Chapter 15 - Personality

1. Chapter 15 - Personality • Monday, Mar 12 – 575 - 579 • Tuesday, Mar 13 – 579 - 580 • Wednesday, Mar 14 – 581 - 586 • Thursday, Mar 15 - 587 - 590 • Friday, Mar 16 - 591 - 600 • Monday, Mar 19 – essay • Tuesday, Mar 20 - Staff Meeting - 600 – 607 • Wednesday, Mar 21 - 607 – 617 • Thursday, Mar 22 – Parent Teacher Conferences • Friday, Mar 23 – Quiz/Study Guide/Cards • Monday, Mar 26 - Desk Mat due

2. Personality (575) Personality -- your characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling and acting

3. Historical Perspectives on Personality (575) Two historically significant perspectives established the field of personality psychology: 1.      psychoanalytic perspective 2.      humanistic perspective

4. Psychoanalytic Perspective (576) • Freud - (1856 - 1939) • originally a doctor specializing in nervous disorders • had patients with physical problems that had no neurological cause - ie.  a patient had lost all feeling in his hand yet there is no sensory nerve that could numb an entire hand and no other body part

5. Psychoanalytic Perspective (576) • Freud thought that maybe the patient's problems were psychological rather than neurological • this led Freud to discover the unconscious • initially through hypnosis but later by free association

6. Psychoanalysis (576) • Freud's theory is called psychoanalysis - it uses the tool of free association • Free association - patient relaxes and says the 1st thing that comes to mind - this allows the therapist to trace back to the patient's past and retrieve and release painful unconscious memories (often from childhood)

7. Exploring the Unconscious (576)

8. Repression (577) •  Repression - blocking unacceptable thoughts from our conscious.  • Repressed ideas surface in disguised forms. • Ex - Freudian slips -  manifest v. latent dream content.

9. Freud’s Personality Structure (577) Our personality arises from a conflict between • our aggressive, pleasure seeking biological impulses and • the internalized social restraints against them • Freud explains this with id, ego and super ego

11. ID/EGO/SUPEREGO (578)

12. Personality Development (578) • Freud says that personality forms during our first few years of life.  Unresolved childhood conflicts affect us later in life.  • Freud says we go through stages (called Psychosexual Stages) where ID's pleasures focus on different areas of the body known as erogenous zones.

13. Psychosexual Stages Stage                   Focus/Erogenous Zone • Oral  (0-18)         mouth - biting/chewing • Anal (18-36)       bowel/bladder control • Phallic (3-6)       genitals/unconscious incestuous sexual feelings • Latency (6-puberty)     dormant sexual feelings • Genital (puberty on)    maturing sexual interests

14. Oedipus/Electra Complex (579) • During the phallic stage children seek pleasure in their genital areas and develop unconscious sexual desires for their different sex parent and jealousy for their same sexed parent.  • Identification - Children cope with this complex by identifying with the "rival" parent.  So,  little Johnny becomes just like daddy!!!!  Freud said that through identification children's superegos gain strength and the child develops a gender identity.

15. Fixations (579) • Freud said that adult maladaptive behavior results from conflicts unresolved in a psychosexual stage. •  Ex. if deprived or overindulged in oral stage you may have an oral fixation as an adult. •  Ex.  if toilet trained too early/late you may now be anal retentive (neat/control freak) or anal expulsive (messy/disorganized)

17. Defense Mechanisms (579) • Sometimes EGO fears loosing the war between ID and SUPEREGO and this leads to anxiety •  The EGO uses Defense Mechanisms to protect itself from anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality.

18. Defense Mechanism: Repression (580) • banishing anxiety-arousing thoughts from consciousness. •  Repression underlies all of the defense mechanisms because each DM disguises threatening impulses and keeps them from our consciousness.  •  Repressed ideas sometimes slip out in slips of the tongue or dreams.

