Personality
Personality Notes
Definition of Personality
Personality: Individuals’ distinct and relatively enduring patterns of thoughts, emotions, motives, and behaviors.
Various indigenous psychologies offer ways to interpret human lived experience, often characterized as the self or personality.
Understanding personality is important when considering issues of value, character, morals, or forensics.
John Locke and the Trilogies of Mind
Trilogy of Mind: Comprises cognition, conation, and affect, traditionally referred to as cognition, motivation, and emotion.
Personhood: Connects rights and responsibilities, duties and privileges.
Personality is the consideration of an individual's personhood without value or character.
Traits and Features of Personality
Growth of personality has been marked by the “loss of person in psychology,” characterized by style over substance.
Nature vs. Nurture Debate
Remains relevant in twin studies.
Several personality theories include:
Biological
Psychoanalytical
Psychodynamic
Traits
Humanistic and self theories.
Biological Roots of Personality
Historical figures such as Galen, Plato, and Sheldon believed body type impacted personality.
Temperament: Characteristic mood and activity.
Inhibition vs. Boldness
Kagan & Snidman discuss shy (inhibited) versus bold (uninhibited) individuals, differing in sensitivity to social and physical stimulation.
Suggests this aspect of personality is innate and largely immutable.
Delay of Gratification
Walter Mischel's Work: Examines delay of gratification in young children (age 4) and how it predicts responses to later life issues based on style of time perspective.
Time Paradox: Considers how present hedonism and future-focused styles lead to differences in education and drug use.
Eysenck's Model of Personality
Focuses on introversion-extroversion and neuroticism (stability), biologically rooted in the central nervous system (CNS).
Lemon Test: Introverts produce more saliva (more sensitive to stimulating drugs), while extraverts produce less saliva (more sensitive to depressive drugs).
Extroversion may be associated with intention-seeking.
Twin studies reveal identical twins raised together are most similar, followed by those raised apart, then siblings.
Neuroticism and anxiousness appear to have genetic roots.
Psychoanalysis
Emphasizes pleasure and sex.
Sigmund Freud (1895): Developed Psychoanalytical Theory.
Structural Model: The mind consists of levels of consciousness:
a) Conscious: What one can focus attention on and remember clearly; it reflects our sense of reality.
b) Preconscious: The dynamic unconscious, a band of semi-consciousness that can shift between clarity and lack thereof.
c) Unconscious: The true unconscious, the source of psychic energy driven by the pleasure principle.
Dialectical Tensions
Eros & Thanatos: Life (Eros) and death (Thanatos), encompassing biological and social/moral aspects of human beings.
ID: The original source of psychic life, driven to maintain and reproduce, seeking immediate gratification through the pleasure principle.
Ego: The mediator of personality, caught between the ID's demands and the superego's moral control and servitude, operating under the reality principle.
Super-ego: Develops during the third year of life, internalizing same-gender parental authority, leading to the formation of ego-ideal (conscious) and a sense of guilt.
Psychosexual Stages
Oral (0-18 months): Seeking pleasure through sucking, biting, and chewing.
Anal (18-36 months): Focuses on bowel and bladder elimination and coping control.
Phallic (3-6 years): Pleasure zone is the genitals where children develop incestuous feelings.
Boys face the Oedipal conflict (desiring the mother and rivalry with the father).
Girls experience the Electra complex (desiring the father and rivalry with the mother).
Latency (6-puberty): Dormant sexual feelings; focus on social bonding.
Genital (puberty+): Maturation of sexual interests leading to adult sexuality.
Dreams and Repression
Dreams as pathways to understanding the repressed drives of the unconscious.
Defense Mechanisms
Mechanisms that alter thoughts to cope with unacceptable urges, including:
Repression: Removing conscious thoughts (impulses, trauma).
Denial: No recollection of specific experiences.
Projection: Casting one’s thoughts onto another (e.g., feeling guilt and accusing a partner).
Reaction Formation: Acting contrary to true feelings (pretending to hate someone you love).
Sublimation: Transforming psychic energy into socially acceptable outlets (e.g., artistic pursuits instead of harmful desires).
Regression: Returning to earlier tendencies in response to anxiety.
Displacement: Redirecting emotional energy toward a more acceptable target.
