Introduction to Psychology: Personality Psychology

Music and Personality

Cattell and Anderson

• Music preference revels unconscious aspects of personality
• Created IPAT Music Preference Test
• 120 classical and jazz music excerpt
• Indicate liking for excerpts
• 12 music-preference factors
• Unconscious reflection of specific personality characteristics
  • Surgency, warmth, conservatism
• Sensation-seeking is positively associated with rock, heavy metal, punk
• Negatively associated with soundtracks and religious music
• Extraversion and psychoticism predicts preferences for music with exaggerated bass
  • Dance music
• Listening to heavy metal music has been shown to increase the arousal level of heavy metal fans beyond that of country music fans
  • Arousal level
  • Function of alertness, situational awareness, vigilance, level of distraction, stress and direction of attention
  • How ready a person is to perform appropriate tasks in a timely and effective manner
• Preference for high arousing music (e.g., heavy metal, rock, alternative, rap, and dance) positively related to resting arousal, sensation seeking, and antisocial personality

Lay Theories/Implicit Theories/Naive Theories/ Folk Theories

• Ontological Assumptions
  • Beliefs about what is true in the world
• Narrative Representations
  • Frameworks that explain and organize the world
• Lay Theories
  • Attitudes and values are evaluative or prescriptive
  • Lay theories are prescriptive or descriptive
  • Their primary purpose is to facilitate the understanding of complex information
  • Fixedness of Traits
  • Entity
  • Fixed and changed
  • “Everyone is a certain kind of person, and there is not much that can be done to really change that.”
  • Malleability of Traits
  • Incremental
  • Dynamic
  • “Everyone can change even their most basic qualities.”

Personality

• The set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are organized and relatively enduring and that influence his or her interactions with and adaptation to the intraphysic, physical, and social environments
• Set of Psychological Traits
  • Characteristics that describe ways in which people are different from each other
  • Average tendencies of a person
• Mechanisms
  • Process of personality
  • 3 Essential Ingredients
  • Inputs: information from the environment
  • Decision Rules: think about specific options
  • Outputs: guide behavior
• Within the Individual
  • Personality is something a person carries with himself or herself over time and from one situation to the next
  • Table over time
  • Consistent across situations
• Organized and Relatively Enduring
  • Psychological traits and mechanisms are not a random collection of elements
• And that Influence
  • How we act, view ourselves, think about the world, interact, feel, select our environments (social environments), what goals and desire we pursue in life, how we react to our social circumstances
• His or Her Interactions
  • Pearson-environment interaction
  • Selection: choose situations to enter
  • Evocation: reactions we produce in others
  • Manipulation: intentionally influence others
• And Adaptations to
  • Adaptive Functioning
  • Accomplishing goals
  • Coping, adjusting, dealing with challenges
  • Breakdown in Functioning
  • Ability to cope with stress
  • Regulate one’s social behavior
  • Manage one’s own emotion
• The Environment
  • Physical environment
  • Social environment
  • Belongingness, love, and self-esteem
  • Intraphysic Environment
  • Memories, dreams, fantasies, desires, collection of private experiences

Personality Psychology

• Describe
  • Helps us to describe people
  • Helps us understand the dimensions of difference between people
• Explain
  • Personality theories
  • What factors, why
• Predict
  • Positive or negative outcomes?
  • Will the characteristics prove to be stable over time?
  • What can we expect from this person based on what we know?
• Control or Change
  • Control to enhance well-being

Major Schools of Personality Psychology

1. Psychoanalytic
   • Sigmund Freud
   • Self-regulating and independent unconscious processes make up the essence of personality. They operate through mental structures that are continual conflict.
2. Neo-Psychoanalytic
   • Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Karen Horney
   • Conscious individual, social, and interpersonal factors are powerful forces in shaping personality
3. Humanistic
   • Albert Ellis, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow
   • People are basically good and strive toward maximum personal development or self-actualization
4. Behavioral
   • John Watson, B.F. Skinner (rewards and punishment), Ivan Pavlov (dogs)
   • Personality is the observable result of reinforcement
5. Genetic or Biological
   • William Sheldon, Edmund O. Wilson, Hans Eysenck
   • Genes, hormones, and neurochemicals in the brain regulate the greater portion of human personality

Varieties of Human Temperament (William Sheldon)

