1. Personality
Chapter 10

2. What is Personality?
Unique & relatively consistent patterns of thinking, feeling & behaving
Personality Theories – attempt to explain why people are similar/different/unique
Psychoanalytic: importance of unconscious processes and childhood experiences
Trait: description and measurement of specific personality differences among individuals

3. Sigmund Freud & the Psychoanalytical Theory
Psychoanalysis: focus on unconscious, sexual & aggressive instinctual urges & enduring effects of early childhood
Unconscious: thoughts, feelings, drives, wishes that operate below conscious awareness
Free association: spontaneously report all thoughts, feelings and images

4. Freud’s Structure of Personality

5. Structural Concepts of the Personality
Id: part of the unconscious that contains needs, drives, instincts and repressed material
Pleasure principle; devil on the shoulder
Ego: part that is in touch w/ reality & strives to meet the demands of id & superego in socially acceptable ways
Reality principle; balance
Superego: part that is source of conscience and inhibits the socially undesirable impulses of the id
Moral principle; angel on the shoulder

7. Defense Mechanisms
Ways in which the ego unconscious-ly protects itself against unpleasant impulses or circumstances (anxiety)
Distort reality
Rationalization: making up acceptable excuses for behaviors that cause us to feel anxious
Repression: pushing thoughts into the unconscious
Denial: refuse to accept the reality of something that makes you anxious
Projection: inner feelings are projected outside the self and on to others

8. Regression: going back to an earlier and less mature pattern of behavior
Displacement: take out anger on another unrelated person
Sublimation: redirecting a forbidden desire into a socially acceptable desire
Reaction Formation: replace unacceptable feelings with opposite ones
Undoing: neutralizing an unacceptable action or thought with a second action or thought

9. Trait Theories
Focus on identifying, describing and measuring individual differences
Trait: relatively stable, enduring disposition to consistently behave in a certain way
Eysenck – extraverts need stimulation; introverts are satisfied & don’t need it
The BIG FIVE personality trait dimensions
Universal structure of human personality!!!

10. Trait Theories (cont’d.)
Cattell:16 source traits
The BIG FIVE!!!

11. Humanistic Theory
Goodness of people, human potential, self-actualization, healthy development
Importance of conscious, subjective perception of self
Carl Rogers: self-concept
Abraham Maslow: hierarchy of needs
Criticisms:
Hard to test scientifically
Too optimistic

12. Neo-Freudians Carl Jung Alfred Adler
More positive view of human nature
Distinguished between personal unconscious and collective unconscious (inherited instincts, urges and memories common to all)
Archetypes: inherited ideas based on experiences of ancestors
Alfred Adler
Inferiority complex: a pattern of avoiding feelings of inadequacy rather than trying to overcome their source

13. Nature v. Nurture Body build Intelligence Personality
Mathematical ability
Baldness
Handedness
Height
Musical ability
Longevity

14. Learning Theories
Behaviorism: study of behavior; diff. learning exp = diff. personalities
Contingencies of reinforcement – occurrence of reward/punishment after behavior
Social-cognitive theory: personality acquired by imitation and obser-vational learning

15. Purpose of Theories
Organize characteristics you know about yourself and others
Explain differences among individuals
Explore how people conduct their lives
Determine how life can be improved
Theories guide research