jimtrue.com : school : PSY1012 : Chapter Fifteen: Personality

Posted by Jim True on April 17, 2006 5:28 PM. Last Updated October 22, 2006 9:23 PM

Disclaimer for all material noted here is at the bottom of this web page.

Chapter Fifteen: Personality

What is Personality?

• Personality
• an individual's characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling and acting
• Everthing we've talked about our learning, our memory, etc. have all worked to build our personality
• Basic Perspectives
• Psychoanalytic
• Humanistic
• The Psychoanalytic Perspective
• From Freud's theory which proposes that childhood sexuality and unconscious motivations influence personality
• There are still Freudian theories around, but he is not the primary focus of any psychologist today
• Most of his patient's were women; very neurotic, no flesh was to show; women were very repressed. They were very well-off and kind of bored.
• Psychoanalysis
• Freud's theory of personality that attributes our thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts
• techniques used in treating psychological disorders by seeking to expose and interpret unconscious tensions; thoughts and motives that are part of hidden motives
• Free Association
• in psychoanalysis, a method of exploring the unconscious
• person relaxes and says whatever comes to mind, no matter how trivial or embarassing
• that's what's on your mind so that must be what's going on in your unconscious
• In this school of thought, psychology is mostly unconscious
• Unconscious
• according to Freud, a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings and memories
• contemporary viewpoint - information processing of which we are unware

Personality Structure (according to Freud)

• Id
• The little devil on your shoulder
• contains a reservoir of unconscious psychic energy
• strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives
• operates on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification
• Superego
• Angel on the other shoulder
• the part of personality that presents internalized ideals
• provides standards for judgement (the conscience) and for future aspirations
• Ego
• the largely conscious, "executive" part of personality
• mediates among the demands of the id, superego, and reality
• operates on the reality principle, satisfying the id's desires in ways that will realistically bring pleasure rather than pain
• Freud's idea of the mind's structure (picture of the conscious and unconscious mind, very much like an iceberg with most of the bulk of our mind below the surface (the unconscious), where the Id and Superego reside).

Personality Development

• Psychosexual Stages
• the childhood stages of development during which the id's pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct errogenous zones
• Oedipus Complex
• a boy's sexual desires toward his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father
• A natural rivalry does exist between father and son; son's are young and adolescent and vital whereas the father is on the downside of his life
• Elektra Complex
• a girl's sexual desires toward her father and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival mother
• Freud's Psychosexual Stages, table on page 578

Stage	Focus
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 for control
Phallic (3-6 years)	Pleasure zone is the genitals; coping with incestuous sexual feelings
Latency (6 to puberty)	Dormant sexual feelings
Genital (Puberty on)	Maturation of sexual interests

• Anally fixated - Anal retentive; Anal expulsive (parent who said 'poop in your pants 'til your six; I don't care'; didn't guide the child in maintaining control. King or queen of sloth and sloppiness
• Freud believes that when the person gets to puberty they are done developmentally; Eric Ericson has the same periods of time, but focuses on psychosocial conflict instead of sexual maturation. Continue to grow until you die.
• Identification
• the process by which children incorporate their parent's values into their developing superegos. Don't be too concerned with this one.
• Fixation
• a lingering focus on pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, where conflicts were unresolved

Defense Mechanisms

• Defense Mechanisms
• the ego's protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality
• Repression
• the basic defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings and memories from consciousness.
• Regression
• defense mechanism in which an individual faced with anxiety retreats to a more infantile psychosexual stage, where some psychic energy remains fixated
• Reaction Formation
• defense mechanism by which the ego unconsciously switches unacceptable impulses into their opposites
• people may express feelings that are the opposite of their anxiety-arousing unconscious feelings
• Projection
• blaming
• defense mechanism by which people disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others
• Rationalization
• defense mechanism that offers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one's actions
• Displacement
• You always hurt the one you love.
• defense mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person
• as when redirecting anger toward a safer outlet
• Usually associated with unpleasantness
• Defense mechanisms are a normal part of everyday life; becomes a problem when this becomes your habitual way of dealing with reality

Assessing the Unconscious

• Projective Test
• a personality test, such as the Rorschach or TAT, that provides ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger projection of one's inner dynamics
• Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
• a projective test in wich people express their inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes
• Children's Apperception Test (CAT)
• Rorschach Inkblot Test
• the most widely used projective test
• a set of 10 inkblots designed by Herman Rorschach
• seeks to identify people's inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of the blots
• Scored on how typical your response is; how many different things you see in the same image

