PSY1411 - Chapter 12 - Personality

Personality: Definition and Measurement
  • Personality: The characteristic style of an individual’s behavior, thinking, and feeling.
  • Four Main Approaches to Personality:
    • Trait-Biological
    • Psychodynamic
    • Humanistic-Existential
    • Social-Cognitive
  • Study of Personality: Focuses on the variations in psychological differences among individuals.
Measuring Personality
  • Personality Inventories:
    • Rely on self-reporting via multiple-choice or forced-choice questions.
    • Self-Report: Individuals answer a questionnaire indicating how well statements describe their behavior.
  • MMPI-2-RF: A well-researched clinical questionnaire assessing personality and psychological problems, utilizing actuarial methods.
Projective Techniques
  • Projective Techniques: Analyze ambiguous stimuli to elicit unique responses reflecting one’s personality.
  • Thematic Apperception Test (TAT): Respondents create stories about ambiguous images, revealing underlying motives and social perceptions.
Trait Approach
  • Trait Approach: Categorizes individual differences using trait terms.
    • Challenges:
    • Narrowing down endless adjectives.
    • Understanding biological/hereditary foundations for particular traits.
  • Traits: Defined as stable dispositions to behave consistently in particular ways (Gordon Allport, 1937).
Core Traits Exploration
  • Core Traits:
    • Early research indicated personality traits could be described via adjectives.
    • Factor Analysis: Sorts personality components into small dimensions, questioning how many core traits exist.
  • Big Five Personality Traits:
    • OCEAN or CANOE model:
    • Openness
    • Conscientiousness
    • Extraversion
    • Agreeableness
    • Neuroticism
    • Criteria for reliability across cultures and minimal overlap.
Biological Basis of Traits
  • Personality Influencers:
    • Changes can result from brain damage, pathologies (e.g., Alzheimer's), or pharmaceutical treatments.
  • Behavioral Genetics: Investigates genetic correlations in monozygotic vs. dizygotic twins, revealing personality traits affected by genetic and environmental factors:
    • Heritability estimates:
    • Openness: 0.41
    • Conscientiousness: 0.31
    • Extraversion: 0.36
    • Agreeableness: 0.35
    • Neuroticism: 0.37
Gender Differences in Personality
  • Research indicates systematic personality differences, suggesting influences of culture and sex hormones:
    • Women: More verbally expressive, sensitive to cues, nurturing, relationally aggressive.
    • Men: More physically aggressive, assertive, slightly higher self-esteem.
  • Controversial debate about the origins of these differences—biological versus cultural.
Psychodynamic Approach: Id, Ego, Superego
  • Origin: Developed by Sigmund Freud, posits personality formed by unconscious needs and motives.
    • Id: Instinctual drives.
    • Ego: Reality principle, mediator.
    • Superego: Moral compass.
  • Anxiety arises from conflicts between these components.
  • Defense Mechanisms:
    • Unconscious strategies to reduce anxiety from unacceptable impulses, including:
    • Rationalization
    • Projection
    • Sublimation
    • Reaction Formation
Psychosexual Stages of Personality Development
  • Sigmund Freud's stages of personality formation based on sexual gratification zones:
    • Oral Stage: Focus on mouth; feeding and sucking.
    • Anal Stage: Focus on bowel control; toilet training.
    • Phallic Stage: Awareness of gender differences; coping with incestuous feelings.
    • Latency Stage: Development of social and intellectual skills.
    • Genital Stage: Mature adult personality development.
Humanistic-Existential Approach
  • Focuses on healthy choices shaping personality.
  • Self-Actualization: Realizing one’s inner potential, influenced by environmental factors.
  • Flow Experience: Achieving focus when tasks align with abilities, as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Social-Cognitive Approach
  • Views personality through thoughts about situations encountered in daily life, emphasizing perception of the environment.
  • Personal Constructs: Dimensions used to interpret experiences, highlighting perspective differences crucial in personality.
  • Locus of Control:
    • Internal: Believing one controls their fate.
    • External: Believing fate is controlled by external factors.
Self-Concept
  • Self-Concept: Knowledge of one’s behaviors and traits; intertwined with personal narratives.
  • Self-Schemas: Traits defining oneself, crucial in memory and self-conceptualization.
  • Formation influenced by feedback from for relationships and environment.
Self-Esteem
  • Defined as the extent to which one values and accepts themselves.
  • Influenced by social perceptions, self-evaluations, and standards.
  • Implicit Egotism: Preferring objects or people with similarities to oneself (e.g., name-letter effect).
Conclusion
  • The study of personality encompasses various approaches that explore the complex interactions between biological, psychological, social, and cultural factors to understand individual differences in behavior, emotion, and thought.