Understanding Self and Personality

• Self and personality are intimately related concepts; self lies at the core of personality.
• Studying self and personality helps in understanding uniqueness and similarities with others and improves understanding of behaviors in diverse settings.
• Several thinkers have analyzed the structure and function of both, leading to different theoretical perspectives today that will be introduced in this chapter.

Self and Personality

• Refer to characteristic ways people define their existence, organize experiences, and display behaviors.
• Ideas about oneself represent the self, and patterns of behavior represent the personality.
• The consistent behavior, thought, and emotion of an individual across situations and time periods characterizes their personality.
• Personality is adaptive to situations, since some features change due to internal/external demands.

Concept of Self

• A preliminary notion can be gained by completing activity 2.1
• Formed from childhood through interactions with physical and socio-cultural environments
• Parents, friends, teachers, and significant people play a vital role in shaping a child's ideas about self
• Interaction with other people, experiences, and meaning given to them serve as the basis of self
• Structure of self is modifiable in light of own experiences and the experiences with other people

Personal identity

• Attributes that make someone different from others.
• Includes name, qualities/characteristics, potentialities/capabilities, and beliefs.

Social identity

• Aspects that link someone to a social/cultural group or are derived from it

• Classifications may include religion, ethnicity, nationality etc...

• Self refers to the totality of an individual's conscious experiences, ideas, thoughts, and feelings regarding themselves, existing at personal and social levels.

• The dual status of self should be kept in mind, as it can be understood as both a subject and an object.

• As a subject, the self actively engages in the process of knowing itself

• As an object the self gets observed and comes to be known

Cognitive and Behavioral Aspects of Self

• Psychologists worldwide have shown interest in the study of self
• Each person has a sense of who they are and what makes them different
• Personal and social identities are retained with a feeling of safety in their stability

Self-concept

• The perception one has of themselves including competencies and attributes.
• Can be positive or negative overall, as well as positive about certain things and negative about others like athletic bravery vs academic talents.

Self-Esteem

• Value judgment made about own worth.
• Those with high self-esteem think highly of themselves, while those with low self-esteem do not.
• Self-esteem can be assessed by presenting statements and asking to indicate the extent to which they are true for someone.
• By age 6-7, children form self-esteem in academic, social, physical/athletic competence, and physical appearance areas.
• Self-esteem has a strong relationship with everyday behavior.
• Children with high academic/social self-esteem perform better academically/socially.
• Children with low self-esteem display anxiety, depression, and antisocial behavior.
• Warm and positive parenting helps develop high self-esteem.
• Parental over-helpfulness can lead to low self-esteem.

Self-Efficacy

• The extent to which people believe they control life outcomes.
• High self-efficacy is defined as believing in their ability/behaviors to handle a situation
• Derived from Bandura's social learning theory, indicating that children/adults learn by observing/imitating
• People's expectations, mastery, achievement, and convictions determine behavior and risk taken
• Strong self-efficacy allows people to select, influence, and construct circumstances and also reduces fear and can be developed through positive models and experiences.

Self-Regulation

• The ability to organize and monitor own behavior
• Those who are able to change their behavior according to the demands of the external environment are high on self-monitoring
• Many situations require resistance to pressures and self-control, possible with 'will power'
• Learning to delay gratification of needs is called self-control and is key for long-term goals.
• Indian cultural tradition provides mechanisms like fasting and non-attachment.

Psychological Techniques for Self Control

• Observation of own behavior - Provides necessary information to change or modify aspects of self
• Self-instruction - Instructions can be effective in self-regulation
• Self-reinforcement - Involves rewarding behaviors that have pleasant outcomes

Culture and Self

• Aspects of self are linked to the culture in which one lives
• Indian cultural context reveals features distinct from Western culture.
• Most important distinction is drawing the boundary between the self and the other.
• Western view has a relatively fixed boundary.
• Indian view has a shifting boundary, where self expands to fuse with cosmos/include others, then withdraws to focus on individual needs
• Western view holds clear dichotomies between self/other, man/nature, subjective/objective.
• In Western culture, the self and group are separate entities; individual members maintain individuality.
• In Indian culture, self is not separated from own group; both coexist harmoniously.
• Western cultures are individualistic, while many Asian cultures are collectivistic.

