Personality

1. Personality A person’s pattern of thinking, feeling and acting. (there are 4 theories)

2. Psychoanalytic Perspective Of Personality

3. Freud's Early Exploration into the Unconscious • Used hypnosis and free association (relax and say it all) to delve into unconscious. • Mapped out the “mental dominoes” of the patients past in a process he called psychoanalysis.

4. Freud's Personality Structure • Conscious • Preconscious • Unconscious

5. Id • Unconscious energy that drives us to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives. • Id operates on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification.

6. Superego • Part of personality that represents our internalized ideals. • Standards of judgment or our morals.

7. Ego • The boss “executive” of the conscious. • Its job is to mediate the desires of the Id and Superego. • Called the “reality principle”.

8. Freud's Stages of Psychosexual Development • Freud believed that your personality developed in your childhood. • Mostly from unresolved problems in the early childhood. • Believed that children pass through a series of psychosexual stages. • The id focuses it’s libido (sexual energy) on a different erogenous zone.

9. Oral Stage • 0-18 months • Pleasure center is on the mouth. • Sucking, biting and chewing. • Oral Fixation

10. Anal Stage • 18-36 months • Pleasure focuses on bladder and bowel control. • Controlling ones life and independence. • Anal Fixation • Anal retentive • Anal expulsive

11. Phallic Stage • 3-6 years • Pleasure zone is the genitals. • Coping with incestuous feelings. • Oedipus and Electra complexes. • Penis Envy

12. Latency Stage • 6- puberty • Dormant sexual feeling. • Cooties stage.

13. Genital Stage • Puberty to death. • Maturation of sexual interests. • Search for a life partner • Reproduction

14. Fixation • A lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage. • Where conflicts were unresolved. Orally fixated people may need to chain smoke or chew gum. Or denying the dependence by acting tough or being very sarcastic. Anally fixated people can either be anal expulsive or anal retentive.

15. Defense Mechanisms • The ego’s protective methods of reducing anxiety by distorting reality. • Never aware they are occurring. • Seven major types.

16. 1. Repression/Denial • The most common defense mechanism. • Push or banish anxiety driven thought deep into unconscious. • Why we do not remember lusting after our parents.

17. 2. Regression • When faced with anxiety the person retreats to a more infantile stage. • Thumb sucking on the first day of school.

18. 3. Reaction Formation • Ego switches unacceptable impulses into their opposites. • Being mean to someone you have a crush on.

19. 4. Projection • Disguise your own threatening impulses by attributing them to others. • Thinking that your spouse wants to cheat on you when it is you that really want to cheat.

20. 5. Rationalization • Offers self-adjusting explanations in place of real, more threatening reasons for your actions. • You don’t get into a college and say, “I really did not want to go there it was too far away!!”

21. 6. Displacement • Shifts the unacceptable impulses towards a safer outlet. • Instead of yelling at a teacher, you will take anger out on a friend by peeing on his car).

22. 7. Sublimation • Re-channel their unacceptable impulses towards more acceptable or socially approved activities. • Channel feeling of homosexuality into aggressive sports play.

23. How do we assess the unconscious? • We can use hypnosis or free association. • But more often we use projective tests.

24. Projective Tests • A personality test. • Provides an ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger projection of one’s inner dynamics. Examples Are:

25. TAT Thematic Apperception Test • A projective test which people express their inner feelings through stories they make about ambiguous scenes

26. TAT

27. Rorschach Inkblot Test • The most widely used projective test • A set of ten inkblots designed to identify people’s feelings when they are asked to interpret what they see in the inkblots.

28. The Humanistic Perspective Of Personality

29. Humanistic Psychology • In the 1960’s people became sick of Freud’s negativity and trait psychology’s objectivity. • Along came psychologists wanted to focus on “healthy” people and how to help them strive to “be all that they can be”.

30. Abraham Maslow’s Self Actualizing Person • Hierarchy of Needs • Ultimately seek self- actualization (the process of fulfilling our potential). • Maslow developed his ideas by studying what he termed “healthy people”.

31. Who did Maslow study?

32. Self-Actualized People • Problem centered rather than self-centered. Focused their energies on a particular task. Few deep relationships, rather than many superficial ones.

33. Self-Actualization • These are the qualities that make up a mature adult. • These people have found their calling in life. Is this a goal worth striving for?

34. How does a Humanistic psychologist test your personality? • You would be asked to fill out a questionnaire asking to describe yourself both as you would ideally like to be and what you actually are. When the ideal self and the way you currently see yourself are alike- you are generally happy.

35. Possible Selves What are your possible selves?

36. The Trait Perspective

37. Trait • A characteristic of behavior or a disposition to feel and act as assessed by self-reported inventories or peer reports.

38. Eysenck PersonalityQuestionnaire

39. The Big Five • Emotional Stability (calm/anxious, secure/insecure, self-satisfied/self-pitying). • Extraversion (sociable/retiring, fun-loving/sober, affectionate/reserved). • Openness (imaginative/practical, variety/routine, independent, conforming) • Agreeableness (soft-hearted/ruthless, trusting/suspicious, helpful/uncooperative). • Conscientiousness (organized/disorganized, careful/careless, disciplined/impulsive).

40. The Big Five Once you take a test that measures your personality according to the Big Five Scale…. Your traits will be stable over time. They can be attributed to your genetics They apply across different cultures They predict other attributes.

41. The Social-Cognitive Perspective Of Personality

42. Social Cognitive Perspective • Different People choose different environments. The TV you watch, friends you hang with, music you listen to were all chosen by you (your disposition) But after you choose the environment, it also shapes you.

43. Social Cognitive Perspective • Our personalities help create situations to which we react. If I expect someone to be angry with me, I may give that person the cold shoulder, creating the very behavior I expect.

44. Personal Control • Our sense of controlling our environment rather than the environment controlling us. • External LOC • Internal LOC

45. External Locus of Control • The perception that chance or outside forces beyond one’s personal control determine one’s fate.

46. Internal Locus of Control • The perception that one controls one’s own fate.

47. Learned Helplessness • The hopelessness and passive resignation an animal or human learns when unable to avoid repeated aversive events.