Personality Psychology

Personality

• Definition: An individual’s characteristic patterns of thoughts, emotion, and behavior, along with the psychological mechanisms behind them.
• An individual’s unique and relatively consistent patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving

Goals of Personality Psychology

• Explain the whole person in his or her daily environment.
• This is an impossible task in its entirety.
• Personality psychology limits focus to patterns of observation, specific patterns, and particular ways of thinking about them.

Study of Personality

• Psychological Triad: The combination of how people think, feel, and behave.
  • Overlaps with Clinical Psychology.
  • Studies normal versus extreme patterns of personality.
  • Both attempt to understand the whole person.

Overlap with Clinical Psychology

• When personality patterns are extreme, unusual, and cause problems, personality disorders are examined through both subfields.
• Personality psychology draws from social, cognitive, developmental, clinical, and biological psychology.

Basic Approaches

• Personality psychology is organized around several basic approaches:
  • Trait Approach: Focuses on how differences might be conceptualized, measured, and followed over time.
  • Biological Approach: Includes anatomy, physiology, genetics, and evolution.
  • Psychoanalytic Approach: Investigates the unconscious mind and the nature and resolution of internal mental conflict.
  • Phenomenological Approach: Focuses on people’s conscious experience of the world.
    • Humanistic: Conscious awareness produces uniquely human attributes; understand meaning and basis of happiness.
    • Cross-cultural: The experience of reality might be different across cultures.
  • Learning and Cognitive Approaches:
    • Classic Behaviorism: Focuses on overt behavior.
    • Social Learning: How observation and self-evaluation determine behavior.
    • Cognitive Personality: Focuses on cognitive processes, including perception, memory, and thought.

Competitors or Complements?

• Major advocates of basic approaches have claimed their approach explains everything worth explaining.
• Approaches are not mutually exclusive.
• Approaches address different questions or key concerns.
• Each advocate ignores concerns of the other.

Funder’s First Law

• Great strengths are usually great weaknesses, and surprisingly often, the opposite is true as well.
  • Advantage: Personality psychology has a broad mandate to account for the psychology of whole persons and real-life concerns.
  • Disadvantage: In the wrong hands it can lead to overly broad or unfocused research

Pigeonholing versus Appreciation of Individual Differences

• Personality psychologists emphasize individual differences.

  • Negative: pigeonholing.
  • Positive: leads to sensitivity and respect for individual differences.
    Psychology’s Emphasis on Method

• Goal of Research: continuously improve on tentative answers to questions

• Emphasis is on thinking and seeking new knowledge

• Learn how to question what we think we know and explore the unknown

• Research: the exploration of the unknown

  • Psychologists do not provide firm answers to questions about the mind and behavior very often

• At times, psychologists can seem more interested in the research process than in the answers their research is supposed to be seeking

• Psychologists are sensitive to and sometimes even self-conscious about:

  • Research methodology
  • The way they use statistics
  • Procedures they use to draw inferences from data

Scientific Education and Technical Training

• Research emphasizes creative thinking over memorizing because it entails seeking new knowledge, not cataloging facts already known
• Technical Training:
  • Teaches how to use what is already known; scientific training teaches how to explore the unknown
  • Ex. Medical education is technical, psychologists are trained with a scientific approach

Personality Data

• Applies to all parts of the psychological triad (thoughts, feelings, behaviors)
  • Use personality clues: the observable aspects of personality, such as behaviors, test scores, or responses to lab procedure; use as many as possible
• Funder’s Second Law
  • There are no perfect indicators of personality; there are only clues, and clues are always ambiguous
• Funder’s Third Law
  • Something beats nothing, two times out of three

