Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory Overview

Personality

• Personality: a pattern of enduring, distinctive thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that characterize the way an individual adapts to the world
• Psychodynamic perspectives: emphasize that personality is primarily unconscious (beyond awareness)
• Behavior is only a surface characteristic

Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory

• Psychoanalysis is Sigmund Freud’s approach to personality
• Three structures of personality:
  • Id: unconscious drives
  • Ego: deals with the demands of reality
  • Superego: serves as judge of the individual’s behavior; also known as conscience.

Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory: Defense Mechanisms

• Defense mechanisms: tactics the ego uses to reduce anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality
• Unconscious; and not necessarily unhealthy.
• Denial is the most primitive.
• Displacement.
• Sublimation.
• Projection.
• Reaction formation.
• Repression.

Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory: Stages of Development

• Oral stage (first 18 months)
• Anal stage (18 to 36 months)
• Phallic stage (3 to 6 years)
• Latency period (6 years to puberty)

Humanistic Perspectives

• Emphasis on the conscious experience and the individual’s potential for growth
• Key theorists: Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow
• Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: a model of human motivation that suggests basic needs must be met before higher needs can be pursued

Evaluating the Humanistic Perspective

• How we perceive ourselves and the world is an essential element of personality
• A positive approach to the whole person.
• Criticisms:
  • Too optimistic.
  • Overestimate people’s freedom and rationality.
  • May promote excessive self-love and narcissism.
  • People are not held accountable.

Trait Perspectives

• Traits are stable personality characteristics
• Trait perspectives on personality have been the dominant approach for nearly four decades

Trait Theories

• Theoretical views stressing that personality consists of broad, enduring dispositions (traits) that tend to lead to characteristic responses.
• “High” on a trait: a strong tendency to behave a certain way according to that trait.
• “Low” on a trait.
• Trait theorists agree that traits are the fundamental building blocks of personality.

Allport’s Contributions

• Stressed each person’s uniqueness and capacity to adapt.
• Traits are structures that cause a person’s behavior to be similar even in different situations.
• Lexical approach: the more important a trait is, the more likely it is that it is represented by a single word
• Allport and H.S. Odbert found 4,500 distinct traits
• W.T. Norman reanalyzed those traits and concluded they could be summarized in just five factors.

The Five-Factor Model of Personality

• The five broad traits that are thought to describe the main dimensions of personality.
• Openness to experience: Imaginative and interested in cognitively engaging with abstract ideas as well as perceptions, nature, and the arts
• Conscientiousness: Reliable, hard working, and dependable
• Extraversion: Outgoing, sociable, and lively
• Agreeableness: Kind, nice, and trusting
• Neuroticism: A worrier, anxious, and insecure

The Five-Factor Model of Personality cont.

• The role of personality traits depends on the situations in which we find ourselves.
• Our traits can be strengths or weaknesses.
• Extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness are the most likely factors to emerge across cultures and languages.
• Neuroticism and openness to experience are more likely to emerge only in English-speaking samples.

Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Well-Being

• Some people are happier than others.
• Life events explain relatively little.
• Extraversion is related to higher levels of well-being.
• Neuroticism is strongly related to lower levels.
• Subjective well-being: a person’s assessment of their own level of positive affect relative to negative affect, and an evaluation of their life in general.
• Positive and negative moods affect life satisfaction.

Social Cognitive Perspectives

• How individuals learn and develop their personalities
• Key theorists: Albert Bandura, Julian Rotter, and Walter Mischel
• Social learning: individuals learn by observing others and modeling their behavior

Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory

• Through observational learning, we form ideas about the behavior of others.
• May adopt that behavior ourselves.
• Our specific beliefs can influence our behavior.
• Personal control: the degree to which a person believes to be in charge of the outcomes of behavior.
• Self-efficacy: the belief a person has that they can master a situation and produce positive change.

Mischel’s Contributions

• Situationism: the idea that behavior changes considerably from one context to another
• Researchers responded by showing that it is not a matter of whether personality predicts behavior, but when and how it does so.

Evaluating the Social Cognitive Perspectives

• Highlights the observation of behavior.
• Emphasizes the influence of cognitive processes.
• Suggests people can control their environment.
• Weaknesses:
  • Too concerned with change and situational influences.
  • Ignores the role biology plays.
  • Tends to lead to very specific predictions for each person, making generalizations impossible.

Biological Perspectives

• The notion that physiological processes influence personality has been around since ancient times.
• More recent advances in method and theory have led to fascinating research on the role of biological processes in personality.

Theories Linking Personality and the Brain

• Hans Eysenck’s arousal regulation theory:
  • In extraverts and introverts, the reticular activation system (RAS)--consisting of the reticular formation and its connections--differs with respect to the baseline level of arousal.
  • Research has not demonstrated this to be true.
  • Researchers have found, however, that blood flow in the striatum differs and this plays a role in levels of dopamine --the neurotransmitter linked with the experience of reward.

Theories Linking Personality and the Brain cont.

• Jeffrey Gray:
  • Reinforcement sensitivity theory: identifies two biological systems linked to learning associations between behaviors and rewards or punishers.
  • Behavioral activation system (BAS): sensitive to learning about rewards.
  • Behavioral inhibition system (BIS): sensitive to learning about punishers.

Explore the key concepts of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory, including the structures of personality, defense mechanisms, and stages of development. This quiz will test your understanding of how these elements contribute to our personality and behavior. Delve into the world of psychodynamics and uncover the layers of the unconscious mind.