Personality Theories & Therapy Philosophies Flashcards
Sheldon’s Body Types
Endomorphy: soft and spherical
Mesomorphy: hard, muscular, and rectangular
Ectomorphy: thin, fragile, lightly muscled
William Sheldon
Early theory of personality
Defined biological variables related to behavior
Characterized people by body type and related then to personality types
Humanism
Developed in the mid 1900s in opposition to psychoanalysis and behaviorism; believe that people should be considered as wholes rather than in terms of S/R (beh.) or instinct (psychoanalysis).
Includes Maslow and Rogers.
Timeline of Treatment
1500s: asylums; shackled, no beds, no heat, etc.
1792: Pinel placed in charge of Paris asylum; removed shackles, improved conditions greatly
Mid-Late 1800s: Dorothea Dix; reformer in U.S.
1938: Cerletti and Bini introduced use of electroshock
1935-1955: prefrontal lobotomies to treat schizophrenia
1950s: antipsychotic drugs introduced; changed atmosphere in psychiatric hospitals; stopped lobotomies and electroshock
General paresis
disorder characterized by delusions of grandeur, mental deterioration, eventual paralysis, and death; eventually was discovered that general paresis was due to brain deterioration by syphilis.
Emil Kraepelin
published a textbook; noted that some symptoms occurred together regularly enough that the patterns could be considered a specific disorder; described the disorders and classified them by integrating clinical data; precursor to DSM
Psychodynamic Theory of Personality and Abnormal Psychology and Treatment Models
Freud, Jung, Adler, Horney, Anna Freud, Erikson, Object-Relations theory (Klein, Winnicott, Mahler, Kernberg)
Psychodynamic (Psychoanalytic) Theory
postulate existence of unconscious internal states that motivate the overt actions of an individual and determine personality
id
everything psychological that’s present at birth; pleasure principle.
Primary process (id’s response to frustration regarding the goal to gain satisfaction now, rather than later; example: hungry but no food available –> use primary process to generate a memory image of food to alleviate frustration)
Wish-fulfillment: the mental image resulting from primary process
ego
ego operates according to reality principle (taking into account objectivity as it guides or inhibits the activity of the id and the pleasure principle)
The give and take of ego with reality promotes growth of psychological processes
Secondary process
Superego
similar to id in that it is separate from reality; moral branch of personality, strives for perfection.
Two subsystems: conscience and ego-ideal
Conscience develops based on punishments
Ego-ideal is based on reward/approval
Instinct
innate psychological representation of bodily excitation (need).
Two types: Eros and Thanatos (life and death instincts)
Life instincts strive for survival (hunger, thirst, sex); form of energy by which life instincts perform their work is “libido”
Death represent unconscious wish for ultimate state of rest
Defense mechanisms (summary)
The ego’s recourse to releasing excessive pressures due to anxiety.
Two common characteristics of all def. mech.: deny (falsify or distort) reality & operate unconsciously
Eight Types of Defense Mechanisms
Repression: unconscious forgetting
Suppression: deliberate forgetting
Projection: attributes urges to others
Reaction formation: repress with opposite wish
Rationalization: socially acceptable explanation
Regression: revert to earlier stage of dev.
Sublimation: transform urges into accepted beh.
Displacement: frustration projected onto different object/person than that causing the frustration
Carl Jung
libido as psychic energy in general (not rooted in sexuality); identified ego as conscious mind
Identified two unconscious parts: personal and collective (system shared among all humans made up of archetypes, thoughts images with emotional element)
Jungian archetypes
Persona: mask adopted by person in response to demands of social convention
Anima and animus: (F/M) help us understand gender
Shadow: animal instincts that humans inherited through evolution
Self: person’s striving for unity; point of intersection between collective unconscious and conscious (self described as a circle “mandala”, reconciler of opposites)
Extroversion/Introversion
Jung: two major orientations of personality, both present but one is usually dominant
Extroversion: oriented toward external, objective world
Introversion: orientation toward inner, subjective world
Four psychological functions (Jung)
Thinking, feeling, sensing, intuiting
One of the four is more differentiated than the others
Alfred Adler’s Theory
Immediate social imperatives of family and society influence unconscious factors; inferiority complex
Inferiority Complex
individual’s sense of incompleteness, sense of imperfection, physical inferiorities, as well as social disabilities.
