Knowt
psychology lect notes part 3 for mid term
Motivation - The psychological reason for producing an action
Primarily driven by emotion
Ancient Philosophers:
Plato and Aristotle believed human motivation is centered on the hedonic principle.
Hedonic principle - our primary motivator for everything we do is ultimately pleasure
All motivation stems from the attraction to pleasure and the avoidance of pain.
The hedonic principle explains human motivation at a basic level
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
– must satisfy the lowest level of the hierarchy first before others so physiological needs would be at the bottom
Physiological Needs:
Basic needs for survival: food, water, shelter, sleep, and air.
Safety Needs:
Security, stability, protection from harm, and safety in one's environment.
Love and Belonging Needs:
Social needs for relationships, love, friendship, family, and community.
Esteem Needs:
Need for self-esteem, respect, recognition, and a sense of accomplishment.
Self-Actualization:
Realizing personal potential, growth, creativity, and achieving one’s fullest potential.
Biological Needs
Drives and Incentives:
Drives: Basic biological needs such as hunger and reproduction that motivate behavior.
Example: Hunger is a drive, the need for food motivates eating.
Incentives: External stimuli that pull us toward satisfying a drive.
Example: Food is an incentive, which satisfies the drive for hunger.
Other human motivations
Approach and Avoidance
Approach: Involves positive, desirable outcomes.
Avoidance: Involves negative, undesirable outcomes. To not experience a negative outcome.
Intrinsic vs Extrinsic
Intrinsic: doing something for yourself
Extrinsic: doing something for a separate reward - often social or monetary
Unconscious vs conscious
PERSONALITY PART 2
Personality is an individual’s characteristic style of:
– Behaviour – Thought – Feeling
The study of personality is the study of both individuals (idiographic approach)
common trends in the population (nomothetic approach)
Personality
The study of personality has two main components:
Measuring personality
What are the characteristics of an individual’s personality?
Methods to measure personality include:Personality inventories: Standardized questionnaires (e.g., MBTI, Big Five Inventory).
Projective techniques: Ambiguous stimuli used to reveal personality traits (e.g., Rorschach test, TAT).
Explaining personality
Why does an individual have their personality?
This looks at factors like genetics and life experiences that shape personality.How does personality affect behaviour?
Focuses on how personality influences actions and responses in different situations.Personality theories: Frameworks explaining personality development, such as Freud’s psychoanalytic theory or humanistic theories by Rogers and Maslow.
Personality Inventories
Personality inventories (or tests/scales) are one of the simplest ways to assess personality.
These inventories rely on self-report:
Subjective answers about one’s own behaviours, thoughts, and feelings.
Typically administered through an interview or written questionnaire.
There are thousands of personality inventories available online.
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is a widely reliable, clinically valid personality test
■ True/false/can’t answer questions
– Why?
■ A lot of questions
– Many versions of the same question
Ex. – I wish I could be as happy as others seem to be
Personality Theories
A number of theories have emerged to help us with this task.
These include:
– Trait approach (Big Five)
– Social-cognitive approach
– Psychodynamic approach
– Humanist approach
The list of traits is practically infinite, so researchers use factor analysis to reduce it to the lowest possible set of traits:
Individuals rate themselves on hundreds of traits.
Highly correlated traits are combined into factors.
Traits with no correlation are considered separate factors.
Researchers use factor analysis to reduce the list of traits to the lowest possible set by identifying core traits that are highly correlated.
The big five (trait approach)
Today, most researchers agree on a five-factor model of personality.
These Big Five personality traits are not correlated with each other.
Big Five personality traits:
Openness: Willingness to experience new things, curiosity, creativity, and open-mindedness.
Conscientiousness: Degree of self-discipline, organization, dependability, and goal-oriented behavior.
Extraversion: Energy, sociability, enthusiasm, and assertiveness.
Agreeableness: Compassion, trust, cooperativeness, and kindness towards others.
Neuroticism: Tendency to experience negative emotions such as anxiety, depression, and irritability.
Trait approach
Personality traits are relatively stable, and this stability increases across the lifespan.
What does it mean for stability to increase across the lifespan?
Rank-order stability: Our rank-order in personality traits stays mostly the same over time.
This is especially true as we get older.
There can be intraindividual change: Significant changes in a person’s personality over time.
