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Personality
Who Am I
Ch 15
Nature of Personality
• A personality trait is a durable disposition to behave in
a particular way across a variety of situations.
• Theorists agree that some traits are more basic than
others, but there is great debate about how many
fundamental traits are required to fully describe
personality.
• According to the five-factor model, most aspects of
personality are derived from 5 crucial traits:
neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience,
agreeableness, and conscientiousness.
Psychodynamic Perspective
Freud’s Theory
• Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory grew
out of his therapeutic work with clients and
emphasized the importance of the
unconscious.
• Freud divided personality structure into three
components: the id, ego, and superego.
Id, Ego, Superego
• Id is the instinctive component that follows
the pleasure principle.
• Ego is the decision-making component that
follows the reality principle.
• Superego is the moral component
3 levels of awareness
• The conscious (current awareness)
• The preconscious (material just beneath the
surface of awareness)
• The unconscious (material well below the
surface of awareness)
Anxiety
• Freud theorized that conflicts centering on sex
and aggression are especially likely to lead to
significant anxiety.
Defense Mechanisms
• 1. Denial
• Denial is the refusal to accept reality or fact, acting as if
a painful event, thought or feeling did not exist. It is
considered one of the most primitive of the defense
mechanisms because it is characteristic of early
childhood development. Many people use denial in
their everyday lives to avoid dealing with painful
feelings or areas of their life they don’t wish to admit.
For instance, a person who is a functioning alcoholic
will often simply deny they have a drinking problem,
pointing to how well they function in their job and
relationships.
Regression
• Regression is the reversion to an earlier stage of
development in the face of unacceptable
thoughts or impulses. For an example an
adolescent who is overwhelmed with fear, anger
and growing sexual impulses might become clingy
and start exhibiting earlier childhood behaviors
he has long since overcome, such as bedwetting.
An adult may regress when under a great deal of
stress, refusing to leave their bed and engage in
normal, everyday activities.
Projection
• Projection is the misattribution of a person’s undesired
thoughts, feelings or impulses onto another person
who does not have those thoughts, feelings or
impulses. Projection is used especially when the
thoughts are considered unacceptable for the person
to express, or they feel completely ill at ease with
having them. For example, a spouse may be angry at
their significant other for not listening, when in fact it
is the angry spouse who does not listen. Projection is
often the result of a lack of insight and
acknowledgement of one’s own motivations and
feelings.
Repression
• Repression is the unconscious blocking of
unacceptable thoughts, feelings and impulses.
The key to repression is that people do it
unconsciously, so they often have very little
control over it. “Repressed memories” are
memories that have been unconsciously blocked
from access or view. But because memory is very
malleable and ever-changing, it is not like playing
back a DVD of your life. The DVD has been
filtered and even altered by your life experiences,
even by what you’ve read or viewed.
Displacement
• Displacement is the redirecting of thoughts feelings and
impulses directed at one person or object, but taken out
upon another person or object. People often use
displacement when they cannot express their feelings in a
safe manner to the person they are directed at. The classic
example is the man who gets angry at his boss, but can’t
express his anger to his boss for fear of being fired. He
instead comes home and kicks the dog or starts an
argument with his wife. The man is redirecting his anger
from his boss to his dog or wife. Naturally, this is a pretty
ineffective defense mechanism, because while the anger
finds a route for expression, it’s misapplication to other
harmless people or objects will cause additional problems
for most people.
Stages of Psychosexual Development
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Oral- what you eat, drink birth-1 yr
Anal- potty training 1-3 yrs
Phallic – Oedipal Complex/ Electra Complex
Latency – dormant ages 6-puberty
Genital - puberty - death
Jung’s Theory
• Analytical Psychology emphasized unconsious
determinants of personality, but he divided
the unconscious into the personal and
collective unconscious
Collective Unconscious
• Storehouse of latent
memory traces inherited
from people's ancestral past.
• These memories consists of
archetypes, which are
emotionally charged thought
forms that have universal
meaning.
