Psychology Chapter 12: Personality Theories

Introduction to Psychology

• Topics covered include theories of personality, counseling and therapy, and psychological disorders.
• The field is designed to examine how humans think, feel, and behave.

Personality

• Personality refers to unique, relatively stable ways people think, feel, and act.
• Character involves moral and ethical value judgments about a person.
• Temperament encompasses enduring qualities people inherit at birth.

Four Perspectives in Study of Personality

• Psychodynamic theories emphasize the impact of early childhood experiences and the unconscious mind. Hidden elements of the unconscious can surface through dreams, free association, and slips of the tongue.
• Behavioristic theories (including social cognitive theory) focus on observable learning, self-efficacy, situational factors, and cognitive processes. Learning and social processes are considered influential aspects of behavior.
• Humanistic theories emphasize personal growth, free will, and subjective feelings. Personal awareness and choice are central in these theories.
• Trait perspectives center on identifying, describing, and measuring specific traits composing personality, aiming to predict future actions.

Sigmund Freud

• Founder of the psychoanalytic movement in psychology.

Divisions of Consciousness

• Preconscious mind: Information available but not currently conscious.
• Conscious mind: Aware of immediate surroundings and perceptions.
• Unconscious mind: Thoughts, feelings, and memories that are not easily brought to consciousness. These can sometimes manifest in dreams and Freudian slips.

Freud's Conception of the Personality

• The personality structure is analogous to an iceberg, with the conscious mind being the visible portion, the preconscious just beneath, and the unconscious at the deepest level of the mind. The Id, ego, and superego are part of the personality and lie within the levels of consciousness.

Freud's Theory: Parts of Personality

• Id: Present at birth, completely unconscious, operates on the pleasure principle.
• Ego: Develops out of a need to deal with reality (reality principle), mostly conscious, rational, and logical.
• Superego: Acts as a moral center.

Defense Mechanisms

• Psychological defense mechanisms are unconscious distortions of reality to reduce stress and anxiety.
  • Denial: Refusal to acknowledge or recognize a threatening situation.
  • Repression: Unconsciously pushing threatening events or memories into the unconscious mind.
  • Rationalization: Creating acceptable excuses for unacceptable behavior.
  • Projection: Unacceptable impulses or feelings are attributed to others.
  • Reaction formation: An emotional or behavioral reaction opposite to one's true feelings.
  • Displacement: Redirecting feelings from a threatening target to a less threatening one.
  • Regression: Returning to childlike patterns of responding to stressful situations.
  • Identification: Imitating someone else's behavior to cope with anxiety.
  • Compensation (substitution): Making up for weaknesses in one area by excelling in another.
  • Sublimation: Converting unacceptable impulses into socially acceptable actions.

Freud's Theory: Stages of Personality Development

• Fixation: Failure to resolve conflicts in a psychosexual stage, can lead to associated personality traits and behaviors into adulthood.
• Psychosexual stages: Five stages of personality development tied to the sexual development of the child (oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital).

OAPhaLaGE – Freud's Psychosexual Stages

• Table showing stages, ages, focus of pleasure, focus of conflict, and difficulties that can affect later life. Note these stages are not universally accepted within modern psychology.

Freud's Psychoanalysis

• Freud's term for both the theory of personality and the associated therapy.

Neo-Freudians

• Alfred Adler: Individual Psychology
• Carl Jung: Analytical Psychology
• Karen Horney: Psychoanalytical social theory
• Erik Erikson: Ego Psychology/Post Freudian Psychology

Behaviorism and Personality

• Behaviorists view personality as a set of learned responses or habits, often automatic.
• Social cognitive learning theorists underscore the influence of other people's behavior and personal expectancies on learning. These can impact future behavior.
  • Reciprocal determinism: The idea that a person's behavior can interact with both personal characteristics and the environment to determine future behavior.
  • Albert Bandura: Significant contributor in social learning theory.
  • Ivan Pavlov: Classical conditioning
  • B.F Skinner: Operant conditioning
• Self-efficacy: Belief in one's ability to succeed. It is different from self-esteem.

