Personality

1. Personality Reading: Ch 15 Myers James Neill Centre for Applied Psychology Rm 3B32; x2536; james.neill@canberra.edu.au

2. Overview Part 1 • Introduction to Personality • Psychoanalytic Perspective • Trait (or Dispositional) Perspective Part 2 • Humanistic Perspective • Social-cognitive Perspective • Comparing Different Perspectives

3. Why study personality? • Personality is a central topic in psychology. • Aims to understand causes of behaviour in ourselves and others by attributing unique individual characteristics.

4. Why study personality? • ‘Personality’ asks ‘big questions’ e.g.,: • Who are you? • How did you become who you are? • What are your unique patterns of doing, thinking, and feeling?

5. What is Personality? “An individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting.”

6. What is Personality? • A person’s general style of interacting with the world. • Differences between people which are relatively consistent over time and place.

7. Personal-ity Mask(latin)

8. Personality Applications Personality is closely related/applied to: • Developmental psychology • Clinical, forensic and neuropsychology • Social psychology • Vocational counselling • Personnel selection

9. Major theoretical perspectives • Psychoanalytic • Trait • Humanistic • Social-Cognitive • Biological (not covered)

10. Psychodynamic Perspective Freud (1856 - 1939)

11. Psychodynamic Perspective • Developed by Sigmund Freud • Psychoanalysis is both: • an approach to therapy and • a theory of personality • Emphasises unconscious motivation

12. Psychodynamic Perspective: Early Development • Freud encountered patients suffering nervous disorders whose complaints could not be explained in terms of purely physical causes. • This led Freud to develop the first comprehensive theory of personality, which included the unconscious mind, psychosexual stages, and defense mechanisms.

13. Model of Mind • Causes of behaviour can be either conscious or unconscious • Mind is like an iceberg: • Conscious (tip) • Pre-conscious (just below waterline) • Unconscious (bulk of iceberg below waterline)

14. Model of Mind

15. Psychodynamic Personality Structure Personality arises from one’s efforts to resolve conflicts between 3 interacting systems of the mind: • Id (Biological – aggression & pleasure-seeking) • Ego (Rationality) • Superego (Social)

16. Id, Ego, Superego

17. Id, Ego, Superego

18. Id • Instinctual drives present at birth • Seeks to satisfy basic biological urges • Operates on the ‘pleasure principle’, unconstrained by logic or reality • Does not distinguish between reality and fantasy

19. Ego • Develops ~ 6-8 months, out of the Id • Operates on the ‘reality principle’ • Seeks to satisfy urges in a realistic way • Understands reality and logic • Mediates between Id and Superego

20. Superego • Develops ~ 5 years • Represents internalised societal and parental morals, values, ideals • Strives for the ideal • Responsible for guilt • Its sole focus is on how one ought to think and behave

21. Id, Ego, Superego

22. Personality Development “The twig of personality is bent at an early stage.”(Myers, 1998, p.423)

23. Personality Development • Freud identified 5 stages of personality development (psychosexual stages): • Oral • Anal • Phallic • Latency • Genital • During these stages the Id focuses on pleasure sensitive body areas called erogenous zones.

24. Personality Development • Personality reflects unresolved conflicts during the psychosexual stages. • Fixation - an attempt to achieve pleasure as an adult in ways that are equivalent to how it way achieved in earlier stages

25. Oral • 0 to 18 months • Pleasure centres on the mouth – sucking, biting, chewing • Weaning can lead to fixation if not handled correctly • Unresolved conflicts can lead to oral activities in adulthood

26. Anal • 18 to 36 months • Pleasure focuses on coping with demands to control bowel & bladder elimination • Toilet training can lead to anal fixation (anal-retentive or expulsive behaviours in adulthood) if not handled correctly

27. Phallic • 3 to 6 years • Pleasure is in the genitals • Coping with incestuous sexual feelings (Oedipus or Electra complex can occur) • Fixation can lead to excessive masculinity in males and the need for attention or domination in females

28. Latency • 7 years to puberty • Sexuality is repressed and dormant • Children participate in hobbies, school and same-sex friendships

