Personality

Personality

The Nature of Personality
1. Defining Personality
  1. 2 concepts used to explain personaility
    1. 1) Consistency - The stability in person's behaviour over time and across situations
    2. 2) Distinctiveness - The behavioural differences among people reacting to the same situation
  2. Personality refers to an individual's unique constellation of consistent behavioural traits
2. Personality Traits
  1. A durable disposition to behave in a particular way in a variety of situations
  2. Factor Analysis: Correlations among many variables are analyzed to identify closely related clusters of variables
3. Five Factor Model
  1. Robert McCrae and Paul Costa used factor analysis to arrive at the five-factor model of personality
  2. "Big Five"
    1. 1) Extraversion (positive emotionality): Sociable, fun-loving, and affectionate
    2. 2) Neuroticism (negative emotionality): Worried, Insecure and Self-pitying
    3. 3) Openess to Experience: Imaginative, Preference for variety and Independent
    4. 4) Agreeableness: Soft-hearted, Trusting and helpful
    5. 5) Conscientiousness (constraint): Well organized, Careful and self-disciplined
Psychodynamic Perspectives
1. Freud's Psychoanalytical Theory
  1. Attempts to explain personality, motivation and psychological disorders by focusing on the influence of early childhood experiences and unconscious motives and conflicts and on methods people use to cope with their sexual and aggressive urges
  2. Structure of Personality Divided into 3 Components
    1. 1) id: The primitive, instinctive component that operates according to the pleasure principle
    2. 2) Ego: The decision making component that operates according to the reality principle
    3. 3) Superego: Moral component that incorporates social standards about what represents rights and wrongs
  3. Levels of Awareness
    1. Conscious: Consists of whatever one is aware of @ a particular point in time
    2. Preconscious: Contains material just beneath the surface of awareness that can easily be retrieved
    3. Unconscious: Contains thoughts, memories and desires that are well below the surface of conscious awareness but nonetheless exert great influence on our behaviour
  4. Anxiety and Defence Mechanisms
    1. Conflicts played out in unconscious can produce anxiety
    2. Effort to ward off anxiety involves defence mechanisms which are largely unconscious reactions that protect a person from unpleasant emotions such as anxiety and guilt
      1. Rationalization: Creating false but plausible excuses to justify unacceptable behaviour
      2. Repression: Keeping distressing thoughts and feelings buried in the unconscious
      3. Self-Deception
        Projection: Attributing one's own thoughts, feelings or motives to another
        Displacement: Diverting Emotional feelings from their original source to a substitute target
      4. Reaction Formation: Behaving in a way that's exactly opposite of one's true feelings
      5. Regression: a reversion to immature patterns of behaviour
      6. Identification: Bolstering Self-Esteem by forming an imaginary or real alliance with some person or group
      7. Sublimation: Occurs when unconscious, unacceptable Impulses are channelled into socially acceptable, perhaps even admirable behaviours
  5. Development: Psychosocial Stages
    1. Developmental Periods with a characteristic sexual focus that leave their mark on adult personality
    2. Fixation: a failure to move forward from one stage to another as expected
    3. 5 Stages
      1. 1) Oral Stage - First year of life, fixation in this stage could form the basis for obsessive eating or smoking later in life
      2. 2) Anal Stage - Second Year, could lead to association between genital concerns and anxiety as well as anxiety about sexual activities later in life
      3. 3) Phallic Stage - Age 4 - Oedipal Complex (Children manifest erotically tinged desires for their opposite sex parent), failure to resolve this complex could result in continued hostility and prevention of identifying adequately with that parent
      4. 4 & 5) Latency and Genital Stages - 6 years to puberty, Events center of expanding social contacts beyond the immediate family. Sexual urges reappear and are directed towards peers
2. Jung's Analytical Psychology
  1. Proposed Unconscious consists of 2 layers
    1. 1) Personal Unconscious: houses material that is not within one's conscious awareness because it has been repressed or forgotten
    2. 2) Collective Unconscious: a storehouse of latent memory traces inherited from people's ancestral past
  2. Archetypes: emotionally charged images and thought forms that have universal meaning
  3. First to describe introverts and extraverts
3. Adler's Individual Psychology
  1. Striving for Superiority: a Universal drive to adapt, improve oneself, and master life's challenges
  2. Compensation: Involves efforts to overcome imagined or real inferiorities by developing ones abilities
  3. Inferiority Complex: Exaggerated feelings of weakness and inadequacy
  4. He was the first to focus on birth order affecting personality
4. Evaluating Psychodynamic Perspectives
  1. Criticized:
    1. 1) Poor testability
    2. 2) Inadequate Evidence
    3. 3) Sexism
    4. 4) Unrepresented Samples
  2. Research Demonstrated that:
    1. 1) Unconscious forces can influence behaviour
    2. 2) Internal conflict often plays a key role in generating psychosocial distress
    3. 3) Early childhood experiences can have powerful influences on adult personality
    4. 4) People do use defence mechanisms to reduce their experience of unpleasant emotions
5. Include all of the diverse theories descended from the work of Sigmund Freud, which focus on unconscious mental forces
Behavioural Perspectives
1. Skinners Ideas
  1. Personality Structure
    1. Skinner argued that behaviour is fully determined by environmental stimuli
    2. Free will is an illusion
  2. Personality Development as a Product of Conditioning
    1. Believed most human responses are shaped by the type of conditioning that he describes operant conditioning
