Consistency of behavior across situations
lies at the core of the concept of personality
Distinctiveness of behavior is also central
to the concept of personality
Personality refers to an individual's unique
constellation of consistent behavioral traits
What are personality traits?
A personality trait is a durable disposition to
behave in a particular way in a variety of situations (e.g., honest,
dependable, moody)
Most trait theories assume that some traits are more basic
than others
The "Big Five" personality traits
Developed from work by Robert McCrae and Paul Costa
They suggest that vast majority of personality traits
derive from five critical traits
Extraversion
Neuroticism
Openness to experience
Agreeableness
Conscientiousness
The dominant model of personality structure in
contemporary psychology
Psychodynamic perspectives
Psychodynamic theories include all the diverse
theories descended from the work of Sigmund Freud, which focus on
unconscious mental forces
Freud's psychoanalytic theory
Freud's background
Born in 1856; grew up in middle-class Jewish home in
Vienna, Austria
Was trained as a physician specializing in neurology
Eventually devoted himself to treatment of mental
disorders using psychoanalysis, which he developed
Structure of personality
Id: the primitive, instinctive component of
personality that operates according to the pleasure principle
Id houses the biological urges that energize our
behavior
Operates according to the pleasure
principle, which demands immediate gratification of its urges
Ego: the decision-making component of
personality that operates according to the reality principle
Mediates between the id and the norms of the external
social world
Operates according to the reality principle,
which seeks to delay gratification of the id's urges until appropriate
outlets and situations can be found
Engages in secondary process thinking,
which is relatively rational and oriented toward problem solving
Superego: the moral component of personality
that incorporates social standards about what represents right and
wrong
Three components distributed across three levels of
awareness
Conscious consists of whatever one is
aware of at a particular point in time
Preconscious contains material just beneath
the surface of awareness that can be easily retrieved
Unconscious contains thoughts, memories, and
desires that are well below the surface of conscious awareness but that
nonetheless exert great influence on behavior
Conflict and defense mechanisms
Behavior is outcome of internal conflicts between id,
ego, and superego
Conflicts centering on sexual and aggressive urges are
particularly influential
Much confusion results from these drives
Sexual and aggressive drives are thwarted more
regularly than other biological urges
Conflicts can produce anxiety that surfaces in conscious
awareness
Efforts to alleviate anxiety involve use of
defense mechanisms, which are largely unconscious reactions
that protect a person from painful emotions such as anxiety and
guilt
Rationalization involves creating false but
plausible excuses to justify unacceptable behavior
Repression involves keeping distressing
thoughts and feelings buried in the unconscious
The most basic and widely used defense mechanism
A form of "motivated forgetting"
Projection involves attributing one's own
thoughts, feelings, or motives to another
Displacement involves diverting emotional
feelings (usually anger) from their original source to a substitute
target
Reaction formation involves behaving in a
way that is exactly the opposite of one's true feelings
Regression involves a reversion to immature
patterns of behavior
Identification involves bolstering
self-esteem by forming an imaginary or real alliance with some person
or group
Development: psychosexual stages
Freud suggested that the foundation of one's personality
is established by the age of five
Psychosexual stages: developmental periods
with a characteristic sexual focus that leave their mark on adult
personality
Fixation: a failure to move forward from one
stage to another as expected
Caused by excessive gratification or
excessive frustration of needs at a particular stage
Generally leads to an overemphasis on the psychosexual
needs that were prominent during the fixated stage
Five psychosexual stages
Oral stage
Usually encompasses first year of life
Source of erotic stimulation is mouth
Crucial event involves weaning
Fixation could form basis for obsessive eating,
smoking later in life
Anal stage
Begins in second year
Erotic pleasure focuses on bowel movements
Crucial event involves toilet training
Phallic stage
Begins around age four
Genitals become focus of child's erotic energy
Marked by occurrence of Oedipal complex,
in which children manifest erotically tinged desires for their
opposite-sex parent, accompanied by feelings of hostility toward
their same-sex parent
Latency stage
Occurs from about age six through puberty
Child's sexuality is suppressed, becomes "latent"
Genital stage
Begins with advent of puberty
Sexual urges reappear and focus on genitals
Sexual energy is normally channeled toward peers of
other sex
Carl Jung's analytical psychology
Like Freud, Jung emphasized unconscious determinants of
personality
Unlike Freud, suggested that the unconscious consists of
two layers
Personal unconscious
Essentially the same as Freud's version of the
unconscious
