Chapter 13 - Personality

Section 1 - Psychodynamic Approaches to Personality

MAIN IDEA QUESTIONS

How do psychologists define and use the concept of personality?

What do the theories of Freud and his successors tell us about the structure and development of personality?

VOCABULARY

psychodynamic approaches to personality - approaches that assume that personality is motivated by inner forces and conflicts about which people have little awareness and over which they have no control

psychoanalytic theory - Freud's theory that unconscious forces act as determinants of personality

unconscious - a part of the personality that contains the memories, knowledge, beliefs, feelings, urges, drives, and instincts of which the individual is not aware

id - the raw, unorganized, inborn part of personality whose sole purpose is to reduce tension created by primitive drives related to hunger, sex, aggression, and irrational impulses

ego - the part of the personality that provides a buffer between the id and the outside world

superego - according to Freud, the final personality structure to develop; it represents the rights and wrongs of society as handed down by a person's parents, teachers, and other important figures

psychosexual stages - developmental periods that children pass through during which they encounter conflicts between the demands of society and their own sexual image

fixations - conflicts or concerns that persist beyond the developmental period in which they first occur

oral stage - according to Freud, a stage from birth to age 12 to 18 months, in which an infant's center of pleasure is the mouth

anal stage - according to Freud, a stage from 12 to 18 months to 3 years of age, in which a child's pleasure is centered on the anus

phallic stage - according to Freud, a period beginning around age 3 during which a child's pleasure focuses on the genitals

Oedipal stage - a child's sexual interest in his or her opposite-sex parent, typically resolved through identification with the same-sex parent

identification - the process of wanting to be like another person as much as possible, imitating that person's behavior and adopting similar beliefs and values

latency period - according to Freud, the period between the phallic stage and puberty during which children's sexual concerns are temporarily put aside

genital stage - according to Freud, the period from puberty until death, marked by mature sexual behavior (that is, sexual intercourse)

defense mechanisms - In Freudian theory, unconscious strategies that people use to reduce anxiety by concealing the source of it from themselves and others

repression - the primary defense mechanism in which unacceptable or unpleasant id impulses are pushed back into the unconscious

neo-Freudian psychoanalysis - psychoanalysts who were trained in traditional Freudian theory but who later rejected some of its major points

collective unconscious - according to Jung, a common set of ideas, feelings, images, and symbols that we inherit from our ancestors, the whole human race, and even animal ancestors from the distant past

archetypes - according to Jung, universal symbolic representations of a particular person, object, or experience (such as good and evil)

inferiority complex - according to Adler, a problem affecting adults who have not been able to overcome the feelings of inferiority that they developed as children, when they were small and limited in their knowledge about the world

The college student was intent on making a good first impression on an attractive woman he had spotted across a crowded room at a party. As he walked toward her, he mulled over a line he had heard in an old movie the night before: "I don't believe we've been properly introduced yet." To his horror, what came out was a bit different. After threading his way through the crowded room, he finally reached the woman and blurted out, "I don't believe we've been properly seduced yet."

~Although this student's error may seem to be merely an embarrassing slip of the tongue, according to some personality theorists such a mistake is not an error at all. Psychodynamic approaches to personality are based on the idea that personality is motivated by inner forces and conflicts abotu which people have little awareness and over which they have no control.

FREUD'S PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY: MAPPING THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND

Sigmund Freud, the Austrian physicist, argued that much of our behavior is motivated by the unconscious - a part of the personality that contains memories, knowledge, beliefs, feelings, urges, drives, and instincts of which the individual is not aware. Slips of the tongue, fantasies, and dreams provide clues to the unconscious which can attempt to be interpreted. A slip of the tongue like the example above (sometimes referred to as a Freudian slip) may be interpreted as revealing the speaker's unconscious sexual desires.

~According to Freud, much of our personality is made up by the unconscious. Deep in the unconscious are instinctual drives - wishes, desires, demands, and needs that are hidden from conscious awareness because of the conflicts and pain they would cause if they were part of our everyday lives. The unconscious provides a "safe haven" for our recollections of threatening events.

Structuring Personality: Id, Ego, and Superego

Freud developed a comprehensive theory which held that personality consists of three separate but interacting components: the id, the ego, and the superego.