• Ectomorph
  • Cerebrotonia (associated with ectomorphy)
  • Characterized by physical and emotional restraint, fast reaction to stimuli and social inhibition
  • Physically “soft-rounded”
• Mesomorph
  • Somatotonia (associated with mesomorphy)
  • Characterized by assertiveness, risk taking, aggressiveness, and indifference to pain
  • Physically firm, rugged
• Endomorph
  • Viscerotonia (associated with endomorphy)
  • Characterized by lassitude, physical or mental weariness
  • Synonymous with lethargy, weariness, languor, sluggishness
  • Physically thin, rugged

Constitutional Psychology

• Size and shape of a person’s body were indicators of intelligence, temperament, moral worth, and even future achievement

Francis Galton

• Founder of Social Darwinism and father of eugenics
• In the late 19th century, proposed a photo archive and beauty map for the whole British population which could serve as a guide for selective breeding
  • Use the archives to restrict the reproduction of inferior types – unfit, ugly, unintelligent or misshapen people – and encourage a king of stud farm of intellectuals

1. Trait
   • Raymond Cattell, Hans Eysenck
   • Differences among people can be reduced to a limited number of distinct behavioral styles or traits
2. Cognitive/Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy
   • Albert Bandura (learning from the interplay of learned and innate styles of thinking), Ulric Neisser, Albert Ellis
   • Personality results from the interplay of learned and innate styles of thinking

Personality

• Universals: true for all people
• Particulars: true for groups
• Uniqueness: true for particular individuals

Nomothetic (larger pattern)

• Has semantic origins in the Greek nomos, which refers to application to people generally, as in general patterns or universal statements or laws
• Nomothetic research and assessment focuses on uncovering general patterns of behavior that have a normative base.
• Primary goal of prediction and explanation of phenomena rather than individual in-depth understanding
• Writing is more often objective and impersonal with a focus on generalized findings (e.g., a randomized experiment)

Idiographic (case study)

• Focuses on understanding the individual as a unique, complex entity
• Writing is very descriptive and detailed in presentation

Personality

• Must be viewed from a critical thinking perspective
• Is a science
• Not just common sense
• Must be studies from a cross-cultural perspective
• Personality development reflects multiple influences

The Psychoanalytic or Psychodynamic

Sigmund Freud

• The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.

Topographic Model of the Psyche (Iceberg)

• Conscious
  • Holds everything you are currently aware
  • Contact with outside world
• Preconscious
  • Contains everything you could become aware of but are not currently thinking about Material just beneath the surface of awareness
• Unconscious
  • Holding all the urges, through, and feelings that might cause us anxiety, conflict, and pain exert an influence on our actions
  • Difficult to retrieve material; well below the surface of awareness

Structural Model of the Psyche

• Id
  • Pleasure principle
  • Primary process thinking (with fulfillment)
  • Biological component
  • The instincts Eros and Thanatos are associated with the unconscious mind and the id
  • Eros: a drive for life, love, growth, and preservation
  • Thanatos: a drive for aggression and death
  • The id is directly linked to bodily experience and cannot deal effectively with reality
  • The id strives to reduce tension from external and internal stimulation
  • Reflex responses
  • Primary process thinking. They want immediate gratification of their needs and the pleasure principle drives them to have all needs or wants filled immediately
• Ego
  • Reality principle
  • Psychological component
  • Secondary process thinking
  • Reality testing
  • Ensures that the id’s impulses are expressed effectively in the context of the real world
  • Decides which actions are appropriate, which id impulses will be satisfied, how and when
• Superego
  • Moral imperatives
  • Social component
  • Contains the conscience and the ego-ideal
  • Provides moral guidance embodying parental and societal values
  • Conscience. Or images of what is right and what deserves punishment. BASIS OF GUILT
  • Ego Ideal. Images of what is regarded or approved of. BASIS OF PRIDE.

