PSYC 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Karen Horney, Heritability, Amygdala

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Dr.Ada Mullett

Document Summary

Personality: a particular pattern of behaviour and thinking that prevails across time and situations and differentiates one person from another. Standardization, reliability, and validity make a good personality test. Personality theroies : psychodynamic theory (sigmund freud): three components of personality, ego (compromise), superego (morals) and id (childish desire). Personality largely determined unconsciously by conflicts between the superego and id and the ego. Resulting psychodynamic theories explain personality in terms of inner drives and forces. Behavioural theory (bf skinner: operant conditioning + classical conditioning = personality, social learning theorists revised; operant condition + classical conditioning + thoughts and cognition = personality. Humanistic theories (rogers and maslow: free will + self development = personality, drives based on hierarchy of needs, not much empirical evidence. Impediments to self-actualization (expectations of others) may distort our personalities. Trait theories (raymond cattell: the big five : openness to experience, contentiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, criticized for only describing, not explaining.