S Data: Self-Judgments or Self-Reports

• S Data: A person’s evaluation of his or her own personality
  • Usually questionnaires or surveys
• High Face Validity
  • The degree to which an assessment instrument appears to measure what it is intended to measure
• Advantages of S-Data:
  • 1.) Large amount of information
    • You are always with yourself
  • 2.) Access to thoughts, feelings, and intention
    • You know your own fantasies, hopes, dreams, fears, and intentions
  • 3.) Definitional Truth
    • The data are true by definition
  • 4.) Causal Force
    • Self-Efficacy: What you think you are capable of and the kind of person you think you are
    • Self-Verification: People work to convince others to treat them in a manner that confirms their self-conceptions
  • 5.) Simple and easy
    • Cost-effective
• Disadvantages of S-Data:
  • 1.) Bias
    • People have distorted images of themselves
    • People may not want to admit certain things about themselves
  • 2.) Error
    • Fish-and-water effect: People do not notice their most obvious characteristics because they are always that way
    • Active Distortion vs. Lack of Insight
    • Carelessness
  • 3.) Too Simple and Easy
    • S-data are so cheap and easy that they are probably overused

I-Data: Find Somebody Who Knows

• I-Data: Judgments by informants
  • Acquaintances, coworkers, clinical psychologists
  • No training or expertise needed
  • May be more accurate than self-judgments for extremely desirable or undesirable traits
  • Used frequently in daily life
• Advantages of I-Data:
  • 1.) A large amount of information
    • Many behaviors in many situations
    • Judgments from multiple informants are possible
  • 2.) Real-World Basis
    • Not from contrived tests or constructed and controlled environments
    • More likely to be relevant to important outcomes
  • 3.) Common Sense
    • Takes context into account
  • 4.) Definitional Truth
    • Some aspects of personality are based on what others think
  • 5.) Causal Force
    • Reputation affects opportunities and expectancies
    • Expectancy effects or behavioral confirmation
• Disadvantages of I-Data:
  • 1.) Limited behavioral information
    • Acquaintances often see each other in only one context
  • 2.) Lack of access to private experience
    • People do not share all their private thoughts and feelings
  • 3.) Error
    • More likely to remember behaviors that are extreme, unusual, or emotionally arousing
  • 4.) Bias
    • Letter of recommendation effect
    • The person could be racist, sexist, etc.

L-Data: The Residue of Personality

• L-Data: Verifiable, concrete, real-life facts that may hold psychological significance
  • Can be obtained from archival records
    • School records, bank statements, medical files, and the internet
  • Can be thought of as the results, or “residue” of personality
    • Your behavior also leaves traces of where you have been and have done
• Advantages of L-Data:
  • 1.) Objective and Verifiable
    • Ex. income, marital status, health, and number of online followers
  • 2.) Intrinsic Importance
    • Goal of every applied psychologist is to predict, and even have a positive effect on real-life consequences
  • 3.) Psychological Relevance
    • Some people have traits that promote career success
• Disadvantages of L-Data:
  • 1.) Multidetermination
    • L-Data can be influenced by much more than personality

B-Data: See What the Person Does

• Natural B-Data: Gathered by observing a person, or by having a person record themselves
  • Diary and Experience-Sampling: The person observes themself rather than having a psychologist or trained observer do so
    • EAR: Electronically activated recorder
    • Wearable Cameras
    • Ambulatory Assessment: Using computer-assisted methods to assess behavior thoughts, and feelings during normal daily activities
    • Social Media
• Laboratory B-Data: Observing behavior in the laboratory, observations come in two varieties:
  • Behavioral Experiments:
    • Make a situation happen and record behavior
    • Examine reactions to situations
    • Represent real-life contexts that are difficult to observe directly
  • Physiological Measures
    • Give us information on biological “behavior”
• Advantages of B-Data:
  • 1.) Range of contexts
    • Researchers can construct situations
  • 2.) Appearance of Objectivity
    • Less distortion and exaggeration
    • However, subjective judgments must still be made
• Disadvantages of B-Data:
  • 1.) Difficult and Expensive
    • Experience-sampling methods require major efforts to recruit, instruct, and motivate research participants, and may also need special equipment
  • 2.) Uncertain Interpretation
    • Behaviors may not mean what we assume they do

Mixed Types of Data

• Data do not always fit into only one category
  • There is a wide range of possible types of data that are relevant to personality

