1. Personality An individual’s distinct and relatively enduring pattern of thoughts, feelings, motives, and behaviors.

2. Personality Psychoanalysis and psychodynamic theories Behavior is determined by conflicting wishes and fears Most wishes and fears are unconscious Each wish or fear pushes behavior in a particular direction, with a certain intensity Humanistic Theories The Trait Approach The Cognitive-Social Approach

3. Ambivalence and conflict Ambivalence: mixed feelings about an object Conflict: tension between opposing motives and/or opposing behavioral choices Example. As an adult, a woman gets involved with flashy, charismatic, and highly successful men, but as soon as the men become serious, she becomes disinterested. As a child, this woman had a father that was flashy, charismatic, and highly successful. However, she felt that she could not obtain his love and respect.

4. Freud’s interpretation of hysteria Hysteria is a conversion disorder Paralysis of limbs Blindness Deafness Convulsions Glove anesthesia No biological cause Caused by repression (forcing from conscious into unconscious) of psychologically painful acts, impulses, thoughts, or memories

5. Topographic components Unconscious Mental processes or contents either Kept outside of awareness by repression Outside of awareness as a function of their automatic or homeostatic nature Preconscious Mental processes and contents that can be brought to awareness if necessary, but are not currently in awareness Conscious Mental processes and contents at the center of subjective awareness

6. Structural components Id (the Child) Reservoir of sexual and aggressive energy Primary process thinking (wishful, illogical, associative thought processes) Superego (the Parent) Conscience, established through identification Identification: internalization (making one’s own) of another person’s behavior, values, attitudes, motives, beliefs, and ideals Ego (the Adult) Balances the wishes of the id with the moral prohibitions of the superego

8. Pleasure vs. Reality Pleasure Principle In psychoanalysis, the id’s boundless drive for immediate and total gratification of all desires Reality Principle In psychoanalysis, the ego’s capacity to delay gratification The ego’s ability to reduce tensions, but in the right place and in the right manner

9. Freudian Personality Dynamics The id’s instinctual urges can be temporarily suppressed, but the energy must find an outlet Outlets are disguised and indirect, to provide release for energy that will be safe and appear normal

10. Psychosexual concepts Libido Sexual drive, but broadly defined to include pleasure-seeking, sensuality, and love, as well as sexual intercourse Erogenous zone A part of the body on which libido is concentrated In the oral stage, the mouth; in the anal stage, the anus; In the phallic stage, the genitals At each stage of development, the child needs to resolve a conflict between satisfying the libidinal drive related to a particular zone and the social limitations on that satisfaction Fixations A potentially lifelong unconscious preoccupation with resolving a conflict from a particular psychosexual stage Regression A return to more primitive strategies for dealing with a fixated conflict that is more likely to occur during times of stress

11. Freud’s Psychosexual Stages Oral; 0-18 mos.; dependency Anal; 2-3 yrs; orderliness and cleanliness Phallic; 4-6 yrs Oedipal complex; castration anxiety; identification Penis envy; feelings of inferiority; Latency; 7-11 yrs; sublimation of aggressive and sexual urges Genital; 12+ yrs; mature sexuality and relationships

12. Defense mechanisms I Unconscious mental processes that deny, falsify, or distort reality and are aimed at protecting the person from unpleasant emotions (especially anxiety) Aimed at protecting the ego from threat Repression Denial Rationalization

13. Defense mechanisms II Projection Instead of “I hate her”, a person thinks “She hates me”; May be less threatening to the ego and it enables a person to express impulses under the guise of defending oneself against one’s enemies Reaction formation Instead of “I love this”, a person thinks “I hate this”; one interpretation of Jimmy Swaggart’s preaching against sex while at the same time seeing a prostitute

14. Evaluation of Freud and psychoanalysis: Negative Too bleak a portrait of human nature Not based on evidence collected with the scientific method Many of Freud’s ideas have not been supported by scientific investigation People still think about psychology in Freudian terms

15. Evaluation of Freud and psychoanalysis: Positive Mental disorders can have a psychological origin Internal working models (e.g., attachment theory) The unconscious Defense mechanisms

16. Personality Psychoanalysis Humanistic Theories All living things are born with a “self- actualizing tendency”, a forward drive to grow and be the best they can be (i.e., reach their full genetic capacity) The Trait Approach The Cognitive-Social Approach

17. Positive Regard Unconditional Positive Regard: A situation in which the acceptance and love one receives from significant others is unqualified Conditional Positive Regard: A situation in which the acceptance and love one receives from significant others is contingent upon one’s behavior

18. Carl Rogers’ Personality Theory The needs for self-actualization and positive regard create a potential for conflict.

