Chapter 15 Personality Breanna Jamison Olivia Smith Aramis Davis =_= Breanna Jamison Olivia Smith Aramis Davis =_=

Chapter 15Personality

Breanna JamisonOlivia Smith

Aramis Davis =_=

*Psychoanalytic Perspective*

Personality

Def: An individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting.

Sigmund Freud1856-1939

Medical doctor who specialized in “nervous” disordersProposed a theory that childhood sexuality and

unconscious motivations influenced personality. Had the first comprehensive theory of personality.

• Which included ideas about the unconscious region of the mind.

• Psychosexual stages (the oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital stages)

• Defense mechanisms for holding anxiety at bay.

Freud

Contributed to the findings of cocaine and its effects.

Founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychiatry. Freud found that nervous disorders often made no

neurological sense. He concluded that their disorders had psychological causes. His effort to understand these causes led to his theory of psychoanalysis, the first comprehensive theory of personality.

The Neo-Freudian and Psychodynamic Theorists

• Neo-Freudians Alfred Adler and Karen Horney accepted many of Freud’s ideas, as did Carl Jung. But they also argued that we have motives other than sex and aggression, and that the ego’s conscious control is greater than Freud supposed.

Psychoanalysis

It is primarily devoted to the study of human psychological

functioning and behavior, although it can also be applied to societies. Psychoanalysis has three main components:

o a method of investigation of the mind and the way one thinks;o a systematized set of theories about human behavior;o a method of treatment of psychological or emotional illness

Personality Structure

• Freud believed that personality arises from our efforts to resolve the conflict between our biological impulses and the social restraints against them. He theorized that the conflict centers on three interacting systems: the id, which operates on the pleasure principle; the ego, which functions on the reality principle, and the superego, an internalized set of ideals. The superego’s demands often oppose the id’s, and the ego, as the “executive” part of personality, seeks to reconcile the two.

Cont.

• A person with a “weak” superego may be self-indulgent

• One with an unusually “strong” superego may be continually guilt-ridden

Defense Mechanism

• Defense mechanisms reduce or redirect anxiety in various ways, but always by distorting reality.

• They are unconscious processes

More Details about Defense Mech.

1. Repression, which underlies the other defense mechanisms, banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts from consciousness

2. Regression involves retreat to an earlier, more infantile stage of development

3. Reaction formation makes unacceptable impulses look like their opposites.

4. Projection attributes threatening impulses to others5. Rationalization offers self-justifying explanations for

behavior6. Displacement diverts impulses to a more acceptable object.

Examples• (displacement) – a child who is angry at their parents but

vents the anger out on the family pet, a less threatening target

• (projection) – thinking someone hates you but in reality you hate that person

• (reaction formation) – overzealous crusaders against “immoral behaviors” who don’t want to acknowledge their own sexual desires

• (rationalization) – saying you drink “just to be sociable” when in reality, you have a drinking problem

• (regression) – nail biting or thumb sucking in an anxiety producing situation

Assessing unconscious processes

• Projective tests are tests that attempt to assess personality by presenting ambiguous stimuli that are designed to reveal the unconscious. Although projective tests, such as the Rorschach inkblots, have questionable reliability or validity, some clinicians continue to use them.

Evaluating the psychoanalytic perspective

• Today’s research psychologists find some of Freud’s specific ideas implausible, invalidated, or contradicted by new research, and they note that his theory offers only after-the-fact explanations. Many researchers now believe that repression rarely, if ever, occurs. Nevertheless, Freud drew psychology’s attention to the unconscious, to the struggle to cope with anxiety and sexuality, and to the conflict between biological impulses and social restraints. His cultural impact has been enormous.

*The Humanistic Perspective*

• Humanistic psychologists have sought to turn psychology’s attention from baser motives and environmental conditioning to the growth potential of healthy people, as seen through the individual’s own experiences.

Abraham Maslow’s Self-Actualizing Person

• Abraham Maslow believed that if basic human needs are fulfilled, people will strive to actualize their highest potential. To describe self-actualization, he studied some exemplary personalities and summarized his impressions of their qualities.

Carl Rogers’ Person-Centered Perspective

• Carl Rogers agreed with Maslow that people are basically good and are endowed with self-actualizing tendencies.

• To nurture growth in others, Carl Rogers advised being genuine, accepting, and empathic. In such a climate, people can develop a deeper self-awareness and a more realistic and positive self-concept.

Assessing the Self

• Humanistic psychologists assessed personality through questionnaires (or the MMPI-2) on which people report their self-concept and in therapy by seeking to understand others’ subjective personal experiences.

