Personality

Personality

Derived from the latin term ‘persona’

  • Representing theatrical masks used by dramatic players
  • Suggests a pretense of appearance
    • The possession of traits other than those that actually characterise the individual behind the mask

Contemporary meaning of Personality - an individual’s characteristic style of behaving, thinking and feeling

Measuring Personality: Self-report

Self -Report: a method in which people provide subjective information about their own thoughts, feelings, or behaviours, typically via questionnaire or interview

  • Participants are usually asked to respond to a specific trait/statement
    • Can be a true/false questions or on a 0.5 likert-type scale
  • Responses are then combined to form…
    • a general sense of the individual’s personality
    • the individual’s personality within a specific domain

Essentially, a list of questions completed by the subject

  • Available for nearly every theoretical orientation/clinical condition

Strengths

  • Can be valuable in quickly identifiying clinical problems
  • Can be given at any point in the clinical process
  • Designated critical items can be used to assess situations that require immediate clinical attention (e.g. suicidal thoughts)
  • Can often be administered with little supervision

Weakness

  • Individual interpretations of items may be problematic in some cases
Measuring Personality: Projective Techniques

Projective Tests - tests are designed to reveal inner aspects of individuals’ personalities by analysis of their responses to a standard series of ambiguous stimuli

Presenting the subject with inherently structured, vague, and ambiguous situations whilst seeking to draw out internal, frequently unconscious influences on behaviour

  • Developers assume that people will project personality factors that are below awareness into the ambiguous stimuli
    • Wishes, concerns, impulses and ways of seeing the world
  • Some situations offer a chance for flexibility, novelty, and the expression of individual differences
    • Highly scripted situations tend to elicit convergent responses/behaviours
    • Less scripted behaviours beg the following question “Of all the ways of behaving, why these specific responses?”

Rorschach Inkblot Test: a projective technique in which respondents’ inner thoughts and feelings can be revealed by analysis of their response to a set of unstructured inkblots

  • Subject is presented with a series of 10 blots and are asked to report what is seen
  • Blots are not intended to look like anything in particular, though subjects almost always report seeing something

Thematic Apperception Test: Respondent’s underlying motives, concerns, and the way they see the social world are believed to be revealed through analysis of the stories they make up/backstory to a single picture/frame

  • Uses pictures of various interpersonal situations
  • Many of the drawings tend to elicit a consistent set of themes

Incomplete Sentence Blank: “My mother __________”

Weaknesses of Projective Techniques
  • Often time consuming
  • Not regarded as being scientific as self-report inventories/interviews
  • Use has waned in recent years
The Trait Approach

One way to think about personality is as a combination of traits

Traits - relatively stable dispositions to behave in a particular and consistent way

However, there are two difficulties with this approach

  • There are thousands of adjectives that one could use to describe someone
  • Do these traits arise from biological/hereditary foundations?
The Search for Core Traits

The search for core traits began with language

  • Early psychologists proposed that core traits could be discerned by finding the main themes in all the adjectives used to describe personality
  • Unfortunately, searches withing the English Language found over 18,000 potential traits
  • How can they be organised or reduced to a manageable number without losing something in the process?

Factor Analysis - a statistical technique that explains a large number of correlations in terms of a small number of underlying factors

Factor Analysis allows us to…

  • Examine the overlap between traits
  • Select a much smaller number of dimensions in which the original traits are best summarised

Most Psychologists agree that personality is best captured by 5 factors

The Big Five - the traits of the five-factor model

  1. Openness to Experience
  2. Conscientiousness
  3. Extraversion
  4. Agreeableness
  5. Neuroticism
BIG 5: Openness to Experience

High on Trait

  • Imaginative
  • Variety
  • Independent

Low on Trait

  • Down to Earth
  • Routine
  • Conforming
BIG 5: Conscientiousness

High on Trait

  • Organised
  • Careful
  • Self-disciplined

Low on Trait

  • Disorganised
  • Careless
  • Weak-willed
BIG 5: Extraversion

High on Trait

  • Social
  • Fun loving
  • Affectionate

Low on Trait

  • Retiring
  • Sober
  • Reserved
BIG 5: Agreeableness

High on Trait

  • Softhearted
  • Trusting
  • Helpful

Low on Trait

  • Ruthless
  • Suspicious
  • Uncooperative
BIG 5: Neuroticism

High on Trait

  • Worried
  • Insecure
  • Self-pitying

Low on Trait

  • Calm
  • Secure
  • Self-satisfied

What are the several reasons for the wide preference towards The Big Five:

  • These five factors repeatedly show the best balance between
    • Accounting for the wide variaton of personality traits
    • Avoiding overlapping or redundant traits
  • These five factors don’t just come up in factor analysis
    • Also in people’s descriptions of themselves and others, interviewers checklists, and behavioural observation
  • These five factors show up across a wide range of participants
    • Including adults, children, and those speaking other languages
The Psychodynamic Approach - Pioneered by Freud
  • An approach that regards personality as formed by needs, strivings, and desires largely operating outside of awareness - motives that can produce emotional disorders
  • The real engines of personality are those which we are largely unaware of

ID - the part of the mind containing the drives present at birth

  • It is the source of our bodily needs, wants, desires, and impulses, particularly our sexual and aggressive drives
  • Pleasure principle - the desire for immediate instinctual gratification
  • ID as a dictator that knows only how to repeatedly assert its own desires

