Psychology: Unit 4 Personality

Personality

An individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking feeling, and acting

Psychodynamic Theory

Sigmund Freud
- Case studies on the unconscious mind
Psychodynamic Theory: view personality with a focus on the unconscious mind and importance of childhood experiences
Unconscious: a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts and feelings
Free association: a method of exploring the unconscious in which the person relaxes and says whatever comes to mind, no matter the questions or thoughts
Freud’s View: personality arises from conflict balancing the 3

Id: unconsciously strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives, operating on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification
Ego: functions as the “executive” and mediates the demands of the id and superego, reality impulses that will bring long term pleasure rather than pain
Super ego: provides standards for judgement, (the conscience) and for future aspirations

Personality Development: Psychosexual Stages

- Personality forms during the first years of life divided into psychosexual stages

- the Id’s pleasure-seeking energies focus on pleasure sensitive body areas called erogenous zones

Stages of Psychosexuality

Oral 0-18 months
Anal 18-36 months
Phallic 3 to 6 years
Latency 6 to puberty
Genital post puberty

Oedipus Complex

Freud believed that during the Phallic stage (3-6) boys seek genital stimulation and develop unconscious sexual desires for their mother
A boy’s sexual desire for his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father
Hans was afraid of horses, which Freud believed was a displaced dear of his father
- He also had castration anxiety because his parents threatened to cut off his penis if he kept playing with it

Electra Complex: according to freud, girls have a similar desire for their father

Identification

Children cope with threatening feelings

Oral Fixation

Freud believed conflicts unresolved during earlier psychosexual stages could surface as maladaptive behavior in adults

At any point in the oral, anal, or phallic stages strong conflict could lock or fixate
Fixation: lingering focus of pleasure seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage where conflicts were unresolved

Defense Mechanisms

The ego’s protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality

Repression

Repression banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from unconciousness
Explains why we do not remember our childhood lust for our parent (oedipus/electra)
Believed that repression is incomplete
Freudian Slip: when you say one thing but you mean another

Regression

Regression leads an individual faced with anxiety to retreat to a more infantile psychosexual stage

(Regressing to a younger time)

Reaction Formation

Causes the ego to unconsciously switch unacceptable impulses into their opposites
People may express feelings of purity when they may be suffering anxiety from unconcious feelings about sex
“I hate him” becomes “I love him”

Projection

Projection leads people to disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others
EX: “He doesn’t trust me” could be a projection of the actual feeling being I don't trust you or myself

Rationalization

Rationalization offers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one’s actions
EX: habitual drinkers may say they drink with friends to be “sociable”

Displacement

Often displaced on less threatening things

Displacement shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person, redirecting anger toward a safer outlet
EX: children who fear expressing anger against their parents may displace it by kicking the dog

Sublimation

Defense mechanism by which people re-channel their unacceptable impulses into socially approved activities

Denial

Protects the person from real events that are painful to accept, either by rejecting a fact or its seriousness
EX: Spouses deny evidence of their partner cheating

Neo-Freudians

Accepted Freud’s basic ideas: the personality structure of the Id, Ego, Superego; importance of the unconscious, shaping of personality in childhood, and defense mechanisms
Disagreed in 2 ways:

Place more emphasis on the conscious mind’s role in interpreting experience and in coping with the environment
They doubted that sex and aggression were all-consuming motivations and instead emphasized motives and social interactions

Karen Horney

- developed the idea of neurosis-driving need for something or someone (makes life bearable/gives us something to strive for)’

-believed that psychological differences between men and women are not due to anatomy but to culture and social expectations

-3 Categories of Neurosis:

Compliance- needs for affection, a partner, and to simplify one’s life
Aggression- including needs for power, exploitation of others, prestige, personal admiration and personal achievement
Withdrawal- including needs for independence and perfection

Freud's Penis Envy Theory: girls develop penis envy, never forgiving their mothers for castrating them at birth
Alfred Andler

- Believed childhood tension were social not sexual

- Inferiority complex: feelings of lack of worth

-Alfred Adler’s Birth Order Theory:

Only child: center of attention
First Born: leadership role
Second Born: independent and competitive
Middle Child: independent and more congenial
Last Born: spoiled

Carl Jung

- believed in the collective unconscious, which contained a common reservoir of images and memories derived from our species’ past

