11.1 What Is Personality?

• Personality: the long-standing traits and patterns that propel individuals to consistently think, feel, and behave in specific ways.

• Our personalities are thought to be long term, stable, and not easily changed.

Historical Perspectives

• Hippocrates theorized that personality traits and human behaviors are based on four separate temperaments associated with four fluids of the body: choleric temperament, melancholic temperament, sanguine temperament, and phlegmatic temperament.

• Greek physician and philosopher Galen suggested that both diseases and personality differences could be explained by imbalances in the fluids and that each person exhibits one of the four temperaments.

  • Choleric person: passionate, ambitious, and bold

  • Melancholic person: reserved, anxious, and unhappy

  • Sanguine person: joyful, eager, and optimistic

  • Phlegmatic person: calm, reliable, and thoughtful.

• Franz Gall, a German physician, proposed that the distances between bumps on the skull reveal a person’s personality traits, character, and mental abilities.

• Immanuel Kant developed a list of traits that could be used to describe the personality of a person from each of the four temperaments.

  • However, Wundt suggested that a better description of personality could be achieved using two major axes: emotional/nonemotional and changeable/unchangeable.

    • Emotional/Nonemotional: separated strong from weak emotions (the melancholic and choleric temperaments from the phlegmatic and sanguine).

    • Changeable/unchangeable: divided the changeable temperaments (choleric and sanguine) from the unchangeable ones (melancholic and phlegmatic).

• According to Freud, unconscious drives influenced by sex and aggression, along with childhood sexuality, are the forces that influence our personality.

  • This theory was modified to reduce the emphasis on sex and focus more on the social environment and effects of culture on personality.

11.2 Freud and the Psychodynamic Perspective

Levels of Consciousness

• Freud said that only about one-tenth of our mind is conscious, and the rest of our mind is unconscious.

• The unconscious: mental activity of which we are unaware and are unable to access.

• Repression: a process that keeps unacceptable urges and desires in our unconscious

• Freud suggested that slips of the tongue are actually sexual or aggressive urges, accidentally slipping out of our unconscious.

• According to Freud, our personality develops from a conflict between two forces: our biological aggressive and pleasure-seeking drives versus our internal (socialized) control over these drives.

  • Imagine three interacting systems within our minds: the id, ego, and superego.

    • Id: contains our most primitive drives or urges, and is present from birth. It directs impulses for hunger, thirst, and sex; operates on the “pleasure principle,” - seeks immediate gratification.

    • Superego: develops as a child interacts with others, learning the social rules for right and wrong; acts as our conscience; is our moral compass that tells us how we should behave.

    • Ego: the rational part of our personality; the part of our personality that is seen by others; balance the demands of the id and superego in the context of reality; operates on the “reality principle” - helps the id satisfy its desires in a realistic way.

    • The id and superego are in constant conflict, because the id wants instant gratification regardless of the consequences, but the superego tells us that we must behave in socially acceptable ways. The ego finds the middle ground - It helps satisfy the id’s desires in a rational way that will not lead us to feelings of guilt.

Defense Mechanism

• Freud believed that feelings of anxiety result from the ego’s inability to mediate the conflict between the id and superego.

• Defense mechanisms: unconscious protective behaviors that aim to reduce anxiety.

  • The ego resorts to unconscious strivings to protect the ego from being overwhelmed by anxiety.

  • While everyone uses defense mechanisms, Freud believed that overuse of them may be problematic.

• Repression: anxiety-causing memories from consciousness are blocked.

• Reaction formation: someone expresses feelings, thoughts, and behaviors opposite to their inclinations.

• Regression: an individual acts much younger than their age.

• Projection: a person refuses to acknowledge her own unconscious feelings and instead sees those feelings in someone else.

• Other defense mechanisms include rationalization, displacement, and sublimation.

Stages of Psychosexual Development

• Freud believed that personality develops during early childhood

• He asserted that we develop via the stages of psychosexual development

• In each psychosexual stage of development, the child’s pleasure-seeking urges, coming from the id, are focused on a different area of the body, called an erogenous zone. The stages are oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital.

  • Oral stage (birth to 1 year): pleasure is focused on the mouth.

  • Anal stage (1–3 years): children experience pleasure in their bowel and bladder movements.

  • Phallic stage (3–6 years): children become aware of their bodies and recognize the differences between boys and girls. The erogenous zone in this stage is the genitals.

  • Latency period (6 years to puberty): this period is not considered a stage, because sexual feelings are dormant as children focus on other pursuits. Children generally engage in activities with peers of the same sex, which serves to consolidate a child’s gender-role identity.

  • Genital stage (from puberty on): there is a sexual reawakening as the incestuous urges resurface.