19. Defense Mechanism: Regression (580) Regression - retreating to earlier, more comfortable stage - (thumb sucking after your first day of grade one)

20. Defense Mechanism: Reaction Formation (580) Reaction Formation - ego unconsciously switches unacceptable impulses to their opposites - I express the opposite of what is in my unconscious.  (ex.  bravado hides feelings of inadequacy)

21. Defense Mechanism: Rationalization (580) Rationalization - we unconsciously make self justifying explanations to hide from the real reasons for our actions.   (ex.  "everybody cheats on their taxes" as opposed to "I am a thief")

22. Defense Mechanism: Projection (580) Projection - threatening impulses are attributed to others  (ex.  "she is a gossip"  as opposed to "I spread stories about people")

23. Defense Mechanism: Displacement (580) Displacement - diverting sex/aggression to a more acceptable target (ex.  I'm mad at my friend so I yell at my mom)

24. Defense Mechanism: Sublimation (580) Sublimation  - finding socially acceptable outlets for unacceptable urges - (ex. play football if I am aggressive)

25. Assessing the Unconscious (581) • Freud believed that our unconscious influenced our personality --- therefore ---- his theory focused on getting into the patient's unconscious •  Freud used free association and dream analysis to reveal the unconscious •  Psychoanalysts don't agree with using objective tests (ie questionaires) to assess personality because they say that these tests just tap the conscious. ---- instead they use Projective Tests

26. Projective Tests (581) 1.   Rorschach Test - ambiguous ink blots 2.  TAT - Thematic Apperception Test by Henry Murray - a patient's story that they make up about an ambiguous picture This is a fun on-line Rorschach test site: http://theinkblot.com/testresults.htm

27. Problems with Rorschach’s Test (582) • low reliability (consistency of result) • low validity (predicting what it is supposed to) • no universally accepted system for scoring and interpreting the test • not successful in predicting behavior • not successful in discriminating between groups

28. Neo-Freudians were the psychologists who first accepted Freud's ideas such as: id, ego, superego importance of unconscious shaping of personality in childhood anxiety and defense mechanisms Neo-Freudians did not accept: they say the conscious is more important they doubted that sex and aggression were the only drives - they placed more emphasis on other motives and on social interaction Evaluating the Psychoanalytic PerspectiveFreud's Early Descendants and Dissenters(582)

29. Neo-Freudians (582) • Adler  - we are driven to conquer childhood feelings of inferiority • Horney - A child’s sense of helplessness triggers our desire for love and security. Horney disagreed with Freud’s assumptions that women had weak superegos and suffer penis envy. • Jung - Our unconscious is more than repressed thoughts and feelings. We also have a collective unconscious derived from our species’ universal experiences. • Psychodynamic Theorists - Do not agree that sex is the basis of our personality. Do agree that our mental life is unconscious, that childhood shapes our personalities and we struggle with inner conflicts among our wishes, fears and values

30. Freud's Ideas in the Light of Modern Research (583) • today theorists see personality development as life-long - not fixed in childhood • today we doubt that an infant's neural networks are developed enough to sustain the emotional trauma that Freud thought possible • some say Freud overestimated parental influence and underestimated peer influence on personality development • Today we also challenge Freud's interpretation of dreams, slips of the tongue and defense mechanism concepts.

31. Freud's Ideas in the Light of Modern Research (583) • we question Freud's idea that conscience and gender identity form as the child resolves the Oedipus complex at 5 or 6.  we now think that we form our gender identity earlier than this and that we can do this even without a same-sex parent present. • Freud did not accept that his patients could have been sexually abused as children - instead he interpreted their "stories" as unresolved childhood sexual conflict.  Today we know that child sex abuse does occur.

32. Is Repression a Myth? (584) • Repression has been used to explain hypnotic phenomena, psychological disorders and lost/recovered memories • Researchers dispute repression and argue that IF it happens, it would only be in relation to terrible trauma. • Evidence against repression:      - children remember their parents' murders - people remember concentration camps

33. Is Repression a Myth? (584) • Hippocampus - We do know that extreme, prolonged stress (child abuse) might disrupt memory by damaging the hippocampus. • But, high stress also enhances memory and negative emotional events are therefore often remembered well (often too well).

