Introduction to Personality

• Personality stands for the long-standing traits and patterns that propel individuals to consistently think, feel, and behave.
• The word "personality" comes from the Latin word "persona", which means a mask worn by an actor

Historical Perspectives

• During the Middle Ages up to the 19th century personality traits and human behavior were thought to be based on balances and imbalances of four separate temperaments, each associated with a humor
• Choleric individuals have yellow bile from the liver, and are passionate, ambitious, and bold
• Melancholic individuals have black bile from the kidneys, and are reserved, anxious, and unhappy
• Sanguine individuals have red blood is from the heart, and are joyful, eager, and optimistic
• Phlegmatic individuals have white phlegm from the lungs, and are calm, reliable, and thoughtful
• Phrenology in the 1700s by Franz Gall was the study of the conformation of the skull as indicative of mental faculties and character.

Theories of Personality

• Sigmund Freud was a Viennese neurologist who developed the first comprehensive theory of personality
• Freud stated that normal behaviors as the result of internal and unconscious conflicts caused by keeping in check sexual and aggressive drives
• Unacceptable urges and desires are kept in the unconscious through repression, but still affect behavior
• A Freudian slip are slips of the tongue that suggest that saying a word not intended to say implies sexual or aggressive urges accidently slipping out of our unconscious

Id, Ego, Superego

• The id contains primitive, impulsive, and instinctual urges like hunger, thirst, and sex which seeks immediate gratification
• The ego attempts to balance the id with the superego and operates according to the "reality" principle, helping the id satisfy desires realistically
• The superego contains values and ideals, develops through interactions with others, learning social rules, and judges behavior, leading to feelings of pride or guilt

Anxiety and Defense Mechanisms

• Freud thought that our dreams reflected our unconscious struggle and were wish fulfillments but some were in disguise
• Anxiety occurs when there are impulses from the id threatening to get out of control or when the ego perceives danger form the environment
• The ego deals with problems through defense mechanisms such as:
• Repression: Motivated forgetting of emotionally threatening memories or impulses
• Denial: Refusing to accept real events because they are unpleasant
• Projection: Unconscious attribution of our negative/unacceptable qualities onto others
• Displacement: Transfer of inappropriate urge or behavior to a more acceptable or less threatening target
• Sublimation: Redirecting unacceptable desires through socially acceptable channels
• Reaction formation: Reducing anxiety by adopting beliefs contrary to your own beliefs
• Regression: Returning to coping strategies for less mature stages of development

Stages of Psychosexual Development

• Freud believed that we pass through stages, each of which is focused on an erogenous zone
• The oral stage of development shows primary satisfaction from chewing and sucking
• The anal stage is focused around pleasure focused on elimination
• The phallic stage is focused on pleasure derived from the sexual organs and experiencing the Oedipal or Electra conflict
• The latency stage
• The genital stage focused on sexual reawakening

Neo-Freudian Approaches

• Neo-Freudian approaches included Alfred Adler, Erik Erikson, Carl Jung, and Karen Horney
• Neo-Freudians focus more on less emphasis on sex and more focus on the social environment and effects of culture on personality and they did agree that childhood experiences matter
• Inferiority complex is person's feelings that they lack worth and don't measure up to the standards of others or of society
• Collective unconscious is a universal version of personal unconscious holding mental patterns or memory traces that are common to us

Cognitive-Behavioral Approaches

• The social learning theory is based around the psychodynamic approach that believes personality is mostly innate and built-in.
• The cognitive-behavioral approaches view personality more that personalities are bundles of habits acquired by classical and operant conditioning, and based on the person's expectations, beliefs, and interpretation of those experiences
• Personality can vary and develops over our entire lives

Locus of Control

• Locus of control is based around beliefs about the power you have over your lives
• Internal locus of control is the belief that life outcomes are under personal control are positively related with self-esteem and use internals use more problem-focused coping
• External locus of control is the belief that luck, chance, and powerful others control behavior
• One believes that people's unhappy things in people's lives are partly due to bad luck or that people's misfortunes result from their mistakes

Humanistic Models

• Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers rejected the notion of determinism and embraced free will
• Self-actualization is proposed as core motive in personality and views human nature as inherently good and constructive
• Importance of the self-concept based on seeking confirmation of our self-concept even though other others place conditions of worth on us To be what one is, one must give up any pretense of what one should be

Traits and Heritability

• Children do resemble their biological parents
• Twin studies show that twins raised apart are similar as twins raised together and adopted siblings have very different personalities
• The importance of non-shared environment and childhood personality, not so much on adult personality
• Shared environments include heredity factors, genetics, and personality
• Biological models explain differences in our personalities inherited predispositions and physiological processes
• Behavior-genetic methods attempt to disentangle the effects of genetic factors, shared environmental factors, and nonshared environmental factors, and twin and adoption studies are used to do this
• Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart showed more similarity between identicals than between fraternals because at least some traits are genetically determined

Temperaments

• Temperaments appears very early in life suggesting a biological basis
• Babies can be categorized into one of three temperaments such as easy, difficult, or slow to warm up

Trait Models

• Trait models are interested primarily in describing and understanding the structure of personality and focus on individual differences along personality dimensions or traits
• Factor analysis is used to reduce diversity of personality descriptors to underlying traits and only five traits have repeatedly appeared in such studies

The Five Factor Model

• The Five Factor Model contains five traits known as the Big Five: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, scored on a continuum

Predictive Ability

• Traits predict many important real-world behaviors like job performance, grades, physical health, and life span
• Relatively similar traits are seen across cultures but predictive validity may depend on whether it is an individualist or collectivist society

Effects of Culture

• Culture is one of the most important environmental factors that influences personality
• Universal and culture-specific aspects account for variation in personalities
• Asian cultures, being collectivist, tend to be less extroverted
• Central and South American cultures tend to score higher on openness to experience
• Europeans tend to score higher on neuroticism
• Researchers found three distinct regional personality clusters in the United States: friendly and conventional (Upper Midwest and Deep South), relaxed, emotionally stable, and creative (West), and stressed, irritable, and depressed (Northeast).
• One explanation for this is selective migration of move to places that people believe are compatible with their personalities

Structure Personality Test

• Structured personality test are self-report paper-and-pencil tests of questions with fixed ways of responding that is mainly used for hiring decisions or diagnosing psychological disorders
• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is the most researched test with MMPI-2-RF having 338 true-false questions, 10 basic scales, 3 validity scales to detect distorted responses
• L (Lie) detects impression management
• F (Frequency) detects malingering
• K (Correction) clinically defensive scale

Testing Biases

• Projective Tests like the Rorschach is heavily relies on projection to assess unconscious process by having the person examine and interpret ambiguous stimuli
• Barnum effect is the tendency to accept high base rate descriptors as accurate
• Important to avoid falling prey to all-purpose descriptions by being aware of all-purpose descriptions that could apply to anyone, your own selective preceptions, and flattery
• Personality assessment can be useful only if using valid, reliable instruments