11.3 Neo-Freudians: Adler, Erikson, Jung, and Horney

Alfred Adler

• Alfred Adler founded a school of psychology called individual psychology.

• Individual psychology: focuses on our drive to compensate for feelings of inferiority.

• Adler proposed the concept of the inferiority complex.

• Inferiority complex: a person’s feelings that they lack worth and don’t measure up to the standards of others or of society.

• Adler’s ideas about inferiority represent a major difference between his thinking and Freud’s.

• Adler viewed childhood development as emerging through social development rather than the sexual stages Freud outlined.

• With these ideas, Adler identified three fundamental social tasks that all of us must experience: occupational tasks (careers), societal tasks (friendship), and love tasks (finding an intimate partner for a long-term relationship).

• He emphasized conscious rather than unconscious motivation, since he believed that the three fundamental social tasks are explicitly known and pursued.

• One of Adler’s major contributions to personality psychology was the idea that our birth order shapes our personality.

  • He proposed that older siblings, who start out as the focus of their parents’ attention but must share that attention once a new child joins the family, compensate by becoming overachievers. The youngest children, according to Adler, may be spoiled, leaving the middle child with the opportunity to minimize the negative dynamics of the youngest and oldest children.

Erik Erikson

• Erikson proposed a psychosocial theory of development, suggesting that an individual’s personality develops throughout the lifespan—a departure from Freud’s view that personality is fixed in early life.

• In his theory, Erikson emphasized the social relationships that are important at each stage of personality development.

• Erikson identified eight stages, each of which represents a conflict or developmental task.

  • The development of a healthy personality and a sense of competence depend on the successful completion of each task.

Carl Jung

• Carl Jung developed his theory, analytical psychology

• Analytical psychology: focuses on working to balance opposing forces of conscious and unconscious thought, and experience within one’s personality.

  • According to Jung, this work is a continuous learning process—mainly occurring in the second half of life—of becoming aware of unconscious elements and integrating them into consciousness.

• Jung didn’t accept that sexual drive was the primary motivator in a person’s mental life.

• Jung focused on the collective unconscious.

• Collective unconscious: a universal version of the personal unconscious, holding mental patterns, or memory traces, which are common to all of us.

  • Archetypes: ancestral memories

    • Represented by universal themes in various cultures.

    • Jung said that these themes reflect common experiences of people the world over.

• In Jung’s view, the task of integrating these unconscious archetypal aspects of the self is part of the self-realization process in the second half of life.

• Jung proposed two approaches toward life: extroversion and introversion.

  • Extrovert: a person who is energized by being outgoing and socially oriented

  • Introvert: a person who may be quiet and reserved, or social, but their energy is derived from their inner psychic activity.

  • Jung believed a balance between extroversion and introversion best served the goal of self-realization.

• Jung proposed the persona, which he referred to as a mask that we adopt.

  • According to Jung, we consciously create this persona; however, it’s derived from both conscious experiences and collective unconscious.

  • Jung believed it’s a compromise between our true self and what society expects us to be.

Karen Horney

• Karen Horney believed that each individual has the potential for self-realization and that the goal of psychoanalysis should be moving toward a healthy self rather than exploring early childhood patterns of dysfunction.

• Horney disagreed with the Freudian idea that girls have penis envy and are jealous of male biological features.

  • According to Horney, any jealousy is most likely culturally based, due to the greater privileges that males often have, meaning that the differences between men’s and women’s personalities are culturally based, not biologically based. She further suggested that men have womb envy, because they cannot give birth.

• Horney’s theories focused on the role of unconscious anxiety.

  • She suggested that normal growth can be blocked by basic anxiety stemming from needs not being met

    • Horney suggested three styles of coping.

      • Moving toward people: relies on affiliation and dependence.

      • Moving against people: relies on aggression and assertiveness.

      • Moving away from people: centers on detachment and isolation.

11.4 Learning Approaches

The Behavioral Perspective

• Behaviorists view personality as significantly shaped by the reinforcements and consequences outside of the organism.

• B. F. Skinner believed that environment was solely responsible for all behavior, including the enduring, consistent behavior patterns studied by personality theorists.

• Skinner proposed that we learn to behave in particular ways.

• Skinner argued that personality develops over our entire life, not only in the first few years.

  • Our responses can change as we come across new situations; therefore, we can expect more variability over time in personality than Freud would anticipate.

The Social-Cognitive Perspective

• Albert Bandura presented a social-cognitive theory.

• Social-cognitive theory: emphasizes both learning and cognition as sources of individual differences in personality.

  • The concepts of reciprocal determinism, observational learning, and self-efficacy all play a part in personality development.

