Chapter 11 Personality: Theory and Measurement

LECTURE OUTLINE

I. The Psychodynamic Perspective: Excavating the Iceberg.

A. Sigmund Freud characterized personality as conflict, a dynamic struggle.

1. Drives like sex, aggression and the need for superiority conflict with laws, social rules and moral codes. At some time the laws are internalized.

2. The conflict is between opposing inner forces.

B. Sigmund Freud’s Theory of Psychosexual Development.

1. Freud’s interests were in neurology.

2. Worked with people who, for example, had paralysis of the legs in absence of any medical disorder.

a. The symptoms often would disappear once the person recalled and discussed stressful events and feelings of guilt or anxiety that seem to be related to the symptoms.

3. The human mind is like an iceberg.

a. The region that pokes through into the light of awareness is called the conscious.

b. Preconscious mind contains elements of experience that are out of awareness but can be made conscious simply by focusing on them.

c. Unconscious mind is shrouded in mystery. Contains biological instincts of:

i. Sex

ii. Aggression.

4. Repression is the automatic ejection of anxiety-evoking ideas from awareness.

5. To explore the unconscious mind, Freud engaged in a form of mental detective work called psychoanalysis.

a. Talk about anything that pops into their mind.

b. Resistance: the desire to avoid thinking about or discussing thoughts.

6. The Structure of Personality.

a. Psychic structures or mental structures that are the clashing forces of personality. Freud proposed that there are three psychic structures:

i. Id

ii. Ego

iii. Superego

b. The id is present at birth and represents physiological drives and is entirely unconscious.

i. Freud described it as chaos, a cauldron of seething excitations.

ii. The id follows the pleasure principle: demands instant gratification.

c. The ego stands for reason and good sense, for rational ways of coping with frustration.

i. Curbs the appetites of the id and makes plans that fit social conventions.

ii. The ego is guided by the reality principle. The ego may use psychological defenses to prevent improper impulses from arising. Repression is one such psychological defense.

d. The superego develops throughout childhood, usually incorporating the moral standards and values of parents through identification.

i. The superego functions according to the moral principle.

ii. The superego holds out the ideal self and acts as your conscience.

iii. The superego floods the ego with feelings of guilt and shame if necessary.

7. Stages of Psychosexual Development.

a. Eros: is aimed at preserving and perpetuating life.

b. Libido: psychic energy involving sexual impulses.

i. Focused on sexual feelings in different parts of the body or erogenous zones.

c. Five periods of psychosexual development:

i. Oral

ii. Anal

iii. Phallic

iv. Latency

v. Genital

d. Oral stage: during the first year of life. If it fits into the mouth then it goes in the mouth (e.g. sucking and biting).

i. Conflict centers on the nature and extent of oral gratification. Insufficient or excessive gratification in any stage could lead to fixation in that stage.

ii. Adults with oral fixations could experience exaggerated desires for oral activities such as smoking, overeating, alcohol abuse, nail biting.

e. Anal stage: gratification is attained through contraction and relaxation of the muscles that control elimination of waste products from the body.

i. The general issue of self-control.

ii. Anal fixations may stem from conflict and lead to anal retentive (excessive self control) or anal expulsive (careless, messiness, and even sadism).

f. Phallic stage: during the third year of life. The major erogenous zone is the penis for boys and the clitoris in girls.

i. Oedipus complex: boys want to marry Mommy; hostility towards Dad.

ii. Electra complex: girls want to marry Daddy; hostility towards Mom.

iii. Resolution comes when children begin to identify with their same sex parent.

iv. This identification is known as gender typing.

g. Latency stage: sexual feelings remain unconscious.

h. Genital stage: final stage, find sexual gratification through intercourse with a member of the other gender.

C. A CLOSER LOOK: Who’s Really “Number One”? On the Persistent American Itch to Create Heroes”

1. Identify with a sports team.

a. Self-esteem rises and falls with the team’s wins and losses.

b. Wins lead to a surge of testosterone in males.

c. Psychoanalytic theory suggests that children identify with parents and other “big” people

d. Evolutionary perspective.

i. Vicarious aggression.

ii. Sports heroes are our warriors.

D. Other Psychodynamic Theorists.

1. Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist developed his own psychodynamic theory called analytical psychology.

a. Jung downplayed the importance of the sexual instinct.

b. Collective unconscious: contains primitive images called archetypes that reflect the history of our species.

i. Archetypes influence our thoughts and emotions and cause us to respond to cultural themes in stories and films.

2. Alfred Adler (1870-1937).

a. Inferiority complex: people are motivated by this complex.

i. Feelings of inferiority may lead to a drive for superiority.

b. Creative self: a self aware aspect of personality that strives to overcome obstacles and develop the individual’s potential.

c. Adler’s view has been termed individual psychology.

3. Karen Horney.

a. Horney argued that little girls do not feel inferior to boys and the view that girls are inferior is founded on Western cultural prejudice, not scientific evidence.

b. Unconscious sexual and aggressive impulses are less important than social relationships in children’s development. Genuineness and consistent love can alleviate the effects of even the most traumatic childhood.

