Personality Psychology Notes

Personality

Key Terms

• Type A: Individuals who feel a sense of time pressure and are easily angered; they are competitive and ambitious.
• Type B: Individuals who are relaxed and easygoing.
• Stage theory: A theory in which development is thought to be discontinuous, with qualitatively different and recognizable stages that people move through in a stepwise fashion.
• Freud's psychosexual stage theory: A stage theory of personality development that includes the oral, anal, phallic, and adult genital stages, with a latency period in between the phallic and genital stages.
• Oedipus crisis: A stage in psychosexual development (phallic stage) where boys sexually desire their mothers and view their fathers as rivals.
• Unconscious: The region of the mind where thoughts are not accessible.
• Id: The part of the personality in the unconscious that contains instincts and psychic energy; it is propelled by the pleasure principle.
• Ego: The part of the personality that follows the reality principle and negotiates between the id's desires and environmental limitations. It exists partly in the conscious and partly in the unconscious mind.
• Superego: The part of the personality that acts as a conscience and develops around age 5; it operates on both the conscious and unconscious levels.
• Defense mechanisms: Strategies used by the ego to protect the conscious mind from threatening thoughts buried in the unconscious.
• Womb envy: The concept suggested by Karen Horney, representing men's jealousy of women's reproductive capabilities.
• Personal unconscious: Similar to Freud's view of the unconscious, containing painful or threatening memories and thoughts.
• Collective unconscious: A concept proposed by Carl Jung, suggesting that it is passed down through the species and explains similarities between cultures; it contains archetypes.
• Complexes: Painful or threatening memories and thoughts that a person does not wish to confront, according to Jung.
• Archetypes: Universal concepts shared as part of the human species, contained within the collective unconscious.
• Trait theorist: Believes that we can describe people’s personalities by specifying their main characteristics, or traits.
• Big five traits: Personality traits that can be described using five traits: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and emotional stability (or neuroticism).
• Factor analysis: A statistical technique used to reduce the vast number of different terms we use to describe people.
• Heritability: A measure of the amount of variation in a trait in a given population that is due to genetics.
• Temperament: Emotional style and characteristic way of dealing with the world.
• Somatotype theory: A theory proposed by William Sheldon, identifying three body types (endomorphs, mesomorphs, and ectomorphs) with associated personality traits.
• Triadic reciprocality/reciprocal determinism: The interaction between the person (traits), the environment, and the person’s behavior.
• Self-efficacy: People with high self-efficacy are optimistic about their own ability to get things done whereas people with low self-efficacy feel a
  sense of powerlessness.
• Locus of control - internal and external: People with an internal locus of control feel as if they are responsible for what happens to them. Conversely, people with an external locus of control generally believe that luck and other forces outside of their own control determine their destinies.
• Self-concept: A person’s global feeling about himself or herself.
• Self-esteem: How much you appreciate yourself; Develops when someone has a positive self-concept.
• Self-actualization: To reach their full potential.
• Unconditional positive regard: A kind of blanket acceptance.
• Projective tests: Involve asking people to interpret ambiguous stimuli.
• Rorschach inkblot test: Involves showing people a series of inkblots and asking them to describe what they see.
• Thematic apperception test (TAT): Consists of a number of cards, each of which contains a picture of a person or people in an ambiguous situation.
• Self-report inventories: Questionnaires that ask people to provide information about themselves.
• MMPI: Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory.
• Reliability: Consistency; reliable measures yield consistent, similar results even if the results are not accurate.
• Validity: Accuracy; a valid test measures what it purports to measure.
• Barnum effect: The tendency to see oneself in vague, stock descriptions of personality.

