PSYUX2234 Tutorial 2 Notes PDF

PSYU/X2234 TUTORIAL 2 NOTES Please read these notes before the second tutorial (these are assessable). The significance of personality theory The study of personality is arguably one of the most fascinating and important areas of psychological research. Although there are diffuse understandings o...

PSYU/X2234 TUTORIAL 2 NOTES Please read these notes before the second tutorial (these are assessable). The significance of personality theory The study of personality is arguably one of the most fascinating and important areas of psychological research. Although there are diffuse understandings of the word ‘personality’, theories of personality tend to focus on both characterising and understanding human nature. For example, theories of personality address issues such as basic human motivation (e.g., are humans innately aggressive, or is this something that develops due to environmental influences?), the nature of ‘mind’ (e.g., how conscious are we of our mind’s workings?), and describing and understanding the characteristics of ‘persons’ (e.g., why are some people more outgoing and sociable, whilst others more withdrawn and shy?). To some extent, personality theory can be seen as a synthesis of all the other domains studied within psychology, whether it be that of social psychology, neuroscience, the study of cognition or the study of motivation. The importance of understanding human nature and the ‘person’ is manifested in several concrete ways. Our understanding of human nature guides, in part, what we consider to be ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ behaviour and what we consider to be ‘therapeutic cure’. Our understanding of personality also guides (again, in part) how we think children should be raised. Furthermore, any understanding of human nature has certain social implications. If you believe that humans (or at least some humans) are aggressive ‘by nature’ (that is, aggressiveness is some how a part of their genetic make-up), then this may influence your view on how society should respond to violent offenders (for instance, you might believe that there is no chance for rehabilitation). In general, then, personality theories guide how we both understand and explain the behaviour of others. It is probably fair to say that each of us holds our own theory of personality (our own view of human nature), whether implicitly or explicitly, that helps us understand people around us. Today’s exercise asks you to understand a case study from two different theoretical perspectives. After developing each interpretation try and identify strengths and weaknesses of each respective position and finally decide whether you believe that one theory better explains the case than the other. Psychoanalytic theory Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis is a psychodynamic theory of personality that focuses on the dynamics, or forces, within the mind. These forces are our desires, needs (or what Freud calls ‘instinctual drives’), and feelings, which, according to Freud, motivate all our thinking and behaviour. Additionally, rather than being harmonious, unified ‘persons’, psychoanalysis notes that we may often have conflicting desires. To give an example, a person may intensely desire to lose weight but also desire to eat chocolate, or a person may desire to give up smoking whilst at the same time wishing that they could continue. To some extent psychoanalysis is a theory of psychological conflict because it is our personal conflicts, particularly those during childhood and development, which determines who we are as persons later in life.  Psychoanalysis also emphasises the importance of emotions (or affects) in our lives. In particular anxiety has an important position because Freud believes that we do not only respond with anxiety to external situations (e.g., such as anxiety at the prospect of exams) but also to our own desires, if they threaten to lead to negative consequences. For example, a child might feel extremely anxious when they desire to hurt a younger sibling because he or she may believe that the desire will lead to the loss of the parents’ love. Depending on the degree of anxiety (amongst other factors), certain defence mechanisms might come into play to cope with this. Defence mechanisms are methods of coping with our own threatening desires and the unpleasurable feelings that may be associated with them. According to Freud, these defences mostly occur unconsciously and often produce effects that prevent us knowing, or being conscious of, aspects of our own personalities that cause us anxiety. To some extent these operations are part of our normal functioning, but when they become entrenched during childhood (when the mind is still primitive and particularly vulnerable) they can lead to long-term maladaptive behaviours. Freud never produced a definitive list of defence mechanisms, but some of the ones he identified include: Repression: This is the forcible rejection of desires from conscious awareness because they cause anxiety. For example, a child may suddenly have an intense desire for the parent to die (say, during a temper tantrum), which in turn causes intense anxiety. The automatic removal of this desire from awareness (like a reflex ‘flight’ response) is repression. To some extent, it is the basis or product of many defence mechanisms. Reaction-formation: This involves forming an attitude opposite to wishes that are felt to be