S-Data and B-Data Personality Tests

• Most personality tests provide S-Data:
  • Other personality tests yield B-Data
    • What does it mean when someone says, “I prefer a shower to a bath” on a questionnaire
• Is Intelligence a personality trait?
  • Tests of intelligence, or IQ tests, also yield B-Data

Personality Assessment

• Patterns of behavior: Motives, intentions, goals, strategies, and how people perceive the world around them
• Business of Testing
  • Well-validated tests and fraudulent tests
    • You cannot tell the difference just by looking
  • Widely used tests: MMPI, CPI, 16PF, SVIB, HPI
    • Omnibus inventories: measure a wide range of traits
    • One-trait measures
    • Most tests provide S data, but some provide B data (MMPI, IQ tests)
  • Projective Tests: The person may or may not be aware of the inner processes
    • Responses to a certain inkblot may reveal
      • Someone who is preoccupied with morbidity, obsessive, or overly analytical

Rorschach Inkblot Test

• Thoughts revealed by the inkblots are not always deep, hidden or mysterious

Significance Testing

• Statistical Significance: A result that would only occur by chance less than 5 percent of the time
• Null-hypothesis significance testing: Determines the chance of getting the result if nothing were really going on
  • Problems with NHST
    • The logic is difficult to describe and understand
    • The criterion for significance is an arbitrary rule of thumb
    • Nonsignificant results are something misinterpreted to means “no result” or no relationship or difference
    • Only provides information about the probability of one type of error
  • P-Level: Probability of obtaining a result if there is no difference between groups or no relationship between variable
• Effect Size: An index of the magnitude of strength of the relationship between variables
  • Correlation Coefficient: The most commonly used measure of effect size
    • Between -1 and +1
    • If 0, there is no relationship
    • Positive Correlation: As one variable goes up, so does the other; likewise, as one variable goes down, so does the other
    • Negative Correlation: As one variable goes up, the other variable goes down
• Confidence Intervals and Interpreting Correlations
  • Confidence Intervals: Provides the range of values within which the true population correlation is likely to be found
  • Variance: The sum of squared deviations from the means
    • The squaring is a computational convenience but has no other rationale
    • Not a good way to explain the magnitude of a correlation
  • Replication: Finding the same result repeatedly, with different participants/different labs
    • Publication Bias: Studies with strong results are more likely to get published
      • Many small studies with weak effects do no get reported
      • Some researchers only report selected analyses
      • Researchers are also rewarded for interesting results
    • Questionable Research Practices or P-Hacking: Hacking around in one’s data until one finds the necessary degree of statistical significance that allows one’s finding s to be published
      • Researchers may:
        • 1.) Delete unusual responses
        • 2.) Adjust results to remove the influence of seemingly extraneous factors
        • 3.) Neglect to report experimental conditions or experiments that fail to get expected results
      • How to make research more dependable:
        • Use a larger number of participants
        • Disclose all methods
        • Share data
        • Report studies that don’t “work”

Purposes of Personality Testing

• There are several ways in which understanding personality can help society
  • Learning about people (researchers, government agencies)
  • Helping people (schools, career counselors, clinicians)
  • Selection or retention (employers, central intelligence agency)

Protection of Research Participants

• Deception
  • Tuskegee study
  • Obedience studies
  • Institutional Review Boards: Must approve all research done by university scientists
• Privacy
  • May be violated when collecting certain data
  • Bound to become a concern for research with social media

Uses of Psychological Research

• Psychological research might be used for harmful purposes
  • The subfield of behaviorism has tried to control behavior
  • Studying race may lead to more prejudice and discrimination
• For a study on any topic, it is worth asking:
  • Why is this research being done?
  • How will the results of this research be used?

