1. Chapter 11 Personality Slides prepared by: Melissa S. Terlecki, Cabrini College PSYCHOLOGY Schacter Gilbert Wegner

2. PSYCHOLOGY Schacter Gilbert Wegner 11.1 Personality: What Is It and How Is It Measured

3. Personality Personality: an individual’s characteristic style of behaving, thinking, and feeling. explanations based on prior events and anticipated events that shape a person’s personality.

4. Questions What does it mean to say that personality is in the eye of the beholder?

5. Measuring Personality Personality inventories: self-report: a series of answers to a questionnaire that asks people to indicate the extent to which sets of statements or adjectives accurately describe their own behavior or mental state. Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI): a well-researched clinical questionnaire used to assess personality and psychological problems. Validity scales Response style

6. Questions What are some limitations of personality inventories?

7. Measuring Personality Projective techniques: a standard series of ambiguous stimuli designed to elicit unique responses that reveal inner aspects of an individuals’ personality. Rorschach Inkblot Test: individual interpretations of the meaning of a set of unstructured inkblots are analyzed to identify a respondent’s inner feelings and interpret his or her personality structure. Thematic Apperception Test (TAT): respondents reveal underlying motives, concerns, and the way they see the social world through the stories they make up about ambiguous pictures of people.

8. Figure 11.1: Sample Rorschach Inkblot (p. 336)

9. Figure 11.2: Sample TAT Card (p. 337)

10. Questions Why might a projective test like the TAT story be less than reliable?

11. PSYCHOLOGY Schacter Gilbert Wegner 11.2 The Trait Approach: Identifying Patterns of Behavior

12. Traits Trait: a relatively stable disposition to behave in a particular and consistent way. The Big Five: traits of the five-factor model include conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness to experience, and extraversion.

13. Figure 11.3: Eysenck’s Depiction of Trait Dimensions (p. 339)

14. Table 11.1: The Big Five Factor Model (p. 340)

15. Questions How might traits both describe people and explain their behavior? What are the strengths of the five- factor model?

16. Genes, Traits, and Personality In behavioral genetics, personality psychologists investigate the correlation between traits in monozygotic and dizygotic twins. the average genetic component of personality is between.40 to.60 (heritability coefficient). must rule out shared environment; studies of identical twins reared apart.

17. Questions What do studies of twins tell us about personality?

18. Traits in the Brain Eysenck postulated differences in cortical arousal between introverts and extraverts.

19. Questions What neurological differences explain why extraverts pursue more stimulation than introverts?

20. PSYCHOLOGY Schacter Gilbert Wegner 11.3 The Psychodynamic Approach: Forces That Lie Beneath Awareness

21. Psychodynamic Approach Psychodynamic approach: personality is formed by needs, strivings, and desires largely operating outside of awareness. The structure of the mind: id: contains the drives present at birth; the source of our bodily needs, wants, desires, and impulses, particularly our sexual and aggressive drives. ego: developed through contact with the external world that enables us to deal with life’s practical demands. superego: the mental system that reflects the internalization of cultural rules, mainly learned as parents exercise their authority.

22. Sigmund Freud and the Psychodynamic Approach (p. 342)

23. The Id, Ego, and Superego in Hollywood (p. 343)

24. Dealing With Inner Conflict Defense mechanisms: unconscious coping mechanisms that reduce anxiety generated by threats from unacceptable impulses. rationalization, reaction formation, projection, regression, displacement, identification, and sublimation. Psychosexual stages: distinct early life stages through which personality is formed as children experience sexual pleasures from specific body areas and caregivers redirect or interfere with those pleasures. oral, anal, phallic (Oedipus conflict), latency, and genital stages. fixation: a person’s pleasure-seeking drives become stuck or arrested at that psychosexual stage.

25. Figure 11.4: Decreased Hippocampal Activity During Memory Suppression (p. 339)

26. Regression (p. 345)

27. Table 11.2: The Psychosexual Stages (p. 345)

28. Questions How is personality shaped by the interaction of the id, ego, and superego? How can our defense mechanisms be useful? Why do critics say Freud’s psychosexual stages are more interpretation than explanation?

29. PSYCHOLOGY Schacter Gilbert Wegner 11.4 The Humanistic- Existential Approach: Personality as Choice

30. Humanistic-Existential Approach Humanistic psychologists emphasize a positive, optimistic view of human nature that highlights people’s inherent goodness and their potential for personal growth. Self-actualizing tendency: the human motive toward realizing our inner potential. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and self-actualization. Existentialist psychologists emphasize the individual as a responsible agent who is free to create and live his or her life while negotiating the issue of meaning and the reality of death. existential approach: regards personality as governed by an individual’s ongoing choices and decisions in the context of the realities of life and death.

31. Questions What is it to be self-actualized? What is angst, and how is it created?

32. PSYCHOLOGY Schacter Gilbert Wegner 11.4 The Social-Cognitive Approach: Personalities in Situations

33. Social Cognitive Approach Social cognitive approach: views personality in terms of how the person thinks about the situations encountered in daily life and behaves in response to them. Person-situation controversy: the question of whether behavior is caused more by personality or by situational factors.

34. Questions Does a person’s behavior in one situation allow us to predict future behaviors?

35. Culture and Community: Does Your Personality Change…? A study was conducted to discover if personality differs based on what language one speaks. Bilingual individuals were found to be more extraverted, agreeable, and conscientious when they took a personality test in English when compared to Spanish.

36. Personal Constructs Personal constructs: dimensions people use in making sense of their experiences. Outcome expectancies: a person’s assumptions about the likely consequences of a future behavior. Locus of control: a person’s tendency to perceive the control of rewards as internal to the self or external in the environment. internal vs. external

37. Questions Why doesn’t everyone love clowns? What is the advantage of an internal locus of control?

38. PSYCHOLOGY Schacter Gilbert Wegner 11.4 The Self: Personality in the Mirror

39. Self Concept Self-concept: a person’s explicit knowledge of his or her own behaviors, traits, and other personal characteristics. autobiographical memory, self-narrative. self-verification: the tendency to seek evidence to confirm the self-concept.

40. Self-portraits and Self-concepts (p. 354)

41. Questions What is your life story as you see it – your self-narrative?

42. Self-esteem Self-esteem: the extent to which an individual likes, values, and accepts the self. affected by being accepted and valued by others, self- evaluations, comparison groups, domains and the ideal self. may reflect degree of social dominance or status, evolutionary theory, or fear of death (negative self- esteem). Self-serving bias: people’s tendency to take credit for their successes but downplay responsibility for their failures. Narcissism: a trait that reflects a grandiose view of the self combined with a tendency to seek admiration from and exploit others.

43. Self-esteem and Social Dominance (p. 357)

44. Questions How might self-esteem have played a role in evolution?

45. Hot Science: Implicit Egotism Name-letter effect: when asked to pick their favorite letter of the alphabet, about 30% of people choose the first letter of their first name. similar effects have been found with cities, streets, occupations, and numbers. greater effects when asked to work quickly (snap judgments). reflects an implicit egotism because people are generally unaware.

46. Where Do You Stand: Personality Testing for Fun and Profit Question validity of personality tests for entertainment. Businesses, vocational counselors, the government, and the military all use personality tests as part of hiring procedures. Can they be used to predict criminal behavior?