AP PSYCH: Personality

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1K4RXPWAlLjFVBX0uzqShi1cGmoWkmoXkD5LiQFHBdGk/edit?usp=sharing

Rorschach Ink Blot

• tries to explore one’s unconscious

personality is an individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting

Breyer found that when his patients talked about how they were feeling, they felt better

• came up with the talking cure - free association

• Freud’s patients wanted him SO BAD LMAO but he was like…this needs to be studied…

Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory

• ego vs super-ego

• mind is made up of these three forces

  • Id

    • driven by impulses and insticts

    • operates on the pleasure principle: if it feels good do it; drive toward immediate gratification, most fundamental human motive

    • sources of energy include:

      • eros: life instinct, perpetuates life

      • thanatos: death instinct/agression

      • libido: sexual energy

  • superego

    • informed by social restraints

    • harshly punitive using feelings of guilt

      • example: if you were on the highway and a gum wrapper fell out, your superego would make you want to get out of the car and pick up the gum wrapper

      • operates on the morality principle

    • internalization of societal and parental values

    • partially unconcious

  • ego

    • operates on the reality principle

      • ability to postpone gratification in accordance with demands of reality

    • rational, organized, logical, mediator to demands of reality

    • can repress desires that are not socially acceptable

    • balances out the superego

• example: a person cuts you off while you’re driving

  • Id: punch the guy who cut you off

  • superego: you should forgive the person and feel bad for wanting to harm any person ever

  • ego: honk horn

• Freud believed that religion gave you a moral ground to stand on

• Freud theorized that children lust over the opposite-sex parent but when they reason out that it wont work out LMAO, they take on the behaviors of the same sex parent

Defense mechanisms are the egos ways of helping you deal with unacceptable uncomfortable thoughts

sublimation could also be big picture

• if a person’s s/o are gone or they’re having a problem, they might put themselves and their energy into their job

psychodynamic perspective (wait idk what this was about)

• encountered patients suffering from a nervous disorder

• their complaint could not be explained in terms of purely physical causes

exploring the unconscious

• a reservoir (unconscious mind) of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories.

• Freud asked patients to say whatever came to mind (free association) in order to tap the unconscious.

• dream analysis

Neo- Freudians

• Karen Horney

  • men have womb envy

  • believed in social aspects of childhood growth and development

  • countered the idea that women have weak superegos and penis envy

• Carl Jung

  • thinks our minds are all connected because of our ancestral past

• Alfred Adler

  • more emphasis on social

  • focused on inferiority complexes

    • thinks they are healthy: you think you need to improve but the inferiority complex can’t be too big that ur like…depressed

Humanistic Perspective

• therapists

  • eye contact

  • side by side

  • talking- not prying

• By the 1960s, psychologists became discontent with Freud’s negativity and the mechanistic psychology of the behaviorists.

  • Abraham Maslow

  • Carl Rogers (1902 - 1987)

    • focused on growth and fulfillment of individuals

      • Genuineness:

        • showing that you care and are listening; eye contact and body language

        • active listening: rephrasing/clarifying what the person is saying

      • acceptance

        • does not mean they are condoning the patient

        • if someones problems are “trivial”, you still have an open ear

        • unconditional positive regard

          • an attitude of total acceptance toward another person

        • no judgement

      • empathy

        • listening, saying how you’d feel in the same situation- validating.

• The humanistic perspective formed as a direct response to Freud’s behavioralist and psychodynamic perspective.