Psychogenetic Model of Development

• Oral (oral pleasures)
  • Birth to 18 months
  • Children are highly dependent on their mothers
  • Derive pleasure from sucking and swallowing
  • Fixation leads to overeating, smoking, drinking, and kissing
    • Oral incorporative, oral ingestive
  • Biting and chewing later in adulthood
  • Fixation leads to chewing objects, nail biting Sarcastic, critical
    • Oral aggressive, oral sadistic
• Anal (potty training)
  • 18 months and 3 years
  • Expulsion and retention of feces
  • The child starts to explore their environment, but experience control and discipline from their parents
  • Fixation leads to being messy and generous
  • Anal expulsive
  • Being mean and orderly
  • Anal retentive
• Phallic (Boss attracted to mother; girls - penis envy)
  • 3 to 5 years
  • Children discover pleasure from touching their genitals
  • Become aware that they are in competition with siblings and their father for their mother’s attention
  • Boys and castration anxiety stems from Oedipus Complex
  • To protect themselves against this anxiety, boy identify with their fathers
  • Girls reject their mother at the phallic stage
  • Increasing attraction to the father who has a penis they lack
  • Penis envy is not resolved until women have a male child
  • Fixation leads to sexual and/or relationship problems
• Latency (sexual impulses -> social activities)
  • 6 to 12 years old
  • Sexual impulses are rechanneled to activities such as sport, learning, and social activities
• Genital (sexual energy to opposite sex)
  • 13 years old to adult
  • Focus libido or sexual energy towards the opposite sex
  • If the earlier psychosexual stages have been successfully negotiated, the individual should now begin to form positive relationship with others

Carl Gustav Jung

• Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves
• There is a constant and often creative development, the search for wholeness and completion, and yearning for rebirth
• Human behavior is conditioned by individual and racial history (causality), and aims and assumptions (teleology)
  • Teleology: reason is motivated by end or goal

Archetypes

• Themes that have existed in all cultures throughout history
• Referred to these themes as images, primordial images, root-images, dominant, behavior patterns
• Collective memories are universal in nature because of our common evolution and brain structure
• Though-forms or ideas that give rise to vision projected onto current experiences
• Recurring regardless of culture, time, and place
• Collective unconscious
• We’re born with it
• Standard stories

The Psyche

• Total personality

• Nonstop physical space that has its own special reality

• Through the psyche, energy flows continuously in various directions

• From consciousness to unconsciousness and back

• From inner to outer reality and back

• Psychic energy is interchangeable with libido

• Libido is a life process

• Sexual urges are one aspect of the libido

• Libidinal energy that courses through the psyche operate autonomously and unpredictably with various results

• Operates according to the principle of opposites

• Psychic energy is considered an outcome of the conflict between forces within the personality

• Without conflict there is no energy and no life

• Libido operates according to the principles of equivalence and entropy

• Principle of Equivalence

  • For a given quantity of energy expanded or consumed in bringing about a certain condition, an equal quantity of the same or another form of energy will appear somewhere
  • Balance
  • What we want to achieve

• Principle of Entropy

  • The process within the psyche whereby elements of unequal strength seek psychological equilibrium
  • One-sided development of the personality creates conflict, tension, and strain, whereas a more even distribution produces a more fully mature person

  

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• Ego-Conscious Mind
  • Complex representations which constitutes the centrum of field of consciousness and appears to possess a very high degree of continuity
  • Unifying force of the psyche
  • Responsible for feelings of identity and continuity as human beings
  • Contains conscious thoughts of our own behavior and feelings and memories of our experiences
• Personal Unconscious
  • Consists of forgotten experiences that have lost intensity for some reason
  • Memories; available or suppressed
  • Possibly because of their unpleasantness
  • Includes impressions that are too weak to be perceived consciously
  • We already have it, psyche DNA
• Collective Unconscious
  • Deposit of world processes embedded in the brain and the sympathetic nervous system which constitutes a sort of timeless and eternal world-image which counterbalances our conscious momentary picture of the world
  • Storehouse of latent memories of our human and prehuman ancestry
  • Experience and information we share as a species; psychological inheritance
• Persona (Masks)
  • A compromise between the demands of the environment and the necessities of the individuals inner constitution
  • The mask we wear in order to function adequately in our relationships with other people
  • Different roles we play; performing the best = may cause imbalance using the persona in all aspects of life
  • May take as many forms as the roles we play in our daily routines
  • We can learn to hide ourselves behind the masks
  • Excessive identification with the persona may have harmful effects in personal development
• Shadow (Weaknesses, Unconscious)
  • Operates independently in the unconscious, where they join forces with other impulse
  • Negative: a dignified and sophisticated executive way suddenly becomes highly abusive toward his colleagues during an important meeting. His arguments may become totally irrational, irresponsible, and unrelated to the issue under consideration
  • Positive: seen when a person feels unaccountably vital, spontaneous, and creative
• Anima (True Self, Collective Unconscious)
  • Feminine archetype in man
  • When anima operates positively in man it serves as his inspiration
  • Her intuitive capacity, often superior to man’s, can give him timely warning
  • Her feelings always directed towards the personal, can show him ways which his own less personally accepted feeling would never have discovered
  • Negative: when men act “bitchy” and “catty”
• Animus (True Self, Collective Unconscious)
  • Masculine archetype in women
  • Has positive manifestations when it produces arguments based on reason and logic
  • Negative: In intellectual women, it encourages a critical disputatiousness and would-be high-browism
  • Argumentative
• Self (Conscious and Unconscious/ Unity or Wholeness)
  • Archetypal potentiality in all of us
  • Way of Individuation: a process by which a person becomes the definite, unique being that he in fact is
  • The final goal of striving
  • The movement toward self-realization is a very difficult process, and one that can never be fully attained
  • Has a transcendent function
  • Provides stability and balance to the various systems of the personality
  • As individuals explore the unconscious aspect of their individual psyche, they learn more about this side of their nature and its functions and begin to feel more comfortable with it.
  • A man begins to understand how his anima forces him to idealize his girlfriend and ignore her fault
  • Principle of equivalence (what we want to achieve)
  • Principle of entropy (learning towards persona or shadow)
• Introversion
  • Excessive brooding and indecisiveness at a time when a person needs to make a firm judgment
  • The creation of useful and unique products
• Extraversion
  • Acting injudiciously
  • Making sensible decisions

