CH12: Personality

Question 1

What is Personality?

Answer 1

Personality is the unique characteristics that account for patterns of inner experience and outward behaviour. Personality is a social construct, similar to IQ, it needs to be operationalized. The early approaches of personality was founded by Franz Gall called Phrenology. Since then, 5 main perspectives were created: Psychodynamic, humanistic, trait, biological, and interactionist.

Question 2

Psychodynamic

Answer 2

Believed that behaviour is driven by the unconsciousness, where events in our childhood shaped our adult personalities. We would protect ourselves with tactics to reduce anxiety (defense mechanisms). The main advocates to this theory were Freud and Jung.

Question 3

Humanistic

Answer 3

Focuses on the inner capabilities for growth and self-fulfillment. A person’s own view of themselves and the world is more important than the behaviour. The main advocates for this were Maslow and Rogers. Maslow’s heirarchy of needs says that people are naturally good and have the urge to grow and that personality comes of the strive to meet one’s needs. Carl Rogers built onto Maslow’s work, emphasizing on the importance of self-concept and unconditional support. Self-concept is a patter of one’s own view of themselves that remain persistent over time and can be used to characterize an individual.

Question 4

Trait

Answer 4

Personality is formed with a limited number of important traits and exists on a spectrum. One’s traits influence the behaviour. The main advocates for this are Allport, Eysenck, Costa and McCrae. They took a new appraoch to measuring personality called the personality inventory, a questionnaire designed to assess various aspects of personality. Gordon Allport based his work on teh Lexial hypothesis, the idea that certain significant personality traits are encoded into our language. Hans Eysenck built on Allport’s work, developing an trait model of personality using factor analysis to find superfactors. Costa and McCrae built on these to form the 5 Factor Model. This is the most widely used scientific personality model.

Question 5

Person-Situation Debate

Answer 5

Personality psychologists aim to explain why people are the way they are and why. 2 additional perspectives formed:
Situationism, which is a view of personality which notes that in many social situations, people tend to respond in similiar ways essentially that the situation drives the response. B.F. Skinner advocates this, saying that we repeat actions because of past rewards.
Interactionism, which emphasizes the relationship between a person’s personality traits and the reinforcing aspects of the situations that people put themselves in. Advocated by Albert Bandura, believing there is a reciprocal relationship among the environment, behaviour, and internal mental events called Reciprocal determinism.

Question 6

Freud’s Psychodynamic Theory

Answer 6

Freud discovers that we use defense mechanisms, largely unconscious reactions that protect a person from negative emotions.
Repression: Keeping unpleasant memories buried in our unconscious.
Denial: Refusing to acknowledge reality.
Rationalization: Creating excuses for unacceptable behaviour.
Reaction formation: Expressing the opposite of one’s true feelings, sometimes to an exaggerated extent.
Projection: Transferring one’s unacceptable qualities onto another.
Displacement: Diverting one’s implusies onto another target.
Sublimation: Using socially unacceptable behaviours into an acceptable activity.
Regression: Reverting to immature ways of responding.