Personality Theories Overview

Personality Lecture Overview

• Personality is defined as an individual's unique, relatively stable, and enduring patterns of thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Lecture Overview

• Trait Theories: Focus on relatively stable personal characteristics.
  • Early trait theorists include Allport, Cattell, and Eysenck.
  • A modern trait theory is the Five-Factor Model (FFM) by McCrae & Costa, which describes personality in terms of five dimensions: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
• Psychoanalytic/Psychodynamic Theories: Explore how unconscious mental forces influence behavior.
  • Freud is the founding father of psychoanalytic theory.
• Humanistic Theories: Emphasize each individual's unique way of perceiving and interpreting the world.
  • Key figures include Rogers and Maslow.
• Biological Theories: Investigate the role of brain structures, neurochemistry, and genetics in personality.
• How Sex, Gender, and Culture Affect Personality: Analyze the impact of biological sex, social gender roles, and cultural values on personality development.

Trait Theories

• Traits: Relatively stable and consistent personal characteristics.
  • Early theorists: Allport, Cattell, Eysenck.
  • Modern theory: Five-Factor Model (FFM) by McCrae & Costa, with five dimensions:
    • Openness: ranging from originality and imagination to conventionality and practicality.
    • Conscientiousness: ranging from responsibility and organization to irresponsibility and laziness.
    • Extraversion: ranging from talkativeness and outgoingness to quietness and passivity.
    • Agreeableness: ranging from trust and kindness to suspicion and ruthlessness.
    • Neuroticism: ranging from anxiety and moodiness to calmness and even-temperedness.

Evaluating Trait Theories

• Pro: Describes and organizes personality characteristics using a limited number of traits (FFM).
• Con: Fails to explain trait development, change, and which traits change. Ignores situational effects.

Psychoanalytic/Psychodynamic Theories

• Psychoanalytic theories attempt to understand individual differences by exploring unconscious mental forces.
• The founding father of psychoanalytic theory is Freud.
• Levels of Consciousness:
  • Conscious: thoughts in your current mind.
  • Preconscious: thoughts that can easily become conscious.
  • Unconscious: thoughts beyond normal awareness.
• Personality Structures:
  • Id (innate): operates on the pleasure principle.
  • Ego (rational): operates on the reality principle.
  • Superego (conscience): operates on the morality principle.
• Defense Mechanisms: The ego's strategies to reduce anxiety by distorting reality.
  • Examples: repression, rationalization, projection.

Evaluating Psychoanalytic Theories

• Pro: Highlights the unconscious influences on behavior and the development of defense mechanisms.
• Con: Difficult to test empirically, overemphasizes biology and the unconscious, lacks adequate empirical support, and is sexist and lacks cross-cultural support.

Humanistic Theories

• Each individual creates their personality based on their unique way of perceiving and interpreting the world.
• Rogers' Self-Concept: Emphasizes the importance of the self-concept, and the matching of self-concept to one's experienced life.
  • Congruence (positive match): Well-adjusted individuals.
  • Incongruence (poor match): Poorly adjusted individuals.
• Conditional vs. Unconditional Positive Regard:
  • Conditional: Positive behavior contingent on certain actions.
  • Unconditional: Positive behavior regardless of actions.
• Maslow's Self-Actualization: Individuals have an innate tendency towards personal growth and realizing their full potential.
• Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: A pyramid of human needs, from basic physiological needs to self-actualization needs.

Evaluating Humanistic Theories

• Pro: Many humanistic concepts are integrated into therapy.
• Con: Naive assumptions, poor testability, limited evidence, and a narrow focus.

Biological Theories

• Personality is affected by several factors including three main contributors:
  • Brain Structures
    • frontal lobe.
  • Neurochemistry
    • important chemicals; neurotransmitters & hormones.
  • Genetic Factors
• Biopsychosocial Model: Genetic factors, Nonshared environmental factors, Shared environmental factors, and Unknown factors play a role in shaping personality. (40-50%, 27%, 7%, and 16-26% respectively).

How Sex, Gender and Culture Affect Personality

• Sex: Refers to biological differences in maleness and femaleness, including physical anatomy, secondary sex characteristics, and brain differences.
• Gender: Refers to psychological and sociocultural meanings added to biological sex. This has an impact on almost every aspect of an individual's life in forming their personality.
  • Examples: Gendered differences in math skills, aggression levels, and parental interaction with children.
• Gender Roles: Societal expectations for appropriate male, and female behavior.
• Culture:
  • Individualistic cultures: Emphasize the individual's needs and goals.
  • Collectivistic cultures: Emphasize the needs and goals of the group.

Personality Assessment

• Interview:
  • Structured interview: Uses a prearranged plan of questions.
  • Unstructured interview: Conversation is informal with topics discussed as they arise.
• Limitations of Interviews: Halo effect (making a favorable first impression influencing evaluation).
• Direct Observation: Assessing behavior through direct surveillance in a variety of situations.
• Other Assessments:
  • Behavioral assessment: Recording the frequency of specific behaviors.
  • Situational test: Creating real-life situations to stimulate someone's reactions.
  • Paper-and-pencil questionnaires: Measures consisting of questions to reveal personality aspects. Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2) is a well-known example.
• Reliability: Does a test give similar scores each time it is given to the same person?
• Validity: Does the test measure what it claims to measure?

Projective Tests

• Psychological tests that use ambiguous or unstructured stimuli, so the person needs to make up stories or describe the stimuli/images.
  • Example: Rorschach Inkblot Test, Thematic Apperception Test (TAT).