PSYCH 2B03 Chapter 1: Chapter 1 - personality
15 Jan 2019
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Chapter 1: The Study of the Person
The study of the person
• Psychology is about the precise manipulation of independent variables for the furtherance of
compelling theoretical accounts of well specified phenomena, such as how many milliseconds is
takes to find a circle in a field of squares
• Personality psychology addresses how people feel, think, and behave, the three parts of the
psychological triad
• Personality psychology deals with the internal inconsistency and self knowledge to solve
• When patterns of personality are extreme, unusual and cause problems two subfields of abnormal
and clinical psychology come together to study personality disorders
• Clinical and personality share the obligation to try to understand whole persons, not just parts of
persons, one individual at a time
The goals of personality psychology
• Personality: an individuals characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behaviour, together
with the psychological mechanisms - hidden or not - behind those patterns
Mission: impossible
• The only way is to choose to limit what you look at
• Basic approach: search requiring you to limit yourself to certain kinds of observations, patterns
and ways of thinking (systematic self imposed limitation)
• Trait approach: focus efforts on the ways that people differ psychologically and how these
differences might be conceptualized, measured and followed over time
• Biological approach: understand mind in terms of body
• Psychoanalytic approach: concerned primarily with the unconscious mind, and the nature and
resolution of internal mental conflict
• Phenomenological approach: focus on peoples conscious expereince of the world
• 2 directions in recent psych
o Humanistic psychology - pursues how conscious awareness can produce such uniquely
human attributed as existential anxiety, creativity and free will - meaning of basis happiness
o Other direction emphasizes the degree to which psychology and the very experience of
reality might be different in different cultures
• Learning: concentrates on how people change their behaviour as a result of rewards, punishments
and other experiences in life
• Behaviourists - focuse tightly on overt behaviour and the ways it can be affected by rewards
punishments
• Social learning theory draws inferences about the ways that mental processes determine which
behaviours are learned and how they are performed
• Learning and cognitive processes approaches - behaviourism, social learning theory and cognitive
personality psychology
Competitors or complements?
• It is not obligatory or helpful to regard these approaches as mutually exclusive and forever locked
in competition, they complement rather than compete with each other because each addresses a
different set of questions about human psychology
• Each one also tends to ignore the key concerns of the others
Distinct approaches vs. the one big theory
• Some believe that the different basic approaches address different sets of questions, and that
each approach generally has the best answers for the questions it has chosen to address
Advantages and disadvantages and vice versa
• Personality psychology provides an excellent example of Funders first law
