Chapter 14 Personality and Self Test 4

Overview of Personality

  • Four main approaches to understanding personality:
    • Psychodynamic/Psychoanalytic
    • Humanistic
    • Trait
    • Social-cognitive
  • Aspects of the self
  • Self-esteem
  • Self-serving bias

Psychodynamic Approach

  • Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
  • Psychoanalytic theory: the first theory of personality.
  • Emphasis on the unconscious mind.
    • The unconscious includes thoughts, feelings, wishes, memories, and desires below conscious awareness.
    • The unconscious is considered a source of psychological problems.
    • Goal: to solve problems by bringing unconscious content into awareness.
  • Techniques to access the unconscious:
    • Free association
    • Dream analysis

Structure of Personality (according to Freud)

  • Id
    • Instincts, operates unconsciously.
    • Driven by the pleasure principle.
    • Seeks immediate gratification.
  • Ego
    • Operates on the reality principle.
    • Delays gratification.
    • Acts as a mediator between the id and superego.
  • Superego
    • Represents the conscience.
    • Driven by the morality principle.
    • Demands perfection.
  • Iceberg analogy: The conscious mind is the tip of the iceberg, while the unconscious is the submerged, larger portion.

Defense Mechanisms

  • Unconscious psychological and behavioral tactics to avoid anxiety.
  • Repression: The basic mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing impulses from consciousness; it enables other defense mechanisms.
  • Examples of defense mechanisms:
    • Regression: Retreating to a more infantile psychosexual stage where some psychic energy remains fixated.
      • Example: A little boy reverts to thumb-sucking on his first day of school.
    • Reaction formation: Switching unacceptable impulses into their opposites.
      • Example: Repressing angry feelings and displaying exaggerated friendliness.
    • Projection: Disguising one's own threatening impulses by attributing them to others.
      • Example: "The thief thinks everyone else is a thief."
    • Rationalization: Offering self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening unconscious reasons for one's actions.
      • Example: A habitual drinker says she drinks with her friends "just to be sociable."
    • Displacement: Shifting sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person.
      • Example: A little girl kicks the family dog after her mother sends her to her room.
    • Denial: Refusing to believe or even perceive painful realities.
      • Example: A partner denies evidence of his loved one's affair.

Psychosexual Stages of Personality Development

  • Erogenous zones: pleasure-sensitive areas of the body.
  • Conflicts arise between satisfying urges and the rules of society.
  • Fixation: getting stuck in a particular stage if conflicts are not resolved.
  • Oral Stage: Focus on the mouth and weaning.
    • Potential for oral fixation.
  • Anal Stage: Focus on the anus and toilet training.
    • Potential for anal fixation.
  • Phallic Stage: Focus on the genitals.
    • Oedipus complex: Desire for the opposite-sex parent, jealousy and fear of the same-sex parent, repression, and identification with the same-sex parent.
    • Electra complex: Analogous to the Oedipus complex but for girls; includes penis envy.
  • Latency Period: A period of dormant sexual feelings.
  • Genital Stage: Maturation of sexual interests.

Variations on Psychoanalytic Theory

  • Neo-Freudians: Jung, Erikson, Horney, Adler.
  • Placed more emphasis on the conscious mind and social influences.
  • Less emphasis on sex and aggression as primary motivators.
  • Modern psychodynamic theories.

Measuring the Unconscious

  • Projective personality tests
    • Use ambiguous stimuli to elicit responses that reveal unconscious processes.
    • Examples: Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) and Rorschach Inkblot test.
  • Problems with projective tests:
    • Subjective interpretation, potentially leading to unreliable results.

Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Approach

  • Problems:
    • Unscientific, with few testable predictions.
    • Not well-supported by research.

The Humanistic Approach

  • Optimistic approach to personality.
  • Focus on the innate drive to fulfill one's potential.
  • Self-actualization: The process of fulfilling one's potential and becoming a fully realized person.
  • Roger's Person-Centered Theory
    • Emphasizes the quality of relationships in personal growth.
    • Requirements for personal growth: genuineness, empathy, acceptance.
    • Conditional positive regard vs. unconditional positive regard.
    • Ideal self vs. actual self.
  • Evaluating the Humanistic Approach:
    • Critiques: Unrealistic, vague, and difficult to measure concepts empirically.

The Trait Approach

  • Traits: Specific, stable, internal characteristics that describe a person's behavior and personality.

  • Goal: to find the fundamental dimensions/traits that underlie personality.

  • Methods:

    • Questionnaires
    • Factor analysis: A statistical technique used to identify clusters of items that are statistically correlated; these clusters are grouped together on one dimension, reflecting a basic trait.

  • Example questionnaire items:

    • T/F I would rather go out to a concert with friends than stay at home.
    • T/F I enjoy riding roller-coasters.
    • T/F People tend to say that I am the life of the party.
    • T/F I like being alone.
    • T/F I avoid going to social gatherings where there are very few people I know.

Eysenck’s Trait Theory

  • Two major dimensions of personality: introversion/extraversion and emotional stability/instability.
  • Biological basis:
    • Inherited levels of brain and autonomic nervous system arousal and reactivity.
    • Extraverts vs. introverts: Differ in their baseline levels of arousal and reactivity.
    • Lemon juice experiment: Used to demonstrate differences in physiological responses between introverts and extraverts.