Key People

• Sigmund Freud: Developed psychoanalytic theory and psychosexual stage theory.
• Karen Horney: Feminist psychologist who challenged Freud's concept of penis envy and proposed womb envy.
• Nancy Chodorow: Feminist psychologist who critiqued Freudian theory.
• Carl Jung: Created psychodynamic theories.
• Alfred Adler: Created psychodynamic theories.
• Hans Eyesenck: Believed that classifying all people along an introversion-extraversion scale and a stable-unstable scale, we could describe their personalities.
• Raymond Cattell: Developed the 16 PF test to measure basic traits.
• Paul Costa: Proposed that personality can be described using the big five personality traits.
• Robert McCrae: Proposed that personality can be described using the big five personality traits.
• Gordon Allport: Differentiated between three different types of personal traits - cardinal, central, and secondary dispositions.
• Hippocrates: Believed that personality was determined by the relative levels of 4 humors in the body.
• William Sheldon: Proposed somatotype theory.
• B. F. Skinner: A radical behaviorist who argued that behavior is personality.
• Albert Bandura: Suggested that personality is created by an interaction between the person (traits), the environment, and the person’s behavior.
• George Kelly: Proposed the personal-construct theory of personality.
• Julian Rotter: Proposed the concept of locus of control (internal vs. external).
• Abraham Maslow: Humanistic psychologist known for the hierarchy of needs and the concept of self-actualization.
• Carl Rogers: Humanistic psychologist who created self-theory and emphasized unconditional positive regard.

Overview of Personality

• Personality is defined as the unique attitudes, behaviors, and emotions that characterize a person.
• Psychologists from different perspectives hold varied ideas about how personality is created.
• Some ideas about personality do not fit neatly into one school of thought.

Type A and Type B Personalities

• Type A:
  • Sense of time pressure.
  • Easily angered.
  • Competitive and ambitious.
  • Higher risk for heart disease.
• Type B:
  • Relaxed and easygoing.
• These types do not fall on opposite ends of a continuum; some people fit into neither type.

Psychoanalytic Theory

Freudian Theory

• Sigmund Freud believed that personality is essentially set in early childhood.
• He proposed a psychosexual stage theory of personality.

Stage Theory

• Development is discontinuous.
• Stages are qualitatively different.
• People move between them in a stepwise fashion.
• All people go through all the stages in the same order.

Freud's Four Stages

• Oral stage.
• Anal stage.
• Phallic stage.
• Adult genital stage.

Latency Period

• Between the phallic stage and the adult genital stage.
• Freud believed that sexual urges were an important determinant of personality development.
• Each stage is named for the part of the body from which people derive sexual pleasure during the stage.

• Children enjoy sucking and biting because it gives them a form of sexual pleasure.

• Children are sexually gratified by the act of elimination.

• Sexual gratification moves to the genitalia.

Oedipus Crisis

• Boys sexually desire their mothers and view their fathers as rivals for their mothers' love.

Electra Crisis

• Theorists suggest that girls have a similar experience, in which they desire their fathers and see their mothers as competition for his love.

• Boys and girls notice their physical differences.

• Girls come to evidence penis envy.

• Boys suffer from castration anxiety.

• Boys specifically fear that their fathers will castrate them to eliminate them as rivals for their mothers.

• To protect them against this threatening realization, Freud believed that the boys used the defense mechanism of identification.
• The purpose of defense mechanisms, in general is to protect the conscious mind from thoughts that are too painful.
• Identification is when people emulate and attach themselves to an individual who they believe threatens them.
• According to Freud, Identification serves a dual purpose: preventing boys from fearing their fathers and encouraging boys to break away from their attachment to their mothers.

• Children push all their sexual feelings out of conscious awareness (repression).
• They turn their attention to other issues such as school.

• People remain in this stage for the rest of their lives.
• They seek sexual pleasure through sexual relationships with others.

Fixation

• Children could get fixated in any one of the stages.
• A fixation could result from being either undergratified or overgratified.

Oral Fixation

• A child who was not fed regularly or who was overly indulged might develop an oral fixation.
• Such people, as adults, might evidence a tendency to overeat, a propensity to chew gum, an addiction to smoking, or another similar mouth-related behavior.

Anal Fixation

• Freud described two kinds of personalities resulting from an anal fixation due to a traumatic toilet training.

• Tends to be messy and disorganized.

