Understanding Personality Traits and Mechanisms

Introduction to Personality

• Personality consists of psychological traits and mechanisms within an individual.
• These traits are organized, relatively enduring, and influence interactions with and adaptations to intraphysic, physical, and social environments.
• Traits characterize differences between individuals.
• Traits describe average trends, helping to describe, explain, and predict behavior.

Process of Personality

• Input (sensitivity to environmental info) --> Decision rule (consider concrete options) --> Output (guides behavior).
• Different traits affect environmental interaction; traits are not always active.

Traits vs. States

• Traits, such as a tendency towards anger, differ from states, such as being angry.
• Psychological traits and mechanisms are not randomly associated, such as desire for food vs. desire for intimacy.
• Traits can significantly affect an individual's life.
• Person-environment interaction occurs through perceptions, selections, evocations, and manipulations:
• Perceptions: Interpreting situations.
• Selection: Choosing situations.
• Evocations: Generating reactions in others.
• Manipulations: Intentionally influencing others.
• Adaptive functioning, goal achievement, adjustment, and problem-solving are central to personality
• Human behavior is functional and purposeful, even if maladaptive, as seen in high neuroticism.
• Adaptation happens in response to challenges encountered in physical environments,
• Social environments pose adaptive challenges, with personality influencing what is important.
• Intrapsychic environments are internal realities of memories, dreams, and fantasies to which individuals adapt.

Three Levels of Personality

• Human nature (like all others): psychological traits and mechanisms typical of humans, common to most.
• Individual and group differences (like some others): psychological traits and mechanisms that differentiate groups of people.
• Uniqueness of the individual (like no others): personal qualities not shared with anyone else.

The Role of Personality Theories

• A divide exists between the analysis of human nature (grand theories) and the analysis of groups and individual differences (contemporary research).
• Good theories provide a guide for researchers, organize known results, and make predictions.
• There is no single personality theory, instead use standards for evaluating theories:
• Comprehensiveness: Explains many facts and observations.
• Heuristic value: Guides new discoveries.
• Testability: Provides empirically testable predictions.
• Parsimony: Contains few premises and assumptions.
• Compatibility and Integration: Does not violate known laws across domains.

Assessment in Personality Measures: Data Sources

• Self-report data (S data) includes emotions, feelings, and states.
• Structured (true/false, Likert Scale, forced choice) or unstructured ("tell me about...").
• Honesty can be an issue.
• Observer report data (O data) offer access to information not available otherwise, such as impressions and reputations. Use multiple observers for average inter-rater reliability.
• Test data (T data) uses standardized tests to assess behavior in specific situations.
• Limitations include reactivity (altering responses), comprehension problems, and researcher bias.
• Life outcome data (L data) is information on events and activities available to the general public, e.g., childhood tantrums predicting military rank.

Issues in Personality Assessment

• Agreement among different data sources is not typically high.
• Disagreement can come down to:
• Alternative measures of the same construct.
• Measurements of different phenomena in different contexts.
• A solution for imperfect reliability of personality measurement is triangulation.

Reliability Estimation

• Repeated measures: test-retest reliability.
• Relationship between items at the same time: internal consistency reliability.
• Agreement between observers: inter-rater reliability.

Factors Affecting Reliability

• Response biases, such as answering unrelated to item content (acquiescence, extreme responses).
• Social desirability.
• Establishing a test measures what it is designed to measure is complex and challenging:
• Types of validity:
• Content
• Criterion: predictive and concurrent validity
• Construct: convergent and discriminant/divergent validity
• Apparent
• Generalizability is the degree to which a measure maintains validity across contexts (people, situations, conditions).

Research Design in Personality

• Experimental methods:
• Conditions should include manipulation of independent variables.
• Equivalence between groups should use randomization.
• Correlational studies use Pearson's correlation coefficient (-1 to 1).
• Case studies:
• Provide in-depth knowledge of a person.
• Are helpful for deriving theories.

Psychoanalytic Approaches to Personality

• Freud specialized in neurology, used hypnosis with Charcot, and treated nervous disorders.
• Developed theory of dreams.
• Psychoanalytic theory assumes the:
• Existence of psychic energy motivates human activity and follows the law of conservation.
• Basic instincts are sex (eros or libido) for satisfying needs and aggression (thanatos) to destroy.
• Unconscious motivation influences behavior without awareness.
• Conscious includes current thoughts, feelings, and perceptions.
• Preconscious is information retrievable into awareness.
• Unconscious is inadmissible information hidden from conscious vision.
• Psychic determinism proposes that nothing happens by chance; everything is an expression of the mind.
• Mental problems stem from repressed unconscious motivations.
• Structure of personality describes instinctual behavior:
• ID: Reservoir of psychic energy, seeking immediate pleasure.
• EGO: Executive of personality, limits reality, engages in secondary thinking.
• SUPEREGO: Upholder of societal values, internalizes morals, causes guilt.
• Dynamics of personality occurs when anxiety is an unpleasant experience that one tries to overcome:
• Objective anxiety: Response to real external threat.
• Neurotic anxiety: Response to ID and ego conflict.
• Moral anxiety: Response to superego and ego conflict.
• Defense mechanisms protect the ego, minimize anxiety:
• Denial: Refusing to acknowledge facts.
• Displacement: Redirecting impulses.
• Rationalization: Generating acceptable explanations.
• Reaction Formation: Suppressing unacceptable desires.
• Projection: Attributing unacceptable impulses to others.
• Sublimation: Channeling impulses into acceptable activities.
• Defense mechanisims are a generation of distinctive indicators of mature adulthood.
• Psychosexual stages of development:
• Stages involve conflict resolution that shapes personality.
• Fixation is unresolved conflict.
• Oral stage (0-18 months): pleasure and tension reduction with breast or bottle withdrawal as the main conflict.
• Fixation leads to nail biting, overeating, smoking, and hostile personality.
• Anal stage (18-3 years): sexual pleasure from sphincter control.
• Fixation leads to excessive self-control
• Phallic stage (3-5 years): sexual desire and Oedipal conflict.
• Penis envy leads to the Electra complex.
• Latency stage (6+ years): Focus on learning abilities and social interaction.
• Genital stage (puberty+): Sexual awakening and achieving libido gratification.

