Personality

Chapter 11

Personality

The Psychoanalytic Perspective Exploring the Unconscious

Neo-Freudians and Psychodynamic Theory

Assessing Unconscious Processes

Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective

Personality

The Humanistic Perspective Abraham Maslow’s Self-Actualizing

Person

Carl Rogers’ Person-Centered Perspective

Evaluating the Humanistic Perspective

Personality

The Trait Perspective Searching for Basic Personality Traits

The Big Five Factors

The Social-Cognitive Perspective The Person

The Situation

The Interaction

Personality

Exploring The Self Self-Esteem: The Good News and the Bad

Self-Serving Bias

Culture and the Self

Personality

• Personality is an individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting

The Psychoanalytic Perspective

• Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) • One of the first medical

practitioners to emphasize the importance of the unconscious – which he considered a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories.

Exploring the Unconscious• Freud believed most of the mind is hidden

• We repress unacceptable desires and thoughts– He saw the unconscious seeping into dreams,

jokes, slips of the tongue, and daily habits

• How to get around repression roadblock: He led patients in free association, in which the person relaxes and says whatever comes to mind, no matter how trivial or embarrassing

Origins of Personality

• Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis is the search for the unconscious motives and conflicts behind our thoughts and actions

• In this theory, Personality is the battleground between biology and society. The battle: our efforts to satisfy biological drives and impulses, while also avoiding guilt coming from internalized social restraints.

Freud’s View of the Mind

• The id operates on the pleasure principle, striving to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives

• The superego is the conscience, representing ideals and standards internalized by society

• The ego is the “executive,” which balances the demands of id, superego, and reality

Freud’s View of the Mind

Personality Developmentaccording to Freudian psychoanalytic theory

• Children pass through several psychosexual stages, during which the id focuses on distinct erogenous zones

• During the phallic stage, boys develop unconscious sexual desires for their mother, and jealousy and hatred for their father (Oedipus complex)

• By repressing these urges, children come to identify with the rival parent, developing the superego

Psychosexual Stages

Unresolved Conflict

• Freud believed unresolved conflict at any stage of development could cause trouble in adulthood

• Fixation: locking the person’s pleasure-seeking energies at the unresolved stage– Stalled at the oral stage, someone

may develop an oral fixation, such as smoking or eating

Defense Mechanisms

• “Anxiety is the price we pay for civilization” --Anxiety comes from managing the tension between biological drives and societal ideals.

• The ego uses defense mechanisms, indirectly and unconsciously, distorting reality to protect itself from anxiety.

• Examples:

- repression, etc.

Defense Mechanism: Regression• Faced with a stressor, children and young

orangutans may regress, retreating to the comfort of earlier behaviors

More Defense Mechanisms

Neo-Freudians and Psychodynamic Theory

• Psychodynamic Theory: a Freud-influenced perspective that sees behavior, thinking, and emotions as reflecting unconscious motives

• Differences from Freud:– Placed more emphasis on the role of the

conscious mind– Doubted that sex and aggression were all-

consuming motivations

Some Important Neo-Freudians

Alfred AdlerCoined the term

inferiority complexBelieved childhood

feelings of insecurity can drive later

behavior

Carl JungProposed a human

collective unconscious,

derived from our species’ experiences

in the distant past

Karen HorneyBelieved children’s

feelings of dependency give rise to

helplessness and anxiety. Felt Freud’s

views showed a masculine bias

Assessing Unconscious Processes

• To assess personality, psychodynamic practitioners might use a projective test – an ambiguous image is designed to trigger projection of unconscious thoughts or feelings

The Rorschach inkblot test is the most widely used projective test

The Rorschach: A Good Test?: Two Qualities of a Good Test: Reliability and

Validity

• Reliability: raters trained in different Rorschach scoring systems showed little agreement

• Validity: The test is not very successful at predicting behavior or discriminating between groups (e.g., who is suicidal)

Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective

• Freud developed his theory before we had knowledge of neurotransmitters or DNA

• Much research in psychology has taken place since Freud

• Do Freud’s theories fit well with new knowledge and today’s ideas about how the mind works?

