Personality

1. Personality Chapter 10

2. Freud and the Psychoanalytic Perspective • Focuses on three factors: • Influence of unconscious mental processes • Importance of sexual and aggressive instincts • Enduring consequences of early childhood experiences

3. Psychoanalysis -cont- • Levels of awareness: • Conscious - thoughts or motives a person is currently aware of or is remembering • Preconscious – thoughts, motives and memories that can be voluntarily brought to mind • Unconscious – thoughts, feelings, motives and memories blocked from conscious awareness • Not directly accessible • Explored through free association – method in which a person relaxes and says whatever comes to mind

4. Freud’s idea of the mind’s structure

5. Psychoanalysis -cont- • Personality structure • Id – completely unconscious • Innate sexual and aggressive instincts and drivse • Impulsive, irrational and immature • Operates on a pleasure principle, seeking to achieve immediate gratification and avoid discomfort • Ex: Your id wants to use your graduation money to buy a car instead of paying for college

6. Psychoanalysis -cont- • Superego – partly conscious • Internalized parental and societal standards • Operates on a morality principle and seeks to enforce ethical conduct • Ex: Your superego would make you feel guilty about putting graduation money towards a car

7. Psychoanalysis -cont- • Ego – both in conscious and preconsicous • Rational and practical • Operates on a reality principle and mediates between the demands of the id and the superego • Ex: Your ego guides you to use most of the money for college tuition while setting some aside for a less-expensive, used car

8. Psychoanalysis -cont-

9. Psychoanalysis -cont- • Ego defense mechanisms – unconscious distortions of reality used by the ego to reduce anxiety • Repression – preventing anxiety-producing thoughts and painful feelings from entering consciousness • First and most basic form of anxiety reduction • Ex: Forgetting the details of what you said when you broke up with your boyfriend/girlfriend • Projection – transferring one’s own unacceptable thoughts, motives or personal qualities to others • Ex: You feel dislike for a coach and then insist she dislikes you • Denial – protecting oneself from anxiety-producing information by refusing to acknowledge it • Ex: Refusing to admit you have a drinking problem even though you drink every day

10. Reaction formation – thinking or behaving in a way that is the opposite of your own unacceptable thoughts and feelings • Ex: Taking care of a sick relative whom you actually hate • Displacement – redirecting anger and other unacceptable impulses toward a less-threatening person or object • Ex: Yelling at a teammate after being criticized by your coach • Rationalization – justifying one’s actions by using socially acceptable explanations • Ex: Dealing with the disappointment of being rejected by a college by saying you really didn’t want to attend such an elitist institution • Regression – retreating from a threatening situation by reverting to a pattern of behavior characteristic of an earlier stage of development • Ex: Throwing a temper tantrum when your parents refuse to extend your curfew

11. The Neo-Freudians • Neo-Freudians accepted Freud’s basic ideas • Personality structure • Importance of unconscious • Shaping of personality n childhood • Dynamics of anxiety and defense mechanisms • Placed more emphasis on the conscious mind’s role in interpreting experience and coping with the environment • Placed less emphasis on sex and aggression

12. The Neo-Freudians: Alfred Adler • Believed infants and young children are helpless and dependent upon others • Produces an inferiority complex • We deal with inferiority in two ways • Compensating for real or imagined weakness by striving to improve themselves and by developing their talents and abilities • Overcompensating for their feelings of inferiority by developing a superiority complex in which they exaggerate their accomplishments and deny their limitations

13. The Neo-Freudians: Carl Jung • Stressed importance of unconscious process but distinguished between personal unconscious and collective unconscious • Personal conscious – experiences that are unique to each person • Collective unconscious – part of a person’s unconscious that is common to all human beings • Includes ideas like the wise grandfather, the innocent child, and the rebellious son

14. Assessing the Unconscious • Projective tests – use ambiguous images (inkblots and pictures of people) that are open to a number of interpretations • Subject’s response is a projection of his/her unconscious conflicts, motives and personality traits into the test images • Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) – people view ambiguous pictures and then make up stories about them

15. Rorschach Inkblot Test – people describe what they see in a series of inkblots • Developed by Hermann Rorschach in 1921 • Critics argue that projective tests are time-consuming, expensive and subjective

16. Criticisms of Freud and the Psychoanalytic Perspective • Developmental psychologists see development as lifelong, rather than fixed in childhood • Freud’s generalizations are based on evidence drawn from a small number of patients • Key concepts are impossible to measure empirically • Freud never claimed psychoanalysis was a predictive science • Theories often reflect a sexist view of women • It is most likely that high stress situations enhance rather than repress memories • There is evidence that we utilize defense mechanisms but these are motivated more by our need to protect our self-image