Counseling and Therapy

• Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT): A therapy that looks at the cycle between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to resolve issues.

Humanistic/Existential Theories of Personality

• Focus on psychological growth, free will, and personal awareness.
• Emphasize subjective feelings and choices.

Humanistic Theories of Personality

• Developed as a reaction against the negativity of psychoanalysis and the deterministic nature of behaviorism.

Roger's Theory of Personality

• Self-actualizing tendency: The drive to reach one's full potential
• Self-concept: Image of oneself based on interactions with significant others
• Self-archetype: Works with the ego to manage other archetypes, balancing the personality.
• Real self: Perception of actual characteristics, traits, and abilities.
• Ideal self: Perception of whom one should be or want to be.
• Positive regard: Warmth, affection, love, and respect from significant others.

Logotherapy (Viktor Frankl)

• Life has meaning even in difficult circumstances.
• Our primary motivation is the will to find meaning in life.
• People have the freedom to find and create meaning from their experiences.

Trait Theories of Personality

• Focus on identifying, describing, and measuring specific traits that make up personality to predict future behaviors.
• Traits are consistent, enduring ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving
• Allport: Created a list of about 200 traits.
• Cattell: Reduced the number of traits to between 16 and 23 using factor analysis.
• Surface traits: Observable aspects of a person's behavior, often considered part of the outward expression.
• The Big Five Theory: Identifies five basic personality dimensions - Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (OCEAN).

Cultural Personality

• Cultures vary along four key dimensions: individualism/collectivism, power distance, masculinity/femininity, and uncertainty avoidance.

Measuring Personality:

• Interviews: Professionals ask questions of the client; can be structured or unstructured. Halo effect is a bias when positive characteristics alter an interviewer's impressions.
• Projective tests: Unstructured stimuli (e.g., inkblots or ambiguous pictures) to elicit responses; Rorschach inkblot test and Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). These tests can be influenced by subjective factors.
• Behavioral measures: Direct observation of behaviors; rating scales and frequency counts.
• Personality inventories: Paper and pencil tests (e.g., MMPI-2, NEO-PI, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) with standardized responses used to assess personality traits.
• Online personality tests: Often lacking in quality, reliability, and validity; require professional interpretation of the results.

Early Explanations of Mental Illness

• In ancient times, holes were cut in people's heads to release evil spirits (trepanning).
• Hippocrates linked mental illness to imbalances in the body.
• In the Middle Ages, labeling the mentally ill as witches was a common practice.

Definitions of Abnormality

• Psychopathology: The scientific study of abnormal behavior.
• Psychological disorders encompass behaviors that cause significant distress, hinder functioning, harm oneself or others, or are statistically rare or deviate from social norms.
• Important considerations include situational context, subjective discomfort, and maladaptive behaviors.
• Sociocultural perspective highlights cultural relativity—the importance of considering cultural context—and culture-bound syndromes.
• Biological model suggests abnormal behavior originates from biological changes (chemical, structural, genetic) in the body.

Psychological Viewpoints of Psychopathology

• Psychoanalytic: Repressed conflicts and unconscious urges contributing to abnormal behavior.
• Behaviorist: Abnormal behaviors are learned responses.
• Cognitive: Irrational beliefs and illogical thoughts causing abnormal behaviors.

Types of Disorders

• Major depression is a very common mood disorder.
• Anxiety disorders include excessive or unrealistic anxiety & fear (phobias, panic attacks, OCD, PTSD, generalized anxiety).
• Mood disorders feature severe and disturbed mood (major depression, bipolar disorder). Affect is an emotional reaction.
• Eating disorders (anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa) involve extreme eating patterns.
• Dissociative disorders involve breaks in conscious awareness, memory, identity, or combinations of these.
• Schizophrenia is characterized by disordered thinking, bizarre behavior, and hallucinations, often differentiating between fantasy and reality.
• Personality disorders are persistent, rigid, and maladaptive behavior patterns interfering with normal social interaction. Examples include antisocial and borderline personality disorders.