ANIMA+ANIMUS =SYZYGY->WHOLENESS

“DIVINE COUPLE”

• Rationale
  • Thinking
  • Helps in understanding events through the use of reason and logic
  • Feeling
  • Evaluating events by judging whether they are good or bad
  • Degree to which we like or dislike something
• Irrational
  • Sensing
  • Initial concrete experience of phenomena without the use of reason or evaluation
  • Intuiting
  • Relying on senses

Ecology of Human Development

• The study of the progressive, mutual accommodation, throughout the lifespan between a growing human organism and the changing immediate environments in which it lives
• An ecology of human development stresses the importance of “mutual accommodation” by the individual in the changing environment
• Microsystem
  • Immediate setting that contains the person
  • Physical space and activities
  • People and their roles
  • Interactions between the individual and other people
  • Family, peers, friends, school, church group, neighborhood play area, health services
• Mesosystem
  • Relationships among different settings in which a person spends time during different periods of development
• Exosystem
  • A set of specific social structures that do not directly contain the individual but have an impact on the person’s development
  • These structures influence delimits, or even undermines what goes on in the microsystems of developing individuals
  • Friends of family, neighbors, legal services, social welfare services, mass media
• Macrosystem
  • Contains all of the elements contained in the individual’s micro, meso, and exosystems plus the general underlying philosophy of cultural orientation within which the person lives
  • Overarching Institutional Patterns of the culture or subculture (economic, social, educational, legal, political)
  • Attitudes and ideologies of the culture

The Trait Approach

• Lexical Approach (Dispositional Approach)
  • Most of the socially relevant and salient personality characteristics have become encoded in the natural language
  • The personality vocabulary contained in the dictionaries of natural language provides an extensive, yet finite, set of attributes that the people speaking that language have found important and useful in their daily lives
  • The important the difference, the more likely it is to be expressed as a single word
  • Language
  • Traits: relatively stable patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior that characterize an individual
  • State: temporary patterns of thoughts, feelings, or behavior

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Personalities in Personality Research

Han Eysenck (focus on factual data)

• Biological Trait Theory

  • Eysenck believed that theorists should start with well-developed ideas about what underlying variables they want to measure
  • Set out to investigate the idea that the 4 types identified by Hippocrates and Galen could be created by combining high and low levels of 2 super traits
  • Introversion - Extraversion
  • Concerns tendencies toward sociability, craving for excitement, liveliness, activeness, and dominance
  • Emotionality - Stability (Neuroticism)
  • Concerns with ease and frequency with which the person becomes upset and distressed, with greater moodiness, anxiety, and depression reflecting greater emotional instability
  • Eysenck believes that these type dimensions relate to aspects of nervous system functioning
  • The differences between introverts and extroverts depends on a part of the brain called ascending  reticular activating system (ARAS)
  • ARAS is part of the reticular activating system
  • RAS links to ADD, sleep disorders, Alzheimer’s, narcolepsy

  

Reticular Activating System (RAS)

