General Psychology
Personality 

Defined:  The sum total of the typical ways of acting, thinking, and feeling that differentiates people.

  (1) Psychoanalytic (personality determined by unconscious motives)

• Sigmund Freud

  • Intro- Context for his theory (1) Victorian era morality, (2) evolutionary theory, and (3) experience with patients.  Background as MD in Austria.  Contact with Breuer and his talking treatment with Anna 0. for hysteria.  Early patients were sexually abused by an adult. (traumatic theory).  Later emphasized evolution in his drive theory.

  • Drive Theory: Personality a function of competing drives or motives characterized by different structures of the mind.

    • Id:  oldest structure, home of instincts sex and aggression.  Unconscious pleasure principle

    • Ego: later structure (age 1) to mediate between id and reality. More conscious and reality principle.

    • Super Ego:  last structure (age 4), ego ideal and morality. Mostly unconscious.

    • Anxiety: result of inadequate ego. May result in a defense mechanism.

    • Defense mechanism: methods by which ego distorts reality to minimize anxiety (self deception). Denial, repression, reaction formation, displacement, projection.

  • Childhood influence: Freud believed the first years of life set or oriented the personality to behave in various ways.

    • Stages of personality development: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital.

• Alfred Adler

  • Early Freud colleague who viewed (1) ego as separate from id and (2) inferiority rather than sex/aggression as a basic motive.

• Carl Jung

  • Another Freud student who differed in (1) notion of collective unconscious, (2) function of psyche as thinking/feeling, sensing/intuitive and extrovert/ introvert.

• Erik Erikson

  • Early ego psychologist who proposed a life-span., psycho-social framework for personality development.

(2)Behaviorism (personality determined by learning history)

• John Watson

  • Personality is conditioned, likes/dislikes/preferences learned via classical conditioning.

• BF Skinner

  • Broadened the view to include operant conditioning,  the law of consequences.

• Albert Bandura

  • Added two aspects to behaviorism. (1) The importance of thought and observation (self efficacy), and (2)  the influence of the person on the environment (reciprocal determinism).

(3) Humanism (personality is by nature good, and emerges in social context)

• Abraham Maslow

  • Studied healthy persons and offered notions of self actualization and peak experiences.

• Carl Rogers

  • Belief in fully functioning person who is present and has trust in self , (real vs ideal self).

  • Advanced notion of (I) unconditional positive regard, (2) congruence, and (3) empathy as facilitators of personal growth.

(4) Trait Theories (personality can be described rather than explained)

• Jung and Eysenck

  • Notion of extraversion/introversion

• Bouchard and others

  • Temperament: broad personality style or orientation, actiavity level, mood, reactivity, withdrawn. Minnesota twins study.

• Cattell and Allport

  • Hundreds of personality traits can be identified.

• McCrae and Costa

  • Big five personality traits: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness.

(5) Psychological Assessment

• Projective measures

  • Rorschach, TAT, Sentence completion, Word association

• Objective measures

  • Observation, surveys, questionnaires: CPI, 16 PF, MMPI (hypochondriasis, depression, hysteria, psychopathic deviate, MF, paranoia, psychoasthesia, schizophrenia, mania, social introversion.