Representation

• Representation of various populations among participants is far from ideal
  • Weird samples abound (western, educated, rich, democratic)
• Psychologists also lack diversity
  • Limited diversity in researchers has led to limited diversity in research

Honesty and Open Science

• Open Science: A set of practices intended to move research closer to the ideals on which science was founded
  • Avoid plagiarism and fabrication of data
  • Report data completely
  • Fully describe all aspects of all studies
  • Report studies that failed and succeeded
  • Freely share data

Eysenck’s View of Extraversion

• Introverts react more strongly and often more negatively to bright lights, loud noises, strong tastes, and other kinds of sensory stimulation than do extraverts
  • Introversion is on the opposite end of the extraversion scale

The Big Five-Extraversion

• Less dangerous-sounding than Eysenck’s view
  • Active, outspoken, dominant, forceful, adventurous, spunky, cheerful
• Has a powerful influence on behavior
• Sensitive to rewards
  • Spend more money on food, travel, etc.
• Disadvantages: Mate poaching, argumentative, need to be in control

The Big Five-Neuroticism

• Ineffective problem solving: Strong negative reactions to stress
  • Sensitive to social threats, unhappy, anxious, and even physically sick
• General tendency towards psychopathology and vulnerability
  • More likely to develop mental illness, stress, and lack the ability to handle criticism
• Associated with undesirable life outcomes
  • More likely to be unhappy, engage in criminal behavior, etc.

The Big Five-Conscientiousness

• Dutiful, careful, rule-abiding, ambitious
  • Valuable employees, are careful and considerate driver, avoid risks
• Disadvantages: Prone to feel guilty when they don’t live up to expectations

The Big Five-Agreeableness

• Conformity, friendly compliance, likeability, warmth, love
  • Facets: Compassion, morality, trust, and modesty
• Predicts life outcomes
  • Likely to be involved in religious activities, have a good sense of humor, and be psychologically well adjusted, not likely to engage in criminal behavior

The Big Five-Openness

• Most controversial trait
  • Approach to intellectual matters or basic intelligence
  • Value of cultural matters
  • Creativity and perceptiveness
• People can score high on this trait regardless of education, culture, or IQ
  • Unlikely to be viewed as simple, shallow, or unintelligent

Beyond the Big Five

• Although the Big Five have proved useful, they have also long been controversial
  • Many attributes are not encompassed within the Big Five, such as sensuality, frugality, humor, cunning, etc.
• Honesty/humility may be another trait, although it correlates with agreeableness
  • Religious people may score high on this trait
• May not be sufficient for really understanding people

Typological Approaches to Personality

• The structure of traits across individuals is not the same thing as the structure of personality within a person
• Important differences between people may be qualitative
• Evaluation Typologies
  • Types were found across even studies within diverse participants from all over the world
    • Three replicable types
      • Well-adjusted: adaptable, flexible, resourceful, interpersonally successful, etc.
      • Maladjusted overcontrolling: too uptight, denies self pleasure needlessly, difficult interpersonally
      • Maladjusted under controlling: too impulsive, prone to crime and unsafe sex
    • Types do not predict behavior or life outcomes beyond what can be predicted with the trait the define the typology
    • Categorization into types is often based on cut-off scores, but most traits are normally distributed

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

• Taken by millions of people each year in workplaces, schools, counseling centers, management workshops, etc.
  • Items are choices between two options of four opposing tendencies
    • Extraversion vs. Introversion
    • Sensing vs. Intuition
    • Thinking vs. Feeling
    • Judgment vs. Perception
  • Not useful for selection or predicting life outcomes
    • No evidence that different types follow, persist in, or succeed in different lines of work
  • Based on normally distributed scores
    • Two people both classified as extroverts could be more different from each other than two people who are classified as extrovert/introvert

The Big Five: Neuroticism

• The brain structure that most research has associated with neuroticism is the amygdala
  • The amygdala of shy people becomes highly active when they are shown pictures of people that they don’t know
  • Anxiety disorders such as panic attacks and PTSD tend to have an active amygdala
• When the amygdala is aroused by the perception of threat or danger, it transmits signals to the hypothalamus causing cortisol to be released into the bloodstream
  • Long-term effect: A rise in the risk of diabetes and heart disease
  • Short-term effect: Rise in cortisol levels