• Used to describe people who are meticulously neat, hyperorganized, and a bit compulsive.

Phallic Stage Fixation

• Can result in people who appear excessively sexually assured and aggressive or, alternatively, who are consumed with their perceived sexual inadequacies.
• These fixations result from psychic energy, the libido, getting stuck in one of the psychosexual stages.

The Unconscious Mind

• Freud believed that much of people's behavior is controlled by the unconscious.
• We do not have access to the thoughts in our unconscious.
• Freud asserted that we spend tremendous amounts of psychic energy to keep threatening thoughts in the unconscious.

Conscious Mind

• Contains everything we are thinking about at any one moment.

Preconscious Mind

• Contains everything that we could potentially summon to conscious awareness with ease.

The Id, Ego, and Superego

• Freud posited that the personality consists of three parts: the id, the ego, and the superego.

The Id

• In the unconscious and contains instincts and psychic energy.
• Two types of instincts exist:
  • Eros (the life instincts).
  • Thanatos (the death instincts).
• Libido is the energy that directs the life instincts.
• Eros is most often evidenced as a desire for sex, while Thanatos is seen in aggression.
• The id is propelled by the pleasure principle; it wants immediate gratification.
• The id exists entirely in the unconscious mind.
• Babies are propelled solely by their ids.

The Ego

• Follows the reality principle.
• Its job is to negotiate between the desires of the id and the limitations of the environment.
• Partly in the conscious mind and partly in the unconscious mind.

The Superego

• Like the ego, the superego operates on both the conscious and unconscious level.
• Around the age of five, children begin to develop a conscience and to think about what is right and wrong.
• This sense of conscience, according to Freud, is their superego.
• Oftentimes, the ego acts as a mediator between the id and the superego.

Defense Mechanisms

• Part of the ego's job is to protect the conscious mind from the threatening thoughts buried in the unconscious.
• The ego uses defense mechanisms to help protect the conscious mind.
• Repression: Blocking thoughts out from conscious awareness.
• Denial: Not accepting the ego-threatening truth.
• Displacement: Redirecting one's feeling toward another person or object.
• Projection: Believing that the feelings one has toward someone else are actually held by the other person and directed at oneself.
• Reaction Formation: Expressing the opposite of how one truly feels.
• Regression: Returning to an earlier, comforting form of behavior.
• Rationalization: Coming up with a beneficial result of an undesirable occurrence.
• Intellectualization: Undertaking an academic, unemotional study of a topic.
• Sublimation: Channeling one's frustration toward a different goal.

Criticisms of Freud

• Little empirical evidence supports it.
• Verifying the existence of many of Freud's constructs such as the unconscious, the Oedipus complex, or Thanatos is extremely difficult, if not impossible.
• Psychoanalytic theory is able to interpret both positive and negative reactions to the theory as support.
• Freudian theory has little predictive power.
• Psychoanalytic theory is also criticized for overestimating the importance of early childhood and of sex.
• Feminists find much of Freudian theory to be objectionable such as the concept of penis envy.
• Horney posited that men may suffer from womb envy, jealousy of women's reproductive capabilities.
• Feminists also take issue with Freud's assertion that men have stronger superegos than women.

Impact of Freudian Theory

• Despite its shortcomings, Freudian theory has profoundly affected the world.
• Many people accept the idea that children are sexual creatures and that our behavior is shaped by unconscious thoughts.
• Freud's impact on culture is arguably greater than its impact on contemporary psychology.
• Many of the terms originally invented by Freud have crept into laypeople's language.
• Many of Freud's ideas play a prominent role in the arts.

Psychodynamic Theories

• A number of Freud's early followers developed offshoots of psychoanalytic theory.
• These approaches are now usually referred to as psychodynamic or neo-Freudian approaches.

Carl Jung

• Proposed that the unconscious consists of two different parts:

Personal Unconscious

• Similar to Freud's view of the unconscious.
• Contains the painful or threatening memories and thoughts the person does not wish to confront.
• Jung termed these complexes.