4. Erik Erikson.

a. Social relationships are more crucial than sexual urges.

b. We are the conscious architects of our own personalities.

c. Proposed stages of psychosocial development.

i. First stage is trust versus mistrust. Mistrust could interfere with the formation of relationships.

ii. Goal of adolescence is the attainment of ego identity.

E. Evaluation of the Psychodynamic Perspective.

1. Psychodynamic theory focused attention on the far-reaching effects of childhood events.

2. Important for parents to be aware of emotional needs of children.

3. Defense mechanisms have become part of everyday speech.

4. Psychic structures may be too vague to measure scientifically.

5. Oedipus and Electra complexes remain little more than speculation.

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II. The Trait Perspective: The Multi-Dimensional Universe.

A. Traits are reasonably stable elements of personality that are inferred from behavior.

B. From Hippocrates to the Present.

1. Hippocrates believed that traits are embedded in bodily fluids. There are four basic fluids (humors):

a. Yellow bile is associated with a choleric (quick tempered) disposition.

b. Blood is associated with a sanguine (warm, cheerful) disposition.

c. Phlegm is associated with the phlegmatic (sluggish, calm, cool) disposition.

d. Black bile is associated with a melancholic (gloomy, pensive) temperament.

2. Gordon Allport catalogued approximately 18,000 human traits from dictionaries. The list has been used in research by many psychologists.

C. Hans Eysenck’s Trait Theory: A Two-Dimensional View.

1. Eysenck focused his research on two personality traits:

a. Introversion-extraversion

b. Emotional stability-instability (neuroticism).

i. An anxious person would be high in both introversion and neuroticism.

ii. The choleric type would be extraverted and unstable.

iii. The sanguine would be extroverted and stable.

iv. The phlegmatic would be introverted and stable.

v. The melancholic would be introverted and unstable.

D. The “Big Five”: The Five-Factor Model.

1. Recent research has focused on five basic personality factors:

a. Extraversion

b. Conscientiousness

c. Agreeableness

d. Openness

e. Neuroticism

2. The factors are related to basic temperaments and are largely inborn.

a. Personalities tend to mature rather than be shaped by environmental conditions.

b. Personalities are affected by culture.

3. McCrae and Costa created the NEO Five Factor Inventory, which has been used in numerous research projects.

4. Very popular right now; being researched widely

a. Older people; men become more agreeable as they grow older

b. Anxious and depressed tend to score higher on neuroticism

c. Introverts fear public gatherings

d. A firm handshake is related to extraversion

e. Right wing authoritarians score low on openness

f. Children high in behavioral problems are more likely to be emotionally unstable

E. Evaluation of the Trait Perspective.

1. Trait theorists have focused much attention on the development of personality tests.

2. Trait theory has tended to be more descriptive than explanatory. Sometimes criticized as being circular.

III. Learning-Theory Perspectives: All the Things You Do.

A. Behaviorism: On Being Easy in One’s Harness?

1. Behaviorism views that personality is plastic-that situational variables and environmental influences are the key shapers of human preference and behaviors.

2. Skinner suggested that environmental influences such as parental approval and social custom shape us into wanting certain things and not wanting others.

3. Some object to behaviorist notions because they play down the importance of consciousness and choice.

B. Social-Cognitive Theory: Is Determinism a Two Way Street?

1. Social Cognitive Theory is a contemporary view of learning developed by Bandura. Focuses on the importance of learning by observation.

2. Social-cognitive theorists see people as influencing their environment just as their environment influences them.

a. Bandura termed this reciprocal determinism.

3. Person variables are variables within people that must be considered if we are to understand them.

4. Expectancies: whether a person will behave in a certain way also depends on what the person expects about the outcomes of that behavior and the subjective values of those outcomes.

5. Self Efficacy expectations are beliefs that we can accomplish certain things.

6. Observational Learning (modeling).

a. Acquiring knowledge by observing others.

b. Our expectations stem from our observations of what happens to ourselves and other people.

c. Person variable include competencies, encoding strategies, expectancies, emotions, and self-regulatory systems and plans.

7. Social Cognitive Theory and Gender Typing

a. Children learn what is masculine and feminine by observational learning

b. Parents, adults and other children inform children about how they are expected to behave

8. Gender-schema theory

a. Emphasizes the role of cognition in gender typing.

b. Cultures tend to polarize males and females into opposing groups

i. Social life is organized around exclusive gender roles

C. Evaluation of the Learning Perspective.

1. Emphasized the importance of publicly observable variables or behaviors, if psychology is to be a science.

2. Learning theorists emphasized the importance of environmental conditions as determinants of behavior.

3. Behaviorism is limited in its ability to explain personality. Behaviorism does not describe, explain or even suggest the richness of inner human experience.