Evaluating Freud: Child Development

• Psychologists now see development as a lifelong process, not fixed in childhood

• Infant’s neural networks are probably not well developed enough to process emotional trauma as Freud suggested

• We gain our gender identity earlier suggested by Oedipal complex resolution, and even without a same-sex parent present

• Freud may have overestimated parent influence, underestimated peer influence in development

Can Memories be Repressed?• Sometimes we neglect (don’t think about)

uncomfortable information including memories • Rarely: Extreme, prolonged childhood stress could

disrupt memory formation by damaging the hippocampus, which is still not repression

• More commonly, high stress enhances memory; trauma is burned in and recalled too often

• When Freud’s female patients did recall memories of abuse, he saw these as false memories from repressed sexual conflicts

Is there a Freudian Unconscious?

• Current theory does not see dreams as revealing hidden unconscious wishes

• Slips of the tongue are probably from competition between similar word choices in our memory network, not from unconscious wishes and urges

• There is a lot of unconscious activity in the brain, but not of the sort Freud had in mind: instead of censored passions, we have… (see next slide)

Unconscious Information Processing

The Unobserved Track in our two-track mind:– Split-brain patients: left hand can show right-

brain processes that the patient cannot verbalize

– Parallel processing: Schemas, mental sets influence perceptions and interpretations

– Implicit memories (e.g. how to play piano, walk to class) operate without conscious recall

– Emotions can activate before conscious analysis

– Self-concepts and stereotypes unconsciously influence how we process social information

Evaluating Freud: Defense Mechanisms

• Defense mechanisms are observed, but they don’t seem to function as a disguise for sexual and aggressive impulses

• Instead, they defend self-esteem, ego. Example:– We see our foibles and attitudes in others.

Freud called this “projection.”– This resembles today’s concept of the false

consensus effect – when we overestimate the extent to which others share our beliefs and behaviors

Final challenge to Freud’s theory: Does it predict behavior?

• Remember, scientific theories organize observations and make testable predictions

• Freud’s theory doesn’t do this well: can we observe and predict the id?

• Response: Freud’s theory was not meant to be predictive. It was meant to be used by psychoanalysts to give meaning to what goes on in the mind

• Other value: Freud created concepts and models still used today.

The Humanistic Perspective

• Humanists viewed Freud’s views as too negative and behaviorism as too mechanical

• Focused on the ways healthy people strive for self-determination and self-realization

Abraham Maslow(1908-1970)

Maslow’s Self-Actualizing Person

• Abraham Maslow proposed human motivations form a hierarchy of needs

• Peak motivations are self-actualization (motivation to fulfill our potential) and self-transcendence (striving for identity, meaning, and purpose beyond the self)

Maslow’s Self-Actualizing Person

• His model is based on a different population than Freud’s: Maslow studied healthy, creative people, rather than troubled clinical cases

• He was interested in the mature, adult qualities of those who lived rich and productive lives

Person-Centered Perspective• Carl Rogers (1902-1987)

– Agreed people have self-actualizing tendencies, and are basically good

– Believed we reach our potential if given a growth-promoting environment

– This father in the cartoon is missing one element for promoting growth (next slide)

Person-Centered Perspective

• People nurture our growth, and we nurture theirs, in 3 ways:– Be genuine, open with your feelings– Be totally accepting, offering unconditional

positive regard. – Be empathetic, sharing another’s feelings

and reflecting their meanings back to them. Listen with real understanding

Humanistic Perspective

• For both Maslow and Rogers, a central feature of personality is one’s self-concept– Definition: All our thoughts and feelings in

response to the question “Who am I?”– If positive, we act and perceive the world

positively– If negative, we fall short of our ideal self,

and feel dissatisfied and unhappy

Evaluating the Humanistic Perspective

Where it succeeds:

• Humanistic ideas have influenced counseling, education, child rearing, and management

• Many believe that a positive self-concept is the key to happiness and success, and that people are basically good and capable of improving