Humanistic Values

• free will

• growth

• living up to your full potential

• nondirective: helps the client come up for a solution themselves

  • client-centered

  • you know the answers the best- you should get everything off your chest

Existential Branch of Humanism

• existential therapists emphasize death

• look for meaning in suffering

• An awareness of life should make you live your life to the full potential

• Rollo May

• Victor Frankl

Criticisms of Evaluating Humanism

• difficult to test or validate scientifically

  • hard to test

• tends to be to optimistic, minimizing some of the more destructive aspects of human nature

  • believes people are born good

  • “we acknowledge that there are sociopaths, but we try to focus on the good”

Trait Theorists

• Trait theorists look at personality types- reserved vs extroverted, optimistic vs pessimistic

• Trait

  • a characteristic pattern of behavior

  • a disposition to feel and act, as assessed by self-report inventories and peer reports

• Gordon Allport

  • Cardinal traits - strong personality traits that affect us the most (most people do not possess these)

    • you look at the person and think THAT- what dominates their personality

  • central traits -highly characteristic of a person

    • shy, outgoing

  • Secondary traits - very subjective preferences

    • do you like jazz… do you like ice cream…

• Cattell

  • surface traits - easily observed by others

    • those that you see, on the surface

    • like phenotypes as opposed to genotype

    • how people present themselves in day to day life

  • source traits- underlie surface behavior

    • how people act in serious situations, situations that bring out the best or the worst in them

  • came up with the 16 personality type using factor analysis

    • called the 16PF inventory (16 personality factor)

Personality Dimensions

Hans and Sybil Eyseck suggested that personality could be reduced down to two polar dimensions, extraversion-introversion and emotional stability-intability.

Costa and McCrae

Questions about the Big Five

1. How stable are these traits?

   • quite stable in adulthood, however, they change over development

2. How heritable are they?

   • Fifty percent or so for each trait.

3. How about other cultures?

   • These traits are common across cultures.

4. Can they predict other personal attributes?

   • Yes. Conscientious people are morning type and extroverted are evening type.

Myers-Briggs

• extroversion vs introversion

  • where do you get your energy from as opposed to how social or not social you are

• for any personality test, if you think that it fits you, then it has good face validity

  • not all these tests are perfectly fallible

  • should have high-validity reliability

MMPI (The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory)

• the most widely researched and clinically used of all the personality tests

• originally developed to identify emotional disorders (still considered its most appropriate use)

• now used for many other screening purposes

• Originally designed to assess mental health and detect psychological symptoms

• Has over 500 questions to which person must reply “True” or “False”

• Includes “lying scales” 

• Empiracally Derived Tests

  • a test developed by testing a pool of items and then selecting those that discriminate between groups

  • such as the MMPI

Social-Cognitive Theory

• Person-Situation Controversy

  • is it the personality or situation that affects ones actions more?

  • Trade theorist, Walter Mischel, thinks the situation is more important; traits are not good predictors of behavior.

• Social Cognitive Perspective

  • Bandura belive that personality is the result of an interaction that takes place between a person and their social context.

• Social-cognitive theory: the importance of observational learning, conscious cognitive processes, social experience, self-efficacy, and reciprocal determinism in personality

• Reciprocal determinism: model that explains personality as the result of behavioral, cognitive, and environmental interactions

  • Reciprocal Influences

    • the three factors, behavior, cognition, and environment, are interlocking determinants of each other.

    • ie) changing seating chart to improve behavior

      

• Self-efficacy: belief that people have about their ability to meet demands of a specific situation

Criticisms of Social Cognitive Perspective

• Well-grounded in empirical, laboratory research

• However, laboratory experiences are rather simple and may not reflect the complexity of human interactions

• Ignores the influences of unconscious, emotions, conflicts

• Critics say that social-cognitive psychologists pay a lot of attention to the situation and pay less attention to the individual, his unconscious mind, his emotions, and his genetics

Culture:

• people considered fashionable in one culture might not be considered fashionable in another

• people considered out-going in one culture might not be considered shy in another

• Self-serving bias

  • people think they are better than they are really are

• Terror-Management Theory

  • Faith in one’s worldview and the pursuit of self-esteem provide protection against a deeply rooted fear of death

    • ie) bad things that happen are part of “God’s Plan”

    • ie) people denying climate change think the earth is just going through a “warming period”

• Spotlight Effect

  • you care more about your mistakes than other people care about your mistakes