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Personality
Psychological Perspectives
Introduction
 Personality: a unique patter of consistent
feelings, thoughts, and behaviors that
originate within the individual
 Two methods to study personality:
Ideographic method: relies on collecting
data from case studies that often include
interviews and naturalistic observations
Nomothetic Method: focuses on variables
at the group level, identifying universal
trait dimensions or relationships between
different aspects of personality. Data
comes primarily from tests, surveys, and
observations.
Temperament
 Temperament is
generally considered the
inherited part of
personality.
 It includes sensitivity,
activity levels, prevailing
mood, irritability, and
adaptability.
 Twin and adoption
studies are revealing in
demonstrating the extent
to which resemblance of
behavioral traits results
from shared genes or
from shared
environments.
 \
Sigmund Freud 1856-1939
 Viennese doctor who specialized
in nervous disorders.
 Found patients whose disorders
made no neurological sense
 Freud and his followers believed
that people have an inborn nature
that shapes personality.
 Freud believed that sexual
conflicts hidden from awareness
caused many of this patients’
problems.
 Wrote 24 volumes espoused his
psychoanalytic theories
 His first book: The Interpretation
of Dreams (1900).
Psychoanalytic Perspective
 Psychoanalysis: (Freud) techniques used to treat
psychological disorders by seeking to expose and
interpret unconscious tensions and motives.
 Free Association: method used to explore the
unconscious. The person relaxes and says whatever
comes to mind, no matter how trivial or embarrassing
 Conscious: Includes everything that we are aware of at
a given moment.
 Preconscious: contains thoughts, memories, feelings,
and images that we can easily recall.
 Unconscious: reservoir filled most unacceptable
thoughts, wishes, impulses, memories, and feelings.
Freud
Personality Structure (Freud)
 Personality is made up of three interacting systems
 Id: Contains a reservoir of unconscious psychic energy
that strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives.
Operates on the pleasure principle, demanding
immediate gratification (reduces tension)
 Ego: partly conscious and unconscious, mediates among
the id, superego and reality. Contains our partially
conscious perceptions, thoughts, judgments, and
memories. Operates on the reality principle, satisfying
the id’s desires in ways that will realistically bring
pleasure rather than pain.
 Superego: composed of the conscious and the ego-ideal.
Represents internalized ideals and provides standards for
judgments and future aspirations.
Id, Ego, & Superego
Psychosexual Development
 The first five years of life are crucial to personality
development.
 Freud believed that children pass through a series
of psychosexual stages, during which the id’s
pleasure seeking energies focus on different
pleasure-sensitive areas of the body called the
erogenous zones.
 At each stage an unconscious conflict occurs that if
it is not resolved well, the libido (life energy)
would become fixated at the pleasure center of
that stage and become a permanent part of the
adult personality.
 To avoid fixation, parents need to be sensitive to
the child’s needs at each stage.
Oral Stage Conflicts
 Pleasure derived from oral stimulation can lead to
adult pleasure in acquiring knowledge or
possessions.
 If weaning from the breast or bottle causes
traumatic separation anxiety for the infant, Freud
thought this could lead to:
 oral-dependent personality: characterized by
gullibility, overeating, and passivity
 Oral-aggressive personality: characterized by
sarcasm & argumentativeness
Anal Stage Conflicts
 Very strict & inflexible methods of toilet training
may cause the child to hold back feces & become
constipated. This can lead to:
 Anal Retentive Personality: marked by
compulsive cleanliness, orderliness, stinginess,
and stubbornness.
 Toilet training causes the child to become angry
sand expel feces at inappropriate times, leading
to:
 Anal-Expulsive Personality: marked by
disorderliness, messiness & temper tantrums.
Phallic Stage Conflicts
 Conflict between child’s sexual desire for parent of
the opposite sex and fear of punishment from the
same sex parent.
 Known as the Oedipus Conflict in boys and the
Electra Complex in girls.
 Resolution of conflict results in identification with
the same sex parent
 In boys, repression of sexual desire for mother
occurs due to fear of castration anxiety from the
dominant rival (Dad), leading to male children
identifying with their fathers.
 Resolution of the Oedipus Conflict causes the
superego to develop and guard against incest and
aggression.
