Summer at the Academy

1. Summer at the Academy Introduction to Psychology Days 7 & 8: Personality Ms. Mary-Liz Fuhrman

2. * Personality * Chapter 15 pp 595-637

3. Ch 15: Personality Overview • Psychoanalytic Perspective • Humanistic Perspective • Trait Perspective • Social-Cognitive Perspective • Exploring the Self

4. What is personality? • Q: How do you describe your own personality? • Personality: an individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting • Focus is on individual not general human nature • Explores: • Traits • Uniqueness • Personal control • Sense of self

5. 4 Perspectives of Personality • Psychoanalytic theory emphasizes the unconscious and irrational aspects of personality. • Humanistic theory draws attention to the concept of self and to human potential for healthy growth. • Trait theory led to advances in techniques for evaluating and describing personality. • The social-cognitiveperspective emphasizes the effects of our interactions with the environment • Contributions & short-comings

6. Psychoanalytic Perspective Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) • Austria • Medical Doctor: • nervous disorders/neurology • Developed theory based on evaluations of self and patients: • Unconscious region of the mind • Psychosexual stages • Defense mechanisms

7. Psychoanalytic Perspective Exploring the Unconscious • Free Association: person relaxes and says whatever comes to mind • Psychoanalysis: Freud’s theory of personality and associated techniques that attributes thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts • seek to expose and interpret unconscious tensions • Unconscious: • FREUD: reservoir of unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories • TODAY: info processing of which we are unaware

8. Psychoanalytic Perspective PersonalityStructure “Iceberg” • Id: pleasure principle—immediate gratification; strives to satisfy sexual and aggressive drives • Ego: reality principle—satisfying the id’s desires realistically; mediates between the id and superego; mostly conscious • Superego: internalized ideals and provides standards for judgments

10. PsychoanalyticPerspective Personality Development FREUD’S PSYCHOSEXUAL STAGES

11. Psychoanalytic Perspective • Oedipus Complex: boy’s sexual desires toward his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father • Electra Complex • Identification: children incorporate their parents’ values into their developing superegos • Fixation: lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, where conflicts were not resolved

12. Psychoanalytic Perspective Defense Mechanisms Ego’s protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality Repression: *Basic defense mechanism; banishes anxiety arousing thoughts, feelings, & memories ** Dreams and “Slips-Of-The-Tongue” Regression: When faced w/ anxiety, retreat to an earlier psychosexual stage where some energy remains fixated Reaction Formation: unconsciously switching unacceptable impulses into their opposites; express feelings opposite of anxiety-arousing unconscious feelings

13. Psychoanalytic Perspective Defense Mechanisms Cont’d • Projection: people disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others • ex: He doesn’t love me ~~ I don’t love him • Rationalization: offers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one’s actions • ex: well I had to check his text messages because… • Displacement: shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person; redirecting anger toward a safer outlet • ex: yelling at your boyfriend when you are angry w/ your parents

14. The Humanistic Perspective • 1960s • Unhappy w/ Freud and Skinner • Freud’s focus was on “sick” people • Humanistic: focus on how healthy people strive for self-determination and self-realization • Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers

15. The Humanistic Perspective Abraham Maslow’s Self-Actualizing Person Heirarchy of Needs pyramid of human needs, beginning at the base w/ physiological needs that must first be satisfied before moving up to psychological needs • Goal: Self-Actualization • fulfilling one’s potential

17. The Humanistic Perspective Maslow studied healthy, creative people • Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Eleanor Roosevelt • Self-aware, self-accepting, open and spontaneous, loving and caring, not paralyzed by other’s opinions • Interests were problem-centered not self-centered

18. PROS Influenced counseling, education, child-rearing, and management strategies Today’s popular psych: “Positive Self-Concept is the key to happiness and success” Hierarchy of Needs relates to Business CONS Vague, subjective Assumptions are too optimistic Individualization can lead to self-indulgent, selfish behaviors The Humanistic Perspective Evaluating the Humanistic Perspective