threatening. For example, someone who is staunchly anti-homosexual or homophobic may in fact be defending against their own unconscious homosexual impulses that they feel threatened by. Projection: This involves refusing to see or accept undesirable wishes in oneself and instead attributing them to other people. For example, someone who sees themselves as a person of high morals may accuse the society around them of being wicked and immoral, preventing them from recognising their own ‘immoral’ feelings. Displacement: This involves changing the target of a desire if the original target seems threatening. For example, a worker may wish to hit his or her boss but not express this due to fear of being fired. Instead, the worker goes home and directs their hostility towards a family member instead. Alternatively, a student may have a hostile desire towards his or her father from childhood, which was never expressed due to fear of punishment. Instead, the student displaces the hostility by being rude and abusive towards a less threatening substitute such as their teacher. See also ‘transference’ below. Sublimation: This involves channelling a desire felt to be unacceptable into a socially acceptable outlet. For example, a person with socially unacceptable aggressive impulses may express these in a socially acceptable outlet such as sport. This is generally considered the most adaptive of defences. Rationalisation: This is a defence where a rational, acceptable explanation is created for some behaviour when the real ‘reason’ cannot be accepted. For example, a person who believes that it is important to do well in exams but fails may rationalise their performance by saying that the exam was unfair, or that he/she was sick etc., rather than admitting that they, in fact, might be responsible. A short word on the meaning of ‘unconscious’ Freud did not use the term ‘sub-conscious’ because he believed that it implied that there was a conscious mind under consciousness (as with so-called cases of split personality). Instead, he wrote of unconscious mental processes. If something is unconscious then it is simply not known (i.e., we are not conscious of it). Freud believes that we are generally not aware of a lot of the workings of the mind. For example, we typically have no conscious awareness of the processes that result in dream-production, and neither do we have conscious awareness of how our brains produce our everyday thoughts. Furthermore, we are not necessarily conscious of our own motives; defence mechanisms can prevent us knowing the real ‘reasons’ for why we behave the way we do. Freud referred to everything that is prevented from conscious awareness due to defensive processes as the ‘dynamic unconscious’. Psychoanalysis & sexuality Sexuality has an important place in psychoanalysis because Freud believes that it is primarily ‘sexual impulses’ that are targeted by our defences. From the lectures you should be aware that Freud meant more here than simply adult conceptions of sexuality (intercourse, etc). Instead, for Freud sexuality includes our basic love relations with others (including friendship), as well as bodily pleasures associated with bodily processes (Freud’s theory is very much a bodily-based theory). Although Freud believes that the road to maturity involves the renunciation or repression of infantile sexuality, he also believes that one stage is particularly influential. This involves the Oedipus complex, named after the Greek myth in which Oedipus kills his father and marries his mother. Freud believes that children around the age of four or five typically desire their parent of the opposite sex in an intimate but not ‘adult sexually’ way (e.g., they might want to ‘marry’ their mummy or daddy), but due to fear of the other parent (in the little boy’s case, Freud believes that the child develops ‘castration anxiety’, a fear of losing the penis), they repress the sexual and hostile desires towards either parent and identify with the same sex parent. However, says Freud, these repressed oedipal desires influence our later love relations so that whoever we fall in love with in later life is a replacement for the renounced first love objects (i.e., our parents). Although Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex (and castration anxiety) may appear antiquated (and/or simply absurd), more recent conceptions view the Oedipus complex as simply the stage where children renounce their parents as intimate love-objects. If you think about it, most of us in infancy have had a very emotionally and physically intimate relationship with our parents (consider breast-feeding, for instance), but in the course of our development we have left behind such avenues of intimacy and for the most part directed our love interests outside of the family. Transference is a form of displacement whereby our feelings towards significant others may be displaced or shifted onto other people who we encounter later in life. Put a little differently, it is a process where our past relationships affect our present ones. For example, if we grow up in a house terrified by our father then that may influence how we feel towards other males later in life who are in a similar position (e.g., a fear of one’s male boss). Social-cognitive theory Social-cognitive theory, most often associated with Albert Bandura, develops B. F. Skinner’s learning theory approach, whilst emphasising the role of social variables (a socio-behaviouristic