1. A person’s pattern of thinking, feeling and acting.
Personality
A person’s pattern of thinking, feeling and acting.

2. Types of Personalities
Type A
Type B
Feel time pressure.
Easily angered.
Competitive and ambitious.
Work hard and play hard.
More prone to heart disease than rest of population.
Relaxed and easygoing.
But some people fit in neither type.

4. Freud: Structure of the Personality
Freud believed that personality consists of three separate but interacting parts
These are NOT actual physical structures
They represent parts of a model of personality
Each part has it’s own functions & elements

5. The “id” Present at birth Consists of urges, instincts, desires
Demanding, insistent, impatient, selfish
Requires immediate gratification
Operates according to the “Pleasure Principle”
Focus = what you WANT

6. The “superego” The last to develop
Represents internalized rules of parents & society
Operates according to the “Morality Principle”
Conscience
Sits in judgment of your behavior
Focus = SHOULD

7. The “ego” Controls all thinking & reasoning
Serves as a mediator or referee between id demands & superego morals
Takes into account what is practical & possible
Operates according to the “Reality Principle”
Focus = what you CAN do

8. Freud: Ego Defenses
A sign that the ego is struggling to reconcile the demands of id & superego = ANXIETY
In order to deal with this anxiety the ego uses a variety of Defense mechanisms
Mental strategies that the ego uses to reduce its own anxiety
Weapons that the ego uses to relieve
tension & cope with anxiety

9. 1. Repression
Involves excluding threatening or painful thoughts, feelings, memories from our awareness
Involuntary removal of something from consciousness

10. 2. Regression
A return to behaviors, thoughts, feelings that you exhibited as a child
Revert back to behaviors you have outgrown

11. 3. Rationalization Explaining away failures & losses
Offers self-adjusting explanations in place of real, more threatening reasons for your actions.
Manufacture excuses for behavior
Excuses to justify behavior
Trying to convince YOURSELF that it’s ok
You don’t get into a college and say, “I really did not want to go there. It was too far away!!”

12. 4. Displacement
The transfer of unacceptable feelings from their appropriate target to an undeserving, safer one
We use displacement when we perceive the real target as too threatening or unavailable.

13. 5. Projection
We attribute our own unacceptable, inappropriate feelings & impulses onto other people
Motives & feelings that you are unwilling to recognize in yourself are “projected” onto someone else

14. 6. Denial
Refusing to admit that something unpleasant is happening or that you are experiencing an inappropriate emotion
Refuse to acknowledge reality

15. 7. Sublimation
Redirecting id urges & impulses to forms of activity that are socially acceptable & appropriate

16. 8. Intellectualization
Undertaking an academic, unemotional study of a topic.

17. 9. Reaction-Formation
Replacement of anxiety-producing feelings with their opposite
Act the opposite of how you really feel
Excessive, you protest too much

18. Criticisms of Freud He really only studied wealthy women in Austria.
His results are not empirically verifiable (really hard to test)..
Karen Horney said he was sexist with the “penis envy” and there is an actual “womb envy”.

19. How do we assess the unconscious?
We can use hypnosis or free association.
But more often we use projective tests.
Projective Tests
A personality test.
Provides an ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger projection of one’s inner dynamics.
Examples Are:

20. 1. TAT Thematic Apperception Test
A projective test which people express their inner feelings through stories they make about ambiguous scenes

21. 2. Rorschach Inkblot Test
The most widely used projective test
A set of ten inkblots designed to identify people’s feelings when they are asked to interpret what they see in the inkblots.

22. Neo-Freudians
Psychologists that took some premises from Freud and built upon them.
Carl Jung
Karen Horney
Alfred Adler

23. Carl Jung: Analytical Psychology
Two Levels of the Unconscious:
Personal Unconscious: contains our own repressed thoughts, experiences, etc. (similar to Freud)
Collective Unconscious: contains universal images, ideas & symbols
Inherited & common to all human beings

24. Jung: Collective Unconscious
Archetypes:
Stored in the collective unconscious
Symbolic characterizations that represent the different aspects of human nature
Common to all people
Reflections of the history of our species

25. Alfred Adler: Individual Psychology
Rejected Freud’s ideas about sexual drives being the root of behavior
Adler believed that people, instead, have a “drive for superiority”:
NOT a desire to dominate
others
A desire for self-improvement
This stems from natural feelings
of inferiority

26. Alfred Adler
Adler believed that the personality develops through an individual’s attempts to overcome their limitations
Basic Terms:
Compensation: a person’s effort to overcome real or imagined personal weakness
“Inferiority Complex”: Exaggerated feelings of weakness

27. Alfred Adler
Adler agreed with Freud regarding the impact of childhood He focused on the effects of “Birth Order”: A child’s position in the family can have an impact on a child’s experience, development & personality

28. Trait Theories of Personality
They believe that we can describe people’s personalities by specifying their main characteristics (traits).
Traits like honestly, laziness, ambition, outgoing are thought to be stable over the course of your lives.