The Big Five: Conscientiousness

• The key structure for planning and self-restraint is the frontal cortex
  • Insula: Plays an interesting role in conscientiousness
    • Involved in generating potentially distracting impulses

The Big Five: Agreeableness

• Neurological research points to two brain processes that appear to be especially important for Agreeableness
  • Mentalizing: Understanding what other people are thinking
  • Empathy: Understanding other people's feelings

The Big Five: Openness

• Can be divided into two facets: Intellect and Openness
  • Intellect: Refers to being interested in abstract thought and theoretical speculations
  • Openness: Refers to responding to aesthetic stimuli including art, music, natural beauty, and even private fantasies

Biology and Personality

• Research on how the brain and chemicals affect personality has:
  • Aided the development of therapeutic drugs, helping people deal with anxiety, depression, and more severe kinds of psychopathology
  • Rapid research progress on the brian chemicals has raised potential issues

Lessons of Psychosurgery

• Psychosurgery is done with the specific purpose of altering personality, emotions or behavior
  • Prefrontal Leucotomy: Damages small areas of white matter behind each frontal lobe with intention of decreasing pathological levels of agitation and emotional arousal
  • Prefrontal Lobotomy: Removes whole sectors of the frontal lobe
    • Ex. Rosemary Kennedy
  • Drugs are now more commonly used to treat mental problems
    • The enthusiasm for psychosurgery was premature
    • Mapping a single brain area, a single biochemical, or a single gene onto behavioral tendencies has repeatedly been shown to be a mistake
      • Physical basis of psychological function is complex

Biology: Cause and Effect

• The relationship between the brain and its environment works in both directions
  • Biological processes are the effects of behavior sor experiences as often as they are the causes
    • Ex. A stressful environment will raise cortisol
    • We will not fully understand the nervous system until we understand depression, anxiety, psychotherapy, and stressful environment
  • Measurable brain activity can be changed by drugs; it can also be changed by psychotherapy

Evolution and Behavior: Aggression and Altruism

• Two sides of many human behaviors have been examined through the evolutionary lens
  • Possible role of the instinct toward aggression
    • Aggressiveness can help a person to protect territory, property and mates
    • May lead to dominance in the social group and higher status
    • The same tendency can also lead to fighting, murder, and war
  • Altruism: May increase inclusive fitness by helping and protecting others

Evolution and Behavior: Self-Esteem

• Sociometer Theory: Feelings of self-esteem evolved to monitor the degree to which a person is accepted by others
  • If we are not valued and accepted it may cause our self-esteem to fall
  • Motivates us to do things that will cause others to think better of us so that we can think better of ourselves

Individual Differences: Adaptation

• At the level of the species, a trait that used to be maladaptive or irrelevant can become vital for survival
• A trait that is adaptive in one situation may be harmful in another
  • Ex. Camouflage

Individual Differences: Life History

• Life History Strategy (LHS): A strategy that may encompass different kinds of adaptation
  • Fast-Life History Strategy: Animal reproduces multiple times at a young age but does not devote many or any resources to protecting offspring
    • Fast-LHS approach may have worked better for reproductive success
  • Slow-life History Strategy: The animal does not reproduce until relatively late in life, has fewer offspring
    • Safe, predictable environments promote individuals who marry late, have few children, and put extensive resources into raising

Three Ways to Account for Individual Differences

• 1.) Behavioral patterns evolve as reactions to particular environmental experiences
• 2.) People may have evolved to have a repertoire of several possible behavioral strategies
• 3.) Some evolved traits may be frequency dependent: they adjust their prevalence according to how common they are in the population at large