• The ignition system of the brain, that awakens an individual from sleep to a state of heightened awareness
• Ascending System: which has connections with the cerebral cortex, hypothalamus, and thalamus
• Descending System: which is connected to the cerebellum and many sensory nerves
• Damage to this system can lead to a transition into coma
• Because of its positioning at the back of the brain, this area is very vulnerable to damage during accidents
• Brain researchers have linked disorders in the RAS to attention deficit disorders, Alzheimer’s disease, narcolepsy, and sleep disorders
• Relays Sensory Signals
  • In a state of wakefulness, all the sensory information that reaches the brain stem is transmitted via this system, to the cerebellum for processing, after undergoing filtering
  • Pain felt in any part of the body is relayed through the reticular formation
• Flight or Fight Response
  • When we encounter a threat, that demands immediate defensive or offensive action, the electrical signals from sensory neurons are relayed to the cerebral cortex for processing, via the RAS
• Regulates Sleep-Wake Transitions
  • The transition that we make from deep sleep to being fully awake and functional, as well as the reverse function
  • The state of wakefulness in humans is associated with the REM (rapid eye movement) phase during sleep. On the other hand, the activity of high voltage slow waves is predominant.
  • During non-REM sleep, which is mostly dreamless, RAS is shut down, thus cutting off connections with sensory inputs. This inhibition of the system is facilitated by the preoptic nucleus neurons.
• Controls Focus Ability
  • The ability to filter out information from external sources and focus on one particular fact, detail, or thought
  • If it weren’t for this circuitry, our consciousness would be overwhelmed and flooded with all sensory information, leading to an inability to make decisions.
  • This system helps in prioritizing information and controls what appears in the mind’s eye, at any point of time
• Coordinated Response to External Stimuli
  • Responsible for providing an integrated (cardiovascular, respiratory, and motor) response to external stimuli
  • Controls coordinating during walking, sexual functions, and eating
• Motor Control
  • Connections of the reticular formation with motor neurons facilitate maintenance of balance, postures, tone, when executing various body movements.
  • Enables cerebellum to integrate vestibular, visual, and audio inputs, to process the data for motor coordination
• Helps Regulate Circadian Rhythm
  • The raphe nuclei, a part of the reticular formation, work with the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) to maintain circadian rhythm
  • Provides information about the level of alertness of the individual to the SCN, for it to act accordingly
• ARAS activates and deactivates higher parts of the brain involved in alertness and concentration
• And in controlling the sleeping-waking cycle
• ARAS functioning at a:
  • High Level: person feels sharp and alert
  • Low Level: person feels sluggish and drowsy

The Big Five (OCEAN)

• Openness to Experience
  • Refers to unconventionality, intellectual curiosity, and interest in new ideas, foods, and activities
  • Appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, imagination, curiosity, and variety of experiences
  • “I see myself as someone who is curious about many different things.”
• Conscientiousness
  • Means having an organized, efficient, and disciplines approach to life
  • A tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; planned rather than spontaneous behavior
  • “I see myself as someone who does things efficiently.”
• Extraversion
  • Means having an energetic approach toward the social and physical world
  • People who are introverted (low on extraversion) tend to disagree with these statements
  • Energy, positive emotions, surgency, and the tendency to seek stimulation, and the company of others
  • “I see myself as someone who is outgoing and sociable.”
• Agreeableness
  • A trusting and easygoing approach to others
  • A tendency to be compassionate and cooperate rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others
  • “I see myself as someone who is generally trusting.”
• Neuroticism
  • Means being prone to negative emotion, and its opposite is emotional stability
  • A tendency to experience unpleasant emotions easily, such as anger, anxiety, depression, or vulnerability, sometimes called emotional instability
  • “I see myself as someone who is depressed, blue.”

Raymond Cattell (Personality is Situational)

• Structure-Based Systems Theory

  • Personality is that which tells what a person will do when placed in a given situation
  • Considers personality as a system in relation to the environment, and seeks to explain the complicated transactions between them as they produce change and sometimes growth in the person
  • There are sets of traits within the person that can initiate and direct behavior
  • Prediction element how a person will react
  • Contemporary
    • Environment or measuring personality empirically
    • Forward movement
    • 16 personality factors

  Response = f(Social Context, Personality)

  • The behavior response of a person is a function of the situation confronted and the individual’s personality
  • An adequate theory of personality must examine and explain the goal-directed motivation of individuals, which goes beyond simple conditioning principles and it involves individual cognitive actively
  • Must consider the ways in which the culture and various groups within it influence individuals that are, in turn, influenced by them.

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