PERSONALITY

• Personality - is the pattern of enduring characteristics that produce consistency and individuality in a given person.

• 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.

STRUCTURING PERSONALITY: ID, EGO, AND SUPEREGO

• 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 word.

• 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.

PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY OF PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT

1. Displacement – process of shifting focus2. Sublimation - people divert unwanted

impulses into socially approved thoughts, feelings, or behaviors.

• 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.

DEVELOPING PERSONALITY: PSYCHOSEXUAL STAGES

• 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 age 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.Oedipus complex - boy's feelings of desire for his

mother and jealously and anger towards his father

Electra complex - girls feel desire for their fathers and jealousy of their mothers.

• 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).

The Neo-Freudian Psychoanalysts

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

1. CARL JUNGcollective 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.personal unconscious- motives, conflicts, information that we hold true to ourselves, that we repress and hold down.archetypes - according to Jung, universal symbolic representations of a particular person, object, or experience (such as good and evil).

2. KAREN HORNEY- first feminist psychologist- Horney 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.

3. ALFRED ADLER • 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.

Trait Approaches: Placing Labels on Personality

• 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.

GORDON ALLPORT’S TRAIT THEORY: IDENTIFYING BASIC CHARACTERISTICS

• Cardinal trait is a single characteristic that directs most of a person’s activities.

• Central traits are an individual’s major characteristics, they usually number from five to ten that are unique to the person.

• Secondary traits are characteristics that affect behavior in fewer situations and are less influential than central or cardinal traits.

Raymond Cattell (1965) : FACTORING OUT PERSONALITY

• Factor analysis is a statistical method of identifying associations among a large number of variables to reveal more general patterns.

• Cattell suggested that 16 pairs of source traits represent the basic dimensions of personality. Using those source traits, he developed the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire, or 16 PF, a measure that provides scores for each of the source traits.

Hans Eysenck (1995)

• He found that personality could best be described in terms of just three major dimensions: extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism.

THE BIG FIVE PERSONALITY TRAITS

Learning Approaches:We Are What We’ve Learned

B.F. SKINNER’S BEHAVIORIST APPROACH

Personality is a collection of learned behavior patterns (Skinner, 1975). Similarities in responses across different situations are caused by similar patterns of reinforcement that have been received in such situations in the past.

SOCIAL COGNITIVE APPROACHES TO PERSONALITY

• 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.

• Reciprocal determinism is the theory set forth by psychologist Albert Bandura that a person's behavior both influences and is influenced by personal factors and the social environment.

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

Biological and Evolutionary Approaches: Are We Born with Personality?

• 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: The Uniqueness of You

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

• The major proponent of the humanistic point of view is Carl Rogers (1971) along with humanistic theorist, Abraham Maslow.

• All people have a fundamental need for 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.

• self-concepts - the set of beliefs they hold about what they are like as individuals.