      1. Enviro consequences - Reinforcement, punishment and extinction - determine people's patterns of responding
    2. Views personality development as a continuous, lifelong journey
2. Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory
  1. Maintains people are self-organizing, proactive, self-reflecting and self-regulating. And aren't just reactive organisms shaped and shepherded by external events
  2. Emphasized important role of forward-directed planning
  3. Reciprocal Determinism: The idea that internal mental events, external environmental events and overt behaviour all influence one another
  4. Observational Learning: Occurs when an organism's responding is influenced by the observation of others, who are called models
  5. Self-sufficiency: Refers to one's beliefs about one's ability to perform behaviours that should lead to expected outcomes
    1. Perceptions of self-efficiency can influence which challenges people tackle and how well they can perform
3. Mischel and the Person-Situation Controversy
  1. He focused his attention on the extent to which situational factors govern behaviour
  2. People make responses that they think will lead to reinforcement in the situation at hand
  3. Both the person and situation are important determinants of behaviour
4. Evaluating Behavioural Approaches
  1. Criticism
    1. 1) Dehumanizing nature of radical behaviourism
    2. 2) Dilution of the behavioural approach
5. Behaviourism: A Theoretical orientation based on the premise that scientific psychology should study only observable behaviour
Humanistic Perspectives
1. Rogers's Person-Centered Theory
  1. The Self
    1. Self-Concept: A collection of beliefs about one's own nature, unique qualities and typical behaviour
    2. Incongruence: The degree of disparity between one's self concept and one's actual experience
  2. Development of the Self
    1. Rogers believes people have a strong need for affection, love and acceptance and that unconditional love from parents fosters congruence and the conditional love fosters incongruence
  3. Anxiety and Defence
    1. Experiences that threated people's personal views of themselves are the principle cause of anxiety
    2. People with high incongruent self concepts are likely to be plagued with anxiety
2. Maslow's Theory of Self Actualization
  1. The Healthy Personality
    1. Self Actualizing Persons: People with exceptionally healthy personalities, marked by continued personal growth
  2. Hierarchy of Needs
    1. Human motives organized into a pyramid of needs: A systematic arrangement of needs, according to priority, in which basic needs must be met before less basic needs are aroused
    2. Need for self-actualization: The need to fulfill one's potential; it is the highest need in Maslow's motivational hierarchy
      1. "What a man can be, he must be"
3. Evaluating Humanistic Perspectives
  1. Weaknesses
    1. 1) Poor testability
    2. 2) Unrealistic View of human nature
    3. 3) Inadequate Evidence
Biological Perspectives
1. Eysenck's Theory
  1. Views personality structure as a hierarchy of traits derived from 3 higher-order traits
    1. Extraversion
    2. Neuroticism
    3. Psychoticism
  2. "Personality is determined to a large extent by a person's genes"
2. Genetics
  1. Twin study results supported hypothesis that genetic blueprints shape the contours of personality
3. Neuroscience of Personality
  1. Relationships between specific personality traits and aspects of brain structure and function
    1. MRI to look at big 5 and size of specific areas of the brain
  2. New line of research
4. Evolutionary Approach
  1. Assert that personality has a biological basis because natural selection has favoured certain traits over the course of human history
5. Evaluating Biological Perspectives
  1. Weaknesses
    1. 1) obsession with establishing the exact magnitude of heritability coefficients
    2. 2) Effects of nature and nurture are twisted together in complicated interactions
Culture and Personality
1. Individualism Vs. Collectivism
  1. Individualism: Involves putting personal goals ahead of a group goals and defining one's identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group memberships
  2. Collectivism: Involves putting group goals ahead of personal goals and defining one's identity in terms of the group one belongs to
2. National Character: The idea that various cultures have widely recognized prototype personalities
3. Self Enhancement: Involves focusing on positive feedback from others, exaggerating one's strengths, and seeing oneself as above average
Contemporary Empirical Approaches
1. Renewed Interest in Narcissism
  1. Narcissism: A personality trait marked by an inflated sense of importance, a need for attention and admiration, and a sense of entitlement, and a tendency to exploit others
  2. Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD)
    1. 1) Grandiose sense of importance
    2. 2) Constant need for attention
    3. 3) Difficulty Dealing with Criticism
    4. 4) Sense of Entitlement
    5. Found in 3-5% of people
  3. Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) is the most widely used measure of narcissism
    1. Scores have been rising from 15.5 in the 80's to almost 17.5 in mid 2000's
2. Perfectionism
  1. Hewitt and Flett differentiate between 3 different types of perfectionism and developed the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (MPS)
    1. 1) Self-Oriented Perfectionism: A personal orientation in which a person sets high standards for one's self
      1. Can lead to intense self-scrutiny, criticism and dysfunctional emotions when standards aren't meant
    2. 2) Other-Oriented Perfectionism: The tendency to set high standards for others in your social environment
      1. Failure to meet standards lead to criticism and dissatisfaction with others and anger toward them
    3. 3) Other-Prescribed Perfectionism: A belief that others are imposing unrealistic standards on you

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