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.