Five “Stress Tests” for Evolutionary Psychology

• Methodology: How can evolutionary speculations be tested?
  • The vast majority of stepparents are not abusive
  • Do not assume that every genetically influenced trait or behavior pattern exists because it has an adaptive advantage
    • Evolutionary theorists have a reasonable response: Alternative explanations are always possible
    • Complex evolutionary theories of behavior are difficult to prove or disprove in their entirety
  • Reproductive Instinct: Evolutionary psychology is sometimes taken to imply that everybody is trying to have as many children as possible
    • How does any of this make sense when people are using condoms or birth control specifically not to have offspring, viable or otherwise?
      • This criticism misunderstands how evolution works
      • You would not be here unless your ancestors had children
    • Conservative Bias: Current behavioral order was not only inevitable but also probably unchangeable and appropriate
      • Evolutionary theorists point out that objections like these are irrelevant from a scientific standpoint
      • Opponents of evolutionary theories themselves commit the “naturalistic fallacy” of believing that anything shown to be natural must be good
    • Human Flexibility: Evolutionary accounts seem to describe a lot of specific behavior as genetically programmed
      • Evolutionary accounts may suggest built-in behavioral patterns that cannot be overcome by conscious, rational thought
      • Evolutionary psychology acknowledges that the evolution of the cerebral cortex has:
        • Given the human brain the ability to respond flexibly to changing circumstances; overcome innate urges
      • Biological Determinism or Social Structure:
        • Behavioral phenomena might be the result not of evolutionary history but of humans responding to changing circumstances
        • Eagly and Wood argue that females value wealth and power in males more than looks, and why the wealth of a female matters less to a male
          • Theoretical Level: How much of human nature is evolutionarily determined and biologically inherited?
          • Practical Level: The world is changing
          • When females have power equal to marks, sex differences in preference for a wealthy spouse are much smaller

Contribution of Evolutionary Theory

• Since the introduction of evolutionary thinking into psychology, the field will never be the same
  • Evolutionary psychology is now placing human thought, motivation, and behavior into a broad natural context
  • Not every aspect of thought or behavior exists because it specifically evolved

Behavioral Genetics

• Personality Trait: A pattern of behavior that is generally consistent across situations
  • The reason biological relatives look alike is because they share genes
• Controversy
  • Research on genetic bases of behavior might lead the public to think that outcomes such as intelligence, poverty, criminality, mental illness, and obesity are fixed in one’s genes
    • Eugenics: Idea that humanity could be improved through selective breeding
    • Cloning: The belief that it might be technologically possible to produce a complete duplicate-psychological as well as physical-of a human being
    • Genetic Confounding: Arises when trying to understand the effects on development that parenting styles and childhood environments do and do not have
  • Calculating Heritability
    • Assumption: Traits and behaviors influenced by genes should be more similar among more closely related people
      • Ex. Monozygotic vs. Dizygotic Twins
    • Heritability Coefficient: Reflects the degree to which variance of the trait in the populations can be attributed to variance in genes
      • Behavioral genetic studies have worked hard to find twins of both types and to seek out the rare twins separated and birth
      • Personalities are usually measured with self-report instruments
      • The average correlation across MZ twins is about r = .60 and across DZ twins it is about r =. 40
  • What Heritability Tells You
    • Not all of personality comes from experience
      • Heritability estimates challenge that presumption whenever they turn out to be greater than zero
    • Some of personality comes from genes
      • How does the early environment operate in shaping personality development?
      • Traits of biological siblings resemble each other with an average correlation of .16, whereas adoptive siblings raised in the same family resemble each other with a correlation of only .04
        • Shared family environment was important in the development of conduct disorder, anxiety, and depression
  • What Heritability Can’t Tell You
    • Heritability calculations have a couple of important limitations that are often overlooked
      • Traits with little variation will have heritability close to zero
      • You can’t use heritability to determine what percent of a trait is determined by genetics and by the environment
        • Heritability statistics are not the nature-nature ratio; a biologically determined trait can have a zero heritability
      • Heritability statistics do not really tell you very much about the process by which genes affect personality and behavior
        • Ex. Divorce is heritable

