PSYC 201 Unit 11

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

\