Personality Theories and Development

Personality Overview

• Definition: An individual’s unique and relatively consistent pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving.
• Four Major Theoretical Perspectives:
  • Psychoanalytic
  • Humanistic
  • Social Cognitive
  • Trait

Freud: Psychoanalytic Perspective

• Key Concepts:
  • Emphasizes unconscious forces, sexual/aggressive instincts, and early childhood experiences on personality development.
• Techniques for Psychological Disorders:
  • Free Association: A method of therapy where a patient speaks freely to uncover unconscious thoughts.
  • Dream Interpretation: Analyzing dreams to understand unconscious desires.
  • Freudian Slips: Mistakes in speech that reveal unconscious thoughts.
  • Projective Tests: Tests designed to reveal hidden emotions and internal conflicts.

Structure of Personality

• Unconscious:
  • Reservoir of unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories.
  • Contemporary viewpoint involves information processing of which we are unaware.
• Components:
  • Id:
  • Contains unconscious psychic energy.
  • Strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives.
  • Operates on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification.
  • Superego:
  • Presents internalized ideals and standards for judgment (the conscience).
  • Ego:
  • The conscious, “executive” part of personality.
  • Mediates demands of the id, superego, and reality.
  • Operates on the reality principle, satisfying desires realistically.

Personality Development

• Psychosexual Stages:
  • Stages of development where id’s pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct erogenous zones.
  • Fixation: A lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at a prior stage due to unresolved conflicts.
• Stages:
  • Oral (0-18 months): Pleasure centers on mouth (sucking, biting).
  • Anal (18-36 months): Focus on bowel/bladder elimination; coping with control demands.
  • Phallic (3-6 years): Pleasure zone is genitals; dealing with incestuous feelings.
  • Latency (6 to puberty): Dormant sexual feelings.
  • Genital (puberty onwards): Maturation of sexual interests.

Defense Mechanisms

• Ego's methods for reducing anxiety by distorting reality:
  • Repression: Banning harmful thoughts from consciousness.
  • Regression: Retreating to a more infantile stage.
  • Reaction Formation: Acting against one's feelings (e.g., expressing hate when feeling love).
  • Projection: Attributing one's own unacceptable thoughts/feelings to others.
  • Rationalization: Justifying actions with reasonable but false explanations.
  • Displacement: Shifting impulses to a more acceptable target (e.g., kicking a dog when angry).

Neo-Freudians

• Carl Jung: Emphasized the collective unconscious.
• Karen Horney: Challenged Freud’s masculine bias and introduced social conflicts in personality.
• Alfred Adler: Highlighted the importance of childhood social tensions.

Humanistic Perspective

• Abraham Maslow: Focused on self-actualization (realization of one's potential).
• Carl Rogers:
  • Emphasized growth and fulfillment through genuineness, acceptance, and empathy.
  • Unconditional Positive Regard: Acceptance regardless of circumstances.
  • Self-Concept: Thoughts and feelings about oneself, answering "Who am I?".

Social-Cognitive Perspective

• Key Focus: Conscious thought processes, self-regulation, and situational influences.
• Albert Bandura:
  • Reciprocal Determinism: Interacting influences between personality and environment.
  • Self-Efficacy: Subjective belief in one's capability to meet challenges.
• Control:
  • Personal Control: Belief in controlling one’s environment versus feeling helpless.
  • External Locus of Control: Belief that outside forces determine fate.
  • Internal Locus of Control: Belief in personal control over one’s fate.

Contemporary Research - The Trait Perspective

• Trait: A characteristic pattern of behavior.
• Personality Inventory: A questionnaire used to assess various personality traits.
• Raymond Cattell’s 16 Personality Factors (16 PF): A model assessing different personality traits.
• Eysenck’s Personality Factors:
  • Two primary factors:
  • Unstable-Stable
  • Introverted-Extraverted
• Examples of Traits:
  • Moody (unstable, introverted) to Lively (stable, extraverted).

The Trait Perspective

• MMPI: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a widely used and researched personality test originally designed to identify emotional disorders but now applied broadly.