Personality

• Personality- An individual's characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting.
• Psychoanalytic Perspective- In his clinical practice, Sigmund Frued encountered patients suffering from nervous disorders. Their complaints could not be explained in terms of purely physical causes.
• Frued's clinical experience led him to develop the first comprehensive theory of personality, which included the unconscious mind, psychosesxual stages, and defense mechanisms.
• Exploring the unconscious- A reservoir (unconscious mind) of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories. Frued asked patients to say whatever came to their minds (free association) in order to tap the unconscious. 
• Dream Analysis- Another method to analyze the unconscious mind is through interpreting manifest and latent contents of dreams. 
• Psychoanalysis- The process of free association (chain of thoughts) leads to painful, embarrassing unconscious memories. Once these memories are retrieved and released (treatment: psychoanalysis) the patient feels better. 
• Model of mind- The mind is like an iceberg.  It is mostly hidden, and below the surface lies the unconscious mind.  The preconscious stores temporary memories. 
• Personality Structure- Personality develops as a result of our efforts to resolve conflicts between our biological impulses (id) and social restraints (superego).
• Id, Ego, and Superego- The id unconsciously strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives, operating on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification.
• Personality Development- Frued believed that personality formed during the first few years of life divided into psychosexual stages.  During these stages the id's pleasure-seeking energies focus on pleasure sensitive body areas called erogenous zones. 
• Frued's Psychosexual Stages
• Oral (0-18 months)- Pleasure centers on the mouth- sucking, biting, chewing.
• Anal (18-36 months)- Pleasure focuses on bowel and bladder elimination; coping with demands of control.
• Phallic (3-6 years)- Pleasure zone is the genitals; coping with incestuous sexual feelings
• Latency (6- puberty)- Dormant sexual feelings
• Genital (puberty on)- Maturation of sexual interests
• Oedipus Complex A- boy's sexual desire for his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father.  A girl's desire for her father is called the Electra complex.
• Identification- Children cope with threatening feelings by repressing them and by identifying with the rival parent.  Through this process of identification, their superego gains strength incorporates their parents' values. 
• Defense Mechanisms- The ego's protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality.

1. Repression banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness.
2. Regression leads an individual faced with anxiety to retreat to a more infantile psychosexual stage.
3. Reaction formation causes the ego to unconsciously switch unacceptable impulses into their opposites.  People may express feelings of purity when they may be suffering anxiety from unconscious feelings about sex.
4. Projection leads people to disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others.
5. Rationalization offers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one's actions.
6. Displacement shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person, redirecting anger toward a safer outlet. 
• The Neo-Freudians

• Like Frued, Alfred Alder believed in childhood tensions.  However, these tensions were social in nature and not sexual.  A child struggles with an inferiority complex during growth and strives for superiority and power. 
• Like Alder, Karen Horney believed in the social aspects of childhood growth and development.  She cuntered Freud's assumption that women have weak superegos and suffer from "penis envy."
• Carl Jung believed in the collective unconscious, which contained a common reservior of images derived from our species past.  This is why many cultures share certain myths and images such as the mother being a symbol of nurturance. 
• Assessing Unconscious Processes
• Evaluating personality from an unconscious mind''s perspective would require a psychological instrument (projective tests) that would reveal the hidden unconscious mind.
• Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
• Developed by Henry Murray, the TAT is a projective test in which people express their inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes. 
• Rorschach Inkblot Test- The most widely used projective test uses a set of 10 inkblots and was designed by Hermann Rorschach.  It seeks to identify people's inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of the blots.
• Projective tests: criticisms- Critics argue that projective tests lack both reliability (consistency of results) and validity (predicting what it is supposed to).
• Evaluating the psychanalytical Perspective
• Personality develops throughout life and is not fixed in childhood.
• Frued underemphasized peer influence on the individual, which may be as powerful as parental influence.
• Gender identity may develop before 5-6 years of age. 
• There may be other reasons for dreams besides with fulfillment.
• Verbal slips can be explained on the basics of cognitive processing of verbal choices.
• Suppressed sexuality leads to psychological disorders.  Sexual inhibition has decreased, but psychological disorders have not.
• Frued's psychoanalytic theory rests on the repression of painful experiences into the unconscious mind.
• The modern Unconscious Mind
• Modern research shoes the existence of non-conscious information processing.  This involves
1. Schemas that automatically control perceptions and interpretations
2. The right-hemisphere activity that enables the split brain patient's left hand to carry out an instruction the patient cannot verbalize
3. Parallel processing during vision and thinking
4. Implicit memories
5. Emotions that activate instantly without consciousness
6. Self-concept and stereotypes that unconsciously influence us. 
• Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective
• The scientific merits of Frued's theory have been criticized.  Psychoanalysis is meagerly testable. Most of its concepts arise out of clinical practice, which are the after-the-fact explanation.
• Humanistic Perspective- By the 1960's, psychologists became discontent with Frued's negativity and the mechanistic psychology of the behaviorists
• Self-Actualizing Person- Maslow proposed that we as individuals are motivated by a hierarchy of needs.  Beginning with physiological needs, we try to reach the state of self-actualization- fulfilling our potential.

