Chapter 11: Personality PDF

# Chapter 11: Personality ## 11.1 What Is Personality? * Personality refers to the long-standing traits and patterns that propel individuals to think, feel, and behave in specific ways. * Personality is what makes us unique individuals. * Our personalities are thought to be long-term, stable, and...

# Chapter 11: Personality ## 11.1 What Is Personality? * Personality refers to the long-standing traits and patterns that propel individuals to think, feel, and behave in specific ways. * Personality is what makes us unique individuals. * Our personalities are thought to be long-term, stable, and not easily changed. * The word personality comes from the Latin word persona. * In the ancient world, a persona was a mask worn by an actor. ## Historical Perspectives * Hippocrates theorized that personality traits and human behaviors are based on four separate temperaments associated with four fluids ("humors") of the body: * choleric temperament (yellow bile from the liver) * melancholic temperament (black bile from the kidneys) * sanguine temperament (red blood from the heart) * phlegmatic temperament (white phlegm from the lungs) * Greek physician and philosopher Galen built on Hippocrates's theory, suggesting that both diseases and personality differences could be explained by imbalances in the humors and that each person exhibits one of the four temperaments. * Galen's theory was prevalent for over 1,000 years and continued to be popular through the Middle Ages. * In 1780, Franz Gall proposed that the distances between bumps on the skull reveal a person's personality traits, character, and mental abilities. ## 11.2 Freud and the Psychodynamic Perspective * Sigmund Freud is probably the most controversial and misunderstood psychological theorist. * Freud was the first to systematically study and theorize the workings of the unconscious mind in the manner that we associate with modern psychology. * He viewed personality as the result of our efforts to balance two competing forces: our biological aggressive and pleasure-seeking drives versus our internal (socialized) control over these drives. * He called them the id, ego, and superego. * **Id**: The id is the primitive, instinctive component of the personality. It houses the drives, instincts, and basic urges, such as impulses for hunger, thirst, and sex. * **Superego**: The superego is the moral compass that tells us how we should behave. It strives for perfection and judges our behavior, leading to feelings of pride or-when we fall short of the ideal-feelings of guilt. * **Ego**: The ego is the rational part of our personality. It's what Freud considered to be the self, and it is the part of our personality that is seen by others. Its job is to balance the demands of the id and superego in the context of reality. * **Defense Mechanisms**: Freud believed that feelings of anxiety result from the ego's inability to mediate the conflict between the id and superego. When this happens, Freud believed that the ego seeks to restore balance through various protective measures known as defense mechanisms, unconscious protective behaviors that aim to reduce anxiety. * **Levels of Consciousness**: Freud compared the mind to an iceberg, explaining that only about one-tenth of our mind is conscious, and the rest of our mind is unconscious. * **Psychosexual Stages of Development**: Freud asserted that we develop via a series of stages during childhood. He asserted that each of us must pass through these childhood stages, and if we do not have the proper nurturing and parenting during a stage, we will be stuck, or fixated, in that stage, even as adults. * **Oral stage**: pleasure is focused on the mouth. Infants receive pleasure through sucking and eating. * **Anal stage**: pleasure is focused on the anus. Children experience pleasure through bowel and bladder movements. * **Phallic stage**: pleasure is focused on the genitals. Freud believed that this stage is marked by the Oedipus complex in boys and the Electra complex in girls. These complexes involve romantic feelings towards the same-sex parent and jealousy and hatred towards the opposite-sex parent. * **Latency stage**: sexual feelings are dormant. Children focus on other pursuits, such as school and friendships. * **Genital stage**: the final stage. The person redirects urges of the previous stages towards socially acceptable partners. ## 11.3 Neo-Freudians: Adler, Erikson, Jung, and Horney * **Alfred Adler**: Proposed that our drive to compensate for feelings of inferiority is at the heart of personality. * **Erik Erikson**: Argued that personality develops throughout the lifespan and emphasized the social relationships that are important at each stage of personality. * **Carl Jung**: Believed in the collective unconscious. This is a universal version of the personal unconscious, holding mental patterns, or memory traces, which are common to all of us. * **Karen Horney**: Disagreed with Freud's ideas about the origins of personality and believed that unconscious anxiety is at the heart of personality. ## 11.4 Learning Approaches * B.F. Skinner: Believed that personality can be best explained by the