Phallic Stage Conflicts
(cont’d)
 Girls hold their mothers responsible for
their castrated condition and experience
penis envy, the desire for a penis that she
wants to share with her father.
 If the Electra Complex is resolved, then the
girl with identify with her mother to
prevent the loss of her mother’s love.
Latency & Genital Stage
Conflicts
 Latency Stage: sexual feelings are repressed and
sublimated during this latency period. Sexual
energy is transformed into developing social
relationships and learning new tasks.
 If child does not meet own expectations or those
of others, child can develop into an adult with
feelings of inferiority.
 Until puberty, child is primarily narcissistic,
obtaining pleasure from his or her own body.
 Genital Stage: adolescents develop warm feelings
for others and sexual attraction. Group activities,
vocational planning, and intimate relationships
develop. Particularly difficult time for teens with
fixations in the phallic stage.
Carl Jung
 A colleague of Freud’s, Jung
later rejected Freud’s sex
theory.
 Developed the Analytic Theory
of Personality by studying
mythology, religion, cultures,
dreams, & symptoms of
mentally ill patients
o Collective Conscious: shared, inherited reservoir of
memory traces from our ancestors.
o Inherited memories are archetypes of common
themes found in all cultures, religions, and
literature, both ancient and contemporary.
Carl Jung
(cont’d)
 Believed that the attitude of extroversion orients a
person toward the external, objective world;
introversion orients a person toward the inner
subjective world.
 Individuation: psychological process by which a
person becomes a unified whole (unconscious &
conscious processes)
 The self is the middle of personality surrounded by
al of the other systems of personality.
Carl Jung
Alfred Adler
 Emphasized social interest as a primary
determinate of behavior.
 Individual Psychology: consciousness is the center
of personality.
 Inferiority Complex: Adler believed that each
person suffers from a sense of inferiority.
 Striving for Superiority: from childhood, Adler
asserted that people work toward overcoming
their inferiority and believed that this drive was
the motivating force behind human behaviors,
emotions, and thoughts.
 Adler hypothesized that the oldest child is likely to
develop- into a responsible, protective person, the
middle child is likely to be ambitious, and welladjusted, and the youngest child is most likely to
be spoiled.
Karen Horney
 Brought a feminist viewpoint to psychoanalytic
theory
 She rejected the concept of penis envy and
countered with the concept of ‘womb envy’,
suggesting that males suffer from feelings of
inferiority because they are unable to give birth to
children.
 Horney also believed that it was social tensions
were the most important for children in the forming
of personality.
 She proposed that children feel helpless and
threatened and learn how to cope by showing
affection or hostility toward others or by
withdrawing from relationships.
Projective Personality Tests
 Projective tests present ambiguous
stimuli to stimulate test takers to
make up stories that reveal their
inner feelings and interests.
 Thematic Apperception Test
(TAT): consists of 20 cards (one
blank) depicting people in ambiguous
situations.
 Test takers are asked to make up
stories about the pictures
 Objective is to learn about the
participant’s inner self – the need
for achievement motivation, sex,
power, and/or affiliation.
Example of
TAT Card
Projective Tests
 Rorschach Inkblot
Test: assumes that
what we see in its 10
inkblots reflects our
inner feelings and
conflicts.
 Due to the subjective
nature of projective
tests, critics have
questioned their
validity and reliability.
(cont’d)
Critique: Psychoanalytic
Perspective
 Many of Freud’s ideas have been invalidated,
contradicted, or found to be implausible based on
modern research.
 Critics assert that Freud offers only “after the
fact” explanations and have little scientific
backing.
 Freud’s entire theory rests in the idea of
repression of painful experiences.
 Current research suggests that repression, if it
occurs at all, is a rare mental response to extreme
trauma
Behavioral Perspective
 B.F. Skinner was one of the most influential
behavioral psychologists in the last half century
 Developed his Operant Conditioning Theory which
explained how we acquire the range of learned
behaviors we exhibit on a daily basis.
 Believed that BEHAVIOR is PERSONALITY
 The environment shapes who we become. Who we
become is determined by the contingencies of
reinforcement we have experienced.
 Psychoanalysts criticize Skinner for not taking into
account emotions.
 Cognitivists criticize Skinner for ignoring our
thinking processes.