Contains material not within one's conscious awareness
Collective unconscious: a storehouse of latent
memory traces inherited from people's ancestral past that is shared with
the entire human race
Jung called these memories archetypes, which
are emotionally charged images and thought forms that have universal
meaning
Jung's ideas about collective unconscious had little
impact on mainstream psychology
Jung was first to describe introverts and extraverts
Introverts tend to be preoccupied with the
internal world of their own thoughts, feelings, and experiences
Extraverts tend to be interested in the
external world of people and things
Alfred Adler's individual psychology
Stressed the social context of personality development
Focused attention on possible importance of birth order
as factor shaping personality
A more optimistic view of human nature than Freud's
Suggested that foremost human drive is not sexuality, but
a striving for superiority
Suggested that everyone has to work to overcome some
feelings of inferiority
Compensation involves efforts to overcome
imagined or real inferiorities by developing one's abilities
Inferiority feeling can become excessive, resulting in
an inferiority complex - exaggerated feelings of weakness
and inadequacy
Can distort the normal process of striving for
superiority
Some people engage in overcompensation
in order to conceal, even from themselves, their feelings of
inferiority
Adler introduced the idea that birth order might
influence personality, but extensive research has failed to support
this idea consistently as of yet
Evaluating psychodynamic perspectives
Yielded some new insights
Unconscious forces can influence behavior
Internal conflict often plays a key role in generating
psychological distress
Early childhood experiences can exert considerable
influence over adult personality
Have been criticized on several grounds
Poor testability
Inadequate evidence
Sexism
Behavioral perspectives
Behaviorism: a theoretical orientation based on
the premise that scientific psychology should study observable behavior
John B. Watson was major force in development of
behaviorism
Behaviorism focuses on response tendencies rather than
internal personality structures
Behaviorist have focused extensively on personality
development
Ivan Pavlov's classical conditioning
Classical conditioning: a type of learning in
which a neutral stimulus acquires the capacity to evoke a response that
was originally evoked by another stimulus
Also called respondent conditioning
First described by Pavlov in 1903
The conditioned reflex
Unconditioned bonds
Unconditioned stimulus (UCS): a stimulus
that evokes an unconditioned response without previous
conditioning
Unconditioned response (UCR): an unlearned
reaction to an unconditioned stimulus that occurs without previous
conditioning
Conditioned bonds
Conditioned stimulus (CS): a previously
neutral stimulus that has acquired the capacity to evoke a conditioned
response through conditioning
Conditioned response (CR): a learned reaction
to a conditioned stimulus that occurs because of previous
conditioning
Classical conditioning in everyday life
Contributes to the acquisition of emotional responses,
such as anxieties, fears, and phobias
Also appears to account for more realistic and
moderate anxiety
Stimulus-response bond does not necessarily last
indefinitely
Extinction: the gradual weakening and
disappearance of a conditioned response tendency
Time it takes to extinguish a conditioned response
depends on variety of factors (e.g., strength of conditioned bond
when extinction begins)
B. F. Skinner's operant conditioning
Operant conditioning: a form of learning in
which voluntary responses come to be controlled by their consequences
The power of reinforcement
Positive reinforcement occurs when a response
is strengthened (increases in frequency) because it is followed by the
arrival of a (presumably) pleasant stimulus
Roughly synonymous with concept of reward
Motivates much of our everyday behavior
Behaviors that are reinforced regularly will tend to
become an integral element of one's personality
Negative reinforcement occurs when a response is
strengthened (increased in frequency) because it is followed by the
removal of a (presumably) unpleasant stimulus
Negative reinforcement is reinforcement (i.e.,
it strengthens a response)
Plays major role in the development of avoidance
tendencies
Extinction and punishment
Extinction occurs when a previously
reinforced response stops producing positive consequences
Punishment occurs when a response is weakened
(decreases in frequency) because it is followed by the arrival of a
(presumably) unpleasant stimulus
Concept is often confusing to students
Mixed up with negative reinforcement
May be viewed as only a disciplinary procedure
Patterns of behavior that lead to punishment tend to
be weakened
According to Skinner, conditioning is a "mechanical"
process that occurs without conscious participation
Other theorists suggest different models in which
behavior is influenced by cognition (the thought processes
involved in acquiring knowledge)
Albert Bandura and social learning theory
Emphasizes the role of cognition in learned behaviors
A less "mechanical" model of human behavior
Maintains that people actively seek out and process
information about their environment
Observational learning
Observational learning occurs when an
