Untitled Quiz

Lecture Objectives

• What is personality theory?
• Psychodynamic/psychoanalytic perspective
• Behavioral perspective
• Humanistic perspective
• Trait perspective
• Social Cognitive perspective
• Exploring the self
• Assessment techniques

What is Personality?

• Personality is a characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting.
• Personality is relatively stable and enduring.
• Personality is inherited and shaped by life events and experiences.

Psychodynamic/Psychoanalytic Perspective

• Developed from Sigmund Freud's theory.
• Childhood sexuality and unconscious motivations influence personality.
• Three phases of Freud's theory:
  • Affect-trauma model: symptoms result from trauma or abuse.
  • Topographical perspective: conscious, preconscious, and unconscious components of the mind.
  • Structural model: the mind consists of the id, ego, and superego.

The Structure of the Personality

• Id:

  • Source of instinctual drives.
  • Wants immediate gratification.
  • Pleasure principle.
  • Present at birth.
  • Focused on fulfilling basic needs.

• Ego:

  • Develops after the id.
  • Executive branch of personality.
  • Mediates between the id and reality.
  • Reality principle.

• Superego:

  • Emerges from the ego.
  • Moral values of society.
  • Works with the ego to inhibit the id.
  • Morality principle.

Psychosexual Stages of Development

• Oral: First year - pleasure centers on the mouth.
• Anal: Second year - pleasure centers on the anus.
• Phallic: 3-5 years - pleasure centers on the genitals.
• Latency: 6-13 years - sexual feelings are dormant.
• Genital: Puberty and adulthood - sexual interests mature.

Anxiety and Defence Mechanisms

• Anxiety is a causal factor in psychopathology.
• Ego defense mechanisms are unconscious protective methods.
  • Repression: Anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories are banished from consciousness.
  • Regression: Individuals may retreat to a more infantile psychosexual stage when faced with anxiety.
  • Projection: People disguise threatening impulses by attributing them to others.
  • Reaction formation: Unacceptable impulses are transformed into their opposite.
  • Rationalization: Self-justifying explanations are offered in place of real, more threatening unconscious reasons.
  • Displacement: Sexual or aggressive impulses are shifted toward a more acceptable/less threatening object or person.
  • Denial: An outright denial of an impulse, thought, or memory.
  • Sublimation: Finding socially acceptable outlets for sexual or aggressive urges.

Behavioural Psychology

• Operant/Instrumental conditioning (B.F. Skinner): Behaviour is shaped by reinforcement.
• Operant conditioning shapes behaviour through reinforcement and punishment.

Humanistic Psychology

• Positive view of human beings.
• Importance of conscious experience.
• Human beings are determining, having free will.

Carl Rogers: Person-Centered Perspective

• Focused on growth and fulfilment of individuals.
• Factors needed for good development: genuineness, acceptance, and empathy.

Trait Perspective

• Views personality as stable and enduring behaviour patterns or traits.
• Traits represent a characteristic pattern of behaviour and disposition.
• Gordon Allport, Hans Eysenck - Identifying traits and analyzing them.
• The Big Five personality factors: Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Openness, and Extraversion.

Social Cognitive Perspective - Bandura

• Learning behaviour through observing and imitating.
• Reciprocal determinism: interaction between behaviour, personal factors, and environmental factors.

Social Cognitive Perspective - Rotter

• Personal control: our sense of controlling our environments.
• External locus of control: believing that chance or outside forces dictate fate.
• Internal locus of control: believing that individual actions determine fate.

Exploring the Self

• James Marcia's Identity States:
  • Identity Foreclosure: Blindly accepting family and significant others' values.
  • Identity Moratorium: Exploring values and self-concepts.
  • Identity Diffusion: Lack of clear identity and no attempt to find one.
  • Identity Achievement: Well-defined personal values and self-concepts.
• Spotlight effect: Overestimating how much others notice personal appearance and behaviour.
• Self-esteem: Feelings of self-worth.
• Self-serving bias: Tendency to perceive oneself favorably.

Assessment Techniques

• Projective tests (e.g., Rorschach Inkblot Test, Thematic Apperception Test): Stimuli designed to trigger projection of inner dynamics.
• Personality inventories: Questionnaires with true-false or agree-disagree items to gauge feelings and behaviors.