29. Genital • Puberty onwards • Maturation of sexual interests • Sexual feelings re-emerge and are oriented toward others • Healthy adults find pleasure in love and work • Fixated adults have their energy tied up in earlier stages

30. Defence Mechanisms • Failure to resolve psychological conflict amongst Id, Ego, and Superego -> anxiety -> unconscious mental processes employed by the ego to reduce anxiety (i.e., defence mechanisms)

31. Defence Mechanisms • Repression • Regression • Displacement • Reaction Formation • Projection • Rationalisation • Sublimation

32. Repression • Blocks anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, etc. from conscious awareness • Underlies other defence mechanisms

33. Regression • Retreats to earlier, more infantile mode of behaviour which is characteristic of an earlier stage of psychosexual development • e.g., thumb-sucking on 1st day of school

34. Displacement • A drive towards an activity by the Id is redirected to a more acceptable activity by the Ego. • e.g., shifting sexual or aggressive impulses to more acceptable objects or people, e.g., “kicking the dog” when angry with something else.)

35. Reaction Formation • Replacing an unacceptable wish with its opposite(e.g., love -> hate) • e.g., A man who is overly obsessed with pornographic material who utilises reaction formation may take on an attitude of strong criticism about the topic.

36. Projection • Reducing anxiety by attributing one’s unacceptable impulses to someone else. • e.g. “You’re moody today!”

37. Rationalisation • Intellectualising/reasoning away anxiety-producing thoughts • The process of constructing a logical justification for a decision that was originally arrived at through a different mental process

38. Sublimation • Displacement to activities that are valued by society • Sublimation is the process of transforming libido into ‘socially useful’ achievements • Psychoanalysts often refer to sublimation as the only truly successful defence mechanism

39. Psychoanalytic Assessment • Access to unconscious is via • free association, • dreams, • slips of the tongue • Ideal: ‘Psychological x-Ray’ • Projective Tests: • Presents ambiguous stimuli and then ask person to describe or tell a story about it • Limited scientific validity, but wide use in clinical settings

40. Psychoanalysis • A fixation (and the need for defence mechanisms) can be ‘resolved’ by bringing the original source of the psychological conflict into conscious awareness. • Free association (chain of thoughts) leads to painful, embarrassing unconscious memories surfacing. Once these memories are retrieved and released (psychoanalysis) the patient feels better.

41. Dream Analysis Another psychoanalytic method to analyse the unconscious mind is through interpreting manifest and latent contents of dreams. The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli (1791)

42. Rorschach Inkblot Test

43. Thematic Apperception Test(TAT)

44. Projective Tests: Criticisms Critics argue that projective tests lack reliability and validity: • When evaluating the same patient, even trained raters come up with different interpretations (reliability). • . Projective tests may misdiagnose a normal individual as pathological (validity).

45. Carl Jung: Collective Unconscious • Collective unconscious: a common reservoir of images derived from our species’ past. • Many cultures share certain myths and images such as the mother being a symbol of nurturance. Carl Jung (1875-1961)

46. CRITICISMS Personality development is lifelong Overemphasis on sexual urges(We have motives other than sex and aggression) Underemphasises peer influence Sexual inhibition has decreased, but psychological disorders have not. Good scientific theory? Evaluating the Psychodynamic Perspective

47. CRITICISMS Theory rests on repression of painful experiences into the unconscious mind, but the majority of children, death camp survivors, and war veterans are unable to repress painful experiences into their unconscious mind. Evaluating the Psychodynamic Perspective

48. Evaluating the Psychodynamic Perspective CONTRIBUTIONS • Importance of unconscious • Defense mechanisms • Development of psychoanalysis • Enormous cultural impact

49. Trait (or Dispositional) Perspective • Personality is: the dynamicorganisation of traits • Trait: “a characteristic pattern of behaviouror a disposition to feel or act”(Myers, 1998, p.431) • Traits are stable & consistent

50. Trait Perspective Personality is an individual’s unique constellation of durable dispositions and consistent ways of behaving (traits) e.g., • Honest • Dependable • Moody • Impulsive