This is rare and typically occurs after life-changing experiences, such as trauma.
Where do traits come from? (Biological explanation)
Genetics is the largest single factor in personality.
The Big Five traits have a heritability factor between 0.35 and 0.49:
0.00: Genetics plays no role in a trait.
1.00: Genetics is completely responsible for a trait (e.g., eye color).
A heritability factor between 0.35 and 0.49 is considered high.
However, about 50% of variability in personality is still influenced by life experiences.
Temperament is an infant’s characteristic:
Activity level
Mood
Attention span
Distractibility
Infants’ temperaments are predictive of their adult personalities!
PERSONALITY PART 3
Sigmund freud is an austrian physician that practiced neurology, the study of the nervous system
Developed psychoanalysis based on patients dreams, fantasies
Psychodynamic theory - is the theory that extends from Freud's psychoanalytic approach
Personality is formed by needs, strivings, and desires
Freud divided the dynamic unconscious into three parts:
Id: Unconscious, animal desires.
Ego: Helps us deal with life’s practical demands.
Superego: Internalization of cultural and social rules.
The dynamic unconscious develops during childhood through a series of psychosexual stages.
Freud believed that our personality is determined by interactions between parts of our unconscious.
Psycho-sexual stages
Conflicts between the three parts (Id, Ego, Superego) cause anxiety.
To resolve this anxiety, we may rely on defence mechanisms.
Study definitions and examples of these mechanisms.
Oral Stage (0-1 years):
Focus on pleasure from the mouth (e.g., sucking, biting). Fixation may lead to issues like smoking or overeating.Anal Stage (1-3 years):
Focus on control over bladder and bowel movements. Fixation may result in an overly organized (anal-retentive) or messy (anal-expulsive) personality.Phallic Stage (3-6 years):
Focus on the genitals. Children develop feelings of desire for the opposite-sex parent (Oedipus/Electra complex). Fixation may lead to difficulties in relationships.Latency Stage (6-puberty):
Sexual impulses are dormant. Focus shifts to peer relationships, learning, and developing skills.Genital Stage (puberty-adult):
Sexual maturity is reached. Focus on mature, intimate relationships and sexual fulfillment.
Psycho-dynamic Approach
Within the psychodynamic approach, projective techniques are used to measure personality.
These tests aim to reveal inner aspects of an individual’s personality by analyzing responses to ambiguous stimuli (e.g., pictures of people, objects, events, or abstract shapes).
The two most famous projective techniques are:
Rorschach inkblot test ("roar-shack")
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
These techniques are controversial due to subjective interpretation.
Rorschach inkblots
A projective technique where respondents' inner thoughts and feelings are revealed by analyzing their responses to a set of unstructured inkblots.
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
The TAT uses a similar technique to Rorschach.
Patients are shown a card with an ambiguous scene and asked to make up a story about it.
Common themes emerge from many respondents.
Details in the story are thought to reveal aspects of the respondent’s personality.
A clinician scores the results.
Projective Techniques
Problems with projective techniques:
Results are difficult to interpret: Common results may come from individuals with specific psychopathologies, so a response might indicate a certain disorder.
Interpretations are too subjective: Since the results require a clinician’s interpretation, the clinician may unintentionally project their own personality traits onto the patient’s responses.
Social-Cognitive Approach
Emerges from a behaviorist approach: Behaviors with positive outcomes are reinforced.
A person may display different personality traits in different situations, based on past experiences in those situations.
According to this approach, personality is how a person deals with daily life situations:
How we construct situations in our minds.
How we respond to those situations.
Social-Cognitive Theorists argue that we base our behavior on personal constructs, which are mental frameworks we use to make sense of the world around us.
Outcome expectancies - are how we expect certain behaviors to bring us closer to or further from our goals.
Humanistic Approach
The humanistic approach is radically different from the trait and psychodynamic approaches.
Humanistic theories have a positive, optimistic view of human nature and believe that humans have free will.
The humanist approach argues that humans seek to realize their inner potential (self-actualization), which includes:
Pursuit of knowledge
Expression of creativity
Spiritual enlightenment
Desire to give back to society
Maslow (1943) proposed a needs hierarchy.
Self-actualization is achieved only when all other needs are met.
Humanists argue that personality differences arise from environmental constraints that prevent individuals from reaching their full potential.
