Personality Psychology Notes
Explores why people are the way they are.
Asks why individuals are the way they are.
Considers people in their entirety as individuals and complex beings.
Seeks to find order and meaningful connections out of complexity.
What Does Personality Mean?
Everyday Meaning (Laypeople):
Describes specific characteristics (e.g., outgoing, shy).
Describes specific people (e.g., friend, flatmate).
Psychologists’ Meaning:
Abstract construct.
Applies to all people.
Definable, measurable, applicable.
Consistent across situations.
Why Do We Conceptualize Personality?
Conveys a sense of consistency or continuity over time, place, and person.
Suggests internal origins of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
Helps predict and understand behavior.
Captures a sense of personal distinctiveness – a person’s prominent characteristics.
Sources of Influence on Personality
Personality is influenced by the situation, thoughts, and feelings, these all combine to influence behaviour.
Definition of Personality
Personality is a dynamic and organized set of characteristics possessed by a person that uniquely influences their cognitions, motivations, and behaviors in various situations (Ryckman, 2004).
Key Features of the Definition
Personality:
Has an organized structure.
Involves active processes.
Has psychological and physiological components.
Helps determine how people relate to the world.
Demonstrates patterns and consistencies.
Manifests itself across a range of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
Two Fundamental Themes
Individual Differences:
Represent differences between people.
Examples: level of aggression, sociability, optimism.
Intrapersonal Functioning:
Stable processes that underlie thoughts, feelings, behaviors.
Examples: goals or motives.
Create continuity and consistency within the person, even if they act differently in different circumstances.
Uniqueness vs. process.
Why Do We Need Theories of Personality? What Is Their Purpose?
Theories provide a general principle or set of principles about a class of events.
Theories of personality are a systematic effort to discover and explain regularities in thought, feeling, and behavior.
To explain what we know – e.g., why do children often act or react similarly to their parents? (social learning theory).
To predict possibilities that have not been examined – e.g., similar personalities between biological parents and their children (biological theories).
Theory and Research: Interconnected
Theory makes predictions.
Research tests theory:
Verifies.
Suggests changes.
What Makes a Theory Good?
Explains what is known – organizes existing data.
Predicts what will happen – testable, points to the discovery of what is not currently known.
Comprehensive - encompasses and accounts for a wide variety of data.
How many different kinds of phenomena can be explained?
Are these central and important to understanding human behavior?
Parsimonious – simple and internally consistent.
Research relevance – useful or not; leads to hypotheses that can be tested.
Personal and intuitive appeal.
Interesting.
Provocative.
Subjective – needs to be appealing, or no one bothers to study them!
Metatheory
Focus and examples:
Dispositional: Stable qualities in people.
Biological: Biological processes as influence of behavior.
Psychoanalytic: Competition and conflict among internal psychic forces.
Neoanalytic: ‘Ego’ development and social relationships.
Learning: Systematic behavior change resulting from experience.
Phenomenological: Subjective experience and tendency toward self-actualization.
Cognitive self-regulation: Patterns in behavior arising from cognitive processes.
Central Aspects of a Personality Theory
Structure – basic units of personality.
Process – dynamic aspects.
Development and growth – develop into unique individuals.
Psychopathology – adaptive or non-adaptive functioning.
Change – how and why we change (or not).
1. Structure
Stable and enduring aspects of personality.
Traits – consistency of an individual’s response across situations, e.g., conscientiousness, introversion.
Type – the clustering of many traits, e.g., adaptive and resilient; inhibited; uninhibited.
Personality theories differ according to the types of structural units/concepts:
Complex systems with many components linked in various ways.
Simple systems with a few components.
Some theories are structured hierarchically.
Some units are higher order and control the function of other units.
2. Process
Theories can be compared with respect to the dynamic, motivational concepts used to account for behavior.
Pervin (1996) maintains there are three major categories of motivational concepts used by personality psychologists:
Pleasure or hedonic.
Growth or self-actualization.
Cognitive motives.
3. Development and Growth
A profound challenge for personality psychologists: accounting for individual differences.
Nature-nurture – personality is determined by:
Genetic determinants.
Environmental determinants.
3. Development and Growth: Genetic Factors
More important for intelligence and temperament.
Less important for values and beliefs.
Evolutionary heritage.
Patterns of behavior shared with other species.
Genes influence our similarities and differences.
3. Development and Growth: Environmental Factors
Cultures.
Social groups.
Families.
Peer groups.
Time and place.
Genetic vs. Environmental Determinants?
Personality development is the result of ongoing interactions between genes and environments.
Gottesman (1963) – heredity fixes a number of possible outcomes, but the environment determines which.
Reaction range – genes define limits, e.g., talent for music or sport.
However, there is an active ongoing relationship between nature and nurture, e.g., a child with easy vs. difficult temperament.
4. Psychopathology
Theories should explain why some people cope with stress and challenges (adaptive) and others experience more difficulties (maladaptive).
Personality disorders - covered in PSYC601 next semester.
5. Change
How and why do people change, or resist change?
How can maladaptive behavior (and emotional and thought patterns) be changed? (Psychological interventions, therapy).
Individual Theories of Personality
Attempt to describe human nature.
Have different orienting assumptions.
May be grouped by metatheoretical perspectives.
May have overlapping connections.
May be (intentionally) limited in scope.