Unit 11: Personality & Psychology 03/02/2023 Psychic energy (not very reputable)

• Finite level to expel everyday -get it out somehow

  • Survival form and sex form

• Eros (libido)-sexual energy

  • Can’t get rid of in socially acceptable way—get rid of through painting or poetry

  • Desire for creation and beauty

  • Online example

    • Porn, painting apps, TikTok

• Thanatos-death and destruction

  • Innate psychic energy for destruction

  • Desire to be aggressive

  • Survival/competitive side

    • Sports or argumentative politics

  • Holocaust was an example of this potential for destruction

  • Online examples

    • Twitter, random comment ranter

Parts of the mind (more entertaining than science)

• 3 motivators-what you should be doing, what you want to do

• Id

  • Animalistic part

  • Primitive (sex/wants)

  • Pleasure loving

  • Impulsive

  • Short-term gain

  • No impulse-control

• Ego

  • Reality based

  • Pragmatic/practical

  • Rational

  • Balances

• Superego

  • Angelic

  • Morals, ideas of society

    • Parents, school, organized religion

  • Extremely high expectations

  • Against our biological nature

  • As maladaptive as an id

  • Worried and anxious-leads to burnout and stress

Defence mechanisms (techniques to minimize anxiety and stress/defend self-esteem)

Universal characteristics of humans

• Denial

  • Refuse to accept something

  • Refuse to pay attention to obvious facts

  • May occur in people questioning sexual orientation

  • Bad long term

• Repression

  • Bury into unconsciousness

  • Unable to remember

  • So anxiety provoking to the point you don’t know its there anymore

  • Helpful short term but comes with maladaptive side effects

• Suppression

  • Keeping ideas in the preconscious

  • Effortful blocking

  • Rise to the surface

  • Can be adaptive in the short term

  • Long term can shorten your life span

  • Pop up as soon as you relax

• Displacement

  • Always maladaptive

  • Transferring negative emotions

  • Accessible targets

  • Not safe to yell back at your boss, so get mad at someone else or yourself (hurting yourself, eat your feelings, glass of wine)

  • Abusive parents leads to children who are bullies

• Projection

  • Attributing your own flaws to others

  • Accusing others of your views

  • May combine with denial

  • Don’t accept it in yourself but you see it in others

  • Cheating partner gets paranoid their partner is cheating

• Reaction formation

  • Adopting beliefs contrary to your own

  • Appearance of more social acceptance

  • Punishing others for your flaws that you don’t acknowledge

  • Politicians opposing gay marriage when they’re having same-sex affairs

  • “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw rocks”

• Rationalization

  • Swapping truth for a socially desirable excuse

  • To manipulate others

  • I was late because… (other person you can’t control)

  • Could be gaslighting

  • “Its your fault I had an affair”

  • Can fully believe their own gaslighting, can convince themselves of it

• Regression

  • Less mature emotional response

  • Accept it

  • Less mature for context and age

  • Start sucking your thumb

  • Child may start wetting themselves

  • Makes a very clear beacon that you need support

• Anticipation

  • Anxious preparation and preoccupation

  • Relatively adaptive because it protects you from the threat

  • Self-rewarding

  • Reinforcing behaviour

  • Run on a full time fear circuit

• Humour

  • Self depreciation

  • Dark humour

  • Many professional comedians come from a lot of trauma

  • Serves a functional purpose

  • Takes the edge off

• Sublimation

  • Most adaptive and best defense mechanism

  • Redirect energy and emotion

  • Constructive

  • Go to the gym if you had a bad day at work

  • Opposite of displacement

  • Is it making you better (sublimation) or worse (displacement)

Personality Types

• Cluster individuals in groups

• One group per person

• Historical types

  • Ayurveda

    • Type on body type

    • Vata-tall and thin, air element

    • Pitta-passionate, fire, strong

  • Hippocrates humors

    • 4 humors-phlegm (water), blood (air), yellow bile (fire), black bile (earth)

