AP Psychology Notes
Topic IX: Personality
Overview
A. Personality is your characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting.
B. This topic will explore and evaluate four major perspectives on personality.
1. Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, which proposes that childhood sexuality and unconscious motives influence personality.
2. The trait perspective, in which researchers identify personality dimensions that account for our consistent behavior patterns.
3. The humanistic approach, which focuses on our inner capacities for growth and self-fulfillment.
4. The social-cognitive approach, which emphasizes how we shape and are shaped by our environment.
The Psychoanalytic Perspective (Sigmund Freud) – the first comprehensive theory of personality.
C. Exploring the Unconscious
1. While experimenting with hypnosis, Freud "discovered" the unconscious.
2. Given his patients’ uneven capacity for hypnosis, he turned to free association.
i. Free Association – a method of exploring the unconscious in which the person relaxes and says whatever comes to mind, no matter how trivial or embarrassing.
ii. Freud seemed to assume that a line of mental dominoes had fallen from his patients’ distant past to their troubled present.
a. Free association, he believed, allowed him to trace that line back, producing a chain of thought leading into the patient’s unconscious, thereby retrieving and releasing painful memories, often from childhood.
3. Freud called his theory and associated techniques psychoanalysis.
4. Freud believed that the mind was like an iceberg – mostly hidden.
i. Unconscious – according to Freud, a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories. According to contemporary psychologists, information processing of which we are unaware.
ii. Preconscious – information that is not conscious but is retrievable into conscious awareness.
5. Of great interest to Freud was the mass of unacceptable passions and thoughts that he believed we repress, or forcibly block from our consciousness because they would be too unsettling to acknowledge.
i. He believed these thoughts, feelings, and ideas powerfully influence us.
ii. He believed that we express them in disguised forms.
a. In this way, the unconsciousness seeps into our thoughts and actions.
6. For Freud the determinist, nothing was ever accidental.
i. He viewed jokes as expressions of repressed sexual and aggressive tendencies, and dreams as the "royal road to the unconscious."
ii. By analyzing people’s dreams, Freud believed he could reveal the nature of their inner conflict and release their inner tensions.
D. Exploring the Unconscious and Personality Structure.
1. In Freud’s view, human personality – including its emotions and strivings – arises from a conflict between our aggressive, pleasure-seeking biological impulses and the internalized social restraints against them. Personality is the result of our efforts to resolve this basic conflict.
2. Freud theorized that the conflict centers on three interacting systems: id, ego, and superego.
i. Id – contains a reservoir of unconscious psychic energy that strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives. The id operates on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification.
ii. Ego – the largely conscious, "executive" part of the personality that mediates among the demands of the id, superego, and reality. The ego operates on the reality principle, satisfying the id’s desires in ways that will realistically bring pleasure rather than pain.
iii. Superego – the part of personality that represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgment (the conscience) and for future aspirations.
3. Because the superego’s demands often oppose the id’s, the ego struggles to reconcile the two.
E. Exploring the Unconscious and Personality Development
1. Again and again, Freud’s patients’ symptoms seemed rooted in unresolved conflicts from early childhood. He concluded that children pass through a series of psychosexual stages
i. Psychosexual Stages – the childhood stages of development during which the id’s pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct erogenous zones.
2. Freud’s Psychosexual Stages.
i. Oral Stage (0-18 months) – focus is on the pleasure center of the mouth (sucking, biting, chewing).
ii. Anal Stage (18-36 months) – focus is on the pleasure of bowel and bladder elimination; coping with demands for control.
iii. Phallic Stage (3-6 years) – focus is on pleasure zone of the genital area; coping with incestuous feelings.
a. Oedipus Complex – according to Freud, a boy’s sexual desire towards his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father.
b. Some psychologists believed that girls experienced a parallel Electra complex, Freud disagreed.
c. Children eventually cope with threatening feelings, said Freud, by repressing them and by identifying with (trying to become like) the rival parent (Ifyou can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em).
- Identification – the process by which children incorporate their parents’ values into their developing superegos.
- Identification with the same-sex parent provides our gender identity.
iv. Latency Stage (6 to puberty) - With their sexual feelings repressed and redirected, children enter a latency stage.
v. Genital Stage (puberty on) – maturation of sexual interests.
3. At any point in the oral, anal, or phallic stage, strong conflict can lock, or fixate, the person’s pleasure-seeking energies in that stage.
i. Fixation – a lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, where conflicts were unresolved.
ii. Orally fixated adults are said to exhibit either passive dependence (like a nursing infant) or an exaggerated denial of this dependence (acting tough or sarcastic).
iii. Those who never quite resolve the anal conflict between desire to eliminate at will and the demands of toilet training may be:
a. Anal expulsive – messy and disorganized
b. Anal retentive – highly controlled and compulsively neat.
F. Exploring the Unconscious and Defense Mechanisms
1. When the ego fears losing control of the inner war between the demands of the id and the superego, the result is a dark cloud of unfocused anxiety.
2. The ego protects itself against anxiety with defense mechanisms.
3. Defense Mechanisms – in psychoanalytic theory, the ego’s protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality.