~The id is the raw, unorganized, inborn part of personality. From birth, the id attempts to reduce tension created by primitive drives related to hunger, sex, aggression, and irrational impulses. The id operates according to the pleasure principle in which the goal is immediate reduction of tension and the maximization of satisfaction. In most cases, reality prevents the fulfillment of the demands of the pleasure principle: We cannot always eat when we are hungry, and we can discharge our sexual drives only when the time and place are appropriate. To account for this fact of life, Freud suggested a second component of personality; the ego.

~The ego, which begins to develop soon after birth, strives to balance the desires of the id and the realities of the objective, outside world. The ego operates according to the reality principle in which instinctual energy is restrained to maintain the individual's safety and to help integrate the person into society. In a sense, "ego" is the executive of personality; it makes decisions, controls actions, and allows thinking and problem solving of a higher order than the id's capabilities permit.

~The superego, the final personality structure to develop in childhood, represents the rights and wrongs of society as taught and modeled by a person's parents, teachers, and other significant individuals. The superego includes the conscience, which prevents us from behaving in a morally improper way by making us feel guilty if we do wrong. It helps us control impulses coming from the id, making our behavior less selfish and more virtuous.

Developing Personality: Psychosexual Stages

Freud provided us with a view of how personality develops through a series of five psychosexual stages during which children encounter conflicts between the demands of society and their own sexual urges (in which sexuality is more about experiencing pleasure and less about lust). According to Freud, failure to resolve the conflicts at a particular stage can result in fixations - conflicts or concerns that persist beyond the developmental period in which they first occur. Such fixations may occur due to having needs ignored or (conversely) being overindulged during the earlier period.

NOTE: During the phallic stage the child must negotiate the Oedipal conflict. As children focus their attention on genitals, the differences between male and female anatomy become more salient. Males begin to unconsciously develop a sexual interest in the mother and starts to see the father as a rival (harboring a wish to kill him - much like Oedipus in the ancient Greek tragedy). He views the father as too powerful, developing a fear that his father may retaliate drastically by removing the source of the threat; the son's penis. This fear leads to castration anxiety, which is so powerful that the desire for the mother becomes repressed and he identifies with his father. Identification is the process of wanting to be like another person as much as possible, imitating that person's behavior and adopting similar beliefs and values. With this identification, then son seeks to obtain a woman like his unattainable mother.

For girls, Freud reasoned that they begin to experience sexual arousal toward their fathers and begin to experience penis envy. They wish they had the anatomical part that seemed most clearly "missing" in girls. Blaming their mother, girls come to believe that their mothers are responsible for this "castration." (This later provoked accusations that Freud considered women to be inferior to men). Like boys, girls would find that they can resolve such unacceptable feelings by identifying with the same-sex parent, behaving like her, and adopting her attitudes and values.

Defense Mechanisms

According to Freud, anxiety is a danger signal to the ego. Although it can occur from realistic fears (a poisonous snake about to strike), it can also occur in the form of neurotic anxiety in which irrational impulses emanating from the id threaten to burst through and become uncontrollable. Defense mechanisms are unconscious strategies that people use to reduce anxiety by concealing its source from themselves and others.

Freud's Defense Mechanisms

Evaluating Freud's Legacy

Many people have accepted Freud's ideas, which have had a major impact on the field of psychology and Western philosophy. Many comtemporary psychologists, however, have leveled significant criticisms against psychoanalytic theory.

1) Lack of compelling scientific data to support it - although individual cases seem supportive, we lack conclusive scientific evidence to support it

2) Freud argued that personality is largely set by adolescence, but we know now that important changes in personality can occur in adolescence and adulthood

3) Freud's theory offers no way to predict how the difficulty will be exhibited - EX: If a person is fixated on the anal stage, he or she may be unusually messy, or unusually neat.

4) Freud made his observations from a limited population, based almost entirely on upper-class Austrian women living in the strict, puritanical era of the early 1900s, who had come seeking treatment for psychological and physical problems.

~Still, Freud generated an important method of treating psychological disturbances called psychoanalysis, which remains in use today. His emphasis on the unconscious has been partially supported by current research on dreams and implicit memory. Advances in neuroscience are consistent with some of Freud's arguments.

