Personality Lecture Notes PDF

PERSONALITY FAREZADI ZAFRY FACULTY OF HEALTH SCIENCES, UiTM  LECTURE OVERVIEW  Trait Theories  Psychoanalytic/Psychodynamic Theories  Humanistic Theories  Biological Theories  How Sex, Gender and Culture Affect Personality  Personality is an individual’s unique, relatively...

PERSONALITY FAREZADI ZAFRY FACULTY OF HEALTH SCIENCES, UiTM  LECTURE OVERVIEW  Trait Theories  Psychoanalytic/Psychodynamic Theories  Humanistic Theories  Biological Theories  How Sex, Gender and Culture Affect Personality  Personality is an individual’s unique, relatively stable and enduring patterns of thoughts, feelings, and actions. TRAIT THEORIES  Traits: relatively stable and consistent personal characteristics;  Early Trait Theorists: Allport, Cattell, and Eysenck.  A modern trait theory is the five-factor model by McCrae & Costa;  Explains personality in terms of 5 dimensions “Five Factor Model” (FFM): openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism;  Openness: from original and imaginative to conventional and down-to earth;  Conscientiousness: from responsible and organized to irresponsible and lazy;  Extroversion: from talkative and outgoing to quiet and passive;  Agreeableness: from trusting and good-natured to suspicious and ruthless;  Neuroticism: from worried and moody to calm and even-tempered; EVALUATING TRAIT THEORIES  Pro: describes and organizes personality characteristics using the fewest number of traits (FFM);  Con: fails to explain why we develop certain traits, why traits sometimes change, and which traits change;  ignores situational effects; PSYCHOANALYTIC/ PSYCHODYNAMIC THEORIES  Psychoanalytic theories of personality attempt to explain individual differences by examining how unconscious mental forces interplay with thoughts, feelings, and actions;  Founding father of the psychoanalytic theory is Freud; LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS  Conscious: thoughts in our current mind;  Preconscious: thoughts that might become conscious easily;  Unconscious: thoughts that lie beyond a person’s normal awareness; PERSONALITY STRUCTURES  Id: innate; operates on the pleasure principle;  Ego: rational part of psyche; operates on the reality principle;  Superego: the conscience; operates on the morality principle; DEFENSE MECHANISMS:  The ego’s protective method of reducing anxiety by distorting reality;  Examples:  Repression: preventing painful thoughts from entering consciousness;  Rationalization: substituting socially acceptable reasons for unacceptable ones;  Projection: transferring unacceptable motives to others; PSYCHOSEXUAL STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT  Oral stage: birth-18 months  Anal stage: 18 months - 3 yrs  Phallic stage: 3-6 yrs  Latency stage: 6 yrs - puberty  Genital stage: puberty - adulthood EVALUATING PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORIES  Pro: proposes that the unconscious influences behavior;  developed defense mechanisms;  Con: difficult to test;  overemphasizes biology and unconscious forces;  has inadequate empirical support;  is sexist & lacks cross-cultural support; HUMANISTIC THEORIES:  Each individual’s personality is created out of his or her unique way of perceiving and interpreting the world. ROGERS: THE SELF-CONCEPT  Emphasized the importance of the self- concept;  Concerned with a match between the self- concept and actual experiences with life;  Conditional Positive Regard: positive behavior toward a person is contingent on behaving in certain ways;  Unconditional Positive Regard: positive behavior toward a person with no contingencies attached; MASLOW: THE SEARCH FOR SELF- ACTUALIZATION  Self-Actualization: the innate tendency toward growth that motivates all human behavior and results in the full realization of a person’s highest potential; MASLOW’S HIERARCHY OF NEEDS EVALUATING HUMANISTIC THEORIES  Pro: many concepts incorporated into therapy;  Con: have naive assumptions;  have poor testability and inadequate evidence;  narrowness; BIOLOGICAL THEORIES:  3 Major Contributors to personality:  Brain structures such as the frontal lobes;  Neurochemistry;  Genetic factors; BIOPSYCHOSOCIAL MODEL- MULTIPLE INFLUENCES ON PERSONALITY HOW SEX, GENDER AND CULTURE AFFECT PERSONALITY:  Sex refers to biological dimensions of maleness and femaleness;  Sex differences include physical anatomy, secondary sex characteristics and brain differences;  Gender refers to psychological and sociocultural meanings added to biological maleness or femaleness;  Gender influences almost every aspect of our lives and helps form our personalities;  Examples of Gender differences:  Males are slightly superior in math;  Males are more aggressive from a very early age;  Females are cuddled more by parents;  Gender role: societal expectations for appropriate male and female behavior;  Our culture also influences our personality;  Individualistic cultures emphasize the needs and goals of the individual;  Collectivistic cultures emphasize the needs and goals of the group; THE ‘SELF’ IN INDIVIDUALISTIC AND COLLECTIVISTIC CULTURES  Interview (personality): Face-to-face meeting designed to gain information about someone’s personality, current psychological state, or personal history  Unstructured interview: Conversation is informal, and topics are discussed as they arise  Structured interview: Follows a prearranged plan, using a series of planned questions  Halo effect: Tendency to generalize a favorable or unfavorable first impression to unrelated details of personality (make a good first impression)  Assessing behavior through direct surveillance  Behavioral assessment: Recording the frequency of specific behaviors  Situational test: Real-life situations are simulated so that someone’s spontaneous reactions can be observed and recorded  Paper-and-pencil measure consisting of questions that reveal personality aspects  Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2): Widely used objective personality questionnaire  Reliability: Does a test give close to the same score each time it is given to the same person?  Does the test measure what it claims to measure?  Psychological tests that use ambiguous or unstructured stimuli; person needs to describe the stimuli or make up stories about them  Developed by Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach; contains 10 standardized inkblots (the “inkblot” test)  Developed by Henry Murray, personality theorist; projective device consisting of 20 drawings (black and white cards) of various situations; people must make up stories about the drawings