organism's responding is influenced by the observation of others, who
are called models
Some models are more influential than others
We tend to imitate people we like or respect
We tend to imitate people we consider attractive or
powerful
We tend to imitate people who are similar to ourselves
Models influence personality development through
children's observational learning
Self-efficacy
Self-efficacy: one's belief about one's
ability to perform behaviors that should lead to expected outcomes
Perceptions of self-efficacy can influence which
challenges one tackles and how well one performs
Evaluating behavioral perspectives
Positive aspects
Rooted in empirical research rather than clinical
intuition
Provided account of why people are only moderately
consistent in their behavior
Criticisms
Dilution of the behavioral approach
Over-dependence on animal research
Humanistic perspectives
Humanism: a theoretical orientation that
emphasizes the unique qualities of humans, especially their free will and
their potential for personal growth
Emerged in 1950s as a backlash against behavioral and
psychodynamic theories
Takes a relatively optimistic view of human nature
Human nature includes an innate drive toward personal
growth
Individuals have free will; they are not pawns of their
environment
People are conscious and rational beings that are not
dominated by unconscious, irrational needs, and conflicts
Carl Rogers's person-centered theory
The self and its development
Self-concept: a collection of beliefs about
one's own nature, unique qualities, and typical behavior
A mental picture of yourself
Rogers stressed the subjective nature of self-concept
Incongruence: the disparity between one's
self-concept and one's actual experience
Childhood experiences may promote congruence or
incongruence
Unconditional love from parents fosters
congruence and conditional love fosters incongruence
Anxiety and defense
Experiences that threaten one's self-concept are the
principal cause of anxiety
People behave defensively to ward off this anxiety and
protect their self-concept
Abraham Maslow's theory of self-actualization
Hierarchy of needs: a systematic arrangement of
needs, according to priority, in which basic needs must be met before less
basic needs are aroused
Usually portrayed as a pyramid
Satisfaction of one level of needs activates needs at
the next level
Main "growth need" is self-actualization: the need to
fulfill one's potential; it is the highest need in Maslow's
motivational hierarchy
The healthy personality
Called people with exceptionally healthy personalities
self-actualizing persons
Self-actualizers are accurately tuned in to reality and
are at peace with themselves
Not dependent on other for approval
Enjoy "peak experiences" (profound emotional highs) more
often than others
Evaluating humanistic perspectives
Positive aspects
Emphasis on subjective personal factors (e.g., beliefs,
expectations) in personality
Made self-concept an important construct in psychology
Criticisms
Poor testability
Unrealistically optimistic view of human nature
Inadequate empirical evidence
Biological perspectives
Han Eysenck's theory
Suggests that personality is a function of genetic
differences in "conditionability"
Views personality structure as hierarchy of traits
Has shown special interest in explaining variations in
extraversion-introversion
Proposed that introverts tend to have higher levels of
physiological arousal than extraverts
Higher arousal motivates introverts to avoid social
situations
Research evidence on Eysenck's theory is mixed
Recent evidence in behavioral genetics
Support for genetic influence on personality provided by
twin studies, in which researchers assess hereditary
influence by comparing the resemblance of identical twins and fraternal
twins on a trait. Hereditability ratios are used to
estimate the proportion of trait variability in a population that is
determined by variations in genetic inheritance
Accumulating evidence suggests that heredity is a key
factor shaping personality
Skeptics suggest that identical twins tend to be
raised more similarly than fraternal twins
Results of the Minnesota study indicate that genetic
inheritance accounts for at least 50% of the variation among people in
personality
Recent studies have found that shared family environment
has little impact on personality
The evolutionary approach to personality
Suggests that natural selection has favored certain traits
over the course of human history
David Buss argues that Big Five personality traits are
fundamental dimensions of personality because they have had significant
adaptive implications
Evaluating biological perspectives
Recent studies have provided convincing evidence that
biological factors help shape personality
Criticisms
Problems with estimates of hereditary influence
Lack of comprehensive theory
An epilogue on theoretical diversity
Review of perspectives on personality illustrates the
theoretical diversity in psychology
No single theory can adequately explain personality
Different theories focus on different aspects of behavior
Frequently more than one way of looking at behavior
Each theory has its own advantages and limitations
Application: Assessing your personality
Key concepts in psychological testing
Psychological test: a standardized measure of a
sample of a person's behavior
Scores from psychological tests should always be
interpreted cautiously