Personality

1. Personality Chapter 11

2. Personality • An individual's unique pattern of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that persists over time and across situations • Two key components • Personality refers to unique differences • Personality is presumed to be stable and enduring

3. Psychodynamic Theories • Psychodynamic theories see behavior as a product of psychological forced within the individual, often outside conscious awareness • Five propositions common to all psychodynamic theories • Much of mental life is unconscious • Mental processes such as emotions, motivations, and thought may conflict with one another • Early childhood experiences strongly affect personality development • Our mental representation of ourselves and others guides our interactions with others • Development of personality involves learning to regulate sexual and aggressive urges

4. Sigmund Freud • Best known of psychodynamic theorists • Freud was first to stress the unconscious • The unconscious is all the ideas, thoughts, and feelings of which we are normally not aware • Freud’s ideas form the basis for psychoanalysis

5. Structure of Personality

6. Id • Collection of unconscious urges and desired that continually seek expression • Operates according to the pleasure principle, i.e., seeks immediate pleasure and to avoid pain • Operates entirely in the unconscious mind

7. Ego • Mediates between reality, conscience (superego), and instinctual needs (id) • Operates according to the reality principle • Operates at the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious levels

8. Superego • The social and parental standards that have been internalized • Conscience • Our sense of morality • Ego ideal • The standard of what one would like to be • We are not born with the superego, but it develops over time • Operates at the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious levels

9. Defense Mechanisms • Anxiety is produced when the ego cannot satisfy the demands of the id in a way acceptable to the superego • This anxiety causes feelings of uneasiness and worry • Ego may employ any of a number of defense mechanisms to protect the conscious mind from this anxiety

10. Defense Mechanisms • Denial • Refusal to acknowledge a painful reality • Repression • Unpleasant thoughts are excluded from consciousness • Projection • Attributing one’s own feelings, motives, or wishes to others • Identification • Taking on the characteristics of other to avoid feeling incompetent • Regression • Reverting to childlike behavior

11. Defense Mechanisms • Intellectualization • Thinking about stressful problems in an abstract way to detach oneself from them • Reaction formation • Expression of exaggerated ideas and emotions that are opposite of true feelings • Displacement • Shift repressed motives from an original object to a substitute object • Sublimation • Redirecting repressed motives and feelings into socially acceptable activities

12. Development of Personality • Freud believed that personality development is the result of various ways in which the sexual instinct (also called the libido) is satisfied during the course of life • There are several stages, each focusing on different bodily areas • These stages are called the psychosexual stages

13. Psychosexual Stages • Oral Stage (birth to 18 months) • Pleasure is obtained by sucking and swallowing • Too much oral stimulation may result in an overly optimistic, gullible, and dependent adult • Too little stimulation can result in a pessimistic, sarcastic, argumentative adult • Anal Stage (18 months to 3 ½ years) • Focus of pleasure is the anus, especially controlling bowels • Strict toilet training may result in anal retentive personality types as adults, i.e., stingy and excessively orderly

14. Psychosexual Stages • Phallic Stage (after age 3) • Erotic feelings center on genitals • Boys experience the Oedipal complex wherein they are strongly attached to their mother and jealous of their father • Girls experience the Electra complex, being strongly attached to their father and jealous of their mother • These complexes are usually resolved by identification with the same-sex parent • Fixation at this stage may result in vanity and egotism in adult life

15. Psychosexual Stages • Latency Stage (5 or 6 to 12 or 13) • Child appears to have no interest in the other sex • Genital Stage (begins at puberty) • Final stage marked by development of mature sexuality

16. Carl Jung • Shared Freud’s emphasis on unconscious processes • Personal unconscious • That part of the unconscious mind containing an individuals thoughts and feelings • Collective unconscious • The part of the unconscious that is inherited and common to all members of a species

17. Archetypes • Ideas/categories in the collective unconscious • Examples of archetypes • Persona • Our public self • Anima • Female archetype as expressed in male personality • Animus • Male archetype as expressed in female personality

18. Attitude Types • Extroverts • Focus on external world and social life • Introverts • Focus on internal thoughts and feelings • Jung felt that everyone had both qualities, but one is usually dominant

19. Personality Types • Rational individuals • People who regulate their actions through thinking and feeling • Irrational individuals • People who base their actions on perceptions, either through their senses or intuition

20. Alfred Adler • Compensation • Our efforts to overcome real or perceived weaknesses • Inferiority complex • Fixation on feelings of personal inferiority that can lead to emotional and social paralysis

21. Karen Horney • Viewed anxiety as a powerful motivating force • Environmental and social factors important seen as being as important as unconscious sexual conflict • Neurotic trends • Irrational strategies for coping with emotional problems

22. Erik Erikson • Eight stages of personality development • Trust vs. mistrust • Autonomy vs. shame and doubt • Initiative vs. guilt • Industry vs. inferiority • Identity vs. role confusion • Intimacy vs. isolation • Generativity vs. stagnation • Ego integrity vs. despair

23. Evaluating Psychodynamic Theories • Culture-bound ideas • Freud made no connection between women’s subordinate status in society and their sense of inferiority • Psychodymanic theories are largely untestable in any scientific way

24. Humanistic Personality Theories • Humanistic view asserts the fundamental goodness of people and their constant striving toward higher levels of functioning • Does not dwell on past occurrences, but rather focuses on the present and future

25. Carl Rogers • All organisms have an actualizing tendency • Humans also have a self-actualizing tendency • Unconditional positive regard • Acceptance of another regardless of person’s behavior • Conditional positive regard • Acceptance is dependent upon certain ways of behaving

26. Evaluating Humanistic Theories • The basic tenets of humanistic theory are difficult to test scientifically • Some view these theories as overly optimistic and that they ignore the nature of human evil • Some argue that humanistic view lead to narcissism and self-centeredness

27. Trait Theories • People differ on personality traits such as dependency, aggressiveness, or anxiety • The “Big Five” traits currently thought to be central to describing personality • Extroversion • Agreeableness • Conscientiousness • Emotional stability • Culture, intellect, openness

28. Are the “Big Five” Traits Universal? • Evidence point to the presence of the big five traits across cultures • Findings suggest a genetic basis for traits

29. Evaluating Trait Theories • Unlike some other theories, trait theories can be studied scientifically • Merely descriptive • Traits represent statistical averages of populations rather than individuals • Disagreement over minimum number of traits needed to fully describe variety of human behavior

30. Cognitive-Social Learning Theories • Hold that people’s behavior is guided by thought, expectancies, learning, and the environment • Expectancies • What a person anticipates in a situation or as a result of behaving in certain ways • Performance standards • Individually determined standards by which to judge one’s own behavior

31. Cognitive-Social Learning Theories • Self-Efficacy • Expectancy that one’s efforts will be successful • Locus of control • Expectancy about whether reinforcement is under internal or external control

32. Evaluating Cognitive-Social Learning Theories • Affirms role of cognition in development of personality • Focuses on conscious behavior and experience • Can be studied scientifically • Has led to many useful therapies

33. Personality Assessment • The personal interview • Direct observation • Objective tests • Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF) • Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI-2) • Projective tests • Rorschach test • Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)