10.20 Impact Of Trauma, Stressors And Personality

Question 1

Define systems theory

Answer 1

• theory of interacting processes and the way they influence each other over time to permit the continuity of some larger whole - Encyclopedia of Human Behavior (Second Edition), 2012
• Anything that happens within a system must be examined with that system in mind because every part of a system impacts the whole

Question 2

What is personality?

Answer 2

• how someone usually act / react
• Personality describes fairly stable and consistent patterns of feeling, thinking, and behaving
  • We often talk about what people are normally like and can predict how they will behave in the future
• Personalities are characterized in terms of personality traits
  • Enduring patterns of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the environment and oneself that are exhibited in a wide range of social and personal contexts
  • Or enduring characteristics that influence our behaviour across many situations
  • Personality traits such as introversion, friendliness, conscientiousness, and honesty are important because they help explain consistencies in behaviour
• The most popular way of measuring traits is by administering personality tests on which people self-report about their own characteristics
  • The most important and well validated of which is the Five-Factor (Big Five) Model of Personality
  • According to this model, there are five fundamental underlying trait dimensions that are stable across time, cross-culturally shared, and explain a substantial proportion of behaviour

Question 3

What is a personality disorder?

Answer 3

• psychiatric disorder

DSM-5 definition
- An enduring pattern of inner experience & behaviour that deviates markedly from the norms and expectations of the individual’s culture (cognition, affect, interpersonal functioning, impulse control), is pervasive and inflexible, has an onset in adolescence or early adulthood, is stable over time, and leads to distress or impairment

• DSM-5 uses a categorical approach – 10 types of specific personality disorders
  • Alternative approach – dimensional
• Personality disorders represent maladaptive variants of personality traits that merge imperceptibly into normality and into one another
  • Only when personality traits are inflexible, maladaptive and cause significant functional impairment or subjective distress do they constitute personality disorders