Personality A person’s pattern of thinking, feeling and acting.

Psychoanalytic Perspective Of Personality

Unconscious Conscious Preconscious Unconscious

Freud's Early Exploration into the Unconscious Used hypnosis and free association (relax and say it all) to delve into unconscious. Mapped out the “mental dominoes” of the patients past in a process he called psychoanalysis.

Freud's Personality Structure Ego Superego Id

Unconscious energy that drives us to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives. Id operates on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification.

Superego Part of personality that represents our internalized ideals. Standards of judgment or our morals.

Ego The boss “executive” of the conscious. Its job is to mediate the desires of the Id and Superego. Called the “reality principle”.

Freud's Stages of Psychosexual Development Freud believed that your personality developed in your childhood. Mostly from unresolved problems in the early childhood. Believed that children pass through a series of psychosexual stages. The id focuses it’s libido (sexual energy) on a different erogenous zone.

Oral Stage 0-18 months Pleasure center is on the mouth. Sucking, biting and chewing.

Anal Stage months Pleasure focuses on bladder and bowel control. Controlling ones life and independence. Anal retentive

Phallic Stage 3-6 years Pleasure zone is the genitals. Coping with incestuous feelings. Oedipus and Electra complexes.

Latency Stage 6- puberty Dormant sexual feeling. Cooties stage.

Genital Stage Puberty to death. Maturation of sexual interests.

Fixation A lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage. Where conflicts were unresolved. Orally fixated people may need to chain smoke or chew gum. Or denying the dependence by acting tough or being very sarcastic. Anally fixated people can either be anal expulsive or anal retentive.

Defense Mechanisms The ego’s protective methods of reducing anxiety by distorting reality. Never aware they are occurring. Seven major types.

Repression The Mac Daddy defense mechanism. Push or banish anxiety driven thought deep into unconscious. Why we do not remember lusting after our parents.

Regression When faced with anxiety the person retreats to a more infantile stage. Thumb sucking on the first day of school.

Reaction Formation Ego switches unacceptable impulses into their opposites. Being mean to someone you have a crush on.

Projection Disguise your own threatening impulses by attributing them to others. Thinking that your spouse wants to cheat on you when it is you that really want to cheat.

Rationalization Offers self- adjusting explanations in place of real, more threatening reasons for your actions. You don’t get into a college and say, “I really did not want to go there it was too far away!!”

Displacement Shifts the unacceptable impulses towards a safer outlet. Instead of yelling at a teacher, you will take anger out on a friend by peeing on his car).

Sublimation Re-channel their unacceptable impulses towards more acceptable or socially approved activities. Channel feeling of homosexuality into aggressive sports play.

How do we assess the unconscious? We can use hypnosis or free association. But more often we use projective tests.

Projective Tests A personality test. Provides an ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger projection of one’s inner dynamics. Examples Are:

TAT Thematic Apperception Test A projective test which people express their inner feelings through stories they make about ambiguous scenes

TAT

Rorschach Inkblot Test The most widely used projective test A set of ten inkblots designed to identify people’s feelings when they are asked to interpret what they see in the inkblots.

Rorschach Inkblot Test

Neo-Freudians Psychologists that took some premises from Freud and built upon them. Alfred Adler Karen Horney Carl Jung

Alfred Adler Childhood is important to personality. But focus should be on social factors- not sexual ones. Our behavior is driven by our efforts to conquer inferiority and feel superior. Inferiority Complex

Karen Horney Childhood anxiety is caused by a dependent child’s feelings of helplessness. This triggers our desire for love and security. Fought against Freud’s “penis envy” concept.

Carl Jung Less emphasis on social factors. Focused on the unconscious. We all have a collective unconscious: a shared/inherited well of memory traces from our species history.

The Trait Perspective

Trait A characteristic of behavior or a disposition to feel and act as assessed by self- reported inventories or peer reports.

Factor Analysis A statistical procedure used to identify different components of your intelligence or personality (depending on the test). FA takes the answers you give on tests and compiles them into general traits.

Eysenck Personality Questionnaire

The Big Five Emotional Stability (calm/anxious, secure/insecure, self-satisfied/self- pitying). Extraversion (sociable/retiring, fun- loving/sober, affectionate/reserved). Openness (imaginative/practical, variety/routine, independent, conforming)

The Big Five (Continued) Agreeableness (soft-hearted/ruthless, trusting/suspicious, helpful/uncooperative). Conscientiousness (organized/disorganized, careful/careless, disciplined/impulsive).