Evaluating the Humanistic Perspective

Criticisms:• Concepts are vague and based on personal

opinions, rather than on scientific research• Emphasis on self-actualization could lead to

self-indulgence, selfishness, lack of moral restraint– Humanistic response: secure self-acceptance is the

first step toward loving others

• Fails to appreciate human capacity for evil

The Trait Perspective

• A trait is a characteristic pattern of behavior or a tendency to feel and act in a certain way– Can be assessed by self-reports on a

personality test

• Trait researchers are less concerned with explaining individual traits than with describing them

Searching for Basic Personality Traits

• We can begin to describe people by placing them on trait dimensions

• Trait psychologists identify factors, clusters of behavioral tendencies that occur together

• E.g., extraversion – outgoing, like excitement and practical jokes, dislike quiet study

Eysenck Personality Questionnaire• The Eysencks believed that personality varied

on just two dimensions

The Big Five Factors

• Assessed with the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI).

• An extension of the Eysencks’ factors

• Very stable in adulthood

• About 50% heritable

• Applies to various cultures pretty well

The Social-Cognitive Perspective

• Do our personality traits change from one situation to another?

• The socio-cognitive perspective views behavior as influenced by the interaction between persons (and their thinking) and their social context

Does Personality Change?

• As people grow older, their personality stabilizes

Age Correlation

Young children +0.3

College-age +0.54

70 +0.73

Within-subject trait score correlations after 7-year interval

• Specific behaviors are less consistent – people are not always predictable

The Person

• Traits do a good job at describing average behavior– Extraverts really do talk

more

• We can tell a lot about a person from things like music preferences, personal spaces, personal Web sites, and writing styles

The Situation

• In unfamiliar, formal situations, our traits may remain hidden

• In familiar, informal settings, our traits emerge– In these settings, our expressive styles are

impressively consistent

The Interaction

• Reciprocal determinism – our personality traits interact with our environment to influence our behavior

The Interaction

We are both the products and the architects of our environments

1.Different people choose different environments

2.Our personalities shape how we interpret and react to events

3.Our personalities help create situations to which we react

Self-Image

• We create an image and understanding of the self, of who we are now

• Your possible selves include your vision of who you dream of (or fear) becoming– This can motivate us to work on specific goals

for self-improvement and achievement

The Spotlight Effect

• We may overestimate how much others notice and evaluate our appearance, performance, and blunders– Researchers had students wear a

Barry Manilow T-shirt in a room other students.

– Subjects thought 50% of the others would notice

– Fewer than 25% actually did

Self-Esteem

• Self-esteem is your feelings of high or low self-worth

• Reminding others of their good points only goes so far – problems and failures lower self-esteem

• People who feel negative about themselves tend to be negative toward others

• Inflated self-esteem is also a problem – people can be conceited and nasty

Categories of Self-Esteem

• Defensive self-esteem– Fragile. Its goal is to sustain itself. Feeds

anger and disorder.

• Secure self-esteem– Less fragile. Relies less on others’

evaluations. In line with Maslow’s and Rogers’ ideas about the benefits of a healthy self-image

Maintaining Self-Esteem

Members of stigmatized groups appear to maintain self-esteem in 3 ways:

1.They value things at which they excel

2.The attribute problems to prejudice

3.They do as everyone else does – they compare themselves to people in their own group

Self-Serving Bias

• Most people display a self-serving bias – a tendency to perceive ourselves favorably– People accept more responsibility for good

deeds than bad, and for successes more than failures

– Most people see themselves as better than average

– Average, even in terms of immunity to self-serving bias!

Self-Serving Yet Self-Critical• If we have a self-serving bias, why do so

many people put themselves down?– Highlighting our mistakes may protect us from

repeating them – Self put-downs are sometimes meant to prompt

positive feedback– Highlighting our weaknesses may prepare us

for possible failure – We may be putting down our old selves, not our

current selves

Culture and the Self

Cultures vary in their meaning of self

• Individualist cultures like mainstream U.S. give priority to our personal goals over group goals and define identity in terms of personal traits

• Collectivist cultures give priority to goals of the group (often extended family or work groups) and define identity accordingly

Culture and the Self