Collective Unconscious

• Passed down through the species.
• Explains certain similarities we see between cultures.
• Contains archetypes that Jung defined as universal concepts we all share as part of the human species.

Archetypes

• The shadow represents the evil side of personality.
• The persona is people's creation of a public image.
• The widespread existence of certain fears, such as fear of the dark, and the importance of the circle in many cultures, provides evidence for archetypes.

Alfred Adler

• Called an ego psychologist because he downplayed the importance of the unconscious and focused on the conscious role of the ego.
• Believed that people are motivated by the fear of failure, which he termed inferiority, and the desire to achieve, which he called superiority.
• Also known for his work about the importance of birth order in shaping personality.

Trait Theories

• Trait theorists believe that we can describe people's personalities by specifying their main characteristics, or traits.
• These characteristics are thought to be stable and to motivate behavior in keeping with the trait.

Nomothetic Approach

• Some trait theorists believe that the same basic set of traits can be used to describe all people's personalities.

Hans Eyesenck

• Believed that by classifying all people along an introversion-extraversion scale and a stable-unstable scale, we could describe their personalities.

Raymond Cattell

• Developed the 16 PF test to measure what he believed were the 16 basic traits present in all people, albeit to different degrees.

Paul Costa and Robert McCrae

• Proposed that personality can be described using the big five personality traits: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and emotional stability (or neuroticism).
  • Extraversion: How outgoing or shy someone is.
  • Agreeableness: How easy to get along with someone is.
  • Conscientiousness: How hardworking, responsible, and organized someone is.
  • Openness to new experiences: Related to one's creativity, curiosity, and willingness to try new things.
  • Emotional stability: Has to do with how consistent one's mood is.

Factor Analysis

• A statistical technique used to reduce the vast number of different terms we use to describe people to 16 or five basic traits.
• Allows researchers to use correlations between traits in order to see which traits cluster together as factors.

Idiographic Theorists

• Assert that using the same set of terms to classify all people is impossible.
• Each person needs to be seen in terms of what few traits best characterize his or her unique self.

Gordon Allport

• Believed that although there were common traits useful in describing all people, a full understanding of someone's personality was impossible without looking at his or her personal traits.

Cardinal Dispositions

• A small number of people are so profoundly influenced by one trait that it plays a pivotal role in virtually everything they do.

Central and Secondary Dispositions

• Central dispositions have a larger influence on personality than secondary dispositions.
• Central dispositions are more often apparent and describe more significant aspects of personality.

Criticisms of Trait Theories

• Underestimate the importance of the situation.
• To describe someone's personality, we need to take the context into consideration.

Biological Theories

• View genes, chemicals, and body types as the central determinants of who a person is.
• A growing body of evidence supports the idea that human personality is shaped, in part, by genetics.
  *Traits are not necessarily inherited.
• Thus far, little evidence exists for the heritability of specific personality traits.
• Heritability is a measure of the amount of variation in a trait in a given population that is due to genetics.
• Genes play a role in people's temperaments, typically defined as their emotional style and characteristic way of dealing with the world.

Hippocrates

• Believed that personality was determined by the relative levels of four humors (fluids) in the body: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm.

William Sheldon's Somatotype Theory

• Identified three body types: endomorphs (fat), mesomorphs (muscular), and ectomorphs (thin).
• Argued that certain personality traits were associated with each of the body types.

Behaviorist Theories

• Radical behaviorists like B. F. Skinner argue that behavior is personality.
• Personality is determined by the environment.
• By changing people's environments, behaviorists believe we can alter their personalities.
• Radical behaviorists are criticized for failing to recognize the importance of cognition.

Social-Cognitive Theories

• Many models of personality meld together behaviorists' emphasis on the importance of the environment with cognitive psychologists' focus on patterns of thought.

Albert Bandura

• Suggested that personality is created by an interaction between the person (traits), the environment, and the person’s behavior.

Triadic Reciprocality/Reciprocal Determinism

• Each of these three factors influence both of the other two in a constant looplike fashion.

