Personality part 1 Flashcards
What is personality
Differences between people
History
Was first a distinguishment between being human and animal
Increasingly associated with individuality
Becomes associated with charm and charisma in 20th century
- When we say no personality they are usually not charming
Personality Psychology
- Psychological differences between people (thought, emotion, behaviour)
- Generally distinct from intellectual abilities (not IQ)
- Enduring dispositions (pretty stable through life spam)
- Generalised clustered patterns of responding
- Encompasses underlying psychological mechanisms
○ Can be unconscious and not accessible
LOOK AT PIC
Major Personality Theories
Psychodynamic/Psychoanalytic Approaches (Freud)
Unconscious mind
Intrapsychic conflict: deep dark evil desires that we need to oppress (conflict)
These things influence our personality
Major Personality Theories
Learning/Behaviourist Approaches
Focus on measureable behaviours (things u can observe)
Instead of thoughts and feelings
Personality is shaped by rewards, punishments and expectations
Major Personality Theories
Humanistic Approaches
Focus on being the best person we can be
Focus on experience
Society is keeping us from being the best person we can
Existential anxiety (know you will die one day), creativity, free will (in contrast to Behaviourist where there is no free will all about rewards)
Cross-cultural (phenomenology varies across cultures)
○ E.g. Extroverted in Australia is different to in India
Major Personality Theories
Genetic Approaches
We inherit some personality from parents
Genes + environment/life experience = our personality
Evolution has helped select traits that ensure survival and reproductive success
Major Personality Theories
Trait Approaches
Describing how people differ psychologically
Determining which features are important for (partially) determining pretty much everything in life
Emphasis on how to best conceptualise and measure these features
Where personality fits into psychology
- Focus is on differences between people (other areas of psych focus on similarities)
- Focus on whole persons in their daily environment
○ Level of abstraction (not easily measurable) - Distinct from social psychology
○ Internal vs external influences in social
○ Stability vs malleability in social - Distinct from clinical psychology
○ Personality psych is about the normal range of
functioning
Personality psych IS NOT SAME AS clinical psych
But there is overlap
Important personality psychologists had clinical training Pervasive problems in functioning associated with personality = personality disorders and is not part of personality psychology
Both fields study ‘whole person’ one at a time
Why learn about Freud
- His ideas dominated psych for 100 yrs
- Many of his ideas are used today in altered forms
- His ideas are often misunderstood in popular culture
During Queen Victoria’s reign
it was a very sexually oppressed time (all about self-control)
Freud treated hysteric patients with hypnosis.
- Loss of feeling in her legs
- Inability to drink water
- Paralysis
- Hallucinations of black snakes
- Couldn’t speak her native German (retaining ability to speak English)
- Mental absences
A lot of the hysteric patients said they were sexually abused before.
Freud didn’t believe this was true.
He thought maybe there were some unconscious conflict/desires that was being oppressed. And they were coming out in the form of symptoms.
Hysteria
Early psychoanalytic theory
- Source of problem stems from the unconscious
- The mind is a place of conflict
- Emphasis on childhood experiences
○ Was a time where children were just viewed as labour
○ People didn’t treat children well - Emphasis on sexuality
○ People didn’t really talk about it
Freud put these theories into 3 models
Freud’s Three Models:
1. Topographic model
Consciousness is small bc can only focus on one thing at a time (thoughts/perceptions). Multitasking is impossible.
Preconscious is something we could pay attention to (memories/stored knowledge)
Unconscious (fears, violent motives, immoral urges, selfish needs, irrational wishes, unacceptable sexual desires)
Censor is trying to keep unconscious things down. Repressing it.
Called a hydraulic model as we need to keep these unconscious things down. Very bad if these thoughts become conscious.
