Personality

1. Personality

2. Personality • A person’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. • Brings continuity to an individual’s behavior in different situations at different times.

3. Sigmund Freud • Father of personality development. • Psychoanalysis – Freud’s system of treatment for mental disorders. • Psychoanalytic Theory – Freud’s theory of personality.

4. Freud’s Theory • Most of the mind is hidden. • Unconscious Mind – The largest part of our mind. A reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories.

5. Freud’s Theory • Believed the unacceptable passions and thoughts we suppress in the unconscious mind influence our personalities and behaviors. • Show themselves in the work we choose, the beliefs we hold, or daily habits, our troubling symptoms.

6. Freud’s Theory • Psychic Determinism – Freud’s assumption that all our mental and behavioral responses are caused by unconscious traumas, desires, or conflicts.

7. Freud’s Theory • Also viewed jokes and dreams as expressions of repressed sexual and aggressive tendencies. • Freudian Slips! • Libido – The Freudian concept of psychic energy that drives individuals to experience sensual pleasure.

8. Freud’s Personality Structure • ID – Contains a reservoir of unconscious psychic energy that strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives. • Operates on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification.

9. Freud’s Personality Structure • Ego – The largely conscious, “executive” part of personality that mediates among the demands of the id, superego, and reality. • Operates as the reality principle, satisfying the id’s desires in ways that will realistically bring pleasure rather than pain.

10. Freud’s Personality Structure • Superego – The part of the personality that represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgment (the conscience) and for future aspirations.

11. Freud’s Personality Development • Psychosexual Stages – The childhood stages of development during which the Id’s pleasure seeking energies focus on distinct erogenous zones.

12. The Psychosexual Stages • Oral (0-18 months) – Please centers on the mouth – sucking, biting, chewing. • Anal (18-36 months) – Pleasure focuses on bowel and bladder elimination – coping with demands for control. • Phallic (3-6 yrs.) – Pleasure zone is the genitals; coping with incestuous sexual feelings. • Oedipus Complex • Latency (6 to puberty) – Dormant sexual feelings. • Genital (Puberty on) – Maturation of sexual feelings.

13. Psychosexual Stages • Oedipus Complex – According to Freud, a largely unconscious process whereby boys displace an erotic attraction toward their mother to females of their own age and, at the same time, identify with their fathers.

14. Psychosexual Stages • Identification – The mental process by which an individual tries to become like another person, especially the same-sex parent.

15. Defense Mechanisms • Ego Defense Mechanisms – Largely unconscious mental strategies employed to reduce the experience of conflict or anxiety. • Have anxiety because of conflict b/t the ID and Superego, or our desires and what society views as acceptable. • The ego uses defense mechanisms to unconsciously defend itself against anxiety.

16. Examples of Defense Mechanisms • Repression – banishes anxiety-arousing wishes from the consciousness. • Repressed urges such as improper sexual desires often manifest themselves in dreams.

17. Examples of Defense Mechanisms • Regression – Allows us to retreat to an earlier, more infantile stage of development. • Faced with the anxious first days of school, a child may regress to the oral comfort of thumb sucking. • College students homesick.

18. Examples of Defense Mechanisms • Reaction Formation – The ego unconsciously switches unacceptable impulses into their opposites. • People may express feelings that are the opposite of their anxiety-arousing unconscious feelings.

19. Examples of Defense Mechanisms • Projection – Disguises threatening impulses by attributing them to others. • “He doesn’t trust me.” = “I don’t trust him, I don’t trust myself.”

20. Examples of Defense Mechanisms • Rationalization – Unconsciously generate self-justifying explanations to hide from ourselves the real reasons for our actions. • “All work and no play makes Jack (or Jill) a dull person.”

21. Examples of Defense Mechanisms • Displacement – Diverts sexual or aggressive impulses toward an object or person that is psychologically more acceptable than the one that aroused the feelings. • Children who fear expressing anger against their parents may displace it by kicking the family pet.

22. Examples of Defense Mechanisms • Denial – Protects the person from real events that are painful to accept, either by rejecting a fact or it seriousness. • Dying patients may deny the gravity of their illness. • Parents may deny their child’s misconduct. • Spouses may deny evidence of their partner’s affairs.

23. Psychodynamic Theory • Projective Tests • Projective tests – Personality assessment instruments, such as the Rorschach and TAT, which are based on Freud’s ego defense mechanism of projection.

24. Psychodynamic Theory • Projective Tests • Rorschach Inkblot Technique – A projective test requiring subjects to describe what they see in a series of ten inkblots.

25. Psychodynamic Theory • Projective Tests • Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) – A projective test requiring subjects to make up stories that explain ambiguous pictures.

