Psychology - Personality Flashcards
What is personality?
A distinctive pattern of behavior, thought, motives, and emotions that characterizes an individual over time.
Schools of psychology differ on
- Origins of personality
- Development of personality
- Stability of personality
- What motivates human behavior
- Influence of past/present/future on personality.
History of Personality Theory
Four Humors: Used in medicine from 400BC - 1800s. When healthy, these four bodily fluids would be in balance. when you hadtoo much of one, a problem would arise. This belief led to the first personality theory that personality was based on humors. Choleric --> Yellow Bile Sanguine --> Blood Melancholic --> Black Bile Phelegmatic --> Phlegm
Four General Theories of Personality
- PSYCHODYNAMIC: focus on the unconscious and on childhood.
- LEARNING: focus on the impact of environment (including social/cognitive views)
- HUMANISTIC: focus on human choice, decisions, positive views of people.
- TRAIT/BIO: focus on deeply-rooted biological factors
Psychodynamic Theory
Psychoanalysis = Freud
3 Basic Structures of Personality:
1) Id: totally unconscious structure that contains our basic desires, drives, instincts, emotions, and needs; acts on impulse, immediate gratification. ‘Libido’ is driving force for desires.
2) Ego: mediator between id and superego; conscious and rational; seeks to gratify id without violating rules of superego.
3) Superego: contains the values and morals of our personality; keeps us in line with societal rules, standards of conscience; ‘personality police’
Ego Defense Mechanisms
- Repression: unconscious pushing down of ideas, feelings, images that would make us feel bad.
- Denial: failure to recognize a problem that is evident to everyone else.
- Displacement: shifting of bad feelings to someone else.
- Sublimation: socially acceptable ways of channeling aggression/sex (eg. sports)
- Projection: seeing in others what you don’t see in yourself.
Defense Mechanisms cont’d
- Reaction Formation: objectionable thoughts are repressed and the opposite is expressed.
- Rationalization: rationally explains behavior/thought that would be anxiety provoking.
- Internationalization: absence of emotional content; intellectual analysis only
- Regression: reverting back to prior developmental stages.
Carl Jung
- A former student of Freud who disagreed on
Overemphasis of sexuality and Structure of the unconscious (iceberg) - Pioneered personality types (E/I)
- Archetypes: universal themes that come up in art, literature, ect. like the ‘hero’, ‘warrior’, ‘mother’, ect.
- Developed idea of the ‘inner child’
Learning Theory
- Personality is shaped by your reaction to the environment.
- Reactions are either reinforced or discouraged.
- Based solely on empirical studies (experiments)
- Can’t measure anything in your mind, so ignored it entirely!
- Ignored unconscious processes and emotion.
- Social and cognitive theories put too much emphasis on information processing.
Humanistic Theory
- Carl Rogers
- Focus on healthy, not sick people; individual’s power to shape their own personality.
- Sees people as good, positive.
- Self-actualization: everyone has the natural tendency to become fulfilled.
- Focus on present, not past or future.
- Vague on how personality develops
Humanistic Theory cont’d
- Abraham Maslow
- Hierarchy of Needs
Order of motivation
(Bottom-Top: Psysiological, Safety, Love/belonging, Esteem, and Self-actualiztion) - Existential Theory
Based on free will, choices and decisions.
Victor Frankl: even in extreme conditions, people have freedom to interpret situations differently (ie. Holocaust)
Trait Theory
- Focus on biological underpinnings of motive, psychology, personality.
- Traits = disposition or inclination to respond a certain way (aka ‘temperament’); relatively stable from infancy or early childhood on.
- Personalities are rooted in genetics and develop overtime through learning.
- Traits shape what we respond to and how we respond.
- TONS of research probes much of this theory.
- 40-50% of behavior seems to be genetic!
- Many modern personality assessments are based on the idea of traits/temperaments
Personality Assessment
- Why test personality?
- Popular assessnments
MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory)
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
PAI (Personality Assessment Inventory) - Projective Tests:
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
Rorschach Inkblot Test
House Tree Person (HTP)
Sentence Completion Test (SCT)
Thematic Apperception Test
When you show someone a picture such as the one of the woman lying in the bed and the man standing up with his hand over his face.
You ask someone to write a story about what they think is going on in the picture and then you interpret what they wrote and how it can connect to what’s going on in their lives.
Rorschach Inkblot Test
You show someone an inkblot and ask them what they see in it.
House Tree Person Test
You have someone draw a house, a tree, and a person and then interpret how they drew each of them.
eg. The house in the example has a sun shining near it.
The tree has no leaves and looks kinda dead.
The person looks like they’re wearing a mask.