Unconscious keeps trying to invade the censor –> especially when you SLEEP or during Freudian slips (mean to say one thing and you say something else)
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Dreams and Freudian slips
Dreams: ‘latent content’ (hidden) and ‘manifest content’ (what dream is about)
Slips: when u say one thing when you were supposed to say another
How dreams evade the censor
Kill the mother
Knife –> sausage roll
In heart –> microwave
Freud’s Three Models:
2. The structural model
Id (i want it now): 'es' ego (i need to do a bit of planning): 'ich' super ego (you can't have it its not right): 'uber ich'
Id: pleasure principle, immediate gratification, sex (to create), death (to destroy), operated by ‘primary process’ (doesn’t care about reason just animal drive or instinct that needs to be fulfilled)
Ego : reality principle, the ‘self’, ego defence mechanisms (to reason with the Id and Super ego), operated by ‘secondary process’
Super ego: socialised, harsh voice of your parents essentially, internalised standards and values, conscience and guilt
When repression fails: Ego defence mechanisms
Projection: attributing an unconscious impulse, attitude, trait or behaviour to someone else
- Helps you hide the unwanted object from yourself
- False consensus effect: overestimating percentage of other people who share your traits, opinions, preferences or motivations
□ protects self esteem by highlighting normativity of
one’s bad traits
Reaction formation:
Converting a socially unacceptable impulse into its opposite
Adams, Wright and Lohr: Most anti gay men show increased arousal to gay porno
Morokoff: Women with negative views towards sex are more aroused with porn
Larry Craig (US Senator) who was arrested for having sex with a gay prostitute in airport bathroom.
Displacement: satisfying an impulse on a substitute object
Displaced aggression: ‘kicking the dog’ phenomenon, most likely triggered by minor annoyance, scapegoating
People tend to take it out on others when they are provoked/stressed by others
Isolation: putting mental space between threatening cognition and other aspects of the self
Temporal bracketing: ‘this is the new me’, addiction recovery, divorce, juvenile crimes
Sublimation:
Rechannelling an impulse into a more socially appropriate outlet
Turning sexual desire into art or intellectual endeavours
Some case studies but no solid scientific evidence
Many more defence mechanisms!
This is why Freudians have become criticised bc they create defences to explain almost anything
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The ego deals with Id, Superego, reality by:
- Secondary process: ideal, but especially for children not always possible (self control conflict)
- Defence mechanisms: sometimes the best anyone can do but can be used maladaptively
- Symptoms (neurotic): last resort, things are bad when u have to use these (maybe hysteria)
Freud’s Three Models
3. The genetic (or developmental) model
Psychosexual stages: sexuality is centred on mouth, anus and genitals
Fixation: staying in one stage too long (when things go bad)
Stages:
Oral: 0-2 ages–> sucking, biting swallowing
Conflict/Effect of fixation:
Weaning from mother’s breast, excessive smoking or eating later in life
Anal: 2-4 ages –> defecating or retaining faeces
Conflict/Effect of fixation:
Toilet training, self control, retentive: obsessive neatness, expulsive: reckless, disorganised
Phallic: 4-5 ages –> genitals
Conflict/Effect of fixation:
- oedipus complex (boys)–> loves mum and dad is rival, castration anxiety bc they see their sister doesn’t have a penis and thinks the dad castrated her. This is how the boy develops masculinity and becomes ally with dad.
- electra complex (girls)–> loves the father and mum is rival, blames mum for leaving them without a penis, penis envy (they look to brother and they want a penis), she represses the desire for her father and begins to look up to her mum, grows up to be a feminine woman
Latency: 6-puberty –> sexual urges sublimated into sport/hobbies. Same-sex friends help avoid sexual feelings. (Sublimation: take unacceptable urges and change them to become socially acceptable)
Conflict/Effect of fixation:
Usually no fixation at this stage but if so, sexual immaturity and dissatisfaction
Genital: puberty onward –> physical changes reawaken repressed needs. Direct sexual feelings towards others lead to sexual gratification
Conflict/Effect fixation:
Learning social rules of romantic relationships/sexual problems, unsatisfactorily romantic relationships
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Critique of Psychoanalysis
Freud’s account of motivation
○ That we rest on 2 instincts (sex and death)
○ Are these plausible instincts?
○ Is 2 enough?
○ What about loving other people, art or flying around the room?
○ Clearly these 2 instincts are not enough
○ Modern Study of desire in Germany
We can see that death and violence is not rlly desired
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Inference problems
○ Wild, arbitrary, over-confident judgements
○ E.g. Low productivity of coal miners was bc they had unconscious thoughts of ripping out mother’s internal organs BUT probably bc working conditions were bad etc.
○ Unreliable –> if you had 10 psycho analysists analyse a dream, you’d get 10 answers
○ The ‘data’ are by nature ambiguous
Psychoanalytic theory is based on ‘soft’ evidence
- Data are not publicly available –> dreams and stuff
- Objectivity is compromised –> analysists is usually bias in their own way
- Interpersonal expectancies –> everyone thinks when u see a psychoanalyst u lie on a coach and talk about ur childhood or whatever.
Falsifiability problems
They didn’t do an experiment so can’t rlly use their hypothesis or prove them wrong or anything.
Karl Popper
‘No need for data. Clinical evidence is sufficient’