• Reciprocal determinism: cognitive processes, behavior, and context all interact, each factor influencing and being influenced by the others simultaneously.

  • Cognitive processes*:* all characteristics previously learned, including beliefs, expectations, and personality characteristics.

  • Behavior: anything that we do that may be rewarded or punished.

  • Context: the behavior that occurs refers to the environment or situation, which includes rewarding/punishing stimuli.

• Bandura suggested that whether we choose to imitate a model’s behavior depends on whether we see the model reinforced or punished.

  • Through observational learning, we come to learn what behaviors are acceptable and rewarded in our culture, and we also learn to inhibit socially unacceptable behaviors by seeing what behaviors are punished.

• Self-efficacy: our level of confidence in our own abilities, developed through our social experiences.

  • People who have high self-efficacy believe that their goals are within reach, have a positive view of challenges seeing them as tasks to be mastered, develop a deep interest in and strong commitment to the activities in which they are involved, and quickly recover from setbacks.

  • People with low self-efficacy avoid challenging tasks because they doubt their ability to be successful, tend to focus on failure and negative outcomes, and lose confidence in their abilities if they experience setbacks.

  • Feelings of self-efficacy can be specific to certain situations.

Julian Rotter and Locus of Control

• Julian Rotter proposed the concept of locus of control, another cognitive factor that affects learning and personality development.

• Locus of control: our beliefs about the power we have over our lives.

• In Rotter’s view, people possess either an internal or an external locus of control.

  • Internal locus of control: believe that most of our outcomes are the direct result of our efforts.

  • External locus of control: believe that our outcomes are outside of our control.

Walter Mischel and the Person-Situation Debate

• One of Mischel’s most notable contributions to personality psychology was his ideas on self-regulation.

• Self-regulation: will power.

• When we talk about will power, we tend to think of it as the ability to delay gratification.

• Mischel designed a study to assess self-regulation in young children (the marshmallow study)

• For Mischel, people are situation processors.

• Mischel’s approach to personality stresses the importance of both the situation and the way the person perceives the situation.

  • Instead of behavior being determined by the situation, people use cognitive processes to interpret the situation and then behave in accordance with that interpretation.

11.5 Humanistic Approaches

• Humanistic perspective: focuses on how healthy people develop.

• One of Carl Rogers’s main ideas about personality regards self-concept, our thoughts and feelings about ourselves.

  • Rogers further divided the self into two categories: the ideal self and the real self.

  • Ideal self: the person that you would like to be

  • Real self: the person you actually are.

  • Rogers focused on the idea that we need to achieve consistency between these two selves.

  • Congruence: when our thoughts about our real self and ideal self are very similar; when our self-concept is accurate**.**

    • High congruence leads to a greater sense of self-worth and a healthy, productive life.

    • Incongruence: when there is a great discrepancy between our ideal and actual selves; can lead to maladjustment.

• Rogers’s and Maslow’s theories focus on individual choices and don’t believe that biology is deterministic.

11.6 Biological Approaches

• Psychologists who favor the biological approach believe that inherited predispositions as well as physiological processes can be used to explain differences in our personalities.

• Heritability: the proportion of difference among people that is attributed to genetics.

Temperament

• Most contemporary psychologists believe temperament has a biological basis due to its appearance very early in our lives

• Research suggests that there are two dimensions of our temperament that are important parts of our adult personality—reactivity and self-regulation.

  • Reactivity: how we respond to new or challenging environmental stimuli; self-regulation refers to our ability to control that response.

11.7 Trait Theorists

• Trait theorists: believe personality can be understood via the approach that all people have certain traits

• Gordon Allport organized the personality traits he found into three categories: cardinal traits, central traits, and secondary traits.

  • Cardinal trait: one that dominates your entire personality, and hence your life

    • Cardinal traits are not very common: Few people have personalities dominated by a single trait. Instead, our personalities typically are composed of multiple traits.

  • Central traits: those that make up our personalities.

  • Secondary traits: those that are not quite as obvious or as consistent as central traits.

    • They are present under specific circumstances and include preferences and attitudes.

• Raymond Cattell narrowed down Allport’s list and identified 16 factors or dimensions of personality: warmth, reasoning, emotional stability, dominance, liveliness, rule-consciousness, social boldness, sensitivity, vigilance, abstractedness, privateness, apprehension, openness to change, self-reliance, perfectionism, and tension

  • He developed a personality assessment based on these 16 factors, called the 16PF. Instead of a trait being present or absent, each dimension is scored over a continuum, from high to low.

• All of our personalities are actually made up of the same traits; we differ only in the degree to which each trait is expressed.

• Psychologists Hans and Sybil Eysenck were personality theorists who believed personality is largely governed by biology.

