Personality Flashcards
Personality
an individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling and acting
Psychodynamic Perspective
**Freud encountered patients suffering from nervous disorders. Their complaints could not be explained in terms of purely physical causes
**This lead Freud to develop the first comprehensive theory of personality, which included the unconscious mind, psychosexual stages, and defense mechanisms.
Core concepts
Psychic Determination: You may think you know why you chose something, but theres underlying things that arent in your awareness yet
Unconscious Motivation: dreams are correlated to our psychoanalysis
Child Development (importance of childhood): what happens in our development is key to who we are
Conflict: we are a product of dynamic tension
Exploring the Unconscious
A reservoir (unconcious mind) of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories.
*Freud asked patients to say whatever came to their minds (free association) in order to tap the unconscious
Dream Analysis
Another method to analyze the unconscious mind is through interpreting manifetr and latent contents of dreams
Instincts
** Eros (libido) —> “sex” instinct —> creation
** Thanatos —> death instinct —> aggression/destruction
Model of Mind
the mind is like an iceberg. It’s mostly hidden, and below the surface lies the unconscious mind. The preconscious stores temporary memories
Personality Structure
Personality develops as a result of our efforts to resolve conflicts between our biologival impulses ID and the constraints of the Ego & Superego
Questions for personality
**Who are we?
**How did we get that way?
Id, Ego & Superego
The Id (pleasure principle):
Unconsciously strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives, operating on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification
*EX:When someone is hungry, the id might create a mental image of food and satisfy the need by eating the food in their imagination.
The Ego (mediates between the id and superego):
Functions as the “executive” and mediates the demands of the id, the real world, and superego, according to the reality principle
The superego provides standards for judgement (the conscience) and moral reasoning
Personality Development
Freud believed that personality formed during the first several years of life divided into psychosexual stages. During these stages, the id’s pleasure seeking energies focus on pleasure sensitive body areas called EROGENOUS ZONES
Psychosexual Stages
Freud divided the devlpoment of personality into five psychosexual stages
**Oral (0-18 months) : Pleasure centers on the mouth–sucking, biting, chewing
**Anal (18-36 months): AUTONOMY VS CONTROL!!!!!
Pleasure focuses on bowel and bladder elimination; coping w/ demands for control(Anal retention holds in, Anal expulsion lets go)
** Phallic (3-6 years): Pleasure zone is the genitals;coping w/ incestous sexual feelings
** Latency (6 to puberty): Dormant sexual feelings
** Genital (puberty on):
Maturation of sexual interests
Oedipus Complex
A boy’s sexual desire for his mother and feelings of jealous and hatred for the rival father. A girl’s desire for her father is called the Electra complex
- “sexual” desire for parent of opposite sex
- Death wish for same- sex parent
- Fear of relatiation from same-sex parent
Identification
Children cope w/ threatening feelings by repressing them & by identifying w/ the rival parent. Through this process of Identification, their superego gains strength that incorporates their parents’ values
Defense Mechanisms
The ego’s protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsiously distorting reality
- Repression banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness
- Regression leads to an individual faced w/ anxiety to retreat to a more infantile psychosexual stage
More Defense Mechanisms
- Reaction Formation causes the ego to unconsciously switch unacceptable impulses into their opposites. For example, people may express feelings of purity when they may be suffering anxiety from unconsious feelings about sex.
- Projection leads people to disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others
- Rationalization offers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one’s actions
- Displacement shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person. For exmaple, redirecting anger toward a safer outlet
Assessing Unconscious Processes
Evaluating personality from an unconscious mind’s perspective would require a psychological instrument (projective tests) that would reveal the hidden unconscious mind.
Rorscach Inkblot Test
The most widely used PROJECTIVE TEST
-set of 10 inkblots designed by Hermann Rorscach—> identify people’s inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of the blots
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
Developed by Henry Murrary, the TAT is a projective test in whcih epolpe express their inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes
Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perpsective
- Personality develops throughout life and is not fixed in childhood
- Overemphasis on the sexual instinct
- Underemphasis of social and environmental influences on the individual
Evaluating the Psycchoanalytic Perspective pt 2
Criticism: part of freuds theory tests on the repression of painful experiences into the unconscious mind
– but, majority of children, death camp survivors, and battle scarred veterans are unable to repress painful experiences into their unconscious mind.