EGO - the component of personality, developed through contact with the external world, that enables us to deal with life’s practical demands

  • Reality principle - fundamentally rational and planful

Ego must perform sophisticated intellectual activities

  • Risk-benefit analyses
  • Means-ends analyses
  • Project the consequences of various courses of action into the future

Superego - the mental system that reflects the internalisation of cultural rules, mainly learned as parents exercise their authority

  • Needed because everything that the Ego imagines might not be possible in the real world
  • Consists of two parts
    • Conscience - What you shouldn’t do
    • Ego Ideal - What you should do and should become
  • Conscience - concerned with the morality principle
    • Morality Principle - the right/wrong of behaviour
  • Ego Ideal - pulls each of us toward the realisation of our unique human potentials
The Psychodynamic Perspective

So the Ego is

  • Trying to satisfy the impulsive demands of the id
  • Trying the honour the constraints of reality/moral constraints of the superego

The ID instincts are always threatening to break through ego controls and saturate behaviour with raw animal forces

  • Awareness of this is called neurotic anxiety
  • The supergo demands perfection, threatening to flood awareness with guilt whenever the satisfaction of ID demands are not disguised
    • This is known as moral anxiety
  • Threats from the external world present reality anxiety

Whatever the source, anxiety is a signal to the ego that some form of corrective action must be made

Defence Mechanisms - unconscious coping mechanisms that reduce anxiety generated by threats from unacceptable impulses

  • Psychoanalysts believe that defence mechanisms help us to overcome anxiety and engage effectively with the outside world
  • People and personality styles have their “go to” defence mechanisms

Types of Defence Mechanisms:

Acting Out - Conflicts are translated into action, with little or no intervening reflection

Denial - Refusal to acknowledge some painful external/subjective reality obvious to others

Devaluation - Attributing negative qualities to self/others, as a means of punishing the self or reducing the impact of the devalued item

Displacement - Conflicts are displaced from a threatening object onto a less threatening one

Dissociation - Conflict is dealt with by disrupting the intergration of consciousness, memory, or perception of the internal/external world

Fantasy - Avoidance of conflict by creating imaginary situations that satisfy drives/desires

Idealisation - Attributing unrealistic positive qualities to self/others

Projection - Unaccpetable emotions/personal qualities are disowned by attributing them to others

Rationalisation - An explanation for behaviour is constructed after the fact to justify one’s actions in the eyes of self/others

Repression - Forbidden thoughts/wishes are withheld from conscious awareness

Splitting - Opposite qualities of a single object are held apart, left deliberately unintegrated (Results in cycles of idealisation and devalutation as either extreme is projected onto self and others)

Sublimation - Unaccpetable emotions are defused by being channeled into socially acceptable behaviour

Defence Mechanisms - these ideas have endured while other freudian ideas have fallen

“penis envy” “good/bad breasts” “castration anxiety” are examples

  • Specific Personality Disorders are characterised by specific defence mechanisms
    • Borderline Personality Disorder - Splitting
    • Antisocial Personality Disorder - Acting Out
Psychosexual Stages and the Development of Personality

Freud believed that personality is forged in the first 6 years of life through resolution/fixation in several

  • Psychosexual Stages - distinct early life stages through which personality is formed as children experience sexual pleasures from specific body areas and caregivers redirect or interfere with those pleasures
    • Caregiver interference leads to conflict
    • At each stage, a different bodily region, or erogenous zone, dominates the child’s subjective experience
    • Each region is a battlefield between the child’s instincts and the adult external world

Conflicts encountered in any stage will influence personality in adulthood

  • Fixation - a phenomenon in which a person’s pleasure-seeking drives become psychologically stuck, or arrested, at a particular psychosexual stage

Oral Stage - first year and a half of life

  • The first psychosexual stage, in which experience centres on the pleasures and frustrations associated with the mouth, sucking and being fed
  • Infants deprived of pleasurable feeding/overindulgently overfed
    • develop a personality style in which they can ‘take in’ from others

Anal stage - between 2/3 years of age

  • The second psychosexual stage, in which experience is dominated by the pleasures and frustrations associated with the anus, retention and expulsion of feces and urine, and toilet training
  • Individuals with difficult negotiating this conflict develop a rigid personaltiy/remain preoccupied with issues of control

Phallic stage - between 3-5 years of age

  • The third psychosexual stage, in which experience is dominated by the pleasure, conflict, and frustration associated with the phallic-genital region as well as coping with powerful incestuous feelings of love, hate, jealousy and conflict
  • Oedipus Conflict - a developmental experience in which a child’s conflicting feelings towards the opposite-sex parent are usually resolved by identifiying with the same-sex parent

Latency stage - between 5-13 years of age

  • The fourth psychosexual stage, in which the primary focus is on the further development of intellectual, creative, interpersonal, and athletic skills
  • No fixation
  • Reaching this stage relatively undisturbed by conflict of the earlier stages is a sign of healthy development

Genital Stage - from age 13 onwards

  • The fifth/final psychosexual stage, the time for the coming together of the mature adult personality with a capacity to love, work, and relate to others in a mutually satisfiying and reciprocal manner