Personality Theory & Assessment Chapter 14 Part I

1. Personality Theory & AssessmentChapter 14Part I William G. Huitt Personality Theories http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/perscontents.html Last revised: May 2005

2. Summary • A human being is inherently • biological • able to be conditioned • sensing & perceiving • emotional • intelligent • knowledge creating • rational thinking • creative thinking • language using • social • motivated • patterned

3. Defining Personality and Traits • Personality • Distinctive and relatively stable pattern of behaviors, thoughts, motives, and emotions that characterizes an individual throughout life. • Trait • A characteristic of an individual, describing a habitual way of behaving, thinking, and feeling.

4. Personality Theories • Distinctive, unique • Patterns of behaviors, thoughts, motives, and emotions that make a person different from others • Commonalities • Dimensions on which all human beings can be measured and compared

5. Temperament • Physiological dispositions to respond to the environment in certain ways. • Ancient Greeks proposed temperaments • Sanguine • Melancholy • Choleric • Phlegmatic • Thomas, Chess, and Birch • Studied 2- to 3-month-old infants on 9 factors and followed them into adolescence and adulthood

6. Temperament • Three general types of temperament emerged from the study • Easy (40%) –generally pleasant moods; adaptable; approached new situations and people positively; established regular sleeping, eating, and elimination patterns • Difficult (15%) –generally unpleasant moods; reacted negatively to new situations and people; intense in their emotional reactions; showed irregularity of bodily functions • Slow-to-warm-up (10%) – tended to withdraw; slow to adapt; had a medium mood

7. Temperament • Martin, Wisenbaker and Huttunen • Inhibition (approach-avoidance) • Negative emotionality • Adaptability • Activity level • Task persistence • Similar to the Big Five factors identified in the study of adult personality

8. Temperament • Research indicates that • temperament is strongly influenced by heredity • environmental factors, such as parents’ childrearing style, also affect temperament • temperament is relatively stable over time; the various dimensions of temperament can predict behavioral problems that may appear later in childhood or in adolescence

9. Personality Theories • Learning • B. F. Skinner • Social Cognition • George Kelly • Walter Mischel • Albert Bandura • Albert Ellis • Transpersonal • Roberto Assagioli • Ken Wilber • Psychoanalytic • Freud • Neo-Freudians • Carl Jung • Erik Erikson • Alfred Adler • Karen Horney • Humanistic • Abraham Maslow • Carl Rogers • Viktor Frankl

10. Sigmund Freud • Psychoanalysis • Freud’s term for his theory of personality and his therapy for treating psychological disorders • The conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious • Freud believed that there are three levels of awareness in consciousness: the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious

11. Sigmund Freud • The conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious • Conscious • The thoughts, feelings, sensations, or memories of which a person is aware at any given moment • Preconscious • The thoughts, feelings, and memories that a person is not consciously aware of at the moment but that may be brought to consciousness • Unconscious • For Freud, the primary motivating force of behavior, containing repressed memories as well as instincts and wishes that have never been conscious

12. Sigmund Freud • Freud proposed three systems of personality • Id • The unconscious system of the personality, which contains the life and death instincts and operates on the pleasure principle • Ego • The rational, largely conscious system of personality, which operates according to the reality principle • Superego • The moral system of the personality, which consists of the conscience and the ego ideal

13. Sigmund Freud

14. Sigmund Freud • Defense mechanisms • An unconscious, irrational means used by the ego to defend against anxiety; involves self-deception and the distortion of reality • Repression • Involuntarily removing an unpleasant memory or barring disturbing sexual and aggressive impulses from consciousness • Projection • Attributing one’s own undesirable thoughts, impulses, traits, or behaviors to others • Allows people to avoid acknowledging unacceptable traits and thereby to maintain self-esteem, but seriously distorts their perception of the external world

15. Sigmund Freud • Defense mechanisms • Denial • Refusing to acknowledge consciously the existence of danger or a threatening condition • Rationalization • Supplying a logical, rational, socially acceptable reason rather than the real reason for an action • When people rationalize, they make excuses for, or justify, failures and mistakes • Regression • Reverting to a behavior characteristic of an earlier stage of development

16. Sigmund Freud • Defense mechanisms • Reaction formation • Denying an unacceptable impulse, often sexual or aggressive, by giving strong conscious expression to its opposite • Displacement • Substituting a less threatening object for the original object of an impulse • Sublimation • Rechanneling sexual or aggressive energy into pursuits that society considers acceptable or admirable

17. Sigmund Freud • The psychosexual stages of development • Psychosexual stages • A series of stages through which the sexual instinct develops • Fixation • Arrested development at a psychosexual stage occurring because of excessive gratification or frustration at that stage

18. Sigmund Freud • Evaluating Freud’s contribution • Unconscious forces may motivate behavior, • Emphasizing the influence of early childhood experiences on later development • Psychoanalysis is still viewed as a useful therapeutic technique

19. Carl Jung • Disagreed with Freud • the sexual instinct is not the main factor in personality • the personality is not almost completely formed in early childhood

20. Carl Jung • Personality consists of three parts • Ego • the rational, largely conscious system of personality, which operates according to the reality principle • Personal unconscious • all of the thoughts and experiences that are accessible to the conscious, as well as repressed memories and impulses • Collective unconscious • contains the universal experiences of humankind transmitted to each individual; not available to conscious thought • Archetype • Existing in the collective unconscious, an inherited tendency to perceive and respond in particular ways to universal human situations (Joseph Campbell)

21. Carl Jung • Personality functions • Extroversion vs Introversion (orientation) • Sensing vs Intuition (data collection) • Thinking vs Feeling (making judgments) • Judging vs Perceiving (preferred function) • Temperaments • SP (sanguine, artist) • SJ (melancholy, guardian) • NT (choleric, rational) • NF (phlegmatic, idealistic)

22. Alfred Adler • Emphasized the unity of the personality rather than the separate warring components of id, ego, and superego • Maintained that the drive to overcome feelings of inferiority acquired in childhood motivates most of our behavior • Claimed that people develop a “style of life” at an early age – a unique way in which the child and later the adult will go about the struggle to achieve superiority

23. Erik Erikson • Developed theory of socioemotional development • Believed that a healthy adult personality depends on acquiring the appropriate basic attitudes in the proper sequence during childhood and adolescence • Developed lifespan approach to personality development

24. Karen Horney • Believed that personality could continue to develop and change throughout life • Believed that many of women’s psychological difficulties arise from failure to live up to an idealized version of themselves • To be psychologically healthy, women, she claimed, (and men for that matter) must learn to overcome irrational beliefs about the need for perfection