26. Neo-Freudians • Neo-Freudians – Literally “new Freudians”; refers to theorists who broke with Freud but whose theories retain a psycho-dynamic aspect, especially a focus on motivation as the source of energy for the personality

27. Carl Jung: Extending the Unconscious • Personal Unconscious – Jung’s term for that portion of the unconscious corresponding roughly to the Freudian ID. • Collective Unconscious – Jung’s addition to the unconscious, involving a reservoir for instinctive “memories,” including the archetypes, which exist in all people.

28. Carl Jung: Extending the Unconscious • Archetypes – The ancient memory images in the collective unconscious. • Appear and reappear in art, literature, and folktales around the world.

29. Carl Jung: Personality Types • Introverts – Quiet, shy, peaceful, calm. • Extroverts – Sociable, outgoing, talkative, lively.

30. Karen Horney: A Feminist in the Psychoanalytic Theory • Basic Anxiety – An emotion, proposed by Horney, that gives a sense of uncertainty and loneliness in a hostile world and can lead to maladjustment. • Neurotic Needs – Signs of neurosis in Horney’s theory, these 10 needs are normal desires carried to a neurotic extreme.

31. Alfred Adler: An early split from Psychoanalysis • Inferiority Complex – A feeling of inferiority that is largely unconscious, with its roots in childhood. • Compensation – Making up for one’s real or imagined deficiencies.

32. Humanistic Theories: Gordon Allport • Gordon Allport and the Beginnings of Humanistic Psychology: • Traits – Stable personality characteristics that are presumed to exist within the individual and guide his or her thought and actions under various conditions.

33. Humanistic Theories: Gordon Allport • Gordon Allport and the Beginning of Humanistic Psychology: • Central Traits – According to trait theory, traits that form the basis of personality. • Secondary Traits – In trait theory, preferences and attitudes. • Cardinal Traits – Personality components that define people’s lives; Very few individuals have cardinal traits.

34. Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

35. Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs • Developed this theory based on the study of successful people who achieved the highest levels: Abe Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Eleanor Roosevelt. • Found they were: • Self aware and self accepting. • Open and spontaneous • Loving and caring • Not paralyzed by other’s opinions • Interests were problem centered • Enjoyed a few deep relationships rather than many superficial ones • Most had been moved by spiritual or peak experiences • Schuster is so coool!

36. Carl Rogers’ • Person-Centered Perspective – Said that personality growth requires three conditions: genuineness, acceptance, and empathy. • Genuineness – Open with feelings, transparent, and self-disclosing. • Accepting – • Unconditional Positive Regard – An attitude of total acceptance toward another person. • Empathic – Sharing and mirroring our feelings and reflecting our meanings.

37. Carl Rogers’s Fully Functioning Person • Fully Functioning Person – Term for a healthy, self-actualizing individual, who has a self-concept that is both positive and congruent with reality. • Phenomenal Field – Our psychological reality, composed of one’s perceptions and feelings.

38. Positive Psychology • Positive Psychology – A recent movement within psychology, focusing on desirable aspects of human functioning, as opposed to an emphasis on psychopathology.

39. Social-Cognitive Theories • Bandura’s Theory • Observational Learning • Reciprocal Determinism – The process in which cognitions, behavior, and the environment mutually influence each other. • Bandura said these influence our personality.

40. Social Cognitive Theories • Julian Rotter’s Theory • Locus of Control – An individual’s sense of where his or her life influences originate.

41. Personality and Temperament • Humors – According the ancient Greeks, four body fluids – blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile – that control personality by their relative abundance.

42. Personality and Temperament • Temperament – The basic and pervasive personality dispositions that are apparent in early childhood and that establish the tempo and mood of the individual’s behaviors.

43. Personality as a Composite of Traits • Five-Factor Personality – A trait perspective suggesting that personality is composed of five fundamental personality dimensions: • Openness to experience • Conscientiousness • Extraversion • Agreeableness • Neuroticism

44. Assessing Personality Traits • MMPI-2 – A widely used personality assessment instrument that gives scores on ten important clinical traits.

45. Assessing Personality Traits • Reliability – An attribute of a psychological test that gives consistent results. • Validity – An attribute of a psychological test that actually measures what it is being used to measure.

46. Personality as a Composite of Traits • Type – Refers to especially important dimensions or clusters of traits that are not only central to a person’s personality but are found with essentially the same pattern in many people.

47. Implicit Personality Theories • Implicit Personality Theories – Assumptions about personality that are held by people (especially nonpsychologists) to simplify the task of understanding others.

48. Implicit Personality Theories • Fundamental Attribution Error – The assumption that another person’s behavior, especially clumsy, inappropriate, or otherwise undesirable behavior, is the result of a flaw in the personality, rather than in the situation.

49. Other Personality Terms • Neuroticism – Suscpetibility to neurotic problems. • Extraversion – A personality descriptor indicating the “outgoing” nature of some individuals. • Introversion – A personality descriptor indicating the quiet and reserved nature of some individuals. • Eclectic – Either switching theories to explain situations or building one’s own theory of personality from pieces borrowed from many perspectives.