4. Defenses:
i. Repression – the basic defense mechanism that banishes anxiety arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness.
ii. Regression – defense mechanism in which an individual faced with anxiety retreats to a more infantile psychosexual stage, where some psychic energy remains fixated.
iii. Reaction Formation – defense mechanism by which the ego unconsciously switches unacceptable impulses into their opposites. Thus people may express feelings that are the opposite of their anxiety-arousing unconscious feelings.
iv. Projection – defense mechanism by which people disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others.
v. Rationalization – defense mechanism that offers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one’s actions.
vi. Displacement – defense mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person, as when redirecting anger toward a safer outlet.
vii. Sublimation – in psychoanalytic theory, the defense mechanism by which people rechannel their unacceptable impulses into socially approved activities.
G. Assessing the Unconscious
1. Different personality theories have developed different methods of assessment.
2. Psychoanalysts dismiss objective assessment tools as merely tapping the conscious surface. Their tool of choice would be a sort of psychological x-ray – a test that sees through our surface pretensions and reveals our hidden conflicts and impulses.
i. Projective Test – a test, such as the Rorschach or TAT, that provides ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger projection of one’s inner dynamics.
a. Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) – a projective test in which people express their inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes.
b. Rorschach Inkblot Test – the most widely used projective test, a set of 10 inkblots, designed by Hermann Rorschach; seeks to identify people’s inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of the blots.
3. Two primary criteria of a good test are reliability and validity. The almost universal agreement among the scientific community is that the Rorschach Test is not very good.
4. The Rorschach remains both the most cherished and the most reviled of all psychological assessment tools.
H. Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective
1. Neo- Freudians Alfred Adler and Karen Horney accepted many of Freud’s ideas, as did Carl Jung. But they also argued that we have motives other than sex and aggression, and that the ego’s conscious control is greater than Freud supported.
2. Today’s research psychologists find some of Freud’s specific ideas implausible, unvalidated, or contradicted by new research.
i. They note that his theory offers only after-the-fact explanations.
3. Many researchers now believe that repression rarely, if ever, occurs.
4. Freud did draw psychological attention to the unconscious, to the struggle to cope with anxiety and sexuality, and to the conflict between biological impulses and social restraints. His cultural impact has been enormous.
Trait Theories
I. Trait theorists believe that we can describe people’s personalities by specifying their main characteristics, or traits.
1. These characteristics (for example, honesty, laziness, ambition) are thought to be stable and to motivate behavior in keeping with the trait.
i. When we describe someone as friendly, we mean that the person acts in a friendly manner across different situations and times.
J. Nomothetic Approach - trait theorists who believe that the same basic set of traits can be used to describe all people’s personalities.
1. Hans Eyesenck - believed that by classifying all people along an introversion-extraversion scale and a stable-unstable scale, we could describe their personalities.
2. Raymond Cattell – developed the 16 PF (personality factor) test to measure what be believed were the 16 basic traits present in all people, albeit to different degrees.
3. Big Five Personality Traits – a few held by a number of contemporary trait theorists that personality can be described using the big five personality traits:
i. extraversion
ii. agreeableness
iii. conscientiousness
iv. openness to experience
v. emotional stability (or neuroticism)
K. Factor Analysis – a statistical technique used to reduce the vast number of different terms we use to describe people to 16 or five basic traits.
1. Researchers use correlations between traits in order to see which traits cluster together as factors.
i. If a strong correlation is found between punctuality, diligence, and neatness, one could argue that these traits represent a common factor that we could name conscientiousness.
L. Idiographic Theorists – assert that using the same set of terms to classify all people is impossible.
1. They argue each person needs to be seen in terms of what few traits best characterize his or her unique self.
i. While honesty may be important in describing one person, it may not be important in describing someone else.
2. Gordon Allport – created a measure to identify each person’s central traits, the traits most important in describing that individual.
M. Assessing Traits
1. To assess traits, psychologists have devised self-report inventories, such as the empirically derived MMPI-2.
2. Peer reports may provide even more trustworthy clues to a person’s behavioral traits.
N. Evaluating the Trait Perspective
1. Critics of the trait perspective question the consistency with which traits are expressed.
2. Although people’s traits persist over time, human behavior varies widely from situation to situation.
3. Despite variations, a person’s average behavior across different situations tends to be fairly consistent.
Humanistic Theories
O. The Humanistic theories of personality view people as innately good and able to determine their own destinies through the exercise of free will
1. Stress the importance of people’s subjective experience and feelings.
2. Focus is placed on the importance of a person’s self-concept and self-esteem.
i. Self-concept – develops through a person’s involvement with others, especially parents.
ii. Someone with a positive self-concept is likely to have high self-esteem.