approach). The social environment primarily shapes who we are as persons. However, although the role of the external environment is important, social-cognitive theory also emphasises that cognitive processes (thought processes such as thinking, believing, anticipating etc) are important for understanding human learning (remember, Skinner wanted to explain behaviour without reference to inner cognitive processes). For Bandura, our understanding of the environment affects the way we learn and behave. Although social-cognitive theory is a departure from Skinner’s radical behaviourism, the theory still appreciates the basic principles of conditioning espoused by Skinner. In Skinner’s theory, behaviour occurs as a response to the environment, and the consequences following that behaviour determine whether the behaviour is more or less likely to occur again. Reinforcement refers to a consequence that makes a response more likely to occur (i.e., reinforce = strengthen). For example, receiving a reward after behaving a certain way will probably increase the likelihood of performing that same behaviour. Punishment, on the other hand, is a consequence that makes a response less likely to occur. For example, a parent punishes a child in the hope that this will make the child less likely to perform certain behaviours. There are two varieties of reinforcement, positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that negative reinforcement refers to punishment, a mistake often made in movies. Following Skinner, positive and negative are best understood here mathematically: positive reinforcement is a consequence that increases the likelihood of a behaviour re-occurring by adding something (generally ‘good’) after the behaviour. For example, if I say ‘hello’ to you and you give me $10 (that is, the $10 is added after my behaviour), then it is probably more likely to increase my saying ‘hello to you’ behaviour. Again, if a rat receives a food reward after pressing down on a bar (the food is added after the response) then bar-pressing behaviour may be more likely to increase. Negative reinforcement, on the other hand, increases the likelihood of a response re-occurring by subtracting something (generally ‘bad’) after the behaviour. Consider the following: I’m trying to sleep and there is a loud party across the road; I go over and ask them to turn the music down, and they oblige (that is, they subtract the noise after my behaviour). I will probably be more likely to ask them to turn down the music in future similar situations. Or to give another example: If I have a headache and I take a pill that takes away the pain (i.e., subtracts it), then I will be more likely to take that pill again the next time I have a headache. However, Bandura’s work differs from Skinners’ insofar as Bandura believes that people can learn without direct reinforcement and punishment occurring as consequences for their own actions. In particular, we can learn through observing others. Other people can act as models for us to imitate. As you may know from the lectures, a child viewing an adult (the model) behaving aggressively to an inflatable ‘Bobo’ doll will tend then to imitate the model’s aggressive behaviour, in the absence of any foreseeable rewards. Similarly, young boys and girls may imitate the behaviour of the mother or father, without being directly reinforced for behaving that way. Such imitation provides an account of how children (or adults) learn new behaviours, and such new behaviours may then go on to be either reinforced or punished. For example, a child exposed to parents who express racist attitudes may imitate their parents’ attitudes first, and in turn may then be reinforced or rewarded for behaving that way. People also learn through observing the consequences of the actions of others (vicarious learning). If we observe a person being rewarded for acting in a certain way then we may behave in the same way since we may expect the same reinforcement to occur to us as well. For example, if we see someone receive a reward for helping someone then we might expect the same reward if we behave in the same way. On the other hand, if we see someone being punished as a consequence for his or her actions then we can learn from that too. For instance, if we see someone else run out across the road and get hit by a car then that may be enough for us to learn not to run across the road ourselves. Another important aspect of Bandura’s theory is self-efficacy. This is the degree to which we feel competent (or efficacious) and in control of our own lives and actions. A person with high self-efficacy feels like he or she is in control and can cope with situations, and such people generally feel good about themselves. On the other hand, a person who doesn’t feel in control or competent (i.e., has low self- efficacy) may be more prone to experiencing anxiety and other disorders, since he or she feels less able to cope with any new challenging situation. A person’s sense of self-efficacy develops as a result of several factors, including via what they have actually managed to achieve, comparison with other’s accomplishments, and through praise and criticism from others. As you can see, social-cognitive theory is less complex than psychoanalysis and discusses types of learning that have been demonstrated in experimental studies. Whether it satisfactorily explains the complexities of human nature is another question, and you will