Personality: An individual's characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting.
Psychoanalytical Perspective: In his clinical practice, Freud encountered patients suffering fr oil m nervous disorders. Their complaints could not be explained in terms of purely physical causes.
Freud's clinical experience led him to develop the first comprehensive theory of personality, which included unconscious mind, psycho-sexual stages, and defense mechanisms.
Exploring the Unconscious: A reservoir (unconscious mind) of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories. Freud asked patients to say whatever came to their minds (free association) in order to tap the unconscious.
Dream Analysis: Another method to analyze the unconscious mind is through interpreting manifest and latent contents of dreams.
Psychoanalysis: The process of free association (chain of thoughts) leads to painful, embarrassing unconscious memories. Once these memories are retrieved and released the patient feels better.
Model of Mind: The mind is like an iceberg. It is mostly hidden, and below the surface lies the unconscious mind. The preconscious stores temporary memories.
Personality Structure: Personality develops as a result of our efforts to resolve conflicts between our biological impulses (id) and social restraints (superego).
Id, Ego, and Superego: The Id unconsciously strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives, operating on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification.
Personality Development: Freud believed that personality formed during the first few years of life divided into psycho sexual stages. During these stages the id's pleasure-seeking energies focus on pleasure sensitive body areas called erogenous zone.
Psychosexual Stages Stage:
-Oral (0-18 months): Pleasure centers on the mouth-sucking, biting, chewing.
-Anal (18-36 months): Pleasure focuses on bow and bladder elimination; coping with demand for control.
-Phallic (3-6 years): Pleasure zone in genitals; coping witb incestuous sexual feelings.
-Latency (6-puberty): Dormant sexual feelings.
-Genital (puberty on): Maturation of sexual interests
Oedipus Complex: A boy's sexual desire for his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the father. A girl's desire for her father is called the Electra Complex
Identification: Children cope with threatening feelings by identifying them and by identifying with the rival parent. Through this process of identification, their superego gains strength that incorporates their parent's values.
Defense Mechanisms: The ego's protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality.
- Repression banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness.
- Regression leads an individual faced with anxiety to retreat to a more infantile psychosexual stage.
- Reaction Formation causes the go to unconsciously switch unacceptable impulses into their opposites. People may express feelings of purity when they may be suffering anxiety from unconscious feelings about sex.
- Projection leads people to disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others.
- Rationalization offers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one's actions.
- Displacement shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person, redirecting anger toward a safer outlet.
The Neo-Freudians:
- Like Freud, Adler believed in childhood tensions. However, these tensions were social in nature and not sexual. A child struggles with an inferiority complex during growth and strives for superiority and power.
- Like Adler, Horney believes in the social aspects of childhood growth and development. She encountered Freud's assumption that women have weak superegos and suffer from "penis envy".
- Jung believed in the collective unconscious, which contained a common reservoir of images derived from our species past. This is why many cultures share a certain myth and images such as the mother being a symbol of nurturance.
Assessing Unconscious Processes: Evaluating personality from an unconscious mind's perspective would require a psychological instrument (projective tests) that would reveal the hidden unconscious mind.
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT): Developed by Henry Murray, the TAT is a projective test in which people express their inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes.
Rorschach Inkblot Test: The most widely used projective test uses a set of 10 inkblots ans was designed by Hermann Rorschech. It seeks to identify people's inner feelings by analyzing conscious interpretations of the blots.
Projective Tests Criticism: Critics argue that projective tests lack both reliability (consistency of results) and validity (predicting what it is suppose to do).
Evaluating the Psychoanalytical Perspective: Personality develops throughout life and is not fixed in childhood.
- Freud under emphasized peer influence on the individual which may be as powerful as parental influence.
- Gender identity may develop before 5-6 years of age.
- There may be other reasons for dreams besides wish fulfillment.
- Verbal slips can be explained on the basis of cognitive processing of verbal choices.