Humanistic Perspective
 Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
 Believed that behaviorism could not account for
his observations of developing children
 Asserted that people are good and move toward
self-actualization as our goal.
 Self-Actualization: the motivation to fulfill one’s
potential.
 Developed his ideas by studying healthy, creative
people.
 Based his description of self-actualization on
notable individuals who led rich and productive
lives who shared common characteristics of being
self-aware, self-accepting, open and
spontaneous, loving and caring, and not
paralyzed by others’ opinions.
Maslow
(cont’d)
 Interests are problem-centered rather than selfcentered.
 Many self-actualized people have experienced
spiritual or personal peak experiences that
surpass ordinary consciousness.
Carl Rogers
o
o
Key concept of Rogers self theory is SELF.
o
According to Rogers, people nurture personality by
being:
Self-Concept: central feature of personality which
encompasses all of our thoughts and feelings about
ourselves in answer to the question “Who am I”
o Genuine: open with feelings, no facades, selfdisclosing
o Accepting: offering unconditional regard (attitude
of total acceptance of another person)
o Empathetic: sharing and mirroring our feeling and
reflecting our meanings.
o
To be fully functioning (self-actualized), we must
learn to accept ourselves, and unite our real and
ideal selves.
Critique: Humanistic Perspective
 Although humanistic psychology helped to renew
interest in the self. Its theories have the following
criticisms:
 Concepts are vague and
subjective
 Values are individualistic
and self-centered
 Assumptions naively optimistic,
there is a reality of human
capacity for evil.
Trait Perspective
 Trait and type psychologists attempt to describe
basic behaviors that define personality and to
create instruments that measure individual
differences in order to understand and predict
behavior.
 Trait: A relatively permanent characteristic pattern of
behavior or conscious motive that can be assessed by
self-report inventories and peer reports and used to
predict our behaviors.
 Traits are often measured on a continuum (such as
introvert ---------extrovert), however not all traits can
be classified in this manner.
Personality Types
 Basic personality types are often characterized as:
 Type A: intense, competitive, motivated
 Type B: laidback
 In children (Kagan, 1986): shy-inhibited
or fearless-uninhibited.
 Body Types (today this research is
considered too stereotypical.)
• Endomorph – plump, jolly, relaxed
• Mesomorph – muscular, bold, physically active
• Ectomorph – thin, high, strung, solitary
Gordon Allport (Trait Theory)
 First coined by Allport, who was more interested in
describing traits than explaining them.
 Conducted idiographic research that focused on
conscious motivations and personal traits.
 Allport proposed three levels of traits:
 Cardinal Trait: a defining characteristic that in a
small number of people, shapes and defines them.
• Examples of Cardinal traits include Freudian,
Machiavellian, narcissism, Don Juan, Christ-like.
• Allport suggested that cardinal traits are rare
and tend to develop later in life
 Central Traits: general characteristics that form
the basic foundations of personality.
• Examples of central traits include intelligent,
honest, shy and anxious.
Trait Theory (cont’d)
 Secondary Traits: characteristics that apparent in
only certain situations.
• Examples include being uncomfortable in
confined spaces, getting anxious when
speaking to a group or impatient while waiting
in line.
 Allport believed that our unique pattern
of traits determines our behavior.
Raymond Cattell
 Conducted nomothetic research, studying surface
traits (visible areas of personality)
 Found that surface traits were either absent/present
in clusters of people, indicating that they represented
a single more basic trait.
 Cattell took the thousands of traits described by
Allport and condensed them down to 16 source traits
underlying personality, using factor analysis.
 Factor Analysis: statistical procedure to identify
clusters of test items that tap basic components of
variables such as intelligence, personality and
motivation.
 Theory: 16 personality factor model
 Instrument: 16PF Questionnaire.
Hans Eysenek
o
Using factor analysis,
Eysenek attempted to
reduce description of
our personalities to
three major genetically
influenced dimensions,
which everyone has to
varying degrees.
o
Arguing that Cattell’s
model contained too
many factors, Eysenek
first proposed that only
two factors were
necessary to explain
individual differences in
personality.
o
Developed a third factor, psychoticism, which dealt with a
predisposition to be psychotic (not grounded in reality) or
sociopathic (psychologically unattached).