The Big Five Once you take a test that measures your personality according to the Big Five Scale…. Your traits will be stable over time. They can be attributed to your genetics They apply across different cultures They predict other attributes.

Assessing Our Traits Personality Inventories: a questionnaire where people respond to items attempting to gauge different aspects of their personality

MMPI Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory: the most widely used personality test. Originally used to identify emotional disorders. Now used for screening purposes.

MMPI put to the Test

The Person-Situation Controversy Are traits really stable? Kind Of…. They change according to the situation

The Humanistic Perspective Of Personality

Humanistic Psychology In the 1960’s people became sick of Freud’s negativity and trait psychology’s objectivity. Along came psychologists wanted to focus on “healthy” people and how to help them strive to “be all that they can be”.

Abraham Maslow’s Self Actualizing Person Hierarchy of Needs Ultimately seek self- actualization (the process of fulfilling our potential). Maslow developed his ideas by studying what he termed “healthy people”.

Who did Maslow study?

Self-Actualized People They share certain characteristics: They are self aware and self accepting Open and spontaneous Loving and caring Not paralyzed by others’ opinions. They are secure in who they are.

Self-Actualized People Problem centered rather than self-centered. Focused their energies on a particular task. Few deep relationships, rather than many superficial ones.

Self-Actualization These are the qualities that make up a mature adult. These people have found their calling in life. Is this a goal worth striving for?

Carl Rogers’s Person-Centered Perspective People are basically GOOD. We are like Acorns Need Water, Sun and Nutrients to Grow into a big Oak Tree. We need genuineness, acceptance and empathy for us to grow.

Genuineness Being open with your own feelings. Dropping your facade. Being transparent and self-disclosing.

Acceptance Unconditional Positive Regard: An attitude of acceptance regardless of circumstances. Accepting yourself or others completely.

Empathy Listening, sharing, understanding and mirroring feelings and reflecting their meanings. Preschool study

Self-Concept All of thoughts and feelings about ourselves trying to answer the question…. WHO AM I?

Self-Concept Both Rogers and Maslow believed that your self-concept is at the center of your personality. If our self concept is positive…. We tend to act and perceive the world positively. If our self-concept is negative…. We fall short of our “ideal self” and feel dissatisfied and unhappy

How does a Humanistic psychologist test your personality? You would be asked to fill out a questionnaire asking to describe yourself both as you would ideally like to be and what you actually are. When the ideal self and the way you currently see yourself are alike- you are generally happy. How do psychoanalytic and trait assess?

Assessing your Self-Concept ME Ideal Self

Possible Selves What are your possible selves?

Self-Esteem One’s feelings of high or low self- worth.

Do minorities have lower self- esteem? NOT REALLY They value the things which they excel. They attribute problems to prejudice. They compare themselves to their own group.

Self-Serving Bias A readiness to perceive oneself favorable. People accept more responsibility for successes than failures. Most people see themselves as better than average.

Does culture play a part in our personality (according to humanistic psychologists)? Individualism: giving priority to one’s own goals over group goals. Defining your identity in terms of yourself. Collectivism: giving priority to the goals of a group and defining your identity as part of that group. Is individualism really better?

The Social-Cognitive Perspective Of Personality

Bandura is Back Social cognitive theory stems from social learning theory (under the umbrella of behaviorism). Behaviorism (as introduced by Watson) supports a direct and unidirectional pathway between stimulus and response, representing human behavior as a simple reaction to external stimuli.

Social Cognitive Theory Focus on how we interact with our environment. Reciprocal Determinism: the interacting influences between personality and environmental factors.

Social Cognitive Perspective 1.Different People choose different environments. The TV you watch, friends you hang with, music you listen to were all chosen by you (your disposition) But after you choose the environment, it also shapes you.

Social Cognitive Perspective Our personalities help create situations to which we react. If I expect someone to be angry with me, I may give that person the cold shoulder, creating the very behavior I expect.

Personal Control Our sense of controlling our environment rather than the environment controlling us.

External Locus of Control The perception that chance or outside forces beyond one’s personal control determine one’s fate.

Internal Locus of Control The perception that one controls one’s own fate.

Learned Helplessness The hopelessness and passive resignation an animal or human learns when unable to avoid repeated aversive events.