THE NEO-FREUDIAN PSYCHOANALYSTS: BUILDING ON FREUD

A series of successors who were trained in traditional Freudian theory but later rejected some of its major points are known as neo-Freudian psychoanalysts. They placed a greater emphasis on the ego by suggesting that it had more control than the id over day-to-day activities. They focused more on the social environment and minimized the importance of sex as a driving force in people's lives. They also paid greater attention to the effects of society and culture on personality development.

Jung's Collective Unconscious

Carl Jung rejected Freud's view of the primary importance of unconscious sexual urges. He looked at the primitive urges of the unconscious more positively and argued that they represented a more general and positive life force that encompasses an inborn drive motivating creativity and more positive resolution of conflict.

~He suggested that we have a universal collective unconscious, a common set of ideas, feelings, images, and symbols that we inherit from our relatives, the whole human race, and even nonhuman animal ancestors from the distant past. This collective unconscious is shared by everyone and is displayed in behavior that is common across diverse cultures - such as love of mother, belief in a supreme being, and even behavior as specific as fear of snakes.

~He proposed that the collective unconscious contains archetypes, universal symbolic representations of a particular person, object, or experience. EX: A mother archetype, which contains reflections of our ancestors' relationships with mother figures, is suggested by the prevalence of mothers in art, religion, literature, and mythology. (Virgin Mary, Earth Mother, wicked stepmothers in fairy tales, Mother's Day, and so forth). Jung also suggested that men possess an unconscious feminine archetype that affects how they behave, whereas women have an unconscious male archetype that colors their behavior.

~Jung believes these archetypes play an important role in determining our day-to-day reactions, attitudes, and values. EX: The popularity of the Star Wars movies is due to the use of broad archetypes of good (Luke Skywalker) and evil (Darth Vader).

~Although no reliable research evidence confirms the existence of the collective unconscious - and Jung knew it would be hard to produce - his theory has had significant influence beyond the areas of psychology. EX: The Myers-Briggs personality test, derived from Jung's personality approach, is widely used in business and industry to provide insights into how employees make decisions and perform on the job.

Horney's Neo-Freudian Perspective

Karen Horney was one of the earliest psychologists to champion women's issues and is sometimes called the first feminist psychologist. She suggested that personality develops in the context of social relationships and depends particularly on the relationship between parents and child and how well the child's needs are met. She rejected Freud's suggestion that women have penis envy; she asserted that what women envy most in men is not their anatomy but the independence, success, and freedom women are often denied.

~She was one of the first to stress the importance of cultural factors in the determination of personality. EX: She suggested that society's rigid gender roles for women lead them to experience ambivalence about success because they fear they will make enemies if they are too successful. Her conceptualizations in the 1930s and 1940s laid the groundwork for many of the central ideas of feminism that emerged decades later.

Adler and the Other Neo-Freudians

Alfred Adler also considered Freudian theory's emphasis on sexual needs misplaced. Adler proposed that the primary human motivation is a striving for superiority, not in terms of superiority over others but in a quest for self-improvement and perfection.

~He used the term inferiority complex to describe situations in which adults have not been able to overcome the feelings of inferiority they developed as children, when they were small and limited in their knowledge about the world. Early social relationships with parents have an important effect on children's ability to outgrow feelings of personal inferiority and instead to orient themselves toward attaining more socially useful goals, such as improving society.

~Other neo-Freudians included Erik Erikson, and Freud's daughter, Anna Freud. They focused less than Freud on inborn sexual and aggressive drives and more on the social and cultural factors behind personality.

Section 2 - Trait, Learning, Biological and Evolutionary, and Humanistic Approaches to Personality

MAIN IDEA QUESTION

What are the major aspects of trait, biological and evolutionary, and humanistic approaches to personality?