Concept of Personality

• Refers to characteristic ways of responding to situations/individuals.
• Personality refers to unique and relatively stable qualities that characterize an individual's behavior across different situations over time and is adaptive to situations.
• Allows us to predict behavior and deal with people realistically
• Characterizes individuals as they appear in most circumstances
• Consistency in behavior, thought and emotion of an individual across situations and across time periods characterizes her/his personality.
• Several terms are used to describe personality such as temperament, Trait, Disposition, Character, Habit and Values

Type Approaches

• Represent a set of expected behaviors based on similarities
• Hippocrates proposed a typology based on fluid/humor, classifying people into sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic, and choleric
• Charak Samhita classifies people into vata, pitta, and kapha based on three humoural elements (tridosha), referring to temperament (prakriti)
• There exists a typology of personality based on the trigunas (sattva, rajas, and tamas), with the dominance of one leading to a particular behavior.
• Sheldon proposed types based on body build and temperament: endomorphic (fat, relaxed, sociable), mesomorphic (muscular, energetic, courageous), and ectomorphic (thin, brainy, artistic, introvert)
• Jung grouped people into introverts (prefer being alone, avoid others, withdraw, shy) and extraverts (sociable, outgoing, drawn to people, lose themselves in social activity)
• Friedman and Rosenman classified people into Type-A (high motivation, impatient, hurried, burdened) and Type-B (absence of Type-A traits) personalities.
• Morris suggested Type-C personality (cooperative, unassertive, patient, suppresses emotions) prone to cancer
• Type-D personality (prone to depression)
• Personality typologies are too simplistic, human behaviour is highly complex and variable.

Trait Approaches

• Concerned with the description/characterization of basic components of personality and uses a smaller number of primary traits to describe personality
• Trait approach attempts to identify primary characteristics of people
• A trait is a relatively enduring attribute/quality that one individual differs from another
• Traits potentially include a range of behaviors activated according to demands of the situation
• Traits are relatively stable over time and situations, varying across strengths and combinations.

Allport's Trait Theory

• Individuals possess multiple traits that are dynamic
• Individuals approach different situations with similar plans
• Traits integrate stimuli and responses that otherwise look dissimilar.
• Used words to describe themselves and others as a basis for understanding
• Categorized traits into cardinal, central, and secondary
• Cardinal traits are highly generalized dispositions and they indicate the goal around which a person's entire life seems to revolve, e.g., Mahatma Gandhi's non-violence
• Central traits are less pervasive in effect, but still quite generalized dispositions, e.g., warm, sincere, diligent
• Secondary traits are the least generalized characteristics, e.g., likes mangoes or prefers ethnic clothes
• Reacting to situations depends on individual traits, but people with the same traits might express them differently Traits are intervening variables between stimulus and response variation elicits a different response

Cattell: Personality Factors

• Common structure on which people differ
• Tried to identify primary traits via factor analysis of descriptive adjectives
• Found 16 primary or source traits that are stable and considered building blocks
• Also found surface traits that result from the interaction of source traits
• Described source traits in terms of opposing tendencies
• Developed the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF) for personality assessment.

Eysenck's Theory

• Personality could be reduced into two dimensions. These are biologically and genetically based
• Each dimension subsumes a number of specific traits. The dimensions are
  • Neuroticism vs. emotional stability people who are neurotic. They are anxious, moody, touchy, restless and quickly lose control
  • Extraversion vs. introversion refers to the degree to which people are socially outgoing or socially withdrawn
• Later added a third dimension, called Psychoticism vs. Sociability
• Constructed the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire for the purpose of studying these dimensions of personality

Five-Factor Model of Personality

• Paul Costa and Robert McCrae examined all possible personality traits and found Big Five Factors: Openness to experience: imaginative, curious, open to new ideas vs low are rigid Extraversion : socially active, assertive, outgoing, talkative, vs shy Agreeableness : helpful, co-operative, friendly, caring, and nurturing vs hostile and self-centered Neuroticism : emotionally unstable, anxious, worried, fearful, distressed vs well adjusted Conscientiousness : achievement-oriented, dependable, responsible, prudent, hardworking vs impulsive

Psychodynamic Approach

• View that owes largely to the contributions of Sigmund Freud.
• Believed to develop this theory in the course of clinical practice
• Used free association (openly sharing thoughts), dream analysis, and analysis of errors to understand the internal mind

Levels of conscious

• Freud's theory considers the sources and consequences of emotional conflicts and the way people deal with these.
  • Consists of three levels of consciousness
  • Conscious which includes the thoughts, feelings and actions of which people are aware
  • Pre conscious, includes mental activity of which people may become aware only if they attend to it closely
  • Unconsciouswhich includes mental activity that people are unaware of
  • This approach leads to psychological conflicts

Freud's theory

• The unconscious is a reservoir of instinctive or animal drives and stores all ideas and wishes that are concealed from conscious awareness
• Much struggle to find a way to express unconscious impulses
• The basic goal of psychoanalytic therapy is to bring the repressed unconscious materials to conscious.