Neo-Freudians

• Alfred Adler
• importance of childhood social tensions
• Karen Horney
• sought to balance Freud's Masculine biases
• Carl Jung
• emphasized the collective unconscious
• concept of a shared inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species' history
• Famous botched cases of Freud; little Dora

Humanistic Perspective

• Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
• studied self-actualization processes of productive and healthy people (eg. Lincoln)
• Self-Actualization
• the ultimate psychological need that arises after basic physical and psychological needs are met and self-esteem is achieved
• the motivation to fulfill one's potential
• Carl Rogers (1902-1987)
• focused on growth and fulfillment of individuals: genuineness, acceptance and empathy
• The Ideal Self and the Real Self: thinks that folks who have an unattainable Ideal Self tend to be more unhappy and don't have healthy personalities
• Unconditional Positive Regard
• an attitude of total acceptance toward another person
• Self-Concept
• all our thoughts and feelings about ourselves, in an answer to the question, "Who am I?"
• Ignores humanity's great capacity for evil towards one another (as during war)

"You are educated when you have trhe ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or self-confidence." - Robert Frost

Contemporary Research -- The Trait Perspective

• Trait
• a characteristic pattern of behavior
• a disposition to feel and act, as assessed by self-report inventories and peer reports
• Personality Inventory
• a questionnaire (often with true-false or agree-disagree items) on which people respond to items to items
• The Trait Perspective
• Hans and Sybil Eysenck use two primary personality factors as axes for describing personality variation (pg. 593) - unstable - stable; introverted - extraverted; melancholic - phlegmatic; choleric - sanguine [attributed to Socrates]
• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)
• the mostly widely researched and clinically used of all personality tests
• originally developed to identify emotional disorders (still considered its most appropriate use)
• now used for many other screening purposes
• Empirically Derived Test [don't need to memorize]
• a test developed by testing a pool of items and then selecting those that discriminate between groups
• such as the MMPI
• MMPI Test Profile - 10 scales pg 594 [purple range indicates 'normal'; everything above that range is clinically significant]
• Fake Good scale and the Fake Bad Scale and scales to attempt to catch the person lying
• Example from book; the Masculinity/Feminity scale shows that the person may be gender-disoriented, which causes the depression, psychopathic, etc.; red scale is after therapy
• The Big Five Personality Factors - Extraversion is 'Agreeableness'; Pg 595; example is Myers-Briggs Test [Non-clinical]

Social-Cognitive Perspective

• Social-cognitive perspective
• views behavior as influenced by the interaction between persons and their social context (the bobo doll)
• You can not leave out of your context of personality how environment affects you
• Reciprocal Determinism
• the interacting influences between personality and environmental factors
• Personal Control
• our sense of controlling our environments rather than feeling helpless
• External Locus of Control
• the perception that chance or outside forces beyond one's personal control determine one's fate [it's not my fault - person who doesn't take control of things they could control]
• Internal Locus of Control
• the perception that one controls one's own fate
• Feeling like you have to have everything under your own control can also be a problem
• Learned Helplessness
• the hopelessness and passive resignation an animal or human learns when unable to avoid repeated aversive events [people who are too externally locus can develop learned helplessness, plays a role in generalized helpless behavior]
• Uncontrollabe bad events -> perceived lack of control -> generalized helpless behavior

Exploring the Self

• Spotlight Effect
• overestimating others noticing and evaluating our appearance, performance, and blunders
• Self-Esteem
• one's feelings of high or low self-worth
• Self-Serving Bias
• readiness to perceive oneself favorably

Disclaimer: These are MY notes taken from classroom lectures while I'm in the classroom. While I'm perfectly happy to share my notes with my classmates and I know I take very good notes, you should still make every effort to attend the class and TAKE YOUR OWN NOTES. I will not transcribe everything the instructor says in the classroom, and I will NEVER post pre-exam reviews. My notes will not replace the value of actually attending class and taking your own class notes.I also cannot attest to their accuracy, other than they are what was provided in the lecture; you should not reference my notes as "expert opionion" by any means, and if you notice an error or omission, please do me the favor of e-mailing me with the correction and I will re-post my notes. End of Disclaimer.