- Suppresses sexuality leads to psychological disorders. Sexual inhibition has decreased, but psychological disorders have not. Freud's psychoanalytical theory rests on the repression of painful experiences into the unconscious mind.
The Modern Unconscious Mind: Modern Research shows the existence of non-conscious information processing. This involves:
- Schemas that automatically control perceptions and interpretations.
- The right-hemisphere activity that enables the split-brain patient's left hand to carry out an instruction the patient cannot verbalize.
- Parallel Processing during vision and thinking.
- Implicit memories
- Emotions that activate instantly without consciousness.
- Self-Concept and stereotypes that unconsciously influence us.
Evaluating the Psychoanalytical Perspective: The scientific merits of Freud's theory have been criticized. Psychoanalysis is meagerly testable. Most of its concepts arise out of clinical practice, which are the after-the-fact explanation.
Humanistic Perspective: By the 1960's, psychologists became discontent with Freud's negativity and the mechanistic psychology of the behaviorists.
Self-Actualizing Person: Maslow proposed that we as individuals are motivated by a hierarchy of needs. Beginning with physiological needs. we try to reach the state of self-actualization-fulfilling our potential.
Person-Centered Perspective: Carl Rogers also believed in an individual's elf-actualization tendencies. He said that unconditional positive regard is an attitude of acceptance of others despite their failings.
Assessing the Self: In an effort to assess personality, Rogers asked people to describe themselves as they would like to be (ideal) and as they actually are (real). If the two descriptions were close the individual had a positive self concept.
Evaluating the Humanistic Perspective: Humanistic psychology has a pervasive impact on counseling, education, child-rearing,and management with its emphasis on positive self-concept, empathy, and the thought that people are basically good and can improve.
- Concepts in humanistic psychology are vague and subjective and lack scientific basis.
- The individualism encouraged can lead to self-indulgences, selfishness, and an erosion of moral restraints.
- Humanistic psychology fails to appreciate the reality of our human capacity for evil. It lacks adequate balance between realistic optimism and despair.
Examples of Traits: Honest, Dependable, Moody, Impulsive.
Exploring Traits: Each Personality is uniquely made up of multiple traits. Allport and Odbert (1936), identifies almost 18,000 words representing traits. One way to condense the immense list of personality traits is through factor analysis, a statistical approach used to describe ad relate personality traits.
Factor Analysis: Hans and Sybil Eysenck suggested that personality could be reduced down to two polar dimensions, extroversion-introversion and emotional stability-instability.
Biology and Personality: Personality dimensions are influenced by genes.
- Brain-imaging procedures show that extroverts seek stimulation because their normal brain arousal is relatively low.
- Genes also influence our temperament and behavioral style. Differences in children's shyness and inhibition may be attributed to autonomic nervous system reactivity.
Assessing Traits: Personality inventories are questionnaires (often with true-false or agree-disagree items) designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors assessing several traits at once.
MMPI: The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory is the most widely researched and clinically used of all personality tests. It was originally developed to identify emotional disorders.
The Big Five Factors: Today's traits researchers believe that earlier trait dimensions, such as Eysencks' personality dimensions, fail to tell the whole story. So, an expanded range (five factors) of trait does a better job of assessment.
Trait Dimensions
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Endpoints of the Dimensions
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Conscientiousness
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Organized------------------------------Disorganized
Careful-------------------------------------- Careless
Disciplined---------------------------------Impulsive
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Agreeableness
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Soft-Hearted---------------------------------Ruthless
Trusting------------------------------------Suspicious
Helpful--------------------------------Uncooperative
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Neuroticism
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Calm -------------------------------------- Anxious
Secure-------------------------------------- Insecure
Self-satisfied----------------------------Self-pitying
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Openness
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Imaginative--------------------------------- Practical
Preference for Variety--Preference for Routine
Independent---------------------------- Conforming
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Extroversion
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Sociable ------------------------------------- Retiring
Fun-loving--------------------------------------Sober
Affectionate--------------------------------Reserved
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Questions about the Big Five:
- How stable are these traits?