34. Freud's Ideas as Scientific Theory (585) • Critics say Freud's theory is not scientific because it has few objective observations and offers few hypotheses to verify or reject • Critics say his theory offered only after-the-fact explanations of characteristics (ie smoking) but failed to predict such characteristics • Critics of the critics say that Freud never claimed to be predictive - he always focused on what we learn by looking back • Freud supporters credit Freud for popularizing the unconscious, the irrational, defense mechanisms, sexuality and the tension between biological and social impulses

35. The Humanistic Perspective (587) • focus on how healthy people strive for self-determination and self-realization • emphasize human potential • see the world through the person's eyes (not the researcher's eyes) • Maslow and Rogers

36. Abraham Maslow (587)

37. Abraham Maslow (587) • developed his hierarchy of needs theory by studying healthy individuals to find common traits • Studied people who had achieved great things - Lincoln, Jefferson, Eleanor Roosevelt • Found that successful people had common traits: • self-aware and self-accepting • open and spontaneous • loving and caring and compassionate • not paralyzed by others' opinions • problem-centred rather than self-centred • had a few deep relationships rather than many superficial • found their calling • outgrown mixed feelings regarding their parents • courage to be unpopular

38. Carl Rogers’ Person-Centred Perspective (587) Rogers said people are born "good" with self-actualizing abilities that will bloom as long as the people in their environment are: 1.  Genuine - open with feelings, dropping facades, disclosing things about themselves, honest 2.  Accepting - show us unconditional positive regards - value us even if we have faults - allow us to drop our pretenses 3.  Empathetic - share and mirror our feelings

39. Carl Rogers’ Person-Centred Perspective (587) Rogers believed the core of personality is the self-concept. People with positive self concepts act and see the world positively.

40. Write down 5 words to describe yourself.

41. Now write down 5 words that you would like to describe you in 10 years.

42. Assessing the Self (588) • Rogers had clients describe their actual self and their ideal self.  If the 2 are similar you have a good self-concept. •  Rogers asks "am I living in a way which is deeply satisfying to me and which truly expresses me?"

43. Self-Esteem?

44. Evaluating the Humanistic Perspective (588) Critics of humanists say: • it is vague and subjective • its emphasis on the individual reinforces Western cultural values.  • too based on Maslow's own personal heroes • too individualistic - can lead to self-indulgence, selfishness and an erosion of moral restraints • fails to appreciate our human capacity for evil.

45. Criticism of Humanism • Even Rogers admitted that there is evil - but - he said evil is a result of toxic cultural influences.  • Note - Humanist Rollo May says that WE are the toxic culture or the good culture

46. Contemporary Research on Personality (590) • Today's personality theorists are most interested in the basic dimensions of personality and -   their impact on behavior -  the biological roots of these dimensions -   the interaction of people and environments -   self-esteem, self-serving bias and cultural influences

47. The Trait Perspective (591) • Trait researchers search for identifiable patterns of behavior or conscious motives that describe basic dimensions of personality. •  Are there stable and enduring traits that underlie our actions?  If so, can we devise valid and reliable tests of them for use in personality assessment?

48. The Trait Perspective Gordon Alport (591) • had a bizarre interview with Freud in 1919 • then went on to describe personality in terms of fundamental traits - characteristic behaviors and conscious motives • he defined personality in terms of identifiable behavior patterns - he wanted more to describe rather than explain these.

49. Personality Types (591) Personality theorists describe and classify personalities by defining broad personality "types"

50. Personality The ancient Greeks classified people according to four types depending on one's bodily "humors" (or fluids) • melancholic (depressed) • sanguine (cheerful) • phlegmatic (unemotional) • choleric (irritable)