• Some psychologist feel that questionnaires are dehumanizing and prefer to use interviews to assess personality.

Major Criticism of Humanistic Psych.

• Humanistic psychologists have influenced such diverse areas as counseling, education, child-rearing, and management.

• They have also had a major impact on today’s popular psychology, perhaps because the emphasis on the individual self strongly reflects Western values

• Research has shown that most people tend to have high self-esteem

Cont.

• Critics complain that the perspective’s concepts are vague and subjective. The individualism promoted by humanistic psychology may promote self-indulgence, selfishness, and an erosion of moral restraints. Humanistic psychology fails to appreciate the reality of our human capacity for evil.

*The Trait Perspective*

Cont.

• Critics of the trait perspective question the consistency with which traits are expressed. Although people’s traits persist over time, human behavior varies widely from situation to situation. Despite these variations, a person’s average behavior across different situations tends to be fairly consistent. Traits matter.

Personality Traits

• A newer technique is factor analysis, a statistical procedure that identifies clusters of behaviours that tend to appear together.

• Brain activity scans suggest that extraverts and introverts differ in their level of arousal, with extraverts seeking stimulation because their normal brain arousal level is relatively low.

• Gordon Allport developed trait theory, which defines personality in terms of people’s characteristic behavior and conscious motives.

• Unlike Freud, he was less interested in explaining individual traits rather than describing them.

The Big 5 Factors

• Five personality dimensions—stability, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness—offer a reasonably comprehensive picture of personality. Genetic predispositions and other biological factors influence these traits.

• These traits appear to be stable in adulthood, largely heritable, common to all cultures, and good predictors of other personal attributes. Locating an individual on these five dimensions provides a comprehensive picture of personality.

*The Social-Cognitive Perspective*

Reciprocal Influences

• The social-cognitive perspective applies principles of learning, cognition, and social behavior to personality, with particular emphasis on the ways in which our personality influences and is influenced by our interaction with the environment. It assumes reciprocal determinism—that personal-cognitive factors combine with the environment to influence people’s behavior.

Personal Control

• By studying how people vary in their perceived locus of control and in their experiences of learned helplessness, researchers have found that a sense of personal control helps people to cope with life. Research on learned helplessness has evolved into research on optimism and now into a broader positive psychology movement.

Assessing Behavior in Situations

• Social-cognitive researchers observe how people’s behaviors and beliefs both affect and are affected by their situations. They have found that the best way to predict someone’s behavior in a given situation is to observe that person’s behavior pattern in similar situations.

Criticisms of Social-Cog. Perspect.

• Critics argue that the social-cognitive perspective focuses so much on the situation that it fails to appreciate the importance of the person’s inner traits, emotions, and unconscious motives.

Evaluating the Social-Cognitive Perspective

• Although faulted for slighting the importance of unconscious dynamics, emotions, and inner traits, the social-cognitive perspective builds on psychology’s well-established concepts of learning and cognition and reminds us of the power of social situations.

*Exploring The Self*

The Benefits of Self-Esteem

• Research on the self has recently expanded to include the concept of possible selves, the visions of ourselves we dream of becoming, and the concept of the spotlight effect, the assumption that we overestimate others noticing and evaluating our appearance, performance, and blunders. But research confirms the importance of high self-esteem and the potency of the self-serving bias.

Culture and Self-Esteem

• People of stigmatized groups do not suffer lower self-esteem as a result of their minority. Self-esteem can be maintained by valuing those areas excelled in, attributing problems to prejudice, and by people comparing themselves to others in the same group.

Cont.

• The self is one of Western psychology’s most vigorously researched topics. Underlying this research is the assumption that the self, as organizer of our thoughts, feelings, and actions, is pivotal in understanding personality.

Self-Serving Bias• Recent research firmly concludes that we

exercise a self-serving bias, a readiness to perceive ourselves favorably. People tend to feel personally responsible for successes, while accepting less responsibility for adversity, and most see themselves as better than average.

Self-Serving Bias and Secure Self-Esteem

• Self-serving bias, our readiness to perceive ourselves favourably, is evident in our tendency to accept more responsibility for good deeds than for bad, and for successes than for failures. Most people also see themselves as better than average.

• Defensive self-esteem is fragile and focuses on sustaining itself which makes failure and criticism feel threatening.

• Secure self-esteem is less fragile because it depends less on external evaluations. Feeling accepted for who we are enables us to lose ourselves in relationships and purposes larger than self.