19. Self-Discrepancy Theory Self-esteem is defined by the match between how we see ourselves and how we want to see ourselves

20. Personality Psychoanalysis The Humanistic Approach The Trait Approach Are there just a few dimensions of human personality that are important to the description of all people? The Cognitive-Social Approach

21. The Trait Approach I Allport & Odbert (1936) listed 18,000 English words that could be used to describe people. Anxious, emotional, secure, fun-loving, cautious, withdrawn, courteous, good- natured, irritable, etc. If you throw out synonyms, slang, and uncommon words, 171 are left.

22. The Trait Approach II Are some traits (anxious and emotional or courteous and good natured) positively correlated? These traits tend to co-occur in people. Are some traits (fun-loving and withdrawn or anxious and secure) negatively correlated? If a person has one trait, they definitely do not have the other. Are some traits (secure and fun-loving vs. withdrawn and irritable) independent? Having one trait has no bearing on having the other trait.

23. The Trait Approach III: The Big Five (OCEAN)

24. Do traits exist? Mischel (1968) argued for situationism Traits are not consistent across situations Therefore, traits are not predictive of behavior After a long debate, scientists agree that traits do exist, but with two caveats Traits predict average behavior, not every relevant behavior in every situation Traits are just one of multiple causes for any single behavior. Interactionism (person-by-situation) Trait-relevant behavior may emerge in some situations, but not others

25. Personality Psychoanalysis The Humanistic Approach The Trait Approach The Cognitive-Social Approach Personality is the problem-solving efforts of people trying to fulfill their life tasks (e.g., Cantor & Kihlstrom, 1987)

26. Cognitive-Social Theory I Peoples actions (i.e., the particular choice among many learned behaviors) are a function of 1) Environmental demands 2) Encoding of those demands 3) Determining the relevance of those demands to goals (judging the value of the event)

27. Cognitive-Social Theory II 4) Come up with a behavioral plan that is dependent upon a) Behavior-outcome expectancies regarding the consequences of particular actions b) Self-efficacy expectencies (or beliefs) regarding one’s ability to perform a certain action 5) Execute the plan, which is dependent upon competences (having the abilities and skills to perform the action) 6) Self-regulation or monitoring one’s own progress at adapting to a particular situation

28. Cognitive-Social Theory III: Personal constructs Encoding and value are determined by personal constructs: the dimensions along which someone encodes and interprets their world These dimensions are extracted from schemas you have of persons, places, things, or events that are significant to you. Determined by the repertory grid technique (Kelly, 1955): How is your father like your favorite teacher and not like someone that seems to dislike you? What characteristics are important to you when you are evaluating someone else?

29. Reciprocal Determinism Personality emerges from the mutual interactions of individuals, their actions, and their environments Person factors (cognitive) Environmental influences (Situation) Overt Behavior

30. Strengths and weaknesses of cognitive-social approach Strengths Easily testable Incorporates the conscious, information- processing components of our existence into personality theory Weaknesses Too much emphasis on rationality and thought and not enough emphasis on emotion, motivation, and irrational aspects of human existence

31. Personality Assessment Idiographic vs. nomothetic approaches Idiographic approaches focus on individual lives and how various characteristics are integrated into unique persons. Case studies Psychobiography (McAdams, 1999, 2001) Nomothetic approaches examine characteristics (dimensions, traits) common to all persons, but on which people vary.

32. Personality Assessment: Nomothetic approaches Psychodynamic theorists prefer projective tests The idea is to ask people to tell stories about ambiguous stimuli and they will project their unconscious motives, wishes, and conflicts onto the stimuli. Rohrshach TAT Trait theorists prefer objective tests Self-report questionnaires NEO Personality Inventory Measures a person’s score on each the Big Five traits Sensation Seeking Scale Measures a person’s score only on sensation seeking

33. The Rorschach Inkblot Test Ambiguous stimuli Person is asked to report what they see This type of test is called projective No clear image, so the things you see must be “projected” from inside yourself Sample Rorschach Card

34. The Rorschach Inkblot Test Ambiguous stimuli Person is asked to report what they see This type of test is called projective No clear image, so the things you see must be “projected” from inside yourself Sample Rorschach Card

35. Thematic Apperception Test Person is asked to tell a story about the “hero” in the picture Another projective test Based on Murray’s personality theory People are distinguished by the needs that motivate their behavior

36. Thematic Apperception Test Person is asked to tell a story about the “hero” in the picture Another projective test Based on Murray’s personality theory People are distinguished by the needs that motivate their behavior

37. Personality assessment: How accurate are the ratings of observers? Observers Show Accuracy in Trait Judgments Sometime close acquaintances predict our behavior more accurately than our self- predictions Why? Sometimes friends observe us more carefully than we observe ourselves Subjective perceptions can diverge from objective behavior