Gray’s Biopsychological Trait Theory

  • Behavioral approach system (BAS)
    • Sensitivity to reward.
  • Behavioral inhibition system (BIS)
    • Sensitivity to punishment.
  • People differ in the relative sensitivities of their BAS and BIS.

The Big Five Model of Personality

  • Five broad personality factors:
    • Conscientiousness: Organized, careful, disciplined vs. disorganized, careless, impulsive.
    • Agreeableness: Soft-hearted, trusting, helpful vs. ruthless, suspicious, uncooperative.
    • Neuroticism (emotional stability vs. instability): Anxious, insecure, self-pitying vs. calm, secure, self-satisfied.
    • Openness: Imaginative, prefers variety, independent vs. practical, prefers routine, conforming.
    • Extraversion: Sociable, fun-loving, affectionate vs. retiring, sober, reserved.
  • Acronym: CANOE

Assessing Traits: Objective Personality Tests

  • Personality Inventories
    • Neuroticism Extraversion Openness Personality Inventory Revised (NEO-PI-R): Assesses the Big Five personality traits.
    • Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI): Assesses psychological disorders and personality traits.

The Social-Cognitive Approach

  • Bandura and Reciprocal Influences: Personality and environment influence each other.
    • Internal cognitive factors (thoughts and feelings about risky activities).
    • Behavior (learning to bungee jump).
    • Environmental factors (bungee-jumping friends).

Bandura and Reciprocal Influences

  • Personality and environment influence each other.
  • Choice: we choose our environments.
  • Reaction: how we react to situations based on our personality.
  • We are both the products and producers of our environments.

Rotter’s Expectancy Theory

  • Personal control: The feeling of controlling or being controlled by the environment.

    • Internal locus of control: Feelings of control.
    • External locus of control: Lack of feelings of control, potentially leading to depression and learned helplessness.

  • Learned Helplessness

    • Experiment with dogs (Seligman & Maier, 1967) demonstrated that when subjected to inescapable shocks, dogs eventually give up trying to avoid the shocks, even when escape becomes possible.

Exploring the Self

  • Culture and the self
    • Collectivists: Emphasize group harmony and interdependence.
    • Individualists: Emphasize personal achievement and independence.
  • Self-esteem: Overall feelings of self-worth.
  • Violence and aggression: Sometimes associated with defensive self-esteem.
  • Defensive self-esteem: Fragile and insecure self-esteem.

Exploring the Self

  • Self-serving bias: The tendency to think well of ourselves.
  • Explaining successes and failures: Attributing successes to internal factors and failures to external factors.
  • Better-than-average effect: The illusion that we are better than average on various dimensions.
  • Illusion of superiority.
  • Depression and self-serving bias: Depressed individuals may have a more realistic view of themselves, lacking the typical self-serving bias.

Comparing the Major Personality Theories

  • Psychoanalytic
    • Key Proponent: Freud
    • Assumptions: Emotional disorders spring from unconscious dynamics, such as unresolved sexual and other childhood conflicts, and fixation at various developmental stages. Defense mechanisms fend off anxiety.
    • View of Personality: Personality consists of pleasure-seeking impulses (the id), a reality-oriented executive (the ego), and an internalized set of ideals (the superego).
    • Personality Assessment Methods: Free association, projective tests, dream analysis
  • Psychodynamic
    • Key Proponents: Adler, Horney, Jung
    • Assumptions: The unconscious and conscious minds interact. Childhood experiences and defense mechanisms are important.
    • View of Personality: The dynamic interplay of conscious and unconscious motives and conflicts shapes our personality.
    • Personality Assessment Methods: Projective tests, therapy sessions
  • Humanistic
    • Key Proponents: Rogers, Maslow
    • Assumptions: Rather than examining the struggles of sick people, it's better to focus on the ways healthy people strive for self-realization.
    • View of Personality: If our basic human needs are met, people will strive toward self-actualization. In a climate of unconditional positive regard, we can develop self-awareness and a more realistic and positive self-concept.
    • Personality Assessment Methods: Questionnaires, therapy sessions.
  • Trait
    • Key Proponents: Allport, Eysenck, McCrae, Costa
    • Assumptions: We have certain stable and enduring characteristics, influenced by genetic predispositions.
    • View of Personality: Scientific study of traits has isolated important dimensions of personality, such as the Big Five traits (conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness, and extraversion).
    • Personality Assessment Methods: Personality inventories
  • Social-Cognitive
    • Key Proponent: Bandura
    • Assumptions: Our traits and the social context interact to produce our behaviors.
    • View of Personality: Conditioning and observational learning interact with cognition to create behavior patterns. Our behavior in one situation is best predicted by considering our past behavior in similar situations.

Influences on Personality

  • Biological influences:
    • Genetically determined temperament
    • Autonomic nervous system reactivity
    • Brain activity
  • Psychological influences:
    • Learned responses
    • Unconscious thought processes
    • Expectations and interpretations
  • Social-cultural influences:
    • Childhood experiences
    • Influence of the situation
    • Cultural expectations
    • Social support