Rationalization: Self-justification or excuse-making for one's behavior.
Neo-Analytical or Psychodynamic Traditions
Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)
Developed Analytical Psychology and was a student of Freud.
Self: Central concept, integrating opposites leads to a complete self.
Dialectical notions draw from medieval alchemy, where balancing opposites is a pathway to wholeness.
Four Functions: Characterize how people typically engage with the world, including intuition, sensation, thinking, and feeling.
Collective Unconscious and Archetypes
Collective Unconscious: A reservoir of shared symbols across humanity.
Jungian Dream Theory: Explores the significance of dreams in personality development.
Trait Approaches to Personality
Gordon W. Allport (1897-1967)
Developed the concept of Personology and wrote "Personality: A Psychological Interpretation".
Paranjape (1993) discusses the style of substance and the loss of personhood.
Allport & Odbert created an 18,000-word list of descriptive words for people, which was condensed to 200.
Cardinal Traits: Ruling passions evident in all experiences, e.g., narcissism or generosity.
Central Traits: Themes such as aggressiveness or sentimentality.
Secondary Traits: Less frequently exhibited behaviors.
R.B. Cattell (1965)
Utilized factor analysis to identify 16 primary dimensions or traits that characterize personality.
Costa & McCrae (2006)
Proposed Big Five Personality Traits (O.C.E.A.N.):
Openness: Original vs. conventional traits.
Imaginative vs. down-to-earth.
Conscientiousness: Dependable vs. lazy.
Hardworking vs. ambitious.
Extraversion: Sociable vs. withdrawn.
Fun-loving vs. sober.
Agreeableness: Good-natured vs. irritable.
Soft-hearted vs. rude.
Neuroticism: Anxious vs. relaxed.
Insecure vs. calm.
MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory)
A comprehensive, objective personality inventory used to assess patterns of traits and psychological states.
Structure:
10 Clinical Scales: Measure psychological disorders (e.g., depression, schizophrenia, hysteria).
15 Content Scales: Assess specific problem areas.
Validity Scales: Detect response bias with scales for evasiveness, defensiveness, and exaggerated symptoms.
Cognitive-Social Learning Approach
Core Assumptions
Personality is learned and shaped by environmental, cognitive, and social context.
Personality is not fixed; it changes over time.
Behaviourism Foundations
John B. Watson: Emphasized environment over biology, proposing that personality can entirely stem from learning (e.g., Little Albert study).
B.F. Skinner: Argued personality is an illusion based on behavior shaped by reinforcement and punishment.
Situationism
Suggests that situations largely influence behavior, leading to an overestimate of personality traits due to variability based on context.
Socio-Cognitive Approach
Walter Mischel: Proposed that behavior results from interactions between a person and their situation (e.g., the Marshmallow experiment illustrates self-control influenced by context).
Social Learning Theory
Albert Bandura: Identified learning through observation and imitation.
Modelling: A lifelong process beginning in childhood.
Self-Efficacy: Belief in one's ability to achieve goals.
High self-efficacy leads to persistence and confidence; low self-efficacy leads to avoidance and anxiety.
Learned Helplessness: Patterns of behavior that lead to negative cycles, e.g., the belief "I can’t do it" resulting in inaction.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Dismissal of successes as luck and personalization of failures, reinforcing chronic self-doubt.
Reciprocal Determinism: Personality develops through mutual influence—behavior, personal factors, and environment interact and shape each other over time.
Self and Culture
Cultural Personality Models
Different cultural frameworks define personality traits, including models from Chinese assessments that encompass the Big Five + 2 additional factors (Kwang-Kuo).
Locus of Control
Perceptions of control over life outcomes:
Internal: Outcomes attributed to personal efforts.
External: Outcomes attributed to fate, luck, or outside forces.
Locus of control affects motivation, coping, and stress levels.
Identity and Culture
Erik Erikson: Posited that identity develops within cultural and social contexts, which shape behavior, self-concepts, and relationships.
Hazel Markus & Shinobu Kitayama: Highlight differences in self-concept as influenced by collectivist (relationships, social harmony) versus individualist (autonomy, individuality) cultural contexts.
Application in Psychology
Industrial/Organizational Psychology: Personality assessments are used for
Personnel selection, employee assessment, management, and predicting job performance and fitness.