  • The Eysencks viewed people as having two specific personality dimensions: extroversion/introversion and neuroticism/stability.

    • High on the trait of extroversion: sociable and outgoing, and readily connect with others

    • High on the trait of introversion: have a higher need to be alone, engage in solitary behaviors, and limit their interactions with others.

    • High on neuroticism: tend to be anxious; they tend to have an overactive sympathetic nervous system and, even with low stress, their bodies and emotional state tend to go into a flight-or-fight reaction.

    • High on stability: tend to need more stimulation to activate their flight-or-fight reaction and are considered more emotionally stable.

  • The Eysencks’ theory divides people into four quadrants.

  • Later, the Eysencks added a third dimension: psychoticism versus superego control.

    • High on psychoticism: tend to be independent thinkers, cold, nonconformists, impulsive, antisocial, and hostile

    • High on superego control: tend to have high impulse control—they are more altruistic, empathetic, cooperative, and conventional.

• Five Factor Model: each person has each trait, but they occur along a spectrum; the five traits are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism

  • Openness to experience: characterized by imagination, feelings, actions, and ideas.

  • Conscientiousness: characterized by competence, self-discipline, thoughtfulness, and achievement-striving (goal-directed behavior).

  • Extroversion: characterized by sociability, assertiveness, excitement-seeking, and emotional expression.

  • Agreeableness: the tendency to be pleasant, cooperative, trustworthy, and good-natured.

  • Neuroticism: the tendency to experience negative emotions.

  • The Big Five traits are relatively stable over our lifespan, with some tendency for the traits to increase or decrease slightly.

11.8 Cultural Understandings of Personality

• Culture: all of the beliefs, customs, art, and traditions of a particular society.

• Western ideas about personality may not be applicable to other cultures

• The strength of personality traits varies across cultures.

• Selective migration: the concept that people choose to move to places that are compatible with their personalities and needs.

Personality in Individualist and Collectivist Cultures

• Individualist cultures and collectivist cultures place emphasis on different basic values.

• Individualist cultures: tend to believe that independence, competition, and personal achievement are important.

• Collectivist cultures: value social harmony, respectfulness, and group needs over individual needs.

Approaches to Studying Personality in a Cultural Context

• There are three approaches that can be used to study personality in a cultural context: the cultural-comparative approach; the indigenous approach; and the combined approach

• Cultural-comparative approach: seeks to test Western ideas about personality in other cultures to determine whether they can be generalized and if they have cultural validity

• Indigenous approach: personality assessment instruments that are based on constructs relevant to the culture being studied.

• Combined approach: serves as a bridge between Western and indigenous psychology as a way of understanding both universal and cultural variations in personality; incorporates elements of both views.

11.9 Personality Assessment

Self-Report Inventories

• Self-report inventories: a kind of objective test used to assess personality; they typically use multiple-choice items or numbered scales, which represent a range from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree).

• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI): one of the most used personal inventories; responses are scored to produce a clinical profile composed of 10 scales: hypochondriasis, depression, hysteria, psychopathic deviance (social deviance), masculinity versus femininity, paranoia, psychasthenia (obsessive/compulsive qualities), schizophrenia, hypomania, and social introversion.

• They have validity and reliability scales.

Projective Tests

• Projective testing: relies on one of the defense mechanisms proposed by Freud—projection—as a way to assess unconscious processes; a series of ambiguous cards is shown to the person being tested, who then is encouraged to project his feelings, impulses, and desires onto the cards—by telling a story, interpreting an image, or completing a sentence.

• Rorschach Inkblot Test: a series of symmetrical inkblot cards that are presented to a client by a psychologist, and upon presentation of each card, the psychologist asks the client, “What might this be?” What the test-taker sees reveals unconscious feelings and struggles.

• Thematic Apperception Test (TAT): a person is shown 8–12 ambiguous pictures and is asked to tell a story about each picture; the stories give insight into their social world, revealing hopes, fears, interests, and goals.

  • The storytelling format helps to lower a person’s resistance divulging unconscious personal details.

• Rotter Incomplete Sentence Blank (RISB): include 40 incomplete sentences that people are asked to complete as quickly as possible; it’s presumed that responses will reveal desires, fears, and struggles.

• Contemporized-Themes Concerning Blacks Test (C-TCB): contains 20 color images that show scenes of African-American lifestyles.

  • When the C-TCB was compared with the TAT for African Americans, it was found that use of the C-TCB led to increased story length, higher degrees of positive feelings, and stronger identification with the C-TCB

• TEMAS Multicultural Thematic Apperception Test: a tool designed to be culturally relevant to minority groups, especially Hispanic youths; uses images and storytelling cues that relate to minority culture.