(why many cultures share certain myths and images such as the mother being a symbol of nurturance)

Terror Management Theory

Idea that thinking about one’s morality provokes anxiety, explores people’s emotional and behavioral responses to reminders of their impending death

Modern Psychoanalytic Perspective

Freud was right about the unconscious mind

- Modern research shows the existence of nonconscious info processing

Schemas that automatically control perceptions and interpretations
Parallel processing during vision and thinking and priming
Implicit memories
Emotions that activate instantly without consciousness

The scientific merits of freud’s theory have been criticized as psychoanalysis is meagerly testable

Assessing Unconscious Processes

Projective tests: personality test (psychological x-ray) that provides ambiguous stsimuli designed to trigger projection of ones inner dynamics

- stimuli has no significance so any meaning people read into it presumable is a projection of their interests and conflicts

Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

-developed by Henry Murray

-protective test in which people express their inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes

Hermann Rorschach

-known for developing a projective test known as the Rorschach inkblot test

-seeks to identify peoples inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of the blots (animals infers aggressive tendencies)

Projective Test: Criticisms

Critics argue that projective tests lack both reliability (consistency of results) and validity (predicting what it is supposed to do)
Projective tests may misdiagnose a normal individual as pathological

Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective

Personality develops throughout life and is not fixed in childhood
Freud underemphasized peer influence on the influence, which may be as powerful as parental influence
Gender identity may develop before 5-6 years of age
There may be other reasons for dreams besides wish fulfillment
Verbal slips can be explained on the basis of cognitive processing of verbal choices
Suppressed sexuality leads to psychological disorders. Sexual inhibition has decreased but psychological disorders have not

Humanistic Theories (6.9)

Humanistic Perspective

Psychologists became discontent with Freud’s negativity and the mechanistic psychology of behaviorists
Humanistic theories: view personality with a focus on the potential for healthy personal growth

Maslow Self-Actualizing Person

Maslow proposed that we individuals are motivated by a hierarchy of needs
Beginning with psychological needs, we try to reach the state of self-actualized- fulfilling our potential

Carl Roger’s Person-Centered Perspective

Individual self-actualization tendencies unless the environment inhibits growth
Growth Promoting Climates need:

Genuineness
Acceptance
Empathy

Self-transcendence: after reaching full potential some people also strive for meaning, purpose, and communion in a way that is transpersonal-beyond the self

Unconditional Positive Regard

Is an attitude of acceptance of others despite their failings

Assessing the Self

In an effort to assess personality, Rogers asked people to describe themselves as they would like to be (ideal) and they actually are (real)
All our thoughts and feelings about ourselves, in an answer to the question “Who am I”

Evaluating the Humanistic Perspective

Humanistic psychology has a pervasive impact on counseling, education, child-rearing, and management
Concepts in humanistic psychology are vague and subjective and lack scientific basis
Gender identity may develop before 5-6 years of age

Trait Theories

Gordon Allport

His findings led him to describe personality in terms of fundamental traits
Trait: characteristic patterns of behavior or a disposition to feel and act, as assessed by self-report inventories and peer reports

The Trait Perspective

Allport came to define personality in terms of identifiable behavior patterns
Was less concerned with explaining individual traits than with describing them
Found 18,000 world traits
- Examples of Traits:
- Honest
- Dependable
- Moody
- Impulsive

Personality Type

Consist of a number of traits
Sort people according to Jung’s personality types based on responses to 126 questions
Used in counseling or as a coaching tool not a research instrument - lacks validity as a job performance indicator

Types of Personalities

Type A Type B

Feel time pressure - Relaxed and easy going
Easily angered - But some people fit in neither type
Competitive and ambitions
Work hard and play hard
More prone to heart disease than rest of population

Raymond

Interested in knowing if some traits predicted others
Factor analysis is a statistical approach used to describe and relate personality traits
Cattell used this approach to develop a 16 personality factor inventory
Found that large groups of traits could be reduced down to 16 core personality traits based on statistical correlations

Personality Dimensions

Hans and Sybil Eysenck suggested that personality could be reduced down to 2 polar dimensions: extraversion-introversion and emotional stability-instability

MMPI

Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory: most widely researched and clinically used of all personality tests
Originally developed to identify emotional disorders
Empirically derived test: created by selecting from a pool of items that discriminate between groups

The Big Five Factors (CANOE)

