PERSONALITY

Summary 1: Introduction
Assumptions
• Nature vs nurture – inherited or environment?
• Changeability vs unchangeability – change over time / diff stages of
lifespan
• Equilibrium vs growth – maintaining balance or urge to develop?
• Knowability vs unknowability – how much can be known and assessed?

• Optimism vs pessimism – basically good or evil?

Summary 2: Biological and Trait

This school suggests that personality is comprised of a number of traits or
dispositions that cause the individual to behave in certain ways and which remain
stable for the person’s lifetime. It is also not affected by environmental influences.
Trait approach – a perspective in which personality is seen as a combination of
characteristics that people display over time and across situations.
• Raymond Cattell (1905 – )
o In 1965 he identified 16 separate traits and developed the 16PF
test.
• Hans Eysenck (1916 – 1977) (“EYE-sink”)
o Introversion-extraversion: the extent to which an individual tends to
seek excitement and stimulation.
o Emotionality-stability: the level of emotional stability possessed by
the individual.
o Eysenck arguded strongly that these were associated with innate
biological differences, eg resting levels of nervous system arousal
• Conclusion from researchers, Costa and McCrae (1985) developed the big-
five model:
o Neuroticism – anxious, self-pitying, tense, emotionally unstable,
impulsive, vulnerable, touchy, worrying
o Extraversion – active, assertive, energetic, outgoing, talkative,
gesturatlly, expressive, gregarious
o Openness to experience – artistic, curious, imaginative, insightful,
original, wide interests, unusual thought process, intellectual
interests
o Agreeableness – appreciative, forgiving, generous, kind, trusting,
non-critical, warm, compassionate, considerate, straight-forward
o Conscientiousness – efficient, organised, planful, reliable, thorough,
dependable, ethical, productive.
• Common contemporary method, but tends to describe only, not for
understanding.
• Acknowledged the importance of situations in influencing behaviour.
Summary 3: Psychodynamic theories
• Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939)
o Freud developed a structural model of personality consisting of
conscious, preconscious and unconscious elements. Later model
incorporated the 3 components: Id, ego, superego.
o Id – the unconscious portion of personality that contains basic
impulses and urges.
o Two kinds of instincts resides in Id – Eros, the life instincts, promotes
positive, constructive behaviour and reflect a source of energy
know as libido (psychic energy); Thanatos, the death instincts, is
responsible for aggression and destructiveness.
o The Id operates on the pleasure principle, seeking immediate
satisfaction of both kinds of instincts.
o Ego – the part of the personality that mediates conflicts b/w and
among the demands of the id, the superego and the real world.
o As a child learns about rules and values of society, they tend to
adopt them – internalizing parental & cultural values produces the
superego. This tells the person what they should or should not do.
This is the moral guide.
o Clashes among the 3 components are intrapsychic or
psychodynamic conflicts.
o How they interact via the processes of cathexis and anticathexis
and the defence mechanisms. ?????
o Development through psychosexual stages:
 Oral stage – the first stage, in which the mouth is the centre
of pleasure and conflict.

 Anal stage – the second stage, usually occurring during the

2nd year of life, in which the focus of pleasure and conflict
shifts from the mouth to the anus.

 Phallic stage – the third stage, in which the focus of pleasure

and conflicts shifts to the genital area. This is when boys and
girls starts to identify with the father / mother and imitates
them, forming the basis of their own superego.
 Genital stage – the last stage, which begins during
adolescence, when sexual impulses appear at the conscious
level.
o Usefulness in doubt given that it can’t be tested empirically.
• Karen Horney (1885 – 1952)
o Believed that the important fixations were based on unresolved
interpersonal factors rather than libido.
o 3 interpersonal orientations to resolve these situations:
 Moving towards
 Moving against
 Moving away
 o Believed that cultural forces rather than biological factors are more
important in shaping personality through parenting patterns.

Summary 4: Social cognitive theories

An approach in which personality is seen as the patterns of thinking and
behaviour that a person learns.
• Look at conscious thoughts

• Based in animal/human learning, but went beyond learning into cognitive.

Eg. an aggressive schoolboy – want to know not only what he has learn to do, and
how he learned it, but also what he thinks about himself, his teacher, his
behaviour – and this expectations about each.
People’s capability to learn through observation.

• Julian Rotter (1982) – Expectancy Theory.

o What the person’s expects to happen following his action
o The value he places on the outcome.
o Some other study how expectations influences lives
 Internals – incline to expect events to be controlled by their
own effort
 Externals – opposite, believe success was due to chance /
luck.
 This is his construct of locus of control
o 3 main concepts

 Reinforcement value – is the degree of preference for any

reinforcement to occur if the possibilities of many different
reinforcements are all equal.