Humanistic Perspective
By the 1960s, psychologists became discontent w/ freuds determinsism and negativity w the mechanistic psychology of the behaviorists
Self-Actualizing Person
Maslow proposed that we as individuals are motivated by a hierarchy of needs, beggingng with physiological needs, but we have a natural tendency toward a state of self-actualization—reaching our full potential
Growth and Fufillment
Carl ROgers also believed in an individuals natural self-actualization tendencies and stressed the need for UNCONDITIONAL POSITIVE REGARD for fostering personal growth and development
THis UPR is an acceptance despite flaws and failings, He also stressed the need for personal autonomy and self-determination
Assesing the Self
All of our thoughts and feelings about ourselves, in an answer to the question; Who am I? refers to self-concept
*Rogers asked people to desrcibe themselves as they would like to be (ideal) and as they actually are (real). If the two descriptions were close the indivdual had a positive self-concept
Evaluating the Humanistic Perspective
- Shifted focus to free will and positive self-growth
- Humansitic psychology has a pervasive impact on counseling, education, child-rearing, and management
but: - Concepts in humanistic psychology are vague and subjective and lack scientific basis
- The theories fail to account for the real existence of evil
Self-Actualization
Maslow proposed that we as individuals are motivated by a hierarchy of needs; beggining with phyiological neeeds, but we have a natural tendency toward a state of self-actualization
Assesing the self
All of our thoughts and feelings about ourself, in an answer to the question, “who am i?” refers to self-concept
**In an effort to assess personality, Rogers asked people to describe themselves as they would like to be (ideal) and as they actually are (real). If the two descriptions were close the individual had a positive self-concept.
Evaluating the Humanistic Perspective
- Shifted focus to free will and positive self-growth
- Humanistic psychology has a pervasive impact on counseling, education, child-rearing, and management.
but:
1. concepts in humanistic psychology are vague and subjective and lack scientific basis
2. The theories fail to account for the real existence of evil
*hard to study this w/ scientific methods
The Trait Perspective
An individual’s unique constellation of durable dispositions and consistent ways of behaving (traits) constitutes his or her personality.
**EXAMPLES OF TRAITS:
Honest, Dependable, Moody, Impulsive
Allport & Odbert identified 18,000 words representing traits
Personality Dimensions
Hans and Sybil Eysenck suggested that personality could be reduced down to two polar dimensions, extraversion-introversion and emotional stability-instability.
MMPI
The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is the most widely researched and clinically used of all personality tests. It was originally developed to identify emotional disorders.
The MMPI was developed by empirically testing a pool of items and then selecting those that discriminated between diagnostic groups
THE BIG 5
Conceitniousness: Organized – disorganized, Careful-Careless,
Dicipline–Impulsive
Agreeableness softhearted–ruthless, trusting–suspcious, helpful–uncooperative
Neuroticism (emotional stabiltity vs instability) : calm–anxious, secure–insecure, self-satified–self-pitying
Openess: Imaginative –Pratcial, Preference for variety–Preference for routine, Independent–Conforming
Extraversion: Socialble–retiring, fun-loving–sober, affectionate–reserved
Assessing Traits
Personality inventories are questionnaries (often true/false or aggree/disagree) designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors assessing several traits at once
MMPI Test Profile
*used in clinical settings –> not used for personality traits
- uses it to profile a patient
NEO-PI
*based on Big 5
* more appropriate for assesing normal personality
Realiability (consistent) & Validity (accuracy)
The reliability of a test refers to its consistency. Does it consistently measure the construct? To establish reliability researchers establish different procedures
*Split-half Reliability: Dividing the test into two equal halves and assessing how consistent the scores are.
*Reliability using different forms of the test to measure consistency between them.
*Test-Retest Reliability: Using the same test on two occasions to measure consistency.
Validity
Reliability of a test does not ensure validity. ***Validity of a test refers to how well it measures what it is supposed to measure (i.e., meaning)
conversion validity transfering anxiety into something similar
Evaluating the Trait Perspective
- Traits are better at describing than explaining
(danger of circular reasoning) - Trait theories tend to exaggerate consistency and ignore the importance of the situation
**The Person-Situation Controversy
Walter Mischel (1968, 1984, 2004) points out that traits may be enduring, but the resulting behavior in various situations is different. Therefore, traits are not very good predictors of behavior in a given situation.
Social-Congitive Perspective
Bandura (1986, 2001, 2005) believes that personality is the result of an interaction that takes place between a person and their social context.
Reciprocal Influences
The three factors, behavior, cognition, and environment, are interlocking determinants of each other.
Individuals & Enviornments
Specifc ways in which individuals and enviornments interact
Different people choose different enviornments–> the school you attend the music you listen to are partly based on your dispositions
Our personalities shape how we react to events–> anxious people react to situations differently than calm people
Our personalities shape situations —> how we view and treat people influences how they treat us.
Behavior
Behavior emegeres from an interplau of external and interal influences
Personal Control
Social-cognitive psychologists like J.B. Rotter emphasize our sense of personal control, whether we control the environment or the environment controls us.
*External locus of control refers to the perception that chance or outside forces beyond our personal control determine our fate.Internal locus of control refers to the perception that we can control our own fate.
*Internal locus of control refers to the perception that we can control our own fate.
Self-Efficacy
belief in one’s ability to succeed in a particular situation
Optimism vs. Pessimism
An optimistic or pessimistic attributional your way of explaining positive or negative events
Evaluating the Social-Cognitive Perspective
Critics say that social-cognitive psychologists pay a lot of attention to the situation and pay less attention to the individual, his unconscious mind, his emotions, and his genetics.
Positive Psychology and Humanistic Psychology
Positive psychology, such as humanistic psychology, attempts to foster human fulfillment. Positive psychology, in addition, seeks positive subjective well-being, positive character, and positive social groups.