Personality Types
• Introverted (inner-directed)
• Extroverted (outer-directed)
• Jung first to describe these
Alfred Adler’s Theory
• Individual psychology emphasized how social
forces shape personality development.
• Argued that the striving for superiority is the
foremost motivational force in people’s lives.
• Attributed personality disturbances to excessive
inferiority feelings that can pervert the normal
process of striving for superiority and can result
in overcompensation.
• Stressed the social context of personality
development and did pioneering work on the
effects of birth order.
Behavioral Perspective
• Skinner’s Theory
– Skinner’s work on operant conditioning was not
meant to be a theory of personality, but it has
been applied to personality.
– Followers view personality as a collection of
response tendencies that are tied to specific
situations.
– Skinnerians view personality development as a
lifelong process in which response tendencies are
shaped by reinforcement.
Bandura’s Theory
Albert Bandura’s social cognitive
theory emphasizes how cognitive
factors shape personality.
1. people’s response tendencies are
largely acquired through
observational learning.
2. Stressed the role of self-efficacyones beliefabout one’s ability to
perform behaviors that should
lead to expected outcomes.
3. Greater self-efficacy is associated
with greater success in a variety
of athletic, academic, and health
pursuits.
Mischel’s
Theory
• Walter Mischel’s brand of social learning
theory emphasizes how people behave
differently in different situations.
• His theory has sparked debate about the
relative importance of the person versus the
situation in determining behavior.
Humanistic Perspectives
• Rogers’s Theory
– Carl Rogers’s person-centered theory focuses on the
self-concept- a collection of subjective beliefs about
one’s nature.
– Incongruence is the degree of disparity between one’s
self-concept and one’s actual experiences
– Unconditional love during childhood fosters
congruence while conditional love fosters
incongruence.
– Asserts that people with highly incongruent selfconcepts are prone to recurrent anxiety.
Maslow’s Theory
• Abraham Maslow proposed that human votives
are organized into a hierarchy of needs, in which
basic needs must be met before less basic needs
are aroused.
• At the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is the
need for self-actualization-the need to fulfill one’s
potential.
• Self-actualizing persons are people with very
healthy personalities, marked by continued
personal growth.
Biological Perspectives
Eysenck’s Theory
• Hans Eysenck views personality structure as a
hierarchy of traits in wheich many superficial
traits are derived from a handful of fundamental
traits.
• Personality is largely determined by genetic
inheritance.
• He theorizes that introversion and extraversion
are shaped by inherited differences in
arousability and ease of conditioning.
Evolutionary Approach
• Analyses focus on how certain personality
traits may have contributed to reproductive
fitness in ancestral times.
• According to David Buss, the Big 5 traits are
especially important because they have had
significant adaptive implications.
CANOE
Behavioral Genetics
• Identical twins reared apart tend to be more
similar in personality than fraternal twins
reared together, which suggests that genetics
shape personality.
• Heritability estimates for personality tend to
hover around 40-50%.
• Behavioral genetics research has revealed that
differences among families have surprisingly
little impact on personality.
A Contemporary Empirical
Approach
Terror management theory
Terror Management Theory
• The collision between human’s self-preservation instinct and
their awareness of death creates the potential for terror when
people think about their mortality.
• Cultural worldviews and self-esteem buffer people from the
anxiety associated with their awareness of their mortality.
• Increasing mortality salience leads people to work harder at
defending their cultural worldview and their self-esteem.
• The need to defend one’s cultural worldview can fuel
prejudice and aggression and can explain many aspects ov
behavior, ranging from conspicuous consumption to political
preferences.
Culture and Personality
• Cross-cultural studies suggest that the basic trait
structure of personality may be pancultural.
• Cultures vary in the degree to which they embrace
individualism v collectivism, and these differences
influence the prevalence of personality traits in a
culture.
• American culture fosters an independent view of the
self, whereas Asian cultures foster a more
interdependent view of the self.
• People from Western cultures tend to engage in selfenhancement, whereas people from Asian cultures are
more prone to self-criticism.