Structure of Personality

• Consists of Id, Ego and SuperEgo residing in our unconscious state Id deals with immediate gratification of primitive needs, sexual desires and aggressive impulses and works on the pleasure principle The Ego grows out of the Id , directing the Id towards more appropriate ways of behaving

The SuperEgo

• The moral branch of mental functioning helps control id by internalizing control
• The way the ego helps manages the Id will determine the person's stability
• He payed more attention to the life instinct also known as libido

Ego Defence Mechanism

• Reflects an attempt to deal with or escape from anxiety
• Defence Mechanism helps to reduce anxiety by distorting reality
• Repression when anxiety Provoking behaviors and thoughts are unconscious and dismissed
• Projection - People attribute their own traits to others
• Denial a person tottally refuses to accept reality
• Reaction formation person defends against anxiety by adopting behaviors opposite to her/his true feelings
• RationalizationPerson tries to make unreasonable feelings or behavior seem reasonable and acceptable

Stages of Personality Development

• Claims core aspects of personality are established early and remain stable in life only changing with great difficulty

• Consists of a 5 stage theory also known as psychosexual development

• Problems encountered at any stage will have long term effects on on going states. There are 5 unique development states;

• The oral stage where a newborn's instincts focused with the mouth and they achieve feeding through thumb sucking and babbling. They also developed a negative sense for the world during this period

• Anal stage two the three years old in a child learns the to respond to parental guidance with urination and defecation. Conflicts arise between needs and desires

• Phallic stage a child focuses on their genitals and learns their sexuality during ages four and five. Male children will experince the oedipus complex while female children will experience the electra complex. This also has the development of identification with parents.

  • The latency occurs between seven years old throughout puberty were a child will continue to grow Physically with the use of child's energy Channel into social activities

• Genital stageOccurs during which a pearson Attains maturity in psychosexual development

• Many theorists further developed the ideas following freud with differing views and opinions

Post-Freudian Approaches

• Neo-Analytic or post-freudian theories characterized by less prominence in sexual and aggressive tendencies + expansion of ego concept
• Human qualities = creativity, competence, and problem-solving abilities
• Carl Jung - Analytical Psychology Personality = Consisting of competition forces that must be balanced instead of a whole

Karen Horney: Optimism

• Discipled Adopted A More optimistic human life with emphasis on human growth in self actualization in order to challenge women as a challenge to Freud
• Psychological disorders were caused by disturbed interpersonal relationships leading to feelings in anxeity and results toward resentment
• Generates amount Children feeling and isolation

Alfred Adler: Lifestyle and Social Interest

• Human Behavior is purposeful and goal orinted. and we are able to choose and create Our goals provide motivation and help with insecurity
• Individual view from inadequacy and guilt

Erich Fromm: human Concern

• Developed theory from a social oritentation with beings who's can be understood with their relationship with others. Traits = results from desire for freedom
• Qualities develop from experiences with individuals which results in a shapened and shifted

Erik Erikson: Search for Identity

• Emphasizes ego process and that should draw attention
• Erikson argues young people must generate for themselves a central perspectives for a meaningful sense of unity and purpose

Limits

• Theories are largely based on individual case studies
• Samples from small atypical individuals
• Scientific testing Is hard for it to be submitted

Behaviorial Approach

• This approach does not give importance to the internal dynamics. The data must be defined and measurable
• Behaviorist believe and learning through responses helps and environment
• the reduction of need organized behavior this is accomplished through the re-enforcement

Cultural Approach

• Relation to to ecological environment plays The Vilo role in origins of variations
• The people view are strongly linked through rituals Demands helps to the need of adaption to the environment.

Humanist Approach

• Believed it to help in fulfilling and motivating force for personality and to it fully extend.
• Rogers believe people need toward human behavior and its choices
• Stresses an Importance relationship of self and the ideal self this helps a Pearson through satisfaction to be social

Assessment of Personality

• formal for better analysis towards the personality
• procedure Is able to validate and differentiate people
• it help to understands the procedure how to handle the situation
• self test help in measurement in the process of self test This helps promoting in training

Self Reporting

• The method required the subject to objectively help and certain items on their respective phases
• This way each test phase is able to develop on individual bases

Projective Techniques

• Are the technique to describe so for known as direct methods
• This can help uncovering their thoughts about their feelings

Behavioral Analysis

• The way a presence behavior can signify a meaningful state An observation and information from all types of testing and can test the procedures in to detail

Interview

• Involves talking and asking and being assessed in specific situations There are interviews structured or unstructured to help create better goals

Observation

Is to watch how they handle behavior this procedures cannot be done without and is for data reasons

Behaviral Rating

It will take place in industrial with Educational settings with various amount of behaviors in scale as you get rating. also suffers various imitiations

Nomination

It it often need to obtain assessment with the help of group where each Pearson must to choose one

Situational Test

• The test require the person to be with some one whom is non cooperative under pressuring testing It's require for observation after it