P. Two of the most influential humanistic psychologists were Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers.
1. Both men believed that people are motivated to reach their fill potential or self-actualize.
2. Maslow – see "Hierarchy of Needs" from previous chapter.
3. Rogers – created "self-theory".
i. Rogers believed that although people are innately good, they require certain things from their interactions with others, most importantly, unconditional positive regard, in order to self-actualize.
ii. Unconditional Positive Regard – a blanket acceptance.
a. Parents make their children feel loved no matter what.
iii. Parents who make their children feel as if they will only be loved if they earn high grades or have the right kind of friends send their children the message that their love is conditional.
iv. Like Maslow, Rogers believed that people must feel accepted in order to make strides toward self-actualization.
Q. Assessing the Self
1. Assess personality through questionnaires on which people report their self-concept
2. Stresses the importance of self-esteem and the potency of the self-serving bias.
3. Individuals and cultures vary in giving priority to "me" or "we"
i. Individualism – personal goals and attributes.
ii. Collectivism – priority given to group goals and to one’s social identity and commitments.
R. Evaluating the Humanistic Perspective
1. Humanistic psychology helped to renew psychology’s interest in the self.
2. Critics complain that the concepts are vague and subjective, its values individualist and self-centered, and its assumptions naively optimistic.
Biological Theories
S. Biological theories of personality view genes, chemicals, and body types as the central determinants of who a person is.
1. While we are still far from being able to map all the human genes, a growing body of evidence supports the idea that human personality is shaped, in part, by genetics.
T. Although many people associate traits with genetics, traits are not necessarily inherited.
1. Little evidence exists for the heritability of personality.
2. Heritability is a measure of the percentage of a trait that is inherited.
i. For instance, high is highly heritable.
3. Personality traits that are believed to be inherited are called temperaments.
i. A number of researchers have suggested that inhibition, or the lack thereof, is a temperament.
4. One of the earliest theories of personality was biological.
i. Hippocrates – believed that personality was determined by the relative level of four humors (fluids) in the body. The four humors were:
a. blood
b. yellow bile
c. black bile
d. phlegm
ii. A cheerful person, for example, was said to have an excess of blood.
U. Another relatively early biological theory of personality was William Sheldon’s somatotype theory.
1. Sheldon identified three body types:
i. endomorphs ( fat) – friendly and outgoing
ii. mesomorphs (muscular) - aggressive
iii. ectomorphs (thin) – shy and secretive
2. Sheldon argued that certain personality traits were associated with each body type.
3. His research show only a correlation and therefore, even if found to be reliable and valid, it does not show that biology shapes personality.
Behaviorist Theories
V. Radical Behaviorists take a very different approach to personality.
1. These theorists argue that behavior is personality and that the way most people think of the term personality is meaningless.
2. According to this view, personality is determined by environment.
i. The reinforcement contingencies to which one is exposed creates one’s personality.
ii. By changing people’s environments, behaviorists believe we can alter their personalities.
Social-Cognitive Theories
W. These models of personality meld together behaviorists’ emphasis with the cognitive focus on patterns of thought.
X. Three examples of such models are:
1. Albert Bandura’s triadic reciprocality model.
i. Bandura believes that personality is created by an interaction between the person (traits), the environment, and the person’s behavior. This model is also known as reciprocal determinism.
2. George Kelly’s personal-construct theory.
i. Kelly argued that people, in their attempt to understand their world, develop their own, individual systems of personal construct.
ii. Such constructs consist of pairs of opposites such as fair-unfair, smart-dumb, and exciting-dull. People use these constructs to evaluate their world.
iii. Kelly’s theory is based on a fundamental postulate that essentially states the people’s behavior is influenced by their cognitions and that by knowing how people have behaved in the past, we can predict how they will act in the future.
3. Julian Rotter developed the concept of locus of control.
i. A person can be described as having either an internal or an external locus of control.
a. Internal locus of control – people feels as if they are responsible for what happens to them
b. External locus of control – people generally believe that luck and other forces outside their own control determine their destinies.
ii. A person’s locus of control can have a large effect on how a person thinks and acts, thus impacting their personality.
Assessment Techniques
Y. Psychologists’ methods of assessing people’s personalities differ depending upon their theoretical orientation.
Z. Projective Tests – involve asking people to interpret ambiguous stimuli.
1. Examples – Rorschach inkblot test, thematic appreciation test (TAT).
2. People are thought to project their unconscious thoughts onto the ambiguous stimuli.
3. Scoring projective tests is a complicated process.
AA. Self-Report Inventories – essentially questionnaires that ask people to provide information about themselves.
1. Used by humanistic psychologists, trait theorists, and cognitive-behavioral psychologists.
2. Example – MMPI-2
BB. Radical behaviorists reject both projective tests and self-report inventories.
1. They argue that the only way to measure a person’s personality is to observe their behavior.
CC. Reliability and validity are a concern in any personality assessment.
DD. Curiosity about one’s personality makes people susceptible to being deceived.
1. Barnum Effect - Research has shown that people have a tendency to see themselves in vague, stock descriptions of personality.
i. "There is a sucker born every minute.
ii. Astrologers, psychics, and fortune tellers take advantage of the Barnum effect in their work.
EE. Personality has proved difficult to define, much less measure.
1. Be skeptical when confronted with people who offer you quick, pat descriptions of your life or future.