Eysenck
(cont’d)
 PEN Personality Model:
 P Scale: Psychotic------High Impulse Control –
measures our tough-mindedness (hostility,
ruthlessness, insensitivity) as opposed to tendermindedness (friendliness, empathetic,
cooperative)
 E Scale: Extroversion-------Introversion –
measures our sociability and tendency to pay
attention to the external environment as opposed
to our private mental experiences.
 N Scale: Neuroticism------Emotional Stability –
measures our level of instability (moodiness,
anxious, unreliability) as opposed to our stability
(calmness, even-tempered, reliability)
The Big Five Personality Factors
 Toward the end of the 20th century, trait
psychologists believed that the three factor model
was too simple and that 16 factors were too many.
 In 1990 Paul Costa and Robert McCrae presented
their FIVE FACTOR THEORY.
 Includes the traits of openness, conscientiousness,
extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism
(OCEAN).
 In adulthood, these traits are quite stable, about
50% inheritable, and in cross-cultural studies, the
same five factors have been identified in trait
ratings.
The Big Five Personality Factors
Assessing Traits
 Personality Inventory: a self-report questionnaire
on which people respond true/false or
agree/disagree items designed to gauge a wide
range of feelings and behaviors.
 Most inventories are scored objectively by
computer, but in untrained hands, tests could be
administered and interpreted incorrectly.
 Some psychologists believe that peer reports yield
more valid information.
MMPI
 Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI
& MMPI 2): most widely researched and clinically
used of all personality tests.
 Originally designed to identify emotional
disorders, it is also used for other screening
procedures.
 Empirically derived test: developed by testing a
pool of items and selecting those that
discriminate between groups.
 MMPI2 has 10 clinical scales (i.e. –
schizophrenia, depression), 15 content scales
(i.e. anger, family problems) and validity scales
to determine if the participant is lying.
 Patterns of responses reveal personality
dimensions.
Critique: Trait Perspective
 Person-Situation Controversy: although general
traits may persist over time, their specific
behavior varies from situation to situation as our
inner disposition interacts with a particular
environment, so traits and are not a good
predictor of behaviors.
 Trait theorists reply that despite these
variations, a person’s average behavior across
many different situations tends to be fairly
constant.
Consistency of Expressive
Style
 The trait of expressive styles refer to animation,
manner of speaking, and gestures.
 Psychologists are interested in this trait since it
demonstrates how consistent a trait can be despite
situational variations in behavior.
 We have little voluntary control over our
expressiveness.
 Observers can been able to judge the trait of
expressiveness in video snippets as short as 2
seconds long.
 Consistency of expressive styles allows us to form
a lasting impression of an individual within a few
minutes of meeting him or her.
Social-Cognitive Perspective
 View that behavior is influences by the interaction
between people (and their thinking) and their social
context.
 Cognitive Part: what we think out our situation
affects our behavior.
 Social Part: we learn many of our behaviors through
conditioning or by observing others and modeling
our behaviors after them
George Kelly
 Personal-Construct Theory: one of the most well-known
Cognitive theories on personality development
 Personal Constructs: we try to make sense of our world
by generating, testing, and revising hypotheses about
our social reality.
 Our pattern of personal constructs determines our
personality
 Personal constructs are bipolar categories that we use
as labels to categorize and interpret the world (i.e. :
Self/genuine, happy/unhappy, energetic/inactive
 Developed the Role Construct Repertory Test
 People with too few constructs tend to stereotype
others
 People with too many constructs have difficulty
predicting the behavior of others.
Alfred Bandura
 Social Cognitive Theory: we learn more by
observation than by operant conditioning
 Reciprocal Determinism: the interacting influences
between personality and environmental factors
 “Behavior, internal personal factors, and
environmental influences all operate as
interlocking determinants of each other.”
 We choose our environments and then those
environments shape who you are
 Our personalities shape how we interpret and
react to events
 Our personalities help create situations in which
we react
Bandura
(cont’d)
 Self-Efficacy: our belief that we are competent and
can perform behaviors necessary to accomplish
tasks.
 In North America and Western Europe, societies
foster an independent view of the self characterized
by individualism – identifying oneself in terms of
personal traits with independent, personal goals.