Molecular Genetics

• Genome-Wide Association Studies
  • Look for associations between hundreds of thousands of genes or patterns of genes and personality in large samples
    • Many and maybe nearly all the results that arise will be due merely to chance
    • Three studies or more than 100,000 people each found patterns of genetic variation associated with traits related to happiness, depression, and anxiety
  • Epigenetics: Explores how experience, especially early in life, can determine how or even whether a gene is expressed during development
    • Experience affects biology
    • May be possible to help people find environments that will lead to good outcomes
  • Gene-Environment Interactions
    • Genes are not causal; they only provide the design
      • Environment can affect heritability
      • Nutrition and Height: Heritability will be higher when all children have the same level of nutrition, but lower when nutrition differs
      • Intellectual stimulation and educational opportunities can also increase IQ
  • The Future of Behavior Genetics
    • Transactions between genes and the environment can go in both directions and reinforce or even counteract each other
      • Research must focus on how genes and the environment interact in daily experience and at the molecular level of gene expression

Freud History

• Left Austria when Hitler came to power
  • Believed war proved that people have an aggressive, destructive urge
• Used Free Association: “The Talking Cure”
  • Believed the first step in studying psychology is trying to understand your own mind (influenced by his patients)

Key Ideas of Psychoanalysis

• Psychic Determinism: Everything that happens in a person’s mind, including everything a person think and does, has a specific cause
  • Contradictions of thoughts and behavior can be resolved, usually by looking at the unconscious part of the mind
    • Areas and processes of the mind of which a person is not aware
  • Miracles, free will, and random accidents do not exist
• The mind is made of separate parts that function independently and can conflict with each other
  • Id: Irrational, Emotional - Impulsive
  • Ego: Rational - Practical
    • Compromise formation between Id and Superego
  • Superego: Moral - Rigid
• Assumption: The psychological part of the mind needs energy (libido)
  • Energy is fixed and finite at any given moment
  • Some implications not supported by research: expressions of anger

Controversy of Freud

• Moral: Dislike of emphasis on sex and sexual energy
• Scientific: Theory is unscientific
• Personal Level: People do not want to be told why they really did something, especially when you are correct

Psychoanalysis, Life, Death

• Libido
  • Creation, protection, and enjoyment of life
  • Creativity, productivity, and growth
• Thanatos
  • Introduced later to account for destruction of life
  • End of life theory

Humanistic Psychology

• The psychological study of awareness, free will, happiness, and the many related aspects of the mind that are uniquely human and give life meaning
  • Goal: Overcome the paradox of studying humans
  • Implications of self-awareness
    • Address the phenomenon of awareness and the uniquely human phenomena awareness results in, including free will, willpower, mindfulness and imagination,

Phenomenology

• One’s conscious experience of the world; everything a person hears, feels and thinks (Ex. Knowing the best seat to see the screen in class)
  • Central Insight: Phenomenology is psychologically more important than the world itself-awareness is all that matters
    • Realization that only one’s present experience matters; the past is gone, the future is not here yet so we can choose what to think and feel (free will)
  • Construal: A person’s particular experience of the world
    • Everyone’s is different
    • Forms the basis of how you live your life
      • Free will is achieved by choosing your construal
      • Ex. fear of dogs because you were bit as a child, but not everyone has that same fear
  • Introspection: Observation of one’s own perceptions and thought process
    • EX. Determining why you have that fear of dogs

Existentialism

• A broad philosophical movement that began in the mid-1800s
  • A reaction against rationalism, science, and the industrial revolution
  • Purpose: regain contact with the experience of being alive and aware
    • Ex. What is the nature of existence? What does it mean?
  • The conscious experience of being alive has three components:
    • 1.) Biological Experience (Umwelt): The sensations you feel by virtue of being a biological organism
      • Ex. being hungry or thirsty
    • 2.) Social Experience (Mitwelt): What you think and feel as a social being
    • 3.) Psychological Experience (Eigenwelt) The experience of experience itself and of introspection (existential living)
  • Thrown-ness: The time, place, and circumstances you happened to be born in
    • The world seems to have no overarching meaning or purpose
      • Religion plays a small role in creating meaning and purpose
      • An important basis of your experience