reinforcements and consequences outside of the organism; in other words, people behave in a consistent manner based on prior learning. * **Albert Bandura**: Agreed with Skinner that personality develops through learning, but disagreed with Skinner's behaviorist approach because he felt that thinking and reasoning are important components of learning; in other words, he proposed a social-cognitive theory of personality. * **Social-Cognitive Theory**: Emphasizes both learning and cognition as sources of individual differences in personality. * **Reciprocal Determinism**: Cognitive processes, behavior, and context all interact. * **Observational Learning**: We learn by observing someone else's behavior and its consequences. * **Self-Efficacy**: Our level of confidence in our own abilities, developed through our social experiences. * **Locus of Control**: This refers to our beliefs about the power we have over our lives - internal or external. ## 11.5 Humanistic Approaches * **Abraham Maslow** and **Carl Rogers**: Focused on how healthy people develop. * **Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs**: Human beings have certain needs in common and that these needs must be met in a certain order. The highest need is the need for self-actualization, which is the achievement of our fullest potential. * **Carl Rogers**: Argued that self-concept (our thoughts and feelings about ourselves) is key to personality. * **Self-Actualization**: Rogers emphasized the idea that we need to achieve consistency between the ideal self (the person that you would like to be) and the real self (the person you actually are). When we achieve this consistency, it leads to a greater sense of self-worth and a healthy, productive life. ## 11.6 Biological Approaches * **Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart**: Identified the heritability of some personality traits, which refers to the proportion of difference among people that is attributed to genetics. * **Temperament**: A person's typical reaction to the world, including their activity level, starting when they are very young. ## 11.7 Trait Theorists * **Trait Theorists**: Believe personality can be understood via the approach that all people have certain traits, or characteristic ways of behaving. * **Gordon Allport**: Identified 4,500 words in the English language that could be used to describe people and organized personality traits into three categories: cardinal traits, central traits, and secondary traits. * **Raymond Cattell**: Narrowed the list of traits down to about 171 and identified 16 factors or dimensions of personality. * **The 16PF** (16 Personality Factor Questionnaire) was based on these 16 factors. * **Hans and Sybil Eysenck**: View personality as having two specific personality dimensions: extroversion/introversion and neuroticism/stability. * **The Five Factor Model**: The most popular theory in personality psychology today and the most accurate approximation of the basic trait dimensions. The five traits are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. ## 11.8 Cultural Understandings of Personality * One of the most important environmental factors that shapes your personality is the culture in which you live. * There are three approaches to studying personality in a cultural context: * **Cultural-comparative approach**: Seeks to test Western ideas about personality in other cultures to determine whether they can be generalized. * **Indigenous approach**: Develops personality assessment instruments that are based on constructs relevant to the culture being studied. * **Combined approach**: Seeks to bridge Western and indigenous psychology as a way of understanding both universal and cultural variations in personality. ## 11.9 Personality Assessment * **Personality Tests**: Techniques designed to measure one's personality. * There are two main types of personality tests: * **Self-report inventories**: Use multiple-choice items or numbered scales to assess personality. * **Projective tests**: Rely on the defense mechanism of projection to assess unconscious processes. * **Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)**: One of the most common self-report inventories, used in clinical practice, to assess personality in the workplace, and in pre-employment screening. * **The MMPI is based entirely on true/false questions. * **The MMPI-2-RF**: An updated version of the MMPI that only uses 338 questions. * **Projective Tests**: A series of ambiguous cards is shown to the person being tested, who then is encouraged to project his feelings, impulses, and desires onto the cards-by telling a story, interpreting an image, or completing a sentence. * **Rorschach Inkblot Test**: A series of symmetrical inkblot cards that are presented to a client by a psychologist, and the client is asked, "What might this be?" * **Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)**: A person taking the TAT is shown 8-12 ambiguous pictures and is asked to tell a story about each picture. * **Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)**: A person taking the TAT is shown 8-12 ambiguous pictures and is asked to tell a story about each picture.