Striving toward superiority drives the personality; when socially oriented, enhances personality
Creative self
Adler; force by which each individual shapes his/her uniqueness, making personality
Style of life
Adler; manifestation of creative self, describes person’s unique way of achieving superiority
Molded by family environment
Fictional Finalism
Adler; individual is motivated more by his/her expectations of future than by past experiences
Human goals are based on subjective/fictional estimate of life’s values rather than objective data from past
Comparing Freud, Jung, Adler
Freud: inborn instincts motivate behaviors
Jung: Inborn archetypes govern behavior
Adler: motivated by striving for superiority
Karen Horney
Suggested 1 of 10 needs governs neurotic personality
Ways neurotic needs differ from healthy needs:
1. Higher intensity
2. Indiscriminate in application
3. At least partially disregard reality
4. Tendency to provoke intense anxiety
Horney’s theory of development
Helplessness –> anxiety
Child uses three strategies to overcome this anxiety:
1. Moving toward people (for security/positive gain)
2. Moving against people (fighting)
3. Moving away from people
Healthy people use all three strategies; threatened child will use one exclusively, carries over into adulthood
Anna Freud
Modified and extended father’s work; more direct investigation of conscious ego and its relation to environment, unconscious, and superego.
Founder of ego psychology
Augmented understanding of ego defense mechanisms
Erik Erikson
Ego psychologist
Expanded on Freud’s stages to cover lifespan
Showed how neg experiences could result in pos results on personality.
Object-Relations Theory
Psychodynamic theory of personality
“Object:” refers to symbolic representation of significant part of child’s personality
Concerned with the creation and dev. of these internalized objects in children
(Klein, Winnicott, Mahler, Kernberg)
Psychoanalysis
psychotherapy; developed by Freud
Intensive, long-term treatment for uncovering repressed memories, motives, & conflicts stemming from problems in psychosexual development
Deal with repressed conflict, free up energy for further devlopment
hypnosis
Used by Freud to uncover repressed thoughts from unconscious; he later used a different method: free association
Free association
Technique (first used by Freud) where client says what comes to mind regardless of how personal, painful, or irrelevant it may appear.
Analyst and client, together, interpret results to identify conflict
Dream interpretation
Defenses are relaxed during sleep and the mind reveals its forbidden desires during dream state
Dreams can reveal unconscious conflicts
Resistance
unwillingness/inability to relate to certain thoughts, motives, experiences
Major part of analysis; ex. forgetting dreams, switching topics, missing session
Transference
Attributing to therapist attitudes and feelings developed in patient’s relations with significant others in the past; allows the analyst and patient the opportunity to uncover, acknowledge, and understand relationships with others
Countertransference
Therapist experiences emotion toward patient; must be understood by therapist in order to not affect treatment
Classical psychoanalysis v. new-Freudian treatment
expensive, large time commitment
Now, neo-Freudian approaches place emphasis on current interpersonal relationships and life situations than on childhood experience and psychosexual developemnt
John Dollard & Neal Miller
Blended psychoanalytic concepts in behavioral S/R reinforcement learning theory approach
Focused on conflicting motives or tendencies in devleopment of personality
B. F. Skinner on personality
personality is a collection of behavior that was reinforced to persist
Bandura on personality
personality development is a result of learning
Social learning theory
modeling observed behavior
Vicarious reinforcement (vicarious learning)
Bandura suggested people learn by observing the reinforcing of others’ behaviors
Martin Seligman
Conducted studies of “learned helplessness” with dogs (shocked floors, eventually, dogs stopped jumping; wall was lowered, still didn’t jump even though could have easily escaped)
Was extrapolated to realm of depression in people
Seligman’s “learned helplessness” and depression
faced with constant difficult situations from which they cannot escape –> learn helplessness over time –> depression
Behavior Therapy
since abnormal behavior is reinforced and “learned,” behavior therapy reinforces certain positive behaviors; assumes new behaviors can be learned to reverse or reduce maladjustment
CBT
Tries to change and restructure person’s distorted/irrational thoughts
Ex. Beck’s cognitive therapy for depression and Albert Ellis’s rational-emotive therapy (RET)
Symptom Substitution
If symptoms are relieved but underlying cause is still there, new symptoms will replace the old ones (according to psychoanalysts, NOT behaviorists; behaviorists treat for symptoms)
Beck’s cognitive therapy for depression
may be asked to write down neg. thoughts, figure out why they are unjustified, and replace them with more realistic, less destructive cognitions
RET
Rational-emotive therapy (Ellis): assumes people develop irrational ways of thinking; therapist may challenge an irrational belief of the client and help them recognize the belief, then replace it with a more rational one
Humanism
Phenomenological theorists; emphasize internal processes
Kurt Lewin’s Field Theory
Personality is dynamic and ever-changing; a field divided into systems
Maslow
Hierarchy of need to move toward self-actualization:
Food, shelter, etc.