• Bandura also posited that personality is affected by people's sense of self-efficacy.

George Kelly's Personal-Construct Theory

• Argued that people, in their attempts to understand their world, develop their own, individual systems of personal constructs.
• Such constructs consist of pairs of opposites such as fair-unfair, smart-dumb, and exciting-dull.
• People then use these constructs to evaluate their worlds.
• Believed that people's behavior is determined by how they interpret the world.

Fundamental Postulate

• People's behavior is influenced by their cognitions.
• By knowing how people have behaved in the past, we can predict how they will act in the future.

Julian Rotter

Locus of Control

• A person can be described as having either an internal or an external locus of control.

Internal Locus of Control

• Feel as if they are responsible for what happens to them.
• Tend to believe that hard work will lead to success.

External Locus of Control

• Generally believe that luck and other forces outside of their own control determine their destinies.

• Internals tend to be healthier, to be more politically active, and to do better in school.

Humanistic Theories

• Many of the models of personality already discussed are deterministic.
• Determinism is the belief that what happens is dictated by what has happened in the past.
• Humanistic theories of personality view people as innately good and able to determine their own destinies through the exercise of free will.
• These psychologists stress the importance of people's subjective experience and feelings.
• They focus on the importance of a person's self-concept and self-esteem.
• Self-concept is a person's global feeling about himself or herself.
• Self-concept develops through a person's involvement with others, especially parents.
• Someone with a positive self-concept is likely to have high self-esteem.

Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers

• Believed that people are motivated to reach their full potential or self-actualize.
• Maslow developed the hierarchy of needs that you read about in the motivation chapter.
• Self-actualization sits atop this hierarchy.
• Rogers created self-theory.
• He believed that although people are innately good, they require certain things from their interactions with others, most importantly, unconditional positive regard, in order to self-actualize.
• Unconditional positive regard is a kind of blanket acceptance.

Criticisms of Humanistic Theories

• Putting forth an overly optimistic theory of human nature.
• If people are innately good and striving to do their best, it is difficult to explain the number and range of truly terrible acts that people commit.

Assessment Techniques

• As with any other kind of testing, reliability and validity are a concern in personality assessment.
• Reliability is often likened to consistency; reliable measures yield consistent, similar results even if the results are not accurate.
• Validity, on the other hand, means accuracy; a valid test measures what it purports to measure.

Projective Tests

• Often used by psychoanalysts.
• Involve asking people to interpret ambiguous stimuli.

Rorschach Inkblot Test

• Involves showing people a series of inkblots and asking them to describe what they see.

Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

• Consists of a number of cards, each of which contains a picture of a person or people in an ambiguous situation.

• People are asked to describe what is happening in the pictures.

• Since both the inkblots and TAT cards are ambiguous, psychoanalysts reason that people's interpretations reflect their unconscious thoughts.

• People are thought to project their unconscious thoughts onto the ambiguous stimuli.

• Scoring projective tests, however, is a complicated process.

• Many people believe that projective tests are particularly unreliable given that they rely so extensively on the therapists' interpretations.

Self-Report Inventories

• Essentially questionnaires that ask people to provide information about themselves.
• Many different kinds of psychologists, such as humanistic psychologists, trait theorists, and cognitive-behavioral psychologists, might use self-report inventories as one means by which to gather data about someone.
• These kinds of tests are often referred to as objective personality tests since people's scores are determined simply by their answers and are thus unlikely to be affected by evaluator bias.
• An interview, on the other hand, is a subjective assessment.
• The Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory (MMPI-2) is one of the most widely used self-report instruments.
• A potential problem with such inventories is that people may not be completely honest in answering the questions.

Observation of Behavior

• Radical behaviorists would reject all the above methods, arguing instead that the only way to measure people's personality is to observe their behavior.

Barnum Effect

• Research has demonstrated that people have the tendency to see themselves in vague, stock descriptions of personality.
• Astrologers, psychics, and fortune-tellers take advantage of the Barnum effect in their work.