Week 21: Personality Theories
Personality: “a particular pattern of behaviour and thinking that prevails across time and
situations and differentiates one person from another”
• A consistent pattern of thoughts, feelings, and behaviours that characterize each person
as a unique individual
• The study of personality focuses on describing stable differences among individuals
• Characteristics lie on a continuum, where everything is relative (i.e. someone is more
outgoing than someone else, not someone is absolutely outgoing)
Four Major Personality Theories:
Psychodynamic Theory:
• By Freud
• Identified Id, Ego and Superego and explained how they developed over 5 psychosexual
stages
• Personality shaped by conflicts occurring between Id and Superego in unconscious mind
and mediated by the Ego
• These conflicts were kept from conscious awareness by defense mechanisms
• Describe personality in terms of internal drives and forces
Humanistic Theory:
• Rogers and Maslow
• Emphasized role of free will and the development of self and critical to personality
development
• Self actualization is important force in personality development
• Circumstances that stand in the way of self actualization such as expectations of others
can get in the way of developing true selves, distorting our true personality and
behaviour
Trait Theory:
• Raymond Cattell
• Described personality as 16 personality factors
• These factors were laid out as a continuum with opposites at each end (i.e. shy---bold)
• Plotting where each person falls in each continuum describes their personality
• These traits were recently reduced to 5 main personality traits known as the Big Five
which include: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness
and neuroticism
• Easy to test, but criticized for merely describing and not explaining personality
Behavioural Theory:
• By B.F Skinner
• Personality is a group of learned habits and responses as a product of operant and
classical conditioning • Personality characteristics are behaviour patterns shaped and reinforced by environment
• Thoughts and cognitions do not play a part
• Social Learning Theory:
• Rejected skinners view
• Argued observational learning experiences and cognitive processes contribute to
personality (Modelling)
Personality Test:
• A good personality test must be:
• Standardized (same for everyone)
• Valid (measures what it’s supposed to be measuring)
• Reliable (consistent across time)
• Different types depending on field of interest
Objective/Diagnostic tests:
• MMPI-2 –true or false questions
• TAT—series of ambiguous pictures that are to be described as a story by participant
(end up projecting personality into story)
• Rorschach—series of inkblots on cards that are to be described by
participant...psychologist listens to response, as well as body language and physical
response to card
• NEO (neuroticism, extroversion, openness to experience): measures personality factors
—provides a series of statements that a person agrees or disagrees with on a 5-point
scale
Factor Analysis: technique uses to reveal factors or basic dimensions that underlie
questionnaire data set (like what we did in our week 21 pre-lab)
• This is how Cattell identified the 16 personality factors
• Even these 16 factors contained redundancies, so it was narrowed down to 5
The Big 5:
• openness to experience
• conscientiousness
• extraversion
• agreeableness
• neuroticism
• best trait model and dominant approach used today to measure personality
• called the “NEO Personality Inventory”
• participants are asked to report that they strongly agree—strongly disagree
Personality Change: • research suggests personality is quite stable throughout adulthood and may actually
become increasingly stable (up to 50 years old)
Interactions:
• personality is affected by the interaction between genetics and environment
Sigmund Freud:
• primary theorist in psychodynamic literature
• specialized in neurology and treated patients who complained of pain or paralysis byt
exhibited no detectable medical problems
• he believed that disturbing, repressed childhood events caused their suffering
• used hypnosis to get patients in touch with these memories
• He was intrigued by the fact that people could be given posthypnotic suggestions (he
would tell patients under hypnosis that they will not remember hypnosis, but 10 minutes
after awakening, they will open an umbrella... and after awakening the patient has an
inexplicable urge to open the umbrella).
• Came up with idea of id, ego, superego
• Believed children developed through a series of childhood stages, during which the
pleasure seeking id became focused on erogenous zones on the body
• Each stage was a different challenge we must work through
• If the stages are completed successfully
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