 

• Person-Centered Perspective- Carl Rogers also believed in an individual's self-actualization tendencies.  He said that Unconditional Positive Regard is an attitude of acceptance of others despite their failings. 
• Assessing the self- In an effort to assess personality, Rogers asked people to describe themselves as they would like to be (ideal) and as they actually are (real).  If the two descriptions were close the individual had a positive self-concept.
• All of our thoughts are feelings about ourselves, in an answer to the question, "Who am I?" refers to self concept. 
• Evaluating the Humanistic Perspective- Humanistic psychology has a pervasive impact on counseling, education, child-rearing, and management with its emphasis on a positive self-concept, empathy, and the though that people are basically good and can improve.
1. Concepts in humanistic psychology are vague and subjective and lack scientific basis.
2. The individualism encouraged can lead to self-indulgence, selfishness, and an erosion of moral restraints.
3. Humanistic psychology fails to appreciate the reality of our human capacity for ___. It lacks adequate balance between realistic optimism and despair.
• The Trait Perspective- An individual's unique collection of durable dispositions and consistent ways of behaving (traits) constitutes his or her personality.
• Examples of Traits
1. Honest
2. Dependable 
3. Moody 
4. Impulsive
• Exploring Traits- Each personality is uniquely made up of multiple traits.  Allport and Odbert (1936, identified almost 18,000 words representing traits.  One way to condense the immense lists of personality traits is through factor analysis, a statistical approach used to describe and relate personality traits.
• Factor Analysis

• Hans and Sybil Eysenck suggested that personality could be reduced down to two polar dimensions, extroversion-introversion and emotional stability-instability. 

• Biology and Personality- Personality dimensions are influenced by genes.  
1. Brain-imaging procedures show that extroverts seek stimulation because their normal brain arousal is relatively low. 
2. Genes also influence out temperament and behavior style.  Differences in children's shyness and inhibition may be attributed to autonomic nervous system reactivity.
• Assessing Traits- Personality inventories are questionnaires (often with true-false or agree-disagree items) designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors assessing several traits at once. 
• MMPI- The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is the most widely researched and clinically used dof all personality tests.  It was originally developed to identify emotional disorders.
• The Big Five Factors- today's trait researchers believe that earlier trait dimensions, such as Eysencks' personality dimensions, fail to tell the whole story.  So, an expanded range (five facrors) of traits does a better job of assessment.  

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• Questions of the Big Five
1. How stable are these traits? Questionable in adulthood. However, they change over development.
2. How heritable are they? Fifty percent or so for each trait.
3. How about other cultures? These traits are common across cultures. 

Evaluating the trait perspectives- The Person-Situation Controversy Walter Mischel (1968,1984, 2004) points out traits may be enduring, but the resulting behaviors in various situations is different. Therefore, traits are not good predictors of behavior.

The Person-situation Controversy- Trait theorists argue the behaviors from situations may be different, but average behavior remains the same. Therefore, traits matter.

Traits are socially significant and influence our health, thinking, and performance.

Consistency of Expressive style

Expressive styles in speaking and gestures demonstrate trait consistency. Observers are able to judge people’s that behaviors and feelings in as little as 30 seconds and in one particular case as little as 2 seconds.

Social-Cognitive Perspective

Bandura (1986, 2001, 2005) believes that personality is the result of an interaction that takes place between a person and their social context.

Individuals & Environments

Specific ways in which individuals and environments interact

1.     Different peoples choose different environments

2.     Our personality’s shape how we react

3.     Our personalities shape situations

Behavior – behavior emerges from an interplay of external and internal influences

Personal Control

Social-cognitive psychologists emphasizes our sense of personal control, whether we control the environment or the environment control refers to the perception chance or external loss of control refers to the perception that chance of chance of outside forces beyond our personal control determines our fate internal loss of control refers to the perception that we can control our own fate

Learned Helplessness

When unable to avoid repeated adverse events an animal or human helplessness

Optimism vs. Pessimism

An optimistic or pessimistic attritional style is your way of explaining positive or negative events. Positive psychology aims to discover and promote conditions that enable individuals and communities to thrive.

Positive Psychology and Humanistic Psychology

Such as humanistic psychology such as humanistic, attempts to foster human fulfillment. Positive psychology, in addition seeks positive social groups.

Assessing behavior in Situations

Realistic and simulated situations because they find that it is the best way to predict the behavior of others in similar situations.

Evaluating the Social-cognitive Perspective

The social cognitive psychologist pay a lot of attention to the situations and pay less attention to the individuals his unconscious mind his emotions and genetics

Exploring the self

Research on the self has a long history because the self organizes thinking feeling and actions and is a critical part of our personality

1.      Research focuses on the different selves we possess. Some we possess and others we dread

2.     Researchers studies  how we overestimate our concern that others evaluate our appearance, performance, and blunders (spotlight effect)

Benefits of self esteem

Maslow and Rogers argued that a successful life results from healthy self-image. The following are two reasons why low self-esteem results in personal problems.

1.      When self-esteem is deflated, we view ourselves and others critically.

2.     Low self-esteem reflects reality our failure in meeting challenges, or surmounting difficulties

 

Culture & self-esteem

 

People maintain their self-esteem even with a low status by valuing things they achieve and comparing themselves to people with similar positions

 

Self-Serving Bias

We accept responsibility for good deeds and success more than for bad deeds and failures. Defensives self-esteem is fragile and egotistic whereas secure self-esteem is less fragile and less dependent on external evaluation