- Quite stable in adulthood, however, they change over development.
- How heritable are they?
- Fifty percent so for each trait.
- How about other cultures?
- These traits are common across cultures.
Evaluating Trait Perspective: The person-situation controversy Walter Mischel (1968, 1984, 2004) points out that traits may be enduring, but the resulting behavior in various situations is different. Therefore, traits are not good predictors of behavior.
The Person-Situation Controversy: Trait theorists argue that behaviors from a situation may be different, but average behavior remains the same. Therefore, traits matter. Traits are socially significant and influence our health, thinking, and performance (Gosling et al.,2000).
Consistency of Expressive Style: Expressive styles in speaking and gestures demonstrate trait consistency. Observers are able to judge people's behavior and feelings in as little as 30 seconds and in one particular case as little as 2 seconds.
Social-Cognitive Perspective: Bandura (1986, 2001, 2005) believes that personality is the result of an interaction that takes place between a person and their social context.
Individuals and Environments: Specific ways in which individuals and environments interact.
- Different people choose different environments.
- Our personalities shape how we react to events.
- Our personalities shape situations.
Behavior: Behavior emerges from an interplay of external and internal influences.
Personal Control
-Social-cognitive emphasize our sense of persional control, whether we control the environment or the environment controls us.
-External locus of control refers to the perception that chance or outside forces beyond our personal control determine our fate.
-Internal locus of control refers to the perception that we can control our own fate
Learned Helplessness: When unable to avoid repeated adverse events an animal or human learns helplessness.
Optimism vs. Pessimism: An optimistic attributal style is your way of explaining positive or negative events. Positive psychology aims to discover and promote conditions that enable individuals and communities to thrive.
Positive Psychology and Humanistic Psychology: Positive psychology, such as humanistic psychology, attempts to foster human fulfillment. Positive psychology, in addition, seeks positive subjective well-being. positive character, and positive social groups.
Assessing Behavior in Situations: Social-Cognitive psychologists observe people in realistic and simulated situations because they find that it is the best way to predict the behavior of others in similar situations.
Evaluating the Social-Cognitive Perspective: The social-cognitive perspective on personality sensitizes researchers to the effects of situations on and by individuals. It builds on learning and cognition research. 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.
Exploring the Self: Research on the self has a long history because the self organizes thinking, feelings, and actions and is a critical part of our personality.
- Research focuses on the different selves we possess. Some we dream and others we desire.
- Research studies how we overestimate our concern that others evaluate our appearance, performance, and blunders (spotlight effect).
Benefits of Self-Esteem: Malow and Rogers argued that a successful life results from a healthy self-image (self-esteem). The following are two reasons why low self-esteem results in personal problems.
- When self-esteem is deflated, we view ourselves and others critically.
- Low self-esteem reflects reality, our failure in meeting challenges, or surmounting difficulties.
Culture and Self-Esteem: People maintain their self-esteem even with a low status by valuing things they achieve and comparing themselves to people with similar positions.
Concept
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Individualism
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Collectivism
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Self
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Independent
(identify from individual traits)
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Interdependent
(identity from belonging)
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Life Task
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Discover and express one’s uniqueness
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Maintain connections, fit in
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What Matters
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Me-personal achievement and fulfillment; rights and liberties;
self-esteem
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Us-group goals and solidarity; social responsibilities and
relationships
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Coping Method
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Change Reality
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Accommodate to reality
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Morality
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Defined by individuals
(self-based)
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Defined by social networks
(duty-based)
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Relationship
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Many, often temporary or casual; confrontation acceptable
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Few, close, and enduring; harmony valued
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Attributing Behavior
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Behavior reflects one’s personality and attributes
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Behavior reflects social norms and roles
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Self-Serving Bias: We accept personality for good deeds and successes more than for bad deeds and failures. Defensive self-esteem is fragile and egotistic whereas secure self-esteem is less fragile and less dependent on external evaluation.
