Personality - describing, causing

A person’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, acting - Q1

Aristotle

• Hedonist - seeks happiness

• Acquisitive - seeks assets, wealth

• Ethical - seeks moral virtue

• Logical - thinks, investigates

Galen

• Yellow bile Choleric

• Black bile Melancholic

• Phlegm Phlegmatic

• Blood Sanguine

Freud - Q2

• 1856 - 1939

• Medical doctor

• Looked for ways to treat ailments with no apparent physical causes

• Used hypnosis, then psychoanalysis

• Interpretation of Dreams - 1900

• Sex and aggression

Freud - Q3

• The unconscious - a part of the mind that is inaccessible, filled with strong emotions that we repress - but these emotions may be expressed in disguised form - iceberg metaphor

• The conscious mind - relatively smaller part of the mind that is easily accessible

• The preconscious mind – memory, etc

Personality structure - Q4, Q5

• Id - unconscious repository of basic human instincts - sex and aggression

• Pleasure principle• Superego - our conscience - tells us how we

should behave ideally• Ego - the reality manager - mediates struggles

between the id and superego in order to allow us to live in real world - reality principle

Personality development

• Oral• Anal• Phallic - oedipal complex, castration

complex, identification, Electra complex, penis envy

• Latent• Genital • fixation

Defense mechanisms - Q7

• Enables us to control basic instincts and express them in socially acceptable ways

• Repression

• Regression

• Reaction formation - makes unacceptable impulses look like their opposite

• Projection - attributes impulses to others

Defense mechanisms

• Rationalization – gives us a plausible reason for doing something

• Displacement – replacing the object of aggression etc

• Sublimation – transforming negative energy into art

Accessing the unconscious - Q8

• Free association in psychoanalysis, introspection, insight

• Projective tests - TAT, Rorschach, Draw a Person, etc

• Dream analysis

• Hypnosis

Personality Tests - Q9

• Projective - How reliable and valid are they?

• Inventories - MMPI, MBTI, traits

After Freud

• Carl Jung - intro/extraversion, collective unconscious, science/culture balance

• Alfred Adler - inferiority complex, multiple causes, fear or exaggerated sense of self

• Karen Horney - disagreed with Freud about genital stage and about women

• Anna Freud - focused on children, development• Harry Stack Sullivan - interpersonal relationships

key to development or illness

Freud today

• Unconscious mind

• Development in stages - used in intellectual, social, moral development theory

• Defense mechanisms

• Talk therapy

• Psychoanalysis - psychodynamics

Personality

Humanists, behaviorists, social/cultural, cognitive theory, traits

Maslow’s hierarchy - Q10

Biological

Safety

Social

Ego

SA

Carl Rogers - Q11

• Ideal personality– Open to experience

– Trust feelings

– Live in the moment

• Ideal environment - attributes of the therapist– Unconditional positive regard

– Genuineness

– Empathy

Self

• Self-ideal - ideal vs actual (all your ideas, values, perceptions, what I am, what I do)

• Possible selves - motivation

• Self-esteem

• Q12 Self-efficacy - Albert Bandura

• Q13 Self-serving bias

• The spotlight effect

Congruence

• Evaluate experiences in terms of self-concept - large gap results in anxiety and defense

• Gap between ideal and real -> large gap = sad, small gap = happy

Society and personality Q14

• Personality in collectivist cultures

• Personality in individualistic cultures

Temperament – Q15

• Ranges from calm to excitable

• Apparent within hours of birth

• Very stable over a lifetime

• Genetic?

Traits

• Gordon Allport counted 18,000 words to describe people - beginning the trait perspective in personality research

• Hans Eysenck developed a system of assessing personality on two scales, extroversion and stability

• Raymond Cattell developed a list of 16 traits

The Big Five – Q16

• OC E A N – outofservice.com

• Openness to new experience

• Conscientiousness

• Extroversion

• Agreeableness

• Neuroticism (nervousness)

Big 5

• Stable?– Generally stable, less intense as we age– C increase in 20’s– A increases in 30’s

• Heritable?

• Cross-cultural?

• Predictors?

Take another test Q17

• humanmetrics.com• Jung/Myers-Briggs typology test - MBTI• Extraversion / Introversion - external / internal

energy• Sensing / iNtuitive - source of information• Thinking / Feeling - processing info - logic /

feeling• Judging / Perceiving - using info - planning /

improvising

Q18 - Stable across situations?

• According to Walter Mischel, cognitive traits are stable in most situations, emotional traits less so

• Person / situation problem - hard to predict behavior in a given situation - on average, stable

Social learning/cognitive perspective

• Albert Bandura - modeling

• Q19 Locus of control

• Attributional style – Situations vs real self– Q20 Fundamental attribution error

• Q21 Learned helplessness - Martin Seligman

Q22 Behaviorism and personality

• Behavior is personality

• You are what you do

Can you change your personality?

• No

• Temperament is very stable; most traits are generally stable

• Research has demonstrated there is a genetic component to personality

Can you change your personality?

• Yes -• a characteristic pattern of feeling, thinking,

acting• Certain types of therapy help you to change

how you think about things, especially effective with phobias

• Habits are just habits

Q23 Methods of studying personality

• Projective tests

• Surveys

• Case studies

• Correlations

• MMPI, NEO-PI

Q24 Names to know

• Alfred Adler, Bandura, Paul Costa and Robert McCrae, Freud, Jung, Maslow, Rogers