Low & Belonging
Esteem, cognitive, and aesthetic needs
Self-actualization (fullest potential)
Most people don’t reach self-actualization
Peak experiences (Maslow)
profound, deeply moving experiences that have important and lasting effects on a person (more likely for self-actualized people than non–self-actualized people)
George Kelly
used himself as a model to theorize about human nature
Individual as scientist; tries to construct a scheme of what others will do, based on knowledge, perception, and relationships with others.
Can’t construct these variables and understand envronment? –> pathology/stress
Humanist (Existential) Therapies
Emphasize process of finding meaning in life by making choices; explores thoughts and feelings with empathy toward client
Affirmation and positive regard
Carl Rogers
Client-centered therapy (aka “person-centered therapy” or “nondirective therapy”)
People have the freedom to control their own behavior (not simply subject to S/R learning); person can take positive action, make choices to determine destiny
Client centered therapy
Rogers, increase congruence between client’s ideal and actual self; necessitated unconditional positive regard
Victor Frankl
Holocaust survivor; believed that mental illness evolves from meaninglessness (Humanist)
Type theorists
Characterize people by personality type
Trait theorists
Characterize dimensions of personality
Type A/Type B
Type theory; divides personalities into two types
A: behaviors are competitive and compulsive
B: laid-back and relaxed
A personality prevalent among middle- and upper-class men, more prone to heart disease
Raymond Cattell
Trait theorist; used factor analysis to measure personality comprehensively
Attempted to account for underlying factors that determine personality; identified 16 traits (permanent reaction tendencies)
Hans Eysenck
Used factor analysis to determine personality types, each followed by more specific traits
Wanted to use scientific methodology to test Jung’s extroversion/introversion theory; discovered another dimension of personalities: stability-neuroticism
Later discovered a third dimension indicating psychoticism
Gordon Allport
Trait theorist; listed three dispositions (traits): cardinal, central, secondary
Trait types (Allport)
Cardinal: Traits around which a person organizes their life (ex. self-sacrifice)
Central: characteristics of personality that are easy to infer (ex. honesty)
Secondary: personal characteristics that are more limited in occurrence
Functional autonomy (Allport)
Given activity or form of behavior may become an end or goal in itself; ex. Hunter continues to hunt when there’s enough food because the goal now is hunting (for enjoyment)
Idiographic vs. nomothetic approaches to personality (Allport)
Idiographic focuses in individual case studies
Nomothetic focuses in groups of individuals and their commonalities
Allport argued that idiographic approach to personality is better
Later named approaches morphogenic (idiographic) v. dimensional (nomothetic)
David McClelland
Identified personality trait as need for achievement (nAch)
People who are high in nAch are more achievement oriented, realistic goals
Herman Witkin
Endeavored to draw relationship between individual’s personality and their perception of the world; classified people by “field-dependence”
Field-dependence (Witkin)
polar theory
At one end, individual’s have capacity to make specific responses to perceived specific stimuli (field-independence)
Other end: more diffuse response to perceived mass of somewhat undifferentiated stimuli (field-dependence); don’t distinguish between separate ideas, more influenced by opinions of others
Julian Rotter
internal and external locus of control
Internal: believe they can control their destiny
External: outside events and chance control their destiny
Locus of control and self-esteem
Rotter related locus of control (as related to success) to self-esteem
Internal –> higher esteem; external –> lower esteem
Locus of control (as related to failure) and self-esteem
Internal –> lower esteem; external –> higher esteem
Machiavellianism
“Machiavellian”: personality trait referring to someone manipulative and deceitful
High score of Machiavellianism –> more manipulative
Androgyny
simultaneously masculine and feminine; can score highly on masculinity and femininity on personality inventories
Walter Mischel
Challenged theories of personality traits; believes that human behavior is largely determined by situation rather than individual characteristics