VOCABULARY

trait theory - a model of personality that seeks to identify the basic traits necessary to describe personality

traits - consistent personality characteristics and behaviors displayed in different situations

social cognitive approaches to personality - theories that emphasize the influence of a person's cognitions - thoughts, feelings, expectations, and values - as well as observation of others' behavior, in determining personality

self-efficacy - belief in one's personal capabilities. Self-efficacy underlies people's faith in their ability to carry out a particular behavior or produce a desired outcome

self-esteem - the component of personality that encompasses our positive and negative self-evaluations

biological and evolutionary approaches to personality - theories that suggest that important components of personality are inherited

temperament - the innate disposition that emerges early in life

humanistic approaches to personality - theories that emphasize people's innate goodness and desire to achieve higher levels of functioning

self-actualization - a state of self-fulfillment in which people realize their highest potential, each in a unique way

unconditional positive regard - an attitude of acceptance and respect on the part of an observer, no matter what a person says or does

"Tell me about Nelson," said Johnetta.

"Oh, he's just terrific. He's the friendliest guy I know - goes out of his way to be nice to everyone. He hardly ever gets mad. He's just so even-tempered, no matter what's happening. And he's really smart, too. About the only thing I don't like is that he's always in such a hurry to get things done. He seems to have boundless energy, much more than I have."

"He sounds great to me, especially in comparison to Rico," replied Johnetta. "He is so self-centered and arrogant that it drives me crazy. I sometimes wonder why I ever started going out with him."

TRAIT APPROACHES: PLACING LABELS ON PERSONALITY

If someone asked you to characterize another person, you would probably come up with a list fo that individual's personal qualities as you see them. But how would you know which of those qualities are most important to an understanding of that person's behavior? To answer this question and others like it, psychologists have developed a model of personality known as trait theory. Trait theory seeks to explain in a straightforward way the consistencies in individuals' behavior. Traits are consistent personality characteristics and behaviors displayed in different situations.

~Trait theorists propose that all people possess certain traits but the degree to which a particular trait applies to a specific person varies and can be quantified. EX: You may be relatively friendly, whereas I may be relatively unfriendly. But we both have a "friendliness" trait, although your degree of "friendliness" is higher than mine. The difficult part for trait theorists is determining the specific primary traits necessary to describe personality. Different theorists have come up with surprisingly different sets of traits.

Allport's Trait Theory: Identifying Basic Characteristics

Gordon Allport, in the 1930s, came up with some 18,000 separate terms that could be used to describe personality. He pared down the list to a mere 4,500 descriptors after eliminating words with the same meaning, but was left with a tough challenge; Which of those traits were the most basic?

~He suggested that there are three fundamental categories of traits: cardinal, central, and secondary.

cardinal trait - single characteristic that directs most of a person's activities. EX: A totally selfless woman may direct all her energy toward humanitarian activities; an intensely power-hungry person may be driven by an all-consuming need for control. Most people do not develop a single cardinal trait, instead developing a handful of central traits that make up the core of personality.

central traits - such as honesty and sociability, are an individual's major characteristics; they usually number from five to ten in any one person.

secondary traits - characteristics that affect behavior in fewer situations and are less influential than central or cardinal traits. EX: A reluctance to eat meat and a love of modern art would be considered secondary traits.

Cattell and Eysenck: Factoring Out Personality

Factor analysis is a statistical method of identifying associations among a large number of variables to reveal more general patterns. EX: Participants receive a questionnaire that asks them to describe themselves by referring to an extensive list of traits. By combining responses and computing which traits are associated with one another in the same person, a researcher can identify the most fundamental patterns or combinations of traits - called factors - that underlie participants' responses.

~Raymond Cattell suggested that 16 pairs of source traits represent the basic dimensions of personality. He developed the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire, or 16 PF.

~Hans Eysenck also used factor analysis but came to a very different conclusion. He found that personality could be described in terms of three major dimensions: extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism. Extraversion relates to the degree of sociability, whereas the neurotic dimension encompasses emotional stability. Psychoticism refers to the degree to which reality is distorted. By evaluating people along these three dimensions, Eysenck was able to predict behavior accurately in a variety of situations.

Extraversion - sociable, lively, active, assertive, sensation-seeking

Neuroticism - anxious, depressed, guilt feelings, low self-esteem, tense

Psychoticism - aggressive, cold, egocentric, impersonal, impulsive

The Big Five Personality Traits

The most influential trait approach of the last two decades contends that five traits or factors - called the "Big Five" - lie at the core of personality.