1 Personality

Introduction to Personality

• Personality: Characteristic way of thinking, feeling, and behaving

Psychodynamic Perspective

• Psychodynamic approaches to personality: Assume that personality is primarily unconscious
• Motivated by inner forces and conflicts about which people have little awareness

Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory

• Psychoanalytic theory: Unconscious forces act as determinants of personality
• Theory by Freud
• Conscious: Part of the personality that you are aware of in any given instance
• Unconscious: Part of the personality that contains the memories, knowledge, beliefs, feelings, urges, drives, and instincts of which the individual is not aware
• Unconsciousness consists of:
  • Preconscious: non-threatening material that is easily brought to mind
  • Drives: instinctual wishes, desires, demands, and needs hidden from awareness because of the conflict and pain they would cause

Structuring Personality: Id, Ego, and Superego

• Id:
  • Instinctual, unorganized, inborn part of personality
  • Sole purpose is to reduce tension created by primitive drives related to hunger, sex, aggression, and irrational impulses
  • Pleasure principle
• Ego:
  • Part of the personality that provides a buffer between the id and the realities of the objective, outside world
  • Reality principle
  • Executive of personality
• Superego:
  • Personality structure that harshly judges the morality of our behavior
  • Includes the conscience, which prevents us from behaving in a morally improper way
  • Makes us feel guilty if we do wrong

Developing Personality: Psychosexual Stages

• Psychosexual stages: Developmental periods that children pass through during which they encounter conflicts between the demands of society and their own sexual urges
• Fixations: Concerns or conflicts that persist beyond the developmental period in which they first occur

Defense Mechanisms

• Threats to the balance between the ego, superego, and id can result in anxiety
• Anxiety results in the ego using defense mechanisms to protect itself
• Defense mechanisms: Unconscious strategies that people use to reduce anxiety by distorting reality and concealing the source of the anxiety from themselves
• Repression: Primary defense mechanism
  • Ego pushes unacceptable or unpleasant impulses out of awareness and back into the unconscious

Evaluating Freud's Legacy

• Individual case studies seem supportive, but there is a lack of conclusive evidence, showing that personality is structured consistent with Freud’s theory
• Sexuality is not the pervasive force that Freud believed it to be
• The Oedipus complex is not as universal as Freud maintained
• The first five years of life are not as powerful in shaping adult personality as Freud thought
• Later experiences warrant attention
• The ego and conscious thought processes play a larger role in personality than Freud believed

The Neo-Freudian Psychoanalysts: Building on Freud

• Psychoanalysts who were trained in traditional Freudian theory but who later rejected some of its major points
• Emphasized the functions of the ego
• Suggested that it has more control than the id over day-to-day activities
• Jung's collective unconscious:
  • Inherited set of ideas, feelings, images, and symbols that are shared with all humans because of our common ancestral past
  • Collective unconscious vs personal unconscious
  • Collective unconscious contains archetypes
  • Archetypes: Universal symbolic representations of particular types of people, objects, ideas, or experiences
• Horney's neo-Freudian perspective:
  • Suggested that personality develops in the context of social relationships
  • Depends on the relationship between parents and child
  • Rejected Freud's notion of penis envy in women
  • Stressed the importance of cultural factors in the determination of personality
• Adler and the other neo-Freudians:
  • Alfred Adler – Proposed that the primary human motivation is striving for superiority in a quest for self-improvement and perfection
  • Birth order plays an important role in personality
  • Inferiority complex – Describes adults who have not been able to overcome the feelings of inadequacy they developed as children

Learning Approaches

• B.F.Skinner's behaviorist approach:
  • Personality is a collection of learned behavior patterns
  • Humans are infinitely changeable through the process of learning new behavior patterns
• Social cognitive approaches to personality:
  • Theories that emphasize the influence of a person's cognitions and observation of others' behavior, in determining personality

Evaluating Learning Approaches to Personality

• Learning theories have:
  • Helped make personality psychology a scientific venture
  • Tend to share a highly deterministic view of human behavior
  • By focusing on observable behavior and the effects of their environments
  • Maintains that behavior is shaped by forces beyond the individual's control
  • Produced important, successful means of treating a variety of psychological disorders

