WEEK 11 - Theoretical perspectives of personality Flashcards
What is personality?
A cluster of traits that are relatively stable and long-lasting tendencies that influence behaviour across environments
What is the nomothetic area of personality?
Understanding individual differences in particular personality characteristics
What is the ideographic area of personality?
Understanding how various parts of a person come. together as a whole.
What is Freud’s psychodynamic approach and the three core assumptions?
Personality model
- Psychic determinism
- Symbolic meaning
- Unconscious motivation
What did Freud mean by psychic determinism?
We are controlled by our underlying drives and conflicts, which shape our behaviour. Although hidden, can be discovered through Freudian slips and dreams.
In the psychodynamic approach to personality, what is symbolic meaning?
All actions (even minor) reveal our underlying drives
What is unconscious motivation?
We are mostly unaware of our motivations
How may the psychodynamic theory explain Freudian slips?
- Parapraxis
Error in speech, memory or physical action which freud believed to be caused by the unconscious mind - Psychological conflict bubbling to the surface
Thoughts are subconsciously repressed and unconsciously released
What is Freud’s topographic model 3 types of mental processes?
Conscious: Rational, goal directed, centre of awareness
Preconscious: Could become conscious at any time (eg knowledge base)
Unconscious: Irrational, not logic based, repressed and inaccessible
- Still plays a role in behaviour
In Freud’s topographic model, What does opposing motives suggest?
Opposing motives = ambivalence
- Different aspects of consciousness have conflicting feelings or motives
In Freud’s topographic model, how is resolution described?
Resolution = compromise formations
Developed to maximise fulfilment of conflicting motives
What is Freud’s drive (Instinct) model?
- Based on Darwin’s work, Freud suggested human behaviour is motivated by two drives:
Aggressive drive
Sexual drive
Describe Freud’s developmental model.
Libido follows a developmental course during childhood.
- Stages of psychosexual development
- Fixed progression of change from stage to stage
- Notion of fixation at a particular libidinal stage
In Freud’s psychosexual stage of development, what is included in the oral stage?
- 0-18 months
- Dependency
In Freud’s psychosexual stage of development, what is included in the anal stage?
- 2-3 years
- Orderliness, cleanliness, control, compliance
In Freud’s psychosexual stage of development, what is included in the phalic stage?
- 4-6 years
- Identification with parents (Especially same sex) and others
- Oecilpus complex, establishment of conscience.
In Freud’s psychosexual stage of development, what is included in the latency stage?
- 7-11 years
- Sublimination of sexual and aggressive impulses
In Freud’s psychosexual stage of development, what is included in the genital stage?
12+ years
Mature sexuality and relationships
What is included in Freud’s structural model of personality?
Id: Basic desires and drives
Ego: Interacts with the world and makes decisions
Superego: Sense of right and wrong, directing us to behave morally
What is the purpose of defence mechanisms?
- People regulate and deal with conflicts by employing defence mechanisms
- Unconscious, aim is to strengthen or reinforce positive emotion and protect from negative and unpleasant emotion
- It is normal
- Can be healthy and useful temporarily
What are. the 6 types of defence mechanisms?
- Repression: memories or thoughts kept out of conscious awareness
- Denial: Refusal to acknowledge external reality
- Displacement: Emotions directed towards a substitute target
- Regression: Return to an earlier stage in psychosexual development (eg. tantrum)
- Reaction formation: Unacceptable feelings or impulses turned into opposites
Rationalisation: Actions explained away to avoid uncomfortable feelings
How may unconscious patterns be assessed?
- Life history methods: Aim to understand the whole person in the context of life experiences
- Projective tests: Assume that persons presented with a vague stimulus with project their own impulses and desires into a description of the stimulus
Who are some Neo-Freudians and what did they believe?
- Shifted focus from sexual drives to social drives
- Suggested that personality was malleable and could change over time
Alfred Adler:
- Primary motive is not sex or aggression but to strive for superiority
- Origin of the phrase - inferiority complex
Carl Jung
- Collective unconscious - ancestral memory that explains similarities in beliefs across cultures
Karen Horney
Erich Fromm
What did neo-freudians, Karen Horney and Erich Fromm believe?
