Personality 1

UQ Extend + Lecture

What is Personality?

• personality refers to the character traits that identify what makes a person who they are

• the unique way of each of us responds to the world around us — our consistent pattern of behaviours, thoughts, and emotions

  • these patterns define an individual and differentiate them from others

  • represents a dynamic combination of biological, psychological, environmental influences

• consistency = personality traits tend to be relatively stable across time and situations

• uniqueness = personality highlights what makes an individual distinct from others

• individuality = encompasses both innate tendencies and learned behaviours

• patterns = refer to the repeated ways in which individuals interact with the world

• individual differences = variability in personality traits and behaviours across people. differences are what make each person unique

• Why study personality?

  • clinical = diagnosing and treating mental health conditions

  • social = predicting social interactions and relationships

  • developmental = understanding how traits emerge and evolve throughout life

• Approaches to studying personality

  • Nomothetic = searching for general laws that govern all human behaviour

    • focuses on identifying general laws or principles that apply to all individuals

    • emphasises universality and generalisation

    • personality models

    • studies of genetic contributions to personality

  • idiographic = focusing on unique aspects of individuals

    • focuses on understanding the unique characteristics of an individual

    • emphasises individuality over generalisation

    • tracking the personality development of a single person over decades to understand how traits evolve with age and life event

    • designing a therapy plan for a person with PTSD

Why Study Personality?: Clinical

• Diagnosis and treatment

  • certain issues may be linked to stable patterns in personality

  • tailor interventions, predict treatment challenges, and guide therapeutic approaches

• Risk factors and prognosis

  • traits can predispose individuals to anxiety or depression onset and outcomes

• Therapeutic Relationships

  • traits can affect engagement and response to therapy

Causes of Personality

• Nature and Nurture

• Shaped by a combination of biological inheritance and environmental influences

  • genetic factors

    • influence brain structure and function, such as neurotransmitter activity, which impacts personality traits

    • eg dopamine systems are linked to traits like extraversion and reward sensitivity

  • shared environmental factors

    • parenting style: authoriative, permissive, or authoritarian parenting may influence personality development

    • socioeconomic status: access to resources, education, and social norms can shape personality

    • cultural value: a shared emphasis on collectivism or individualism within a family

  • non-shared environmental factors

    • explains majority of environmental variances in personality traits

    • different peer groups: friends can shape attitudes, behaviours, and preferences

    • unique life events: personal traumas, achievements, or opportunities that differ between siblings

    • birth order: firstborns may receive more parental attention, while later-borns may have different expectations place upon them

Psychodynamic Approach

• Interaction between id, ego, superego

• Developed through psychosexual stages

• Criticised for its lack of empirical evidence and its focus on sexuality

• Dynamic interplay

  • the id wants instant gratification

  • the superego imposes strict moral guidelines

  • the ego mediates to achieve balance, often leading to internal tension

Id

• pleasure principles, seek pleasure and avoid pain

• primitive and instinctual part of the mind, operating entirely on the unconscious level

• contains biological drives and instincts

Ego

• reality principle, delay gratification when necessary

• rational and realistic part of the mind that mediates. between the id and the eternal world

• executive decision maker — balances the impulsive desires of the id and the moral constraints of the superego

Superego

• perfection principle, pushing the individual to strive for moral perfection

• moral and ethical component of personality, representing societal and parental standards

• develops around age 5-6 through internalisation of rules and values

• two subsystems

  • conscience = guilt for violating moral standards

  • ego ideal = aspirations for achieving moral and ideal behaviours

Psychosexual Stages of Development

• personality develops through a series of stages, each centred on a specific erogenous zone

• at each stage, children experience conflicts between their biological drives and societal expectations

• successful resolution of these conflicts is essential for healthy personality development

• fixation at a stage can lead to personality and behavioural issues later and life

Criticisms of Freud’s Theories

• lack of empirical evidence

  • freud’s theories are difficult to test scientifically and lack of falsifiability

• Overemphasis on sexuality

  • his psychosexual stages have been criticised for being overly focused on sexual development

• Cultural and Gender bias

  • concepts like “penis envy” are considered sexist and reflective of Victorian-era values

• Subjectivity

  • ideas were based on case studies and subjective interpretations rather than controlled research

Freud’s Contributions

• importance of early childhood experiences in shaping personality

• Concepts like fixation and unconscious conflict laid groundwork for modern psychodynamic therapies

• Freud’s ideas have permeated literature, art, and discussion of human behaviour, even beyond psychology

• Freud’s theories actually gave people a socially acceptable way to talk about sexuality by giving sexual interpretations to everyday behaviours

• Sexual development and sexuality is an important part of psychology

Behavioural Theories of Personality

• Early psychology focused on unconscious processes, but moved onto focusing on things people can measure

• Behaviourists thought that people should explain personality in terms of people’s behaviour rather than just their thoughts — because that could be measured

• B.F. Skinner proposed behaviourism mainly

• The behavioural approach to personality is the idea that personality is under the control of genetic factors and environmental reinforces and punishers

• Skinner, like Freud, thought that our behaviour is strictly deterministic, that one doesn’t consciously chose how we behave, as well that is is determined by unconscious processes

• Freud however says unconscious processes are things that happen deep inside our psyche, outside of our level of awareness, whereas Skinner thought the unconscious things that affect us are things that are in the environment that reinforce or punish us

• Skinner thought that the unconscious variables are outside of oneself.