 Collective Efficacy: our perception, that with
collaborative effort, our group will attain its desired
outcome
 more beneficial in Asian societies where there is an
interdependent view of the self is characterized by
collectivism – primary identification of a person as a
member of a group
 The goals of the group become the individual’s goals.
Julian Rotter (Social Learning
Theory
 Locus of Control: (personal control) whether we
learn to see ourselves as controlling our environment
rather than being helpless.
 Our perspective of control impacts our personality
because it influences both how we think about
ourselves and the actions we take.
 External Locus of Control: the perception that chance
or outside forces beyond our control determine out
fates.
 Internal Locus of Control: the perception that we
control our own fates
 Self-Control: the ability to control impulses and delay
gratification, predicts good adjustment, egrades, and
social success(Tagney et al., 2004).
Learned Helplessness
 Learned Helplessness: when repeatedly faced with
traumatic events over which one has no control, the
person comes to feel helpless, hopeless, and
depressed.
 Martin Seligman: Dogs strapped into a hammock were
given mild, repeated electric shocks with no chance to
avoid them.
 Later, when placed into another
situation where they could
avoid punishment by
jumping the hurdle, the dogs
cowered without hope.
o They had formed the
expectation that they could
control their environment
Walter Mischel
 Built on the theories of Rotter and Bandura.
 Cognitive-Affective Personality System (CAPS):
Interaction among five factors and characteristics
of the situation account for our individual
personality differences.
 Five Factors: encoding strategies, expectancies
and beliefs, goals and values, feelings, and
personal competencies and self-regulatory
processes.
 Behavioral Signatures: unique ways of responding
in similar situations that characterize our
personality.
Optimism vs. Pessimism
 Optimistic or Pessimistic Attribution Style:
individual’s way of explaining events and is a
measure of how helpless or effective you feel.
 Students who express an attitude of hopeful
optimism tend to get better grades than those who
are pessimistic.
 Excessive optimism can
foster feelings of
invincibility that can expose
a person to unnecessary
risk.
Assessing Behavior in Situations
 Social-Cognitive researchers are interested in how
people’s behaviors and beliefs affect and are
affected by their surroundings.
 Observe people in realistic settings because they
have found that the best way to predict someone’s
behavior in a specific situation is to observe that
person’s behavior in similar situations.
 Hawthorne Effect: when people know they are
being observed, they change their behavior to what
they think the observer expects or to make
themselves look good.
Critique: Social-Cognitive
Perspective
 Critics assert that the social-cognitive perspective
focuses too much on the situation and fails to
appreciate a person’s inner traits
 By focusing so much on the situation, this
perspective loses sight of the person.
 Also criticize this perspective for slighting
unconscious dynamics, emotions, and biologically
influenced traits.
Positive Psychology
 Main purpose is to measure, understand, and build
on human strengths and civic virtues that enable
individuals and communities to thrive.
 Shares with humanistic psychology an interest in
advancing human fulfillment, but its method of
study is scientific.
 Based on three major pillars:
 Positive emotions: happiness is a by-product of a
pleasant, engaged and meaningful life
 Positive character: exploring and enhancing
virtues such as creativity, courage, compassion,
integrity, leadership, self-control, wisdom,
spirituality
 Positive groups, communities, and culture:
fostering of a positive social ecology.
The Self
 Self-Concept: Overall view of our abilities, behavior,
and personality.
 Self-Esteem: one part of our self-concept; deals with
how we evaluate ourselves.
 Affected by our emotions and comes to mean how
worthy we think we are
 Whether high or low, self-esteem reflects reality.
In other words, it is a side effect of our successes
or failures in meeting challenges and
surmounting difficulties.
 In this view, the best boost to self-esteem would
be to help children meet challenges, not
rewarding them despite their failures.
The Self
(cont’d)
 Spotlight Effect: overestimating others’ noticing
and evaluating our appearance, performance, and
blunders
 Self-Serving Bias: our readiness to perceive
ourselves favorably includes our tendencies:
 To more readily accept responsibility for good
deeds and for successes than for bad deeds and
failures.
 To see ourselves as better than average.
 Defensive Self-Esteem: takes the form of egotism
focused on sustaining itself at any cost, so failures
and criticisms feel threatening. Correlates with
aggressive and antisocial behaviors.
 Secure self-Esteem: less fragile since it is less
dependent on external evaluations.