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Chapter 11. Personality. Schacter Gilbert Wegner. PSYCHOLOGY. Slides prepared by: Melissa S. Terlecki, Cabrini College. 11.1. Personality: What Is It and How Is It Measured. PSYCHOLOGY. Schacter Gilbert Wegner. Personality.
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Chapter 11 Personality Schacter Gilbert Wegner PSYCHOLOGY • Slides prepared by: • Melissa S. Terlecki, Cabrini College
11.1 Personality: What Is It and How Is It Measured PSYCHOLOGY Schacter Gilbert Wegner
Personality • Personality: an individual’s characteristic style of behaving, thinking, and feeling. • explanations based on prior events and anticipated events that shape a person’s personality.
Questions • What does it mean to say that personality is in the eye of the beholder?
Measuring Personality • Personality inventories: • self-report: a series of answers to a questionnaire that asks people to indicate the extent to which sets of statements or adjectives accurately describe their own behavior or mental state.
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) • 1.I like mechanics magazines2.I have a good appetite3.I wake up fresh & rested most mornings4.I think I would like the work of a librarian5.I am easily awakened by noise6.I like to read newspaper articles on crime7.My hands and feet are usually warm enough8.My daily life is full of things that keep me interested9.I am about as able to work as I ever was10.There seems to be a lump in my throat much of the time
Questions • What are some limitations of personality inventories?
Measuring Personality • Projective techniques: a standard series of ambiguous stimuli designed to elicit unique responses that reveal inner aspects of an individuals’ personality.
Rorschach Inkblot Test: individual interpretations of the meaning of a set of unstructured inkblots are analyzed to identify a respondent’s inner feelings and interpret his or her personality structure.
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT): respondents reveal underlying motives, concerns, and the way they see the social world through the stories they make up about ambiguous pictures of people.
Sentence completion test • 1) If only I could…2) People I know…3) I can always…4) I think guys…5) What makes me sad is…6) I think girls…7) My father...8) Where I live…9. My mother was the type . . .10) My health is…
Sentence completion test • 1) If only I could...feel more hopeful about things.2) People I know...are usually fair and honest.3) I can always...talk things out with someone.4) I think guys...are less emotional than girls.5) What makes me sad is...not being able to see my kids.6) I think girls...were mysterious to me in High School.7) My father...would always listen to what I had to say.8) Where I live...is quiet and peaceful.9. My mother was the type . . .who always took care of her family.10) My health is...generally very good.
Questions • Why might a projective test like the TAT story be less than reliable?
11.2 The Trait Approach: Identifying Patterns of Behavior PSYCHOLOGY Schacter Gilbert Wegner
Traits • Trait: a relatively stable disposition to behave in a particular and consistent way. • The Big Five: traits of the five-factor model include conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness to experience, and extraversion.
Figure 11.3: Eysenck’s Depiction of Trait Dimensions (p. 339)
Questions • How might traits both describe people and explain their behavior? • What are the strengths of the five-factor model?
Genes, Traits, and Personality • In behavioral genetics, personality psychologists investigate the correlation between traits in monozygotic and dizygotic twins. • the average genetic component of personality is between .40 to .60 (heritability coefficient). • must rule out shared environment; studies of identical twins reared apart.
Questions • What do studies of twins tell us about personality?
Traits in the Brain • Eysenck postulated differences in cortical arousal between introverts and extraverts.
Questions • What neurological differences explain why extraverts pursue more stimulation than introverts?
11.3 The Psychodynamic Approach: Forces That Lie Beneath Awareness PSYCHOLOGY Schacter Gilbert Wegner
Psychodynamic Approach • Psychodynamic approach: personality is formed by needs, strivings, and desires largely operating outside of awareness. • The structure of the mind: • id: contains the drives present at birth; the source of our bodily needs, wants, desires, and impulses, particularly our sexual and aggressive drives. • ego: developed through contact with the external world that enables us to deal with life’s practical demands. • superego: the mental system that reflects the internalization of cultural rules, mainly learned as parents exercise their authority.
Dealing With Inner Conflict • Defense mechanisms: unconscious coping mechanisms that reduce anxiety generated by threats from unacceptable impulses. • rationalization, reaction formation, projection, regression, displacement, identification, and sublimation. • Psychosexual stages: distinct early life stages through which personality is formed as children experience sexual pleasures from specific body areas and caregivers redirect or interfere with those pleasures. • oral, anal, phallic (Oedipus conflict), latency, and genital stages. • fixation: a person’s pleasure-seeking drives become stuck or arrested at that psychosexual stage.
Figure 11.4: Decreased Hippocampal Activity During Memory Suppression (p. 339)
Questions • How is personality shaped by the interaction of the id, ego, and superego? • How can our defense mechanisms be useful? • Why do critics say Freud’s psychosexual stages are more interpretation than explanation?
11.4 The Humanistic-Existential Approach: Personality as Choice PSYCHOLOGY Schacter Gilbert Wegner
Humanistic-Existential Approach • Humanistic psychologists emphasize a positive, optimistic view of human nature that highlights people’s inherent goodness and their potential for personal growth. • Self-actualizing tendency: the human motive toward realizing our inner potential. • Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and self-actualization. • Existentialist psychologists emphasize the individual as a responsible agent who is free to create and live his or her life while negotiating the issue of meaning and the reality of death. • existential approach: regards personality as governed by an individual’s ongoing choices and decisions in the context of the realities of life and death.
Questions • What is it to be self-actualized? • What is angst, and how is it created?
11.4 The Social-Cognitive Approach: Personalities in Situations PSYCHOLOGY Schacter Gilbert Wegner
Social Cognitive Approach • Social cognitive approach: views personality in terms of how the person thinks about the situations encountered in daily life and behaves in response to them. • Person-situation controversy: the question of whether behavior is caused more by personality or by situational factors.
Questions • Does a person’s behavior in one situation allow us to predict future behaviors?
Culture and Community: Does Your Personality Change…? • A study was conducted to discover if personality differs based on what language one speaks. • Bilingual individuals were found to be more extraverted, agreeable, and conscientious when they took a personality test in English when compared to Spanish.
Personal Constructs • Personal constructs: dimensions people use in making sense of their experiences. • Outcome expectancies: a person’s assumptions about the likely consequences of a future behavior. • Locus of control: a person’s tendency to perceive the control of rewards as internal to the self or external in the environment. • internal vs. external
Questions • Why doesn’t everyone love clowns? • What is the advantage of an internal locus of control?
11.4 The Self: Personality in the Mirror PSYCHOLOGY Schacter Gilbert Wegner
Self Concept • Self-concept: a person’s explicit knowledge of his or her own behaviors, traits, and other personal characteristics. • autobiographical memory, self-narrative. • self-verification: the tendency to seek evidence to confirm the self-concept.