17. The Humanistic Perspective: Abraham Maslow • Proposed we are motivated by a hierarchy of needs • Stressed humans have a natural drive to find self-fulfillment and realize their potential

18. The Humanistic Perspective: Carl Jung • Believed people are innately good • Self-concept is the cornerstone of a person’s personality • Set of perceptions and beliefs that individuals have about their own nature and behavior • Matching self-concept and life experiences result in high self-esteem and better mental health • A growth-promoting climate required • Genuineness • Acceptance – offering unconditional positive regard – attitude of total acceptance toward another person • Empathy

19. The Humanistic Perspective • Assessment • Self-evaluations • Some see this as depersonalizing • Criticisms of the humanistic perspective • Concepts are vague and subjective • Emphasis on individualism can lead to self-indulgence, selfishness and erosion of moral restraint • It is naively optimistic

20. The Trait Perspective • Early trait theories • Trait – relatively stable personal characteristic that can be used to describe how an individual consistently behaves • Gordon Allport • Used a comprehensive dictionary to develop a list of 4,504 adjectives that could be used to describe specific personality traits and arranged them in three levels: • Cardinal traits – dominate and shape a person’s outlook • Central traits – influence most of our behavior • Secondary traits – only seen in certain situations • Traits were confusing and overlapping • Raymond Cattell used factor analysis to reduce Allport’s list to 171 terms and later refined those to 16 personality factors • Factor analysis – statistical procedure that identifies clusters of correlated test items that tap basic components of intelligence

21. The Trait Perspective -cont- • Assessing traits • Personality inventories – longer questionnaires that cover a wide range of feelings and behaviors and are designed to assess several traits at once • Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) • Contains over 500 statements (“I am very tense on the job,” or “I wish I could do over some of the things I have done.”) • Is used to diagnose psychological disorders • Proponents argue that self-report inventories are standardized, objective and relatively inexpensive • Critics argue that respondents can lie

22. The Trait Perspective -cont- • The Big Five Factors • Openness • High scores = curious, open to experience, interested in cultural pursuits, sensitive to beauty • Low scores = conventional thinkers, prefer straightforward answers, regard arts and sciences with suspicion • Conscientiousness • High scores = self-disciplined, well-organized, motivated to achieve personal goals • Low scores = careless, impulsive and undependable

23. The Trait Perspective -cont- • Extroversion • High scores = sociable, talkative, enthusiastic, draw attention to themselves in groups • Low scores = reserved, quiet, prefer time alone • Agreeableness • High scores = trusting, cooperative, helpful • Low scores = suspicious, argumentative, uncooperative • Neuroticism • High scores = insecure, easily upset, anxious, moody • Low scores = calm, easy going, emotionally stable

25. The Trait Perspective -cont- • Current research shows Big Five traits are stable in adulthood • Our personality traits seem stable but the consistency of specific behaviors vary from one situation to the next • Can make personality test scores weak predictors of behavior • Our average behavior across situations is predictable

26. The Social-Cognitive Perspective • Social cognitive perspective – views behavior as influenced by the interaction between people’s traits and their social context • Proposed by Albert Bandura • Bandura also conducted research in self-efficacy – feelings of self-confidence or self-doubt that people bring to a specific situation • Reciprocal determinism – interacting influences of behavior, internal cognition and environment • Different people choose different environments • Out personalities shape how we interpret and react to events • Our personalities help create situations to which we react

27. The Social-Cognitive Perspective -cont- • Personal control – extent to which people perceive control over their environment rather than feeling helpless • External locus of control – believing most situations are governed by chance and lucky breaks • Internal locus of control – accepting personal responsibility for one’s life experiences • Achieve more in school and work, act more independently, enjoy better health, feel less depressed • Evaluating the social-cognitive perspective • Utilizes psychological research more than other perspectives • Critics argue it overemphasizes the situation at the expense of inner traits

28. Exploring the Self • Self – assumed to be the center of personality, and the organizer of our thoughts, feelings and actions • Spotlight effect – overestimating others’ noticing and evaluating our appearance, performance and blunders • Self-serving bias – a readiness to perceive oneself favorably • People accept more responsibility for good deeds than bad • Most people see themselves as better than average

29. Culture and the Self • Individualism- giving priority to one’s own goals over group goals and defining one’s identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identifications • Collectivism – giving priority to the goals of one’s group and defining one’s identity accordingly