Personality Flashcards
1
Q
Social psychology vs personality psychology
A
Social: tends to examine the sort of things that stay stable across personalities
Personality: the opposite of that - the things about the person that remains stable across those situations –> “enduring patterns of thought, feeling, motivation and behaviour that are expressed in different circumstances”
2
Q
What is personality?
A
- how a person’s thoughts and actions interact with and shape reciprocally the conditions of their lives
- people choose their environments –> people affect their environments –> in return, these environments affect the stable ways in which a person thinks about and approaches the world
3
Q
Issues and questions in personality research
A
- what are the basic elements of personality? to what extent is personality stable across time and across situations
- structure of personality
- personality processes
- individual differences in personality
- causal contributions of biology, culture, history to personality development
- the effect of situation; reciprocal forces
- the impact of personality on important aspects of life such as relationships
4
Q
Research approaches to personality:
A
- clinical approach
- correlational approach
- experimental approach
5
Q
Clinical approaches to personality research
A
INFO
Focus: involves the systematic, in-depth research of individuals
Methods: observation and self-report
Significant researchers: Charcot, Janet, Morton Prince, Freud, Murray
STRENGTHS
- does not assume that everyone has the same degree of insight into their own functioning
- observes a great variety of phenomena
- considers the functioning of a whole person
- generates new hypotheses
LIMITATIONS
- difficult for others to confirm observations
- may be difficult to formulate lab-style tests of hypotheses
- hard to replicate with questionnaires (tends to distrust self-report)
6
Q
Correlational approaches to personality research
A
INFORMATION
Focus: establishes associations between sets of measures on which people have been found to differ (not studying persona as a whole but relationships between elements) –> are there basic groups of characteristics on which people differ?
Methods: measurements based on self-report and factor analysis
Significant researchers: Galton, Gordon Allport (5 Factor model of personality)
Assumes: trait is fundamental unit of personality
Aim: sought periodic table of elements of personality
STRENGTHS
- self-report is easy to use on large groups, cost effective
- compares an individual to the average via numerical scores (clinical utility)
LIMITATIONS
- correlational does not equal causation
- factor analysis has subjective elements
- self reports are subject to biases and errors (self deception, social desirability)
7
Q
Experimental approaches to personality research
A
INFORMATION
Focus: involves systematic manipulation of variables to establish causal relationship and general laws
Methods: experimental manipulation and direct experimental control
Significant Researchers:
- Wundt (how do changes in stimuli influence changes in experience / phenomenal consciousness?)
- Ebbinghaus (laws of memory)
- Pavlov
- Skinner
STRENGTHS
- close to scientific ideal
- no need to worry about whether subject knows truth about self or is telling truth as does not rely on self-report
LIMITATIONS
- difficult to bring important features of personality into the lab
- not in the context of a whole person
- participants bring own expectations into the lab
- experiment is a social situation
8
Q
What was freud looking at (clinical approach)
A
- tried to explain hysteria
- examined ambivalence (conflicting feelings and motives) , self-defeating behaviour, compromise formations, defence mechanisms
9
Q
Temperament (genetic approach)
A
- has a significant genetic component and strong claims for consistency across the life span
- temperament variables include: inhibition to the familiar, impulsivity, reactivity
10
Q
Temperament: inhibition to the unfamiliar
A
- includes shyness, anxiety when faced with novel stimuli
- found in about 10% of children (manifests in crying, being upset, etc with unfamiliar stimuli)
11
Q
Temperament: impulsivity
A
Zuckerman:
- stimulus hungry people
- issues of impulsivity (liveliness, risk-taking, impulsive behaviour, non-planning) and sensation seeking (thrill, adventure, seeks novel and intense stimuli, disinhibition, boredom susceptibility, evolutionary advantage)
- places sensation seeking in the limbic system rather than the cortex
- dopamine seen as driving sensation seeking
- serotonin seen as inhibiting sensation-seeking
12
Q
Temperament: reactivity
A
- Strelau
- low reactive work well when the job requires a high deree of precision, there is a high price for mistakes, etc
- high reactives: have sensitive nervous systems, react strongly to changing, high levels of demand
13
Q
Heritability
A
- heavily influenced by genes
- researchers have looked for similar levels of a trait in identical twins reared apart and compared those levels to those found in twins reared together
- some researchers that some traits are more heritable than others:
- -> IQ / openness is most heritable
- -> extraversion, neuroticism is somewhat heritable
- -> conscientious, agreeableness is least heritable
14
Q
Trait Approaches to Personality
A
- very dominant approach
- assumes that all people have enduring characteristics or traits and personality can best be described as a set of these characteristics
- example include: extraversion, levels of warmth, impulsiveness, conscientiousness, anxiety, trust
- assumption in trait models: these characteristics occur in every individual at levels that can be mapped on a continuum normally distributed across the general population
- introduced by Gordon Allport
- Raymond Cattell listed 16 distinct traits
- Costa and McCrae did the the Five Factor Model (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism)
15
Q
The nomothetic approach
A
- assumes that levels of particular traits occur on a continuum from low to high in all people, and are normally distributed
16
Q
idiographic approach
A
- emphasises the uniqueness of the individual (rather than comparing individual scores to a wider norm)