Humanistic Approaches

• Emphasize people's innate goodness and desire to achieve higher levels of functioning
• Rogers and the need for self-actualization:
  • State of self-fulfillment in which people realize their highest potential, each in a unique way
  • Unconditional positive regard: Attitude of acceptance and respect on the part of an observer, no matter what a person says or does
  • Conditional positive regard depends on one's behavior

Evaluating Humanistic Approaches

• Benefits:
  • Highlights the uniqueness of human beings
  • Guides the development of a form of therapy designed to alleviate psychological difficulties
• Criticisms:
  • Difficulty of verifying basic assumptions of the approach
  • Making the assumption that people are basically “good”

Trait Approaches

• Trait theory: Model of personality that seeks to identify the basic traits necessary to describe personality
• Traits: Consistent, habitual personality characteristics and behaviors displayed across different situations
• Costa and McCrae's Big Five Personality Traits

Evaluating Trait Approaches to Personality

• Benefits:

  • Provide straightforward explanation of people's behavioral consistencies
  • Allow comparison of one person to another
  • Influence the development of several useful personality measures

• Drawbacks:

  • Validity of trait conceptions of personality
  • Do not provide explanations for behavior### Personality

• Personality is the characteristic way of thinking, feeling, and behaving

• It is a collection of learned behavior patterns and can be changed through the process of learning new behavior patterns

Learning Approaches to Personality

• Focus on observable behavior and the effects of environmental forces
• Deterministic view of human behavior
• Helped make personality psychology a scientific venture
• Produced important, successful means of treating various psychological disorders

Humanistic Approaches

• Emphasize people’s innate goodness and desire to achieve higher levels of functioning
• Rogers and the need for self-actualization
• Self-actualization: State of self-fulfillment in which people realize their highest potential, each in a unique way
• Unconditional positive regard: Attitude of acceptance and respect on the part of an observer, no matter what a person says or does

Evaluating Humanistic Approaches

• Highlights the uniqueness of human beings
• Guides the development of a form of therapy designed to alleviate psychological difficulties
• Difficulty of verifying basic assumptions of the approach
• Making the assumption that people are basically “good”

Trait Approaches

• Trait theory: Model of personality that seeks to identify the basic traits necessary to describe personality
• Traits: Consistent, habitual personality characteristics and behaviors displayed across different situations
• Costa and McCrae’s Big Five Personality Traits

Evaluating Trait Approaches to Personality

• Provide straightforward explanation of people’s behavioral consistencies
• Allow comparison of one person to another
• Influence the development of several useful personality measures
• Validity of trait conceptions of personality
• Do not provide explanations for behavior

Psychodynamic Perspective

• Psychodynamic approaches to personality: Assume that personality is primarily unconscious
• Motivated by inner forces and conflicts about which people have little awareness
• Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory: Mapping the Unconscious Mind

Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory

• Unconscious forces act as determinants of personality
• Conscious: Part of the personality that you are aware of in any given instance
• Unconscious: Part of the personality that contains memories, knowledge, beliefs, feelings, urges, drives, and instincts of which the individual is not aware
• Preconscious: non-threatening material that is easily brought to mind
• Drives: instinctual wishes, desires, demands, and needs hidden from awareness because of the conflict and pain they would cause

Structuring Personality

• Id, ego, and superego
• Id: instinctual, unorganized, inborn part of personality
• Ego: Provides a buffer between the id and the realities of the objective, outside world
• Superego: Personality structure that harshly judges the morality of our behavior

Developing Personality

• Psychosexual stages: Developmental periods that children pass through during which they encounter conflicts between the demands of society and their own sexual urges
• Fixations: Concerns or conflicts that persist beyond the developmental period in which they first occur

Psychosexual Stages

• Oral Stage: Infants derive pleasure from oral activities like sucking, biting, and tasting
• Anal Stage: Focus on bowel and bladder control
• Phallic Stage: Children become aware of their bodies and develop unconscious sexual desires
• Latency Stage: Sexual impulses are dormant, and children focus on developing social and cognitive skills
• Genital Stage: Begins at puberty, where the individual's sexual desires reawaken and are directed towards others in a mature way

Defense Mechanisms

• Unconscious strategies that people use to reduce anxiety by distorting reality and concealing the source of the anxiety from themselves
• Repression: Primary defense mechanism
• Other common defense mechanisms include denial, projection, rationalization, displacement, sublimation, and regression