Social Learning Theories of Personality

• Albert Bandura took Skinner’s idea of environmental influences on people’s behaviour, but also that cognition was still important in terms of behaviour and how we express personality

• Bandura argued that personality is the interaction between a person’s traits, their thoughts, and the environment that their behaviour is expressed in

• Reciprocal determinism refers to the idea that behavioural, cognitive, and environmental variable interact to produce personality

• Although, Bandura’s social learning approach relies on expectancies — you need to have the cognitive machinery to be able to form these expectancies which is a higher level of cognitive function, but we still see social learning in animals that don’t have cognitive machinery

Humanistic Theory of Personality

• More positive = how positive motivations can be related to the expression of personality

• Two main proponents of these perspectives, Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow

• Rogers thought that personality was a function of the person, the self which is the self-concept, and what he called the Conditions of Worth

• Conditions of Worth are the expectations or rules that society puts on our behaviour, which can lead to an inconsistency between people’s self-concept and what they are actually like

• Personality development will be fully realised in a world where there were no expectancies about what people are meant to be like = Roger’s idealised this world

• Maslow thought that positive motivation was important for personality

• Maslow defined personality as the expression of the tendency to strive for what he calls self-actualisation, which is the idea that people want to fulfil their potential.

• Hierarchy of needs = the idea that if our phsyiological needs are met (food, water, oxygen, rest), we would be motivated by the next tier up, which are safety needs

• The idea is we can’t be motivation by self-actualisation unless all of these lower order needs are satisfied first — however, the needs are defined subjectively, thus hard to test

Types versus trait models of personality

• Humoral theory = first theories of personality was a type model

• Humoral theory characterised a person’s personality based on what sort of humour/fluid they had in excess in their body

  • choleric type people—too much yellow biles, they would be bad tempered and irritable

  • melancholic people = too much black bile, gloomy & pessimistic

• No biological evidence for humoral theory, but people still think about personality in terms of types

Personality traits

• Traits are the building blocks of personality and refer to enduring characteristics that influence behaviour

  • stable tendencies to think, feel, or behave in certain ways across different situations

  • they exist on dimensions or spectrums, rather than as categorical types

  • they help predict behaviours

  • traits contribute to individual differences in how people respond to similar situations

• Trait theorists think that traits are the factors that are responsible for causing patterns of behaviour, that traits are things that reside in our brains

  • brain injuries, drugs, etc, may affect your personality when changing the brain

• To determine personality traits, you can give someone a questionnaire and ask them how many personality specific words apply to them. Then, perform a statistical test — factor analysis — on the responses, which tells us what the minimum number of things we need to summarise the data and the minimum number of things are the dimensions of personality. You can then plot the responses and see if you need a certain amount of dimensions

• From research, people seem to agree that there are between 3 and 16 dimensions of personality that are necessary for describing it.

• Raymond Cattell came up with ‘16PF’ = 16 personality factors

• Neil Mccrae and Paul Costa came up with Big Five = 5 factors to personality

  1. neuroticism = tense and moody

  2. extraversion = social and lively

  3. openness = intellectually curious and unconventional

  4. agreeableness = friendly and easy to get along with

  5. conscientiousness = careful and responsible

• Hans Eysenck came up with three bipolar dimensions

  1. extraversion to introversion = going from outgoing nature, high level of activity, to shuns crowds, prefers solitary activity

  2. neuroticism to emotional stability = going from full of anxiety, worries and guilt to relaxed and at peace

  3. psychoticism to self-control = aggressive, egocentric and antisocial

The Big 5 Across Cultures

• China has 26 different personality constructs = Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory (CPAI)

  • dependability = responsibility, optimism, trustworthiness

  • interpersonal relatedness = harmony, thrift, relational orientation, tradition

  • social potency = leadership, adventurousness, extraversion

  • individualism = logical orientation, defensiveness, self-orientation

• Overlaps with B5 — neuroticism was correlated with dependability, extraversion with social potency, agreeableness with individualism

Biopsychological Theory of Personality

• Jeffery Gray developed the idea that personality is explained by physical differences in the brain

• Gray proposed the behavioural inhibition system (BIS) and behavioural approach system (BAS)

• BIS

  • related to the individuals sensitivity to punishment and motivation for avoidance

• BAS

  • related to the individuals sensitivity to reward as well as their motivation for approach

Personality Assessment: Objective Tests

• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)

  • questionnaire measure of personality with a large number of items

  • designed for a clinical setting

  • MMPI is useful for diagnosing psychological disorders

  • yet comes with the risk of being deceived even if made to detect deception and social desirability bias

• Thematic Apperception Test

  • present people with an ambiguous stimuli and ask people to describe whats in the image

Personality Assessment: Projective Tests

• Rorschach inkblot

  • shows someone an ambiguous inkblot and ask them to describe what they see, then score according to different coding schemes.

  • Involves subjective judgements = low reliability and low validity