29. The Trait Perspective Trait
A characteristic of behavior or a disposition to feel and act as assessed by self-reported inventories or peer reports.

30. Nomothetic Theories
The same traits can be used to describe all peoples personalities.
Introversion-Extroversion scale
BIG FIVE personality traits:
Extroversion
Agreeableness
Conscientiousness
Openness to experience
Emotional Stability
Factor Analysis is used to see the clusters and score these tests.

31. Factor Analysis
A statistical procedure used to identify different components of your intelligence or personality (depending on the test).
FA takes the answers you give on tests and compiles them into general traits.

32. Eysenck Personality Questionnaire

33. The Big Five
Emotional Stability (calm/anxious, secure/insecure, self-satisfied/self-pitying).
Extroversion (sociable/retiring, fun-loving/sober, affectionate/reserved).
Agreeableness (soft-hearted/ruthless, trusting/suspicious, helpful/uncooperative).
Openness (imaginative/practical, variety/routine, independent, conforming)
Conscientiousness (organized/disorganized, careful/careless, disciplined/impulsive).

34. Idiographic Theorists
Using the same set of traits to classify everyone is impossible.
Each person may have a few traits that are unique to them (selfish may be important to describe one person but not another).

35. Gordon Allport: Three Types of Traits
Cardinal Traits:
One trait that dominates everything you do (rare).
Central Traits:
These are the basic building blocks that shape most of our behavior although they are not as overwhelming as cardinal traits.
Usually number from 5 to 10 in any one person
An example of central traits: honest, outgoing, moody, passive…
Secondary traits:
Attitudes or preferences and often appear only in certain situations or under specific circumstances.
These are characteristics that effect behavior in fewer situations & are less influential
A preference for ice cream or dislike of modern art would be considered a secondary trait.

36. Trait Theory Criticism
Do NOT take into account the importance of the situation.

37. Biological Theories of Personality
What % of personality is inherited –heritability?
We are not sure BUT temperaments do seem to be stable from infants to old age.

38. Somatotype Theory A biological Theory by William Sheldon.
Endomorphs (Fat) tend to be friendly and outgoing.
Mesomorphs (muscular) tend to be more aggressive.
Ectomorphs (thin) tend to be more shy and secretive.
Study has not been replicated.

39. Behaviorist Theory of Personality
The way most people think of personality is meaningless.
Personality changes according to the environment (reinforcers and punishments).
If you change environment then you change the personality.

40. The Social-Cognitive Perspective
Albert Bandura
Social cognitive theory stems
from social learning
Focus on how we interact with
our environment.
Reciprocal Determinism: the interacting influences between personality and environmental factors. .

41. Social Cognitive Perspective
Different People choose different environments.
The TV you watch, friends you hang with, music you listen to were all chosen by you (your disposition)
But after you choose the environment, it also shapes you.

42. Social Cognitive Perspective
Our personalities help create situations to which we react.
If I expect someone to be angry with me, I may give that person the cold shoulder, creating the very behavior I expect.

43. Humanistic Theory of Personality
Do not believe in Determinism (your actions are dictated by your past).
They believe that humans have free will (our ability to choose your own destiny).
We are innately good and as long as our self-esteem and self-concept are positive we will be happy.

44. Humanistic Psychology
In the 1960’s people became sick of Freud’s negativity and trait psychology’s objectivity.
Humanists wanted to focus on “healthy” people and how to help them strive to “be all that they can be”.

45. Carl Rogers’s Person-Centered Perspective
People are basically GOOD.
Our objective is to reach Self-Actualization
We need genuineness, acceptance and empathy for us to grow.

46. Genuineness Being open with your own feelings. Dropping your facade.
Being transparent and self-disclosing.

47. Acceptance Unconditional Positive Regard:
An attitude of acceptance regardless of circumstances.
Accepting yourself or others completely.

48. Empathy
Listening, sharing, understanding and mirroring feelings and reflecting their meanings.
Preschool study

49. Self-Concept
All of thoughts and feelings about ourselves trying to answer the question….
WHO AM I?

50. Assessing Personality
Most common way is self-report inventories.
MMPI- Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
Test must be . . .
Reliable- does it yield the same results over time.
Valid- does it measure what it is supposed to measure.

51. Be careful of the Barnum Effect!!!
People have the tendency to see themselves in vague, stock descriptions of personality.
Horoscopes, astrologers and psychics all use this concept.