have the opportunity in class of applying both psychoanalysis and social-cognitive theory to a case study and deciding for yourself, which, if any, is the better theory. Important limitations of this demonstration Today’s exercise was primarily designed to give you an experience of understanding human behaviour from two different theoretical perspectives. However, a general problem for such interpretations is that they are deduced ‘after the fact’, and are open to the charge of being exercises in ‘confirmation bias’. That is, the facts are interpreted in such a way so as to fit the theory, rather than the theory being made to fit the facts. Furthermore, with such cases it is difficult to evaluate whether the interpretation is correct or not, a problem that is especially pronounced when you have two competing theories, each claiming to ‘explain’ the case. These have been long standing criticisms of psychoanalytic interpretation in general, and this problem inspired other theorists, such as Bandura, to develop theories that are more amenable to experimental testing (you may already be familiar with Bandura’s famous ‘Bobo doll’ studies of children imitating violent adults). Having said this, although Freud relied on the case study method, as do many psychoanalysts today, this is not to say that psychoanalysis is untestable, as is often claimed. Literally thousands of experiments have been conducted to test psychoanalytic claims, and at present Freud’s theory is being debated within neuroscientific research circles. Furthermore, the history of psychology has numerous accounts of case studies that have served as the basis for scientific knowledge. This has been particularly so with neuroscientific case studies (you may have heard of the case of Phineas Gage whose personality was never the same again after a steel bar shot up through his skull whilst working on a railway). In isolation, however, such case studies, whether they be neuroscientific or psychoanalytic, are limited because they tend to lack rigorous scientific control and any interpretation may be open to personal bias. However, such case studies may still be scientifically useful when they are not used in isolation and serve as a basis for formulating theories and further testable hypotheses. Further Information (non-assessable) A) How might other Personality theories interpret Troy’s case? As you already know from lectures, there are many theories of personality and each could focus on different aspects of Troy’s case and provide a different interpretation of his behaviour. The following are brief accounts of some alternative interpretations, which encapsulate the main features of each of the theories. Carl Rogers’ Humanistic theory Carl Roger’s would emphasise Troy’s basically healthy and naturally growth directed motivation: Troy was originally loving, caring and sensitive. However, Troy received conditional positive regard from his parents. He was only accepted as a person when he behaved in an ‘ideal’ way (tough, uncaring and macho) and not when he acted as his caring ‘real self’. As a result, Troy’s original natural sensitive ‘real self’ became replaced and covered over by an ‘ideal’ of being cold, tough, and uncaring. Troy’s relationships could be considered attempts to find his real, caring true nature, but these attempts tend to fail since his real self is perceived to be a threat to the identity that he has formed. Eysenck’s Personality Trait & Type Approach Hans Eysenck would focus on Troy’s personality traits. Troy appears fairly outgoing and sociable (extroverted), but also easily angered and temperamental (emotionally reactive). As such, he would correspond to the classical ‘choleric’ personality, which Eysenck believes has specific nervous system correlates (low ARAS arousal and high visceral brain activity). Although the specific form of Troy’s character requires shaping by the environment, Eysenck would believe that he was disposed at birth to form this particular personality temperament. Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory George Kelly would look at Troy’s personality in terms of Troy’s experience and the ‘constructs’ (or belief-systems) that he has developed that help him to understand the world and other people. Troy’s feelings and attitude towards women could be seen as determined by his expectations that women will reject him, constructed from his experience with his own mother. Since he expects all women to be unreliable, he has a tendency to break-off his relationships early. This understanding of the world and relationships has become a core, self-defining construct for him, and his anxiety at the intimate relationship he has later in life would result from the perception that his world-view needs to change. What does all of this illustrate? Although we are dealing with a fictitious case, and the interpretations of the character’s behaviour quite superficial, one question that arises is, ‘how do we know which theory is right?’ Since all the theories appear to be able to ‘explain’ the character’s behaviour to varying degrees we need to be able to ascertain which, if any, is the better theory. There are two paths open to the scientific researcher her. The first involves conceptual analysis of the theories to determine whether they are in fact coherent and stand up to critical logical scrutiny. For those that do, then testable hypotheses can be deduced from the theory and subjected to empirical research.