19. The Humanistic PerspectiveELIZABETH KUBLER-ROSS: Stages of Grieving • Denial • Anger • Bargaining • Depression • Acceptance

20. The Trait Perspective • stable and enduring behavior patterns • Traits: a characteristic pattern of behavior or a disposition to feel and act, as assessed by self-report inventories and peer reports • Gordon Allport (1920s) • Less explaining; more describing • “Types” of personalities • Myers-Briggs Type Indicator sorts people according to Jung’s personality types • Extroverted/Introverted, Sensing/Intuition, Thinking/Feeling, Judging/Perceiving

22. The Trait Perspective Assessing Traits Personality Inventories: questionnaire (often t/f or agree/disagree) on which people respont to items designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors; assesses selected personality traits Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI): the most widely researched and clinically used personality test. Originally designed to identify emotional disorders.

23. The Trait Perspective The Big 5 Factors • Conscientiousness • Organized/disorganized, careful/careless, disciplined/impulsive • Agreeableness • Soft-hearted/ruthless, trusting/suspicious, helpful/uncooperative • Neuroticism (emotional stability v. unstability) • Calm/anxious, secure/insecure, self-satisfied/self-pitying • Openness • Imaginative/practical, variety/routine, independent/conforming • Extraversion • Sociable/retiring, fun-loving/sober, affectionate/reserved

24. The Trait Perspective • How stable are these traits? • Conscientiousness increases in 20s • Agreeableness increases in 30s • How heritable are they? • About 50% per dimension • How well do they apply to other cultures? • Well supported for other cultures • Do the Big Five traits predict other personal attributes? • Yes! Morning people (conscientious) v. night owls (extraverted) • Marital satisfaction decreases with low agreeableness, stability, and openness

25. The Trait Perspective Evaluating The Trait Perspective • The person-situation controversy • Effects of interaction w/ the environment • Personality traits persist over time and situations • Specific behaviors are less consistent • Consistency of Expressive Style • Unfamiliar/Formal situations—wait for social cues • Familiar/Informal (friends)– more comfortable • Expressiveness is relatively, consistent • Even modest outgoing people are more expressive than inhibited people at their peek

26. The Social-Cognitive Perspective • Views behavior as influenced by interaction between persons and their social context • Albert Bandura • Social: Learn behaviors through conditioning or by observing others and modeling our behavior after theirs • Cognitive: What we think about our situations affects our behavior • Interaction: How we interpret and respond to external events.

27. The Social-Cognitive Perspective Reciprocal Influences Reciprocal Determinism: the interacting influences between personality and environmental factors *Different people choose different environments: friends, school, jobs– you choose the environment that shapes you *Personalities shape how we interpret and react to events anxious– notice threatening events more *Personalities help create situations to which we react how we view and treat people influences how they treat us

28. Social-Cognitive Perspective Personal Control Def: Our sense of controlling our environment rather than feeling helpless • Internal Locus of Control: we control our own fate • External Locus of Control: fate is determined for us Learned Helplessness: the more traumatic events faced, the more helpless, hopeless, and depressed we become

30. PROS More focus on cognition and learning Reminds us that the situation does impact individuals CONS Too much focus on situation and not traits Emotions? Evaluating the Social-Cognitive Perspective

31. Exploring The Self • Self is Center of our personality Includes Possible self & feared self • Spotlight Effect: overestimating others’ noticing and evaluating our appearance, mistakes, and performance

32. Exploring The Self Benefits of Self-Esteem • Self-Esteem: one’s feelings of high or low self-worth • Lower self-esteem– more personal problems • Why? • Success leads to higher self esteem • self-esteem reflects reality • Gauges our relationships w/ others

33. Exploring the Self Self Serving Bias Def: A readiness to perceive oneself favorably • Accept more responsibility for good deeds and success than for bad deeds and failures • Most people see themselves as above average