17
Q
Self report measures
A
- relies on person having good self-awareness and being truthful
STRENGTHS - valuable predictors of behaviour - cheap and efficient WEAKNESSES: - open to response biases - responses may differ from one time to the next (low reliability) - open to influence from many variables (environment mood, recent experience) - assume good self-awareness - may have low validity
18
Q
Freud’s topographic model
A
Conscious mental processes
- rational, goal directed thoughts
- at the centre of awareness
Pre-conscious Mental Processes
- not conscious but could become conscious at any point
Unconscious mental processes
- irrational
- organised on associative lines
- inaccessible to consciousness because they are repressed
19
Q
Freud assumed that:
A
- symptoms ahve meaning
- symptoms may be psychosomatic
- unconscious conflicts are the causes of some illnesses
- repressed mental processes, although unconscious, are still active and may affect the person in the form of a bodily symptom
- emphasised ambivalence
20
Q
Freud and Drives
A
Where do unconscious conflicts come from? - society won't let us directly express many of our urges but these urges give us the energy to work, love, play, create The drives: - respiration - hunger - pain-avoidance - thirst - libido - later added: aggressive
21
Q
Freud’s Psychosexual Stages
A
- theory about the development of key aspects of personality
- at each stage libido is focused on a different part of the body
- examines fixations (conflicts or concerns related to a given stage that persist past developmental period in which they arise) which come from excessive or inadequate pleasure at the given stage
The Stages; - oral
- anal
- phallic
- latency
- genital
22
Q
Freud’s Structural Model
A
People have 3 essential mind structures
ID
- concerned with the pleasurable
- runs according to primary process thinking (wishful, illogical, associative thought)
EGO
- concerned with the actual
- works on the reality principle - balances the drives of the Id, the constraints of the superego and what is realistically possible in the world
- represses unacceptable urges
- realistically satisfies the drives in conjunction with the environment
- involves perception, memory, motor coordination, cognition, problem solving, management of emotions
- can delay gratification and weigh alternatives
- responsible for defence mechanisms
SUPEREGO
- concerned with what’s ideal
- internalised moral principles of our parents by introjection/identification and developing a consciousness / standards for your behaviour
- seeks perfection and can make us deeply unhappy
23
Q
Freud’s defence mechanisms
A
DM are an unconscious mental process used by the ego to protect the person from experiencing unpleasant emotional states –> does this by falsifying inner perceptions
Repression: repressing thoughts or memories that are too painful
Denial: refusal to acknowledge these
Projection: attributes their unacknowledged feelings to others
Reaction formation: turns unacceptable feelings or impulses into their opposites
Sublimation: converting aggressive or sexual impulses into socially acceptable activities
Rationalisation: explains away actions in a seemingly logical way to avoid guild
Displacement: directing emotions away from real target to a substitute
Regression: returning to behaviours from an earlier stage of psychosexual development
Passive aggression: indirect expression of anger
Isolation: severing the conscious ties between an unacceptable act and its memory source
Undoing: try to undo pleasant outcome by re-enacting it with a more accpetable outcome
Identification with the aggressor: stockholm syndrome
Reversal: the turning about of an instinct
24
Q
Object Relations Theories
A
- grew from psychosanalysis
- focuses on relationship seeking rather than instinctual gratification
- concerned with how past experiences of important others in one’s life are represented as: aspects of understanding about
- -> one’s self
- -> others
- -> the self in relation to others
- importance of early relationships
- basic agreement on the 5 elements of inner representations of the self
1. multidimensional (many representations)
2. affect / emotional content
3. motives in terms of one’s wishes or fears
4. conscious, non-conscious, unconscious
5. develop alongside representations of others and self in relation to others
25
Psychoanalytic testing
```
Word association test
- allows access to unconcsious processes
Life history methods
- through interviews gain an understanding of the person's life experiences
Projective tests
- rorschach inkblots
- murray's thematic apperception test
Analysis of transference
- transference (when a person relates to another person as if that person is a different person from their past)
Hypnosis
- reveal unconscious
Dream interpretation
```
26
Psychodynamic approaches
STRENGTHS
Strong empirical support for some processes
- unconscious cognitive, emotional and motivational processes
- ambivalence in intrapersonal conflict
- childhood experiences in shaping adult patterns of interacting with others
- mentalmodels of self and others
- ability to regulate impulses
WEAKNESSES
- insufficient basis in scientfiically sound observation
- very male centred
- some believe that drive theory has not stood the test of time
- may discount too much of the learning we do as adults
27
Social Cognitive Theories
BASIC IDEA:
- learned behaviours and learned emotional reactions become a stable part of personality
- these are linked with triggers in the environment or specific events
- learned through: operant conditioning, associative learning, modelling
- focus on: beliefs, expectations, memories and knowledge, knowledge structures such as schemas and scripts about the self, others, the self in relation to others and about the world, info processing
SOCIAL COGNITIVE APPROACH: assumes that we have a neural network of memories, emotions, thoughts and plans for action that are linked together in the brain (when we experience something a cluster of neurons is set aside to recognise it again)
28
Nodes
When we experience something, a cluster of neurons (a node) is set aside to recognise it again.