 Psychological situations – are in the eye of beholder.

 Expectancy
• Albert Bandura (1999) – Reciprocal Determinism
o Behaviour, personal factors and external environment are
constantly affecting one another.
o Important factor in the web of influence is self-efficacy – the learnt
expectation of success. People who are high on self-efficacy will
show more effort and persistence with a task and are better to cope
with stress and disappointments associated with that task.
o Techniques – setting smaller goals, encourangements
• Walter Mischels (2004) – Cognitive / Affective theory
o Cognitive person variables
 Encodings – the beliefs the person has about the
environment and others
 Expectancies – what the person expects to follow from
various behaviours and what they are capable of doing
 Affects – feelings, emotions and affective responses
  Goals and values – things he believes in and want to achieve
 Competencies and self-regulatory plans – ability to engage in
planned, self controlled and goal directed behaviour
o This is the “if-then” theory
o He challenged the trait theorists’ view of cross-situational
consistency of traits; in fact, they were similar situations but were
consistent across time.
 Competency – knowing what to do and ability to do it
 Characterising events – how well we assess the situation
 Expectancies – predicting the future outcome
 Values of outcome – is it important to us

 Self regulatory plans – if situation changes so does our plans

o Delaying gratification – children and delayed reward
o People are ‘interactionist’ – recognise that behaviour changes
across situation, rather than traits
• Critics
o Psychodynamic theorists argue that the social cognitive approach
leave no role for unconscious thoughts and feelings in determining
behaviours.
o Trait theorist, complain that if failed to identify what is it about the
situation that brings out certain behaviours.
o Unable to be general

Summary 5: Humanistic theories of personality

A view in which personality develops through an actualizing tendency (an innate
inclination toward growth that motivates all people) that unfolds in accordance
with each person’s unique perceptions of the world.
More optimistic about human behaviour than other personality perspectives –
humans differ from animals – self awareness, creativity, planning, decision making
and responsibility.
• Basic propositions
o Phenomenology – subjective mental experiences are an important
component of personality (consciousness)
o Holistic view – individuals are unified entities and not merely a
series of parts or process
o Actualising tendency – hat human beings strive to reach their
potential rather than just protecting themselves against anxiety
• Carl Rogers (1902 – 1987)
o Emphasis actualizing tendency
o Self concept – positive regard shaping by parents, teachers,
environment – evaluations by others, ie. conditions of worth
 o Incongruence (feeling out of place) examples: sending subtle
message that a child is loveable only when well behaved. Possibly
creating distorted self-perceptions.
o Key goals in psychotherapy was to reduce this incongruence and in
the process, help people realise their potential, ie achieve self-
actualisation. People are to accept themselves unconditionally.
• Abraham Maslow (1908 – 1970)
o Believe self-actualisation is not just a human capability but a human
need
o Many fail to do so because they focus on lower needs in the
hierarchy, being controlled by deficiency orientation (a
preoccupation with perceived needs for things a person does not
have)
o Growth orientation – a tendency to draw satisfaction from what is
available in life, rather than to focus on what is missing. It opens to
door to ‘peak experiences’.
o Shortfall – not very scientific

Summary 6: Personality assessment

• Two groups of personality tests

o Objective personality tests

 Asks direct questions about a person, quantitatively scored

 Efficiency, standardization
 Subject to deliberate distortion

 Eg. NEO-PI-R, MMPI, MMPI-2, 16-PF

o Projected personality tests
 Unstructured stimuli create maximum freedom of response;
scoring is subjective, thou some objective methods exists
 “correct” answer not obvious; designed to tap unconscious
impulses; flexible use
 Reliability and validity lower than those of objective tests

 Eg. House, person & tree, Rorshach inkblot test, TAT

• General requirements for personality measures
o Standardisation – uniform procedures
o Norms – scores of various individuals can be compared
o Reliability – consistency or stability
o Validity – does it predicts what it is supposed to
• The major approaches to the assessment of personality
o Interviews
o Self-report inventories
o Projective techniques
 o Behavioural assessment

• Tests could be misuse – Kalat suggested screening process similar to new

drugs release.
• Assessment methods associated with specific theorists
o Freud / Horney – free association, analysis of transference, dream
analysis, analysis of resistance
o Cattell – factor analysis (L-data, Q-data, T data), psychology tests
(16PF)
o Rotter – I-E scale, interpersonal trust scale
o Bandura – observation techniques, self-efficacy scales
o Maslow – personal orientation inventory