Karen Horney:
- Feminist perspective
- Penis envy and oedipal complex are the symptom of womens enforced dependency on men
Erich Fromm:
Escape from freedom - increasing technology means humans are able to live independently of others but what we crave is closer connection. This leaves us vulnerable to making bad choices in relationships and leaders.
What are object relation theorists?
Neo-freudians who believe we form mental representations of (objectify) people who are the target of our impulse-driven desires - partners, lovers etc
- Object relations theories: focus on interpersonal disturbances and capacity for relatedness to others
- Relational theories: argue that adaption is primarily adaption to others
What are some contributions and limitations of neo-freudian perspectives?
- Acknowledgement of unconscious forces and their potential influence on behaviour
- Importance of childhood experiences in determining adult personality
- Human thought and action - meaning
- Inadequate scientific base and poor testability
- Sexism
What do behavioural approaches believe?
- Difference in our personalities stem largely from learning histories
- Personalities are bundles of habits acquires by classical and operant conditioning
- Personality is controlled by genes and contingencies
- Determinism but different from psychoanalytic because there are external forces as well as internal which are learned behaviour patterns, not instinctual drives
What are the cognitive-social theories?
- The way people encode, process and think about information determines their personality
- Several necessary conditions for a behaviour
- Situation encoded as relevant and meaningful
- . Belief in own ability and actual ability
- Self regulation of ongoing activity
What did Albert Bandura believe about the social learning theory?
- We learn to be the person we are by watching others and by seeing who/what gets rewarded and who/what does not.
- A child who sees others involved in helping and being rewarded will emulate this behaviour
What did Albert Bandura believe was reciprocal determinism in the social learning theory?
Personality is constant interplay between environment, behaviour and our beliefs.
What is the social-cognitive locus of control (Rotter)?
- Internal locus of control
- Life outcomes are under personal control
- positively correlated to self-esteem
- Internals use more problem-focused coping
- External locus of control
- Luck, chance and powerful others control behaviour
What did Kelly (1955) study surrounding encoding and personal constructs and what did she believe?
- Mental representations that are individually significant
- Looked for roots in behaviour in cognition
What did Captor and Kihlstrom say about personal constructs and the information processing theory?
- Conception of self, others and the way social information is encoded, interpreted and remembered is central to who people are.
What are expectancies, competencies and self-regulation?
Behaviour Outcome expectancies: Belief that a certain behaviour will led to a certain outcome
Self efficacy expectancy: Individual conviction that necessary actions can be performed to produce the desired outcome
Competencies: possession of skills and abilities for solving particular problems
Self-regulation: Setting goals, evaluating performance and adjusting behaviour
Name the conditions that need to be met for a behaviour to occur according to cognitive-social theories.
Stim Encoding > Personal value > Behaviour-outcome expectancy, behavioural plan, self-efficacy expectancy > Competencies, Behaviour > Self regulation
What are the contributions and limitations of the cognitive social theories?
Contributions:
- Focus on the role of thought and memory in personality
- Readily testable
Limitations:
- Emphasised rationality at the expense of emotion
- Assumes people consciously know what they think, feel and want
What are humanistic approaches to personality?
- Emerged as an alternative to psycho analysis and behaviourism
- Focus on those aspects that are distinctly human
- Meaning in life
- Being true to self
- Roger’s person-centred approach
- Existential theories of personality
What does Maslow’s hierarchy of needs suggest?
- All people are looking for life meaning
- To find your own meaning is to become self-actualised
- The motivation for positive growth is innate, sometimes circumstances block growth
What is self-actualisation?
- Maslow said that self-actualised people tend to be more creative, spontaneous and accepting of themselves and others
- Can come off as difficult to work with or aloof
- Prone to peak experiences
What did Carl Rogers believe?
- Rejected notion of determinism and embraced free will
- Proposed self-actualisation as core motive in personality
What was Roger’s personality model?
Three major components of personality:
- The organism (innate, generic blueprint
- The self (set of beliefs about who we are)
- Conditions of worth (expectations we place on ourselves - can result in incongruence)
____________/________ between ideal and self-concept can lead to ________ in behaviour or the way one _______ themselves.
- Divergence/Incongruence
- Distortions
- Sees
What is Rogers person-centred approach?
- Attempt understanding of individual’s phenomenological experience - the way they conceive of reality and think about the world
- Fundamental took of the psychologist is empathy
- The capacity to understand another person’s experience