4. Behaviorism may not pay enough attention to genetic variation.

IV. The Humanistic Perspective: How Becoming?

A. Humanists and existentialists dwell on the meaning of life. Self awareness is the hub of this search for meaning.

B. The third force in American Psychology, Humanism puts people and self-awareness at the center of consideration. People are capable of:

1. Free choice.

2. Self-fulfillment.

3. Ethical behavior.

C. Abraham Maslow and the Challenge of Self-Actualization.

1. Maslow argued that people also have a conscious need for self-actualization-to become all that they can be.

D. Carl Roger’s Self Theory.

1. Rogers wrote that people shape themselves through free choice and action.

2. Rogers defined the self as the center of experience.

3. Choices are made on the basis of your values.

4. The Self-Concept and Frames of Reference.

a. Self-concepts consist of our impressions of ourselves and our evaluations of our adequacy

b. Frames of Reference: unique ways of looking at ourselves and the world.

5. Self-esteem and Positive Regard.

a. Unconditional positive regard: accept people as having intrinsic merit regardless of their behavior at the moment.

i. If parents show conditional positive regard, then children may develop conditions of worth-come to think that they have merit only if they behave as their parents wish them to behave.

ii. Some children deny many of their feelings or disown aspects of themselves. The self-concept becomes distorted which results in anxiety.

b. Rogers suggested that the path to self-actualization requires getting in touch with our genuine feelings, accepting them, and acting upon them.

c. Roger’s believed that we have mental images of what we are capable of becoming. These are termed self-ideals. We are motivated to reduce the discrepancy between our self-concepts and our self-ideals.

E. Evaluation of the Humanistic Perspective.

1. Humanistic-Existential perspective helped emphasize the importance of personal experience.

2. Humanistic-existential perspective see humans as free to make choices, assuming personal freedom.

3. Conscious experience is private and subjective. Therefore the validity of formulating theories in terms of the consciousness has been questioned.

4. Self-actualization yields circular explanations for behavior.

5. Humanistic-existential perspective has little to say about the development of traits and personality types.

V. The Sociocultural Perspective: Personality in Context.

A. Some psychologists believe that personality cannot be understood without reference to the sociocultural perspective.

1. Aspects of culture, religion, race should be considered.

B. Individualism Versus Collectivism.

1. Individualsits: tend to define themselves in terms of their personal identities and to give priority to their personal goals.

a. People in the United States and many northern European nations tend to be individualistic.

b. Capitalist systems tend to foster individualism to a degree.

2. Collectivists: tend to define themselves in terms of the groups to which they belong and to give priority to the group’s goals.

a. Many people from Africa, Asia and Central and South America tend to be collectivists.

C. Acculturation, Adjustment, and Self-Esteem: Just How Much Acculturation Is Enough?

1. Acculturation: the process by which immigrants become acclimated to the customs and behavior patterns of their new host culture.

2. Self-Esteem has been shown to be connected with acculturation patterns among immigrants.

D. Evaluation of the Sociocultural Perspective.

1. The sociocultural perspective provides valuable insights into the roles of ethnicity, gender, culture, and socioeconomic status in personality formation.

2. Sociocultural factors are external forces that are internalized.

3. The sociocultural perspective enhances our sensitivity to cultural differences.

a. Enhances the appreciation of the richness of human behavior and mental processes.

VI. Measurement of Personality

A. Scientific Personality Test

1. Validity: extent to which the test measures what it is suppose to measure.

2. Reliability: the stability of one’s results from one testing to another

3. Standardization: process which checks out the scores, validity, reliability of a test with people of various ages and from various groups.

B. Personality Assessment: take a sample of behavior to predict future behavior.

1. Behavior-rating scales: trained observers check off each occurrence of a specific behavior within a certain time frame.

2. Aptitude assessment aids in gaining insight into whether individuals are suited for certain occupations.

C. Objective Tests.

1. Objective tests present respondents with a standardized group of test items in the form of a questionnaire.

a. Responses are limited to a specific range of answers.

b. Forced-choice format: respondents are asked to indicate which of two statements is more true for them.

2. Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) contains hundreds of items in a true-false format.

a. Used to diagnose psychological disorders.

b. Most widely used test in clinical work.

c. Most widely used personality measurement in psychological research.

d. MMPI contains:

i. 4 validity scales

ii. 10 clinical scales

e. Response set: biases in answering questions.

f. MMPI scales were empirically constructed; based on actual clinical data rather than on psychological theory.

g. Confidence in the MMPI has developed because of its extensive use.

D. Projective Tests.

1. People are shown ambiguous stimuli such as inkblots or ambiguous drawings and asked to say what they look like.

a. People project their own personalities into their responses.

2. The Rorschach Inkblot Test.

a. Individuals are shown inkblots and asked what they look like.

i. A response that reflects the shape of the blot is considered a sign of adequate reality testing.

ii. A response that integrates several features of the blot is considered a sign of high intellectual functioning.

b. Critics argue that there is little evidence to support the test’s validity.

3. The Thematic Apperception Test.

a. Developed by Murray and Morgan; the test consists of drawings and subjects are asked to make up stories about them.

i. Widely used in research on motivation.

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