Personality of Psychoanalysis

• Psychoanalysis reconstructs personality by releasing and empowering a person to deal with unconscious desires and memories realistically.
• Techniques to reveal unconscious:
• Free association: Verbalizing whatever comes to mind.
• Dream interpretation: Freud viewed dreams as a form of messages.
  • Manifest content is the dream itself.
  • Latent content reveals underlying elements within a dream.
• Projective techniques: Projective tests are based on projection of personality.
• Contributions of Freud include mind understanding, the "talking cure," psychoanalytic ideas and everyday language.
• This viewpoint has been criticized over the lack of contemporary research conducted, as well as sexual urges in child development and Freud's view of women.

Contemporary Issues: Neo-Analytic Movement

• Classical psychoanalysis (1900s) has been modified, postulating it is similar to modern psychoanalysis.
• This includes a broad role of unconscious conflict and the impact of childhood.
• Contemporary research addresses repression of memories and the role of therapist bias.

Contemporary Views of the Unconscious

• Classical psychoanalytic theory centered on motivation. Current thought proposes both cognition and motivation from different viewpoints.
• Ego psychology focuses on the importance of the ego.
• Erikson's eight stages of development:
• Identity crises or psychosocial crises
• Infant stage (1 year): Basic trust vs. mistrust.
• Toddler stage (2-3 years): Autonomy vs. shame and doubt.
• Pre-schoolers stage (3-5 yrs): Initiative vs. guilt.
• Grade Schooler stage: Industry vs. inferiority.
• Teenager stage (12-20 yrs): Identity vs role comfusion.
• Young Adult stage: Intimacy vs. isolation.
• Middle age Adult: Generativity vs stagnation.
• Older Adult: Ego intergrity and despait.

Object Relations Theory

• Emphasizes social relationships originating in childhood.
• Early childhood attachment and importance of bond with primary caregiver:
• Secure attachment (66%)
• Anvious or ambivalent attachment (14%)
• Avoidant or evasive attachment (20%)
• First experiences have a great influence on relationships later in life.
• Secure, Ambivilant and Avoidant relationship styles develop from those childhood experiences.

Motives and Personality

• Motives are internal states that activate and direct behavior toward specific goals.
• They differ in type, quantity, intensity over time and exist in the intrapsychic domain as needs and urges, some even in the unconcious.
• Central ideas with dispositional psychologist:
• People have measurable traits related to strength of motives.
• Differ among individuals stable over different types of outcomes.
• Provide answers to why individuals do what they do.
• Need organizes perception and guides us to what we want and satisfy for relief
• It is organized with:
• Specific desire or intention
• Concrete set of emotions
• Specific action tendencies of accepting people.
• Can be described with names such as loyalty.

Murray's Needs

• Achievement: Master, manipulate, or organize.
• Exhibition: Be seen, heard, impress, amaze.
• Order: Arrange, clean, organize.
• Dominance: Influence, direct, control.
• Abasement: Accept criticism and submit.
• Aggression: Overcome opposition forcefully.
• Autonomy: Shake off restraint and resist.
• Blame-avoidance: Avoid humiliation.
• Affiliation: Enjoy cooperation.
• Nurturance: Take care of others.
• Succor: Receive aid from others.
• Press are aspects of the environment relevant to the need. An act of interpreting the act of perceiving meaning of what is happening is the process of apperception. An example of this is the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT).
• TAT asses both state the level of need / trait asses the level of needs with very low correlation with questionnaires when measuring the same needs.

The Big Three Motives

• Achievement (nAch): Desire to be successful with moderate difficult tasks and responsible tasks.
• Power (nPOW): Desire to control, influence, impress others while worse frustration management.
• Intimacy (nInt): Desire for strong relationships and close interactions.

Humanistic Tradition

• Emphasizes awareness of the need choice of personal responsibility with the goal/purpose of creating fulfilling lives. Need to grow and achieve one's full potential is self actualization.
• Motivation to grow and achieve one's accomplishments instead.
• Hierarchical order is satisfying lower needs to achieve highest potential while not satisfied with top level.
• Roger Contributions include anxiety that something is not right with the way one is feeling.
• Clients are never given an interpretation or direction instead generate situations for them to change from sincere and unconditional acceptance/empathy.