When we experience that thing again the node becomes activated.
Nodes that are activated together become wired together.
The more often nodes are activated together, the stronger the links become.
Because of these links, activating one node will begin to activate linked nodes.
If these same sequence of events play out often enough, either in real life or vicariously, it becomes a script that plays out the same way whenever it is triggered.
29
Anderson and Bushman General Aggression model of Social Cognition
Person variables + situation variables
Cognitions, accessible affects, arousal
Immediate appraisal, reappraisal, thoughtful action
Resources, impulsive action
Aggressive response
30
Social cognitive approach: bandura
- imitation in the absence of reinforcement or pav conditioning
- social cog theory: focuses on how individuals perceive, recall, think about and interpret info about themselves and others
- e.g. self efficacy + self-efficacy expectancy
31
What is a schema?
- mental outline or framework of some aspect of experience, which is based on prior experience or memory (provide the mental glasses through which we see the world)
- includes knowledge, beliefs, emotions, memories, action tendencies
- a group of nodes with associative links
- if enough nodes are activated, the entire schema will reach threshold and become fully activated to then influence the person
- primed schema = not fully activated
32
Development of Schemas
Jeff Young
- certain childhood experience bias the way we see ourselves
- there are up to 18 types of maldaptive schemas (abandonment, mistrust/abuse, emotional deprivation, social isolation, defectiveness/shame, failure, subjugation, vulnerability to harm, entitlement)
33
Schema therapy
- schemas are challenged and new patterns of thinking established over a significant period of therapy
34
script therapy
- person meets situation
- attend to and evaluate cues from environment
- heuristic search; retrieve scripts for behaviour
- evaluate accessed scripts
- how appropriate
- likely outcomes?
- self efficacy?
- costs and consequences?
- act on script
- evaluate response to your response
35
Strengths and Weaknesses of Social Cognitive Theories
STRENGTHS
- acknowledge the role of thoughts, memories, neural networks in personality
- readily testable through experimentation
- applie value
WEAKENESS
- emphasising the rational at the expense of the emotional, motivational and irrational
- criticised for the underlying assumption that people know what they think, feel and want and hence can report it
36
Humanistic approaches
1950s-60s
FOCUS
- aspects of personality that are distinctly human
- what is the human experience
- phenomenology = imitation in the absence of reinforcement of pav conditioning
- blending of social and cognitive psychology
- what is self and how does it develop
- hard scientific methods not necessarily valuable
ROGERS = PERSON CENTRED APPROACH
- need to understand each individual's phenomenal experience
- 3 selves (true self, false self, ideal self)
- self concept: organised pattern of thoughts and perceptions about oneself
- self-actualisation: primary motivation in humans, to reach one's potential
SATRE
- existentialism
- humans have no fixed nature and must create themselves
STRENGTHS
- unique emphasis on meaningful experience
- unique person and unique experience
WEAKNESSES
- not a comperhensive theory of personality
- little empirical evidence
37
What is a personality style?
An enduring pattern of approach to oneself or one's world, that comprises of a range of personality factors.
38
Narcissistic personality styles
- a constellation of traits and dispositions that reflect a concentration of interest on the self
- characterised by grandiose behaviours, vanity, arrogance, lack of empathy, entitlement, easily threatened
ORIGINS
- Freud (psychodynamic, clinical) = overvalued by parents
- Millon (clinical) = over-indulgent and over-admiring parents who are instrumental in the child creatin and enhanced and unsustainable self image
- Kohut(psychodynamic, object relations) = if a child's parents are cold, unempathetic, unaffirming and unresponsive to child's needs
39
Section II Trait Approach (Narcissistic Personality Disorder)
- 5 or more of the following traits
ISSUES:
- narrow conceptualisation
- does not take into account: levels from normal/healthy to pathological, phenotypes, expressions of pathological narcissism
40
Psychopathic personality styles
Characterised by
- superficial charm, grandiose sense of self worth, pathological lying, manipulative, lack of guilt, parasitic lifestyle, promiscuity
41
Shame prone personality style
- shame guilt and narcissism
- enduring belief that one is a fraud, belief that one is unworth, deep fear of disgrace, sensitive to rejection, feels powerless
42
Machiavellianism
- very similar to psychopathy
- manipulative, dominating, controlling, people are expendable, cold, calculating
- machiavellians enjoy the sport of manipulating others but would not let this get in the way of a desired outcome
