Personality Theories and Measurement

Exploring Personality: Theories and Measurement

• Personality is defined as reasonably consistent patterns of emotions, motives, and behavior that differentiate individuals.

Theoretical Perspectives on Personality

• Several perspectives offer insights into understanding personality.

Psychodynamic Perspective

• Pioneered by Sigmund Freud, this perspective emphasizes unconscious conflicts in shaping personality.
• Freud's theory includes levels of awareness: conscious, preconscious, and unconscious.
• The structure of personality consists of the Id, Ego, and Superego.
• Freud proposed stages of psychosexual development.
• Neo-Freudians, including Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Karen Horney, and Erik Erikson, expanded on Freud's ideas.
• They focused on concepts such as the collective unconscious, inferiority complex, and psychosocial development.

Trait Perspective

• Focuses on identifying and measuring stable personality traits.
• The "Big Five" or Five-Factor Model includes extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness to experience.

Learning-Theory Perspectives

• Highlights the role of learning in shaping personality.
• Behaviorism, associated with John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner, centers on observable behaviors and environmental influences.
• Social-cognitive theory, developed by Albert Bandura, emphasizes observational learning, cognitive processes, and self-efficacy.

Humanistic-Existential Perspective

• Emphasizes human potential, free choice, and self-fulfillment.
• Humanism emphasizes self-awareness.
• Existentialism highlights personal responsibility.
• Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs and Carl Rogers's self theory are key components.

Sociocultural Perspective

• Emphasizes the influence of ethnicity, gender, culture, and socioeconomic status on personality development.
• It explores concepts like individualism vs. collectivism and the impact of acculturation on self-esteem.

Personality Measurement

• Psychologists use various tests to measure personality.

Scientific Personality Tests

• These tests have validity (measuring what they are supposed to), reliability (stability of results), and standardization (comparison to norms).

Types of Personality Tests

• Use of objective and projective tests
• Objective tests use a forced-choice format, including standardized questionnaires like the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI).
• Projective tests present ambiguous stimuli, such as the Rorschach inkblot test and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT).

A Comprehensive Overview of Human Development Across the Lifespan

• Human development occurs across the lifespan through key stages and milestones.

Prenatal Development

• Germinal, Embryonic and Fetal stages.
• The germinal stage involves the zygote's implantation.
• The embryonic stage includes major organ systems forming.
• Fetal stage involves growth, maturation, and movement.

The Childhood Stage

• This stage sees emergence of reflexes and motor skills.
• Perceptual development involves refinement of sensory abilities.
• Cognitive development is explained through theories.
• Piaget's theory describes cognitive development through stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational.
• Vygotsky's theory emphasizes the role of social interaction and culture.
• Kohlberg's theory focuses on moral reasoning.

Adolescence

• Characterized by puberty and significant brain development.
• Frontal lobes continue to mature, impacting judgment and reasoning.
• Adolescents enter Piaget's formal operations stage, enabling abstract thinking.
• Egocentrism manifests as the imaginary audience and the personal fable.
• Moral development may reach Kohlberg's postconventional level.
• Navigating relationships with parents and peers occurs in this stage.
• Erikson's stage is ego identity vs. role diffusion.

Emerging Adulthood

• A distinct period focused on identity exploration, college attendance, and life planning, roughly ages 18-25.

Adulthood

• Divided into early, middle, and late stages, each with unique characteristics.
• Physical development peaks in early adulthood.
• Middle adulthood: Gradual physical decline and menopause in women.
• Late adulthood: Bones become brittle, skin loses elasticity, and response time slows.
• Crystallized and fluid intelligence are key cognitive concepts.
• Memory functioning may decline with age.
• Alzheimer's disease can impact intellectual functioning.
• Parenting styles influence child development and include authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and uninvolved.
• Diana Baumrind focused on restrictiveness, maturity demands, communication ability, warmth, and involvement.

Understanding Motivation, Hunger, Sexuality, and Emotion

Theories of Motivation

• Motivation is explained through motives, needs, drives, and incentives.
• A motive is a hypothetical state that activates behavior towards a goal.
• Needs, either physiological or psychological, give rise to drives.
• Incentives are external factors that satisfy needs.
• Many animals follow their instincts.
• Humanistic Theory, Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs suggests that people are motivated by a conscious desire for personal growth, with self-actualization being the ultimate goal.
• Cognitive Perspectives individuals strive to eliminate inconsistencies in their beliefs and behaviors.
• Cognitive-dissonance theory suggests that people are motivated to hold consistent beliefs and justify their behaviors.

Hunger and Eating Disorders

• Biological influences on hunger include signals from the mouth and digestive tract, blood sugar levels, and receptors in the liver.
• The hypothalamus plays a crucial role, with the ventromedial nucleus (VMN) acting as a stop-eating center and the lateral hypothalamus as a start-eating center.
• Psychological influences include the sight and aroma of food, and feelings of depression, anxiousness, or boredom.
• Factors contributing to becoming overweight include heredity, adaptive thermogenesis, obesogenic environments, lifestyle, stress, and negative emotions.
• Eating disorders are characterized by persistent disturbances in eating patterns.
• Anorexia nervosa involves extreme fear of being overweight, dramatic weight loss, and a distorted body image.
• Bulimia nervosa involves repeated cycles of binge eating and purging.

Sexuality

• Sex hormones promote the development of sex organs, regulate the menstrual cycle, and affect sex drive.
• The sexual response cycle includes the excitement, plateau, orgasmic, and resolution phases, characterized by vasocongestion and myotonia.
• Sexual orientation refers to one's romantic interests and erotic attractions (homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual). Gender identity is one's sense of being female, male, or somewhere in between.

Emotion

• Emotions are feeling states with physiological, cognitive, and behavioral components, associated with arousal of the autonomic nervous system (ANS).
• Expression of many emotions is universal.
• Facial expressions can influence emotional states through the facial-feedback hypothesis.
• James-Lange theory: emotions are by-products of physiological responses.
• Cannon-Bard theory: bodily responses and emotions are triggered simultaneously.
• Emotional labels depend on the appraisal of the situation.
• Positive psychology deals with positive emotions and factors contributing to happiness, such as genetics, socioeconomic circumstances, social relationships, religion, and attitudinal aspects like optimism.