Lecture 17 And 18 - Personality Flashcards
What is Personality
An individual’s characteristic patterns of thoughts feelings, and behaviours persisting over time and across situations
Psychodynamic Theories
inner conflicts between innate drives and social forces
humanist theories
focus on private, subject experiences and personal growth
Trait theories
Focus on identifying clusters of traits that can help differentiate people
Social learning theories
focus on the role of socialization and mental processes, emphasizes the interaction between the person and environment
Psychodynamic approach to personality
Change of perspective
- Physical symptoms could be caused by purely psychological factors
- fascinated by unconscious
Id
- At the start of life
- The pleasure principle
Ego
- Reality Principle
Superego
- Morality principle
- Conscience internalized from parents and society
- age 4 or 5
Relation of ego and personality
- Personality emerges from the efforts of our ego that resolves ensign between our id and the superego
Psychosexual stages of Freud’s Model
- Oral
- Anal
- Phallic
- Latency
- Genital
Oral
- 0-18 months
- Pleasure centres on the mouth
Anal
- 18-36 months
- Pleasure focused on bowel and bladder elimination (control)
Phallic
- 3-6 years
- Pleasure zone is in the genitals, coping with incestuous sexual feelings
Latency
- 6-puberty
- dormant of sexual feelings
Genital
- puberty-after
- maturation of sexual interests
How does the ego protect us
- Reduces anxiety by unconsciously altering reality
Denial
Refusing to believe or even perceive painful realities
Displacement
Shifting sexual or agressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person
Projection
Disguising one’s own threatening impulses by attributing them to others
Rationalization
Offering self-justifying explanations in lieu of the real threatening unconscious reasons for one’s action
Reaction Formation
Switching unacceptable impulses into their opposites
Regression
Retreating to a more infantile psychosexual stage
Psychoanalysis techniques for revealing the unconscious mind
- free association
- Looking for meanings from the “latent” content of dreams or slips of the tongue
Projective Tests
- Psychological assessment tools
- criticisms
Flaws in Freud’s Research
- Unfalsifiability
- Unrepresentative sampling
- Biased Observations
- explanations afterwards rather than predictions
Maslow Understanding of Self-Actualization
- Humans are fundamentally good
- Innate drive toward growth
- Personality is shaped by needs and pursuit of self-actualisation
- motivation by unfulfilled needs
- lower needs in hierarchy use be satisfied before higher needs motivate
Characteristics of a Self-Actualized Person
- Efficient perception of reality
- acceptance of self, others and nature
- Not hostile sense of humour
- Autonomy
- Profound interpersonal relationships
- Peak experiences
Rogers’ person-centred perspective
- Personality results from one’s sense of self
- consistent set of beliefs and perceptions about oneself
- includes both who you are and who you want to be
- maladjustment results from a mismatch between the actual and ideal selves
Conditions that facilitate growth
- Unconditional Positive REgard
- Empathic understanding
- Genuineness
How to strive for a congruent self
Active listening
Can humanism lead to too much self-centredness
Self acceptance and self-actualisation do not encourage self-transcendence but self-centredness
Trait
An enduring quality that makes a person tend to act a certain way
Big 5 personality Factors
- Openness
- Conscientiousness
- Extraversion
- Agreeableness
- Neuroticism
Personality Inventory
Questionnaire assessing many personality traits
- standardizing
- scaling
- standard norming data
Myers Briggs
Examines Personality - 16 types of
- Extraversion or Introversion
- Sensing or Intuition
- Thinking or feeling
- Judging or Perceiving
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
Full atheoretical based on patterns in the data using factor analysis - 335 items to rate
MMPI scales
- Clinical Scales
- Validity Scales
- Supplemental Scales
How do we interpret and respond to external events and social situations
Memories, schemas and our expectations
Reciprocal Determinism
Personality, thoughts, social environment all reinforce/cause each other over time
The self
- Assumes to be the centre of personality by socio-cognitive approaches
- repositories of our memories, schemas and expectations used to interpret situations
Self-esteem
Value of Self, increased self-esteem has been observed to buffer inflammatory responses to acute stress
