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Personality
Chapter 13
Personality
What Is Personality?
Personality refers to a person’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting.
Personality
The Psychoanalytic Perspective
Personality
The Psychoanalytic Perspective
Exploring the Unconscious
Personality Structure
Credit: Ben Stephenson
Personality Structure
The id’s unconscious psychic energy strives to satisfy basic drives to survive, reproduce, and agress.
Personality Structure
The ego seeks to gratify the id’s impulses in realistic ways that will bring long-term pleasure.
Personality Structure
The superego forces the ego to consider not only the real but the idea (focuses on how we ought to behave).
According to Freud, personality forms through a series of psychosexual stages, during which the id’s pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct pleasure-sensitive areas of the body called erogenous zones.
Personality Development
Defense mechanisms – the ego’s protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality. For example, regression allows us to retreat to an earlier, more infantile stage of development.
Defense Mechanisms
Credit: Vstock/Alamy
Credit: Barbara Von Hoffman/Animals Animals
Defense Mechanisms
The ego’s protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality.
2. Repression banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness.
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.
1. Regression leads an individual faced with anxiety to retreat to a more infantile psychosexual stage.
Defense Mechanisms
The ego’s protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality.
4. Projection leads people to disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others.
6. Displacement shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person, redirecting anger toward a safer outlet.
5. Rationalization offers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one’s actions.
Personality
The Psychoanalytic Perspective
The Neo-Freudians and Psychodynamic Theorists
Alfred Adler
Like Freud, Adler 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.
Karen Horney
Like Adler, Horney believed in the social aspects of childhood growth and development. She countered Freud’s assumption that women have weak superegos and suffer from “penis envy.”
Personality
The Psychoanalytic Perspective
Assessing Unconscious Processes
Projective tests – aim is to provide a window into the unconscious by asking test-takers to describe an ambiguous stimulus or to tell a story about it. Above, the Thematic Apperception Test.
Credit: Lew Merrim/Photo Researchers, Inc.
Rorschach inkblot test – people describe what they see in a series of inkblots. Seeing (for example) a predatory animal or a weapon is interpreted as indication of aggressive tendencies.
Personality
The Psychoanalytic Perspective
Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective
Contradictory Evidence from Modern Research
Today, developmental psychologists think of development as lifelong, not as something fixed in childhood. They also doubt that neural networks are mature enough to sustain as much emotional trauma as Freud assumed.
Credit: Vstock/Alamy
Is Repression a Myth?
“Dozens of formal studies have yielded not a single convincing case of repression in the entire literature on trauma.”
- John Kihlstrom
The Modern Unconscious Mind
Back to the two-track mind: effortful vs. automatic processing
X
The Modern Unconscious Mind
Back to the two-track mind: effortful vs. automatic processing
X
The Modern Unconscious Mind
Back to the two-track mind: effortful vs. automatic processing
X
Freud’s Ideas as Scientific Theory
Freud’s theory offers after the fact explanations of most any behavior, but it fails to predict such behaviors. For example, if you feel angry at your mother’s death, it’s because of “unresolved childhood dependency.” If you don’t, it’s because of repression!
Personality
The Humanistic Perspective
Personality
The Humanistic Perspective
Abraham Maslow’s Self-Actualizing Person
Credit: Ted Polumbaum/Time Pix/Getty
Self-actualization
Esteem
Love/Belonging
Safety
Physiological
Personality
The Humanistic Perspective
Carl Rogers’ Person-Centered Perspective
Source: nrogers.com
Freud’s Ideas as Scientific Theory
Unconditional positive regard – an attitude of grace, an attitude that values us even knowing our failings. Genuineness, acceptance, and empathy are the water, sun, and nutrients that enable people to grow.
Credit: Image Source/Jupiterimages
Personality
The Humanistic Perspective
Evaluating the Humanistic Perspective
Source: nrogers.com
Credit: Ted Polumbaum/Time Pix/Getty
Personality
The Trait Perspective
Traits: People’s characteristic behaviors and conscious motives
Personality
The Trait Perspective
Exploring Traits
Credit: AP Photo/Peter Kramer
Factor Analysis
PET studies show that extraverts seek stimulation because their normal brain arousal is relatively low; also, dopamine tends to be higher in extraverts.
Biology and Personality
Credit: Jens LangnerCredit: Acodered / Vladimir Lysyuk / Jarno (Mc) Cordia
Twin studies show that individual differences in personality traits are influenced by genes, perhaps via the autonomic nervous system.
Biology and Personality
Credit: Reto Stauffer
Personality
The Trait Perspective
Assessing Traits
Personality
The Trait Perspective
The Big Five Factors
Personality inventory – a questionnaire on which people respond to items designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors; used to assess traits.
I am the life of the party.
I spend time reflecting on things.
I change my mood a lot.
I make people feel at ease.
I pay attention to details.
The Big Five are stable, substantially heritable, and predictive of important outcomes (e.g., grades).
I am the life of the party.
I spend time reflecting on things.
I change my mood a lot.
I make people feel at ease.
I pay attention to details.
Personality
The Trait Perspective
Evaluating the Trait Perspective
The Person-Situation Controversy
Personality traits are stable and predictive of behaviors, attitudes, and interests.
The Person-Situation Controversy
The Person-Situation Controversy
However, as emphasized by social psychologists Walter Mischel, Philip Zimbardo, and others, the situation can still have a powerful influence on behavior.
Originally published in the N
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orker
Phillip G
. Zim
bardo, Inc.
Personality
The Social-Cognitive Perspective
Reciprocal Influences
Reciprocal determinism: The social-cognitive perspective proposes that our personalities are shaped by the interaction of our personal traits (thoughts and feelings), our environment, and our behaviors.
Personality
The Social-Cognitive Perspective
Personal Control
Internal Versus External Locus of Control
Credit: LWA-Dann Tardiff/Corbis
People with an external locus of control have the perception that chance or outside forces determine their fate, while those with an internal locus of control believe that they are the masters of their own destiny.
Learned Helplessness Versus Personal Control
Optimism Versus Pessimism
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_psychology
Martin Seligman(Courtesy of Martin Seligman)
Credit: Ed Schipul
Chapter Review
What is personality?
What is the basic idea of the psychoanalytic perspective on personality?
According to Freud, what is the structure of personality, and how does it develop?
Chapter Review
How did Neo-Freudians differ from Freud in their thinking about personality?
How has the Psychoanalytic perspective fared since Freud? What are some
critiques?
What is the basic idea of the humanistic perspective on personality?
Chapter Review
What is the basic idea of the trait perspective on personality? What is a trait?
How are traits measured? Are they stable? Heritable? Predictive?
What is the person-situation controversy?
Chapter Review
What is the basic idea of the social-cognitive perspective on personality?
Chapter Review
Question(s) from textbook on material not covered in class:
Exploring the Self (pp. 544-549)