  • Astrology-based on Hippocrates

• Jungian types-NOT scientific

  • Sensing-earth

    • Feel grass, breath air and see the sun

  • Intuition-fire

    • Passionate, gut-instinct, “third eye”, regardless of practicality

  • Feeling-water

    • Emotional, meditative,

  • Thinking-air

    • Rational, logical

• Myers-Briggs type indicator-no science

  • Mother-daughter team

  • Magazine writers-“buzzfeed quizzes”

  • 1940s

  • 4 dimensions-scales and 16 types

    • Extraversion-introversion

    • Sensing-intuition (sense vs gut)

    • Feeling-thinking

    • Judging-perceiving (critique vs enjoy)

  • Criticisms

    • Not empirically supported

    • Not on either end-follows normal curve-70% in the middle

    • Forced choice-empirically bad

      • Choose between two statements

      • Could be equally endorsed/not endorsed

      • Ignores magnitude

    • Categories vs distribution

      • High, low, medium?

    • Type vs trait

      • Considers the extreme the same in the middle

• Barnum effect

  • Broad statements

  • Could apply to anyone

  • Difficult to disprove

  • Keeps things addictive

  • Confirmation bias-you realize the things that are true and ignore the rest

• Eysenck-problematic

  • Biology based personality

  • Measure as trait NOT type

  • Extraversion

    • Arousal, sociability, talkativeness, energy, assertiveness

    • Blood brain barrier

  • Neuroticism

    • Stress&anxiety, frustration, wary, loneliness

    • Fear circuit is more active

  • Psychoticism-less reputable

    • Testosterone, aggressiveness, risk-taking, manipulative, creativity

    • Element of creativity to break social norms and rhetoric

    • Based on testosterone levels (not true)

• Cattell-good amount of scientific rigor

  • Lexical approach-20000 words

    • Read dictionaries to find words that describe differences between people

    • Looked at synonyms and clusters according to dictionaries

    • A-theoretically-to such an extreme that it was a weakness

  • Statistical approach-16 factors

    • Put math to a survey

    • Factor analysis between words

    • If correlated they went together

  • Missed if they were overlapping

• The Big Five factor model-most scientifically reputable

  • Changed one thing in the math to make it 5 traits

  • Replicated across cultures and ages groups

  • Extraversion vs introversion

    • More energy for social things—being alone is draining

    • Leader/loud

    • Energize from alone time—being around people is draining

    • Shy/quiet

    • No gender effects-talkative vs dominance

  • Agreeable vs disagreeable

    • Willing to stop and listen

    • Deprioritize themselves

    • Not an asshole, just prioritize themselves

    • Gender effects (group averages)—women=more agreeable vs men=disagreeable

    • Agreeableness vs apathy

      • Apathy=slightly disagreeable

  • Conscientious vs casual

    • Orderly/perfectionist/attention to detail

    • Big picture/ideas over grammar

  • Emotionally stable vs neurotic

    • Emotions don’t get “bouncy” out of control

    • Simmer vs rage of anger

    • Winnie the Pooh=emotionally stable

    • Tiger=neurotic

  • Open vs closed

    • Open to new experiences

    • Learn the perspectives of others

    • More tolerant of those who are different

    • Does not mean they will vote that way

    • Tendency towards intellect

    • Conservative in taking on perspectives

    • Narrow-minded but just like what works

• Dark Triad (Paulhus)

  • Narcissism

    • Inflated importance

  • Machiavellianism

    • Manipulative

    • False promises

    • Self-perseverance

    • Gaslight/emotionally abusive

  • Psychopathy

    • Lack empathy

    • Sense of cruelty

    • Enjoy the destruction of others

    • Don’t feel remorse

  • Low in dark triad answered by HEXACO

• HEXACO (Lee and Ashton)

  • Lexical in non-English language

  • Honesty-humility=low dark triad

    • Sincerity, fairness, greed-avoidance, modesty

  • Can be an honest jerk or can be fake

  • More culturally robust

  • A concept that struggled to be described in English dictionaries used

  • Could correlate to morality