your life like parental divorce doesn’t have as big of an impact compared to genetics)

  • Anatomy & Physiology

    • Changes in personality can be caused by:

      • Brain damage (e.g. Phineas Gage – had drill shoot right through his brain - personality changed)

      • Brain pathologies (Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, tumors)

      • Pharmaceutical treatments that change brain chemistry

  • Gender differences: biology or culture?

    • Researchers have found reliable gender differences

      • Women are more: verbally expressive, sensitive to non-verbal cues, more nurturing, more agreeable, conscientious, neurotic, likely to engage in more relational aggression

      • Men are: more assertive, greater sensation-seeking, slightly higher self-esteem; more physically aggressive

      • Other traits show no differences (e.g. helpfulness is the same for both)

      • More personality similarities than differences (researchers just want to look for the differences in their studies)

    • Differences attributed to sex hormones during puberty and culture

      • E.g. testosterone effects

        • Look at transgender men who want injections of testosterone, did personality test before and then after

    • Evolutionary perspectives argue for the social role theory

      • Personality characteristics result from different cultural standards and expectations between the genders

    • Androgyny = better adjustment

Traits are wired in the brain

  • Extraversion may be the most relevant to neurophysiological mechanism; variation in alertness

    • Over/under stimulation of the part of the brain responsible for arousal

  • Two brain systems may be responsible for the extraversion and neuroticism:

    • Behavioural activation system (BAS) – approach (go system)

      • Extravert: highly reactive BAS

    • Behavioural inhibition system (BIS) – inhibition (stop system)

      • Introvert: highly reactive BIS

    • Operate independently – can have both

    • These BIS/BAS systems relate to how the brain (and consequent behaviour) works; they are not “structures”

Do animals have personalities?

  • Can use the big five (OCEAN)

  • Dimensions of stable personality types have been identified in certain animal species; e.g. dogs, hyenas, octopi, guppies

Personality part 4

The Psychodynamic Approach to Personality

  • Psychodynamic approach: view that personality is formed by needs and desires that mostly operate outside of conscious awareness

    • Developed by Sigmund Freud

    • Used to explain onset of mental disorders

  • Freud proposed that the mind consists of 3 independent systems that together determine the personality’s structure:

    • The Id, the ego, and the superego

  • Id: part of the mind containing the drives present at birth; source of our bodily needs, wants, desires and impulses especially sexual and aggressive drives (operates via pleasure principle)

    • Entirely submersed in our unconscious

  • Ego: developed through contact with the external world; enables us to deal with life’s practical demands (reality principle)

    • Mediator between id and superego

  • Superego: mental system that reflects the internalization of cultural rules, mainly learned through parental authority (like conscience)

  • Id, ego, and superego are in constant internal conflict (this causes anxiety)

  • Defense mechanisms: unconscious coping mechanisms that reduce anxiety generated by threats from unacceptable impulses

    • E.g. rationalization

      • Giving a reasonable-sounding explanation for unacceptable feelings and behaviour to hide own underlying motives/feelings

    • E.g. projection

      • Attributing own negative feelings/motives to others

Psychosexual Stages and personality development

  • Distinct early life stages through which personality is formed as children experience sexual pleasures from specific body areas and caregivers redirect/ interfere with those pleasures

  • Not dependable facts to refer to

  • Oral stage

    • Birth to 18 months

    • Pleasure from mouth (via eating and drinking)

    • Experience centers on the pleasures and frustrations associated with the mouth, sucking, and being fed

  • Anal stage

    • 18 months to 3 yrs

    • Pleasure from anus (via withholding or expelling feces

    • What does “anal retentive” mean?

    • Experience centers on the pleasures and frustrations associated with the anus, retention and expulsion of feces and urine, and toilet training

  • Phallic stage

    • 18 months to 4/5 yrs

    • Gender differences are notices – child relates to same sex parent

    • Experience centers on the pleasures, conflict, and frustration associated with the phallic-genital region, as well as coping with powerful incestuous feelings of love, hate, jealousy, and conflict

  • Latency stage

    • 4/5 yrs to adolescence

    • Sexual drives lay dormant

    • Time for coming together of the mature adult personality with a capacity to love, work, and relate to others in a mutually satisfying and reciprocal manner

  • Genital stage

    • Adolescence

    • Sexual urges reawaken, interest turns to relationships