Unit 4

• Unit 4 covers introduction to personality

Introduction to Personality

• Two key theories: psychodynamic, emphasizing childhood sexuality and unconscious motivations, and humanistic, focusing on inner growth and self-fulfillment.

Classic Perspectives on Personality

• Personality involves an individual's characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting.
• Trait theories examine characteristic patterns of behaviors, or traits.
• Social-cognitive theories explore interactions between traits (including thinking) and social context.

Psychodynamic And Humanistic Theories of Personality: Psychoanalytic And Psychodynamic Theories

• Psychodynamic theories highlight the unconscious mind and childhood experiences.
• Psychoanalysis is Freud's theory, linking thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts.

Freud's Psychoanalytic Perspective: Exploring the Unconscious

• Freud believed that psychological issues stem from unresolved conflicts related to expected gender roles and hidden sexual desires.
• The unconscious is a reservoir of unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories.
• Free Association helps explore the unconscious.

Personality Structure

• Ego mediates between the id and superego
• Superego is internalized ideals
• Id strives to satisfy basic drives

Personality Development

• Psychosexual stages include oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital stages
• Conflicts unresolved in early stages may lead to maladaptive behavior
• Fixation results from lingering focus on pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage in which conflicts are unresolved

Defense Mechanisms

• Defense mechanisms distort reality to reduce anxiety, operating indirectly and unconsciously.
• Defense mechanisms include repression, regression, reaction formation, projection, rationalization, displacement, sublimation, and denial.

The Neo-Freudian And Later Psychodynamic Theorists

• Neo-Freudians emphasized the conscious mind's role in interpreting experience and coping with the environment.
• They downplayed sex and aggression as all-consuming motivators, emphasizing loftier motives and social interactions.

Evaluating Freud's Psychoanalytic Perspective And Modern Views of the Unconscious

• Modern research challenges several of Freud's ideas.
• Developmental psychologists now believe development is lifelong, not fixed in childhood, and not predictable.
• Freud challenged self-righteousness and self-protective defenses.

Modern Challenges.

• Alfred Adler's inferiority complex involves overcoming feelings of inferiority.
• Karen Horney countered Freud's masculinity theory, highlighting childhood anxiety and security
• Carl Jung introduced the concept of the collective unconscious.

Modern Research Challenges the Idea of Repression

• Repression is rare; extreme, prolonged stress disrupts memory by damaging the hippocampus, but memory increases

The Modern Unconscious Mind

• The unconscious involves schemas that control perception and interpretations, as well as priming.
• Right-hemisphere activity enables split-brain patients to carry out instructions they can't verbalize.
• Emotions activate instantly.
• Research supports reaction formation and projection.
• Terror-management theory addresses death-related anxiety
• Facing death can inspire us to affirm life.

Assessing Unconscious Processes

• Projective Tests use ambiguous images to trigger projection of inner dynamics.
• Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) involves making up stories about ambiguous pictures.
• Rorschach Inkblot Test involves interpreting inkblots, but they have inaccurately diagnosed many as pathological

Evaluating Humanistic Theories

• Influenced counseling, education, child raising, and management
• Criticism involves being vague, subjective, overemphasizing individualism, naive, placing too much emphasis on self, and not being scientific

Abraham Maslow’s Self-Actualizing Person.

• Motivated by a hierarchy of needs, from physiological to self-transcendence.
• Believed all people are good, and the environment makes them bad

Carl Rogers’ Person-Centered Perspective

Believed that a growth promoting social climate provides;

• Acceptance (unconditional positive regard)
• Genuineness
• Empathy
• Self-Concept

Assessing the Self

• A questionnaire, by Carl Rogers, that asks people to describe themselves as their ideal & who they actually are
• When they are similar, the self-concept = positive

Evaluating Humanistic Theories

• Criticism - vague & subjective, emphasis on individualism, naive, not scientific

Social-Cognitive And Trait Theories of Personality: Trait Theories

• Gordon Allport used interviews with Sigmund Freud to describe personality through recognizable behaviors and conscious motives.
• Isabel Briggs Myers + Katherine Briggs (mother) Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) helps increase self awareness

Exploring Traits

• Factor analysis identifies clusters of test items that tap basic components of a trait.
• A statistically correlated cluster reflects a basic factor or trait
• Hans Eysenck & Sybil Eysenck can reduce variations into extraversion-introversion & emotional stability instability factors are genetically influenced

Biology And Personality

• Frontal lobe areas associated w/ behavior inhibition = Vactive in extraverts
• Dopamine influences personality

Assessing Traits

• Personality inventories use long questionnaires to assess several traits at once.
• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMex) identifies emotional disorders and personality traits.
• It can identify people who are faking disorders
• Emperically derived test

The Big Five Factors

• The Big Five Factors – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, & neuroticism = describes personality
• The Big Five traits are generally stable.
• Conscientiousness = organized careful, disciplined
• agreeableness = soft-hearted, trusting, helpful * coping to anxiety & stress
• E-extraversionsociable, fun-loving, affectionate
• Neuroticism wired for success
• The Big Five traits are common to all human groups & predicts life outcomes

Evaluating Trait Theories

• New situations & major life events can shift personality traits we express.

The Person-Situation Controversy

• While careers & relationships may change, personality is consistent, but certain behaviors aren't
• Personality traits gets expressed in our preferences, written communications, online & Personal Spaces etc

Social - Cognitive Theories

• Albert Bandura focus is on how we & our environment interact
• Emphasize that we learn behaviors through conditioning or by observation & imitating.
• Emphasize * of mental processes focus mainly on effects of learning on personality development

Reciprocal Influences

• Reciprocal determinism: interacting influences of behavior, & environmene.
  • Different people choose different environments
  • Our personalities help create situations to which we reace

Assessing Behavior in Situations

• Assessing Behavior in Situations to predict behavior = observe behavior in realistic situations, past behavior patterns in similar situations

Evaluating Social - Cognitive Theories

• Evaluation of Social - Cognitive Theories built from psychological research learning cognition but this is a focus too much on situation, failing to appreciate inner traits

Exploring The Self

• Research shows that a positive view of self and the future can motivate, and that Self is assumed to be organizer of actions.
• Spotlight Effect: overestimating other's noticing

The Benefits of Self-Esteem

• Self esteem: feelings of high or low self-worth. Blindness to One's Own Incompetence
• It's hard to change your traits

Optimism vs. Pessimism

• Factors on optimism-Excessive optimists failure when we overestimate abilities