Conscientiousness
- Organized ←→ Disorganized
- Careful ←→Careless
- Disciplined ←→ Impulsive

Agreeableness
- Soft hearted ←→Ruthless
- Trusting ←→ Suspicious
- Helpful ←→ Uncooperative

Neuroticism (emotional stability vs instability)
- Calm ←→ Anxious
- Secure ←→ Insecure
- Self-Satisfied ←→ Self-pitying

Openness
- Imaginative ←→ Practical
- Preference for variety ←→ Preference for routine
- Independent ←→ Conforming

Extraversion
- Sociable ←→ Retiring
- Fun-loving ←→ Sober
- Affectionate ←→ Reserved

Questions about the BIG FIVE

Stability of these Traits: stable in adulthood, change over development (maturity principle)
Heritability of these Traits: 50% or so for each trait
Common across cultures
Conscientious people are morning type and extraverted are evening type

Evaluating the Trait Perspective

Walter Mischel points out that traits may be enduring, but the resulting behavior in various situations is different
Therefore, traits are not good predictors of behavior
People can fake desirable responses on self-report measures of personality

Social Cognitive Theories

Social Cognitive Perspective

Albert Bandura believes that personality is result of an interaction that occurs between a person and their social context
Social Cognitive Theory: believe we learn many behaviors through conditioning, observing, or modeling > social part
What we “think” about our situations affect behaviors > mental part
Focus on how we and our environment interact

Behavioral Approach

Behavioral approach: focuses on the effects of learning on our personality development
We are conditioned to repeat certain behaviors and we learn by imitating and observing others
Social-cognitive theorists do consider the behavioral perspective and also emphasize the importance of mental processes

Reciprocal Determinism

3 factors (behavior, cognition, environment) are interlocking determinants of each other (mutual influences between personality and environmental factors)

Individuals and Environments

Specific ways in which individuals and environments interact
Different people choose different environments = school you attend and the music you listen to are partly based on your dispositions
Our personalities shape how we react to events = anxious people reach to situations differently than calm people
Our personalities shape situations = how we view and treat people influences how they treat us

Assessing Behavior in Situations

Observe people in realistic and simulated situations because they find that it is the best way to predict the behavior of others in similar situations

Behavior

Behavior emerges from an interplay of external and internal influences

Evaluating the Social-Cognitive Perspective

Critics say that psychologists pay a lot of attention to the situation and pay less attention to the individual, his unconscious mind, his emotions, and his genetics
Built on learning and cognition

Exploring the Self

Self: modern psychology assumes to be the center of personality
overestimate our concern that others evaluate our appearance, performance, and blunders (spotlight effect)

Benefits of Self-Esteem

Maslow and Rogers argued that a successful life results from a healthy self-image
Self Esteem: feelings of high or low self-worth
The following are two reasons why low self-esteem results in personal problems

When self-esteem is deflated, we view ourselves and others critically
Low self-esteem reflects reality, our failure in meeting challenges, or surmount difficulties

Types of Self-Esteem

Defensive self-esteem: fragile and focuses on sustaining itself, makes failure and criticism feel threatening

- Defensive people may respond to perceived threats with anger or aggression

Secure self-esteem: less fragile because contingent on external evaluations

- feel accepted for who we are and not for our looks, wealth, or acclaim relieves pressures to succeed and enables us to focus beyond ourselves

Self-Efficacy

Self-efficacy: one’s sense of competence and effectiveness according to Bandura
Children’s academic self efficacy predicts school achievement but general self image does not

Self-serving Bias

A readiness to perceive one favorably
Accept responsibility for good deeds and blame others for failures

Narcissism

Excessive self love and self absorption

Dunning-Kruger Effect

People are often most overconfident when most incompetent
“Ignorance when one’s own incompetence” phenomenon
Often takes competence to recognize incompetence
Type of cognitive bias
Poor self-awareness and low cognitive ability lead to overestimation of oneself

Culture and Self-Esteem

Individualism: giving priority to one’s own goals over group goals and defining one’s identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identifications
Collectivism: giving priority to the goals of one’s group and defining one’s identity accordingly

Comparing the Major Personality Theories

Psychoanalytic: free association, projective tests, dream analysis
Psychodynamic: The unconscious and conscious minds interactto influence behavior, emphasizing the importance of early childhood experiences and internal conflicts.