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Personality: the distinctive and relatively enduring ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that characterise a persons responses to life situations
Ways of understanding what people are really like Theories of personality as models of human beings
Key differences are found in:
Hypothesized sources of motivation Assumptions about human nature Sources of data used to draw conclusions
Conscious: mental events in current awareness Preconscious: memories, feelings, and thoughts that we are currently unaware of but that can be recalled easily Unconscious: a dynamic realm of wishes, feelings, and impulses that lies beyond our awareness
The
Structure of Personality:
Id is the only structure present at birth Source of all psychic energy Exists totally within the unconscious mind Pleasure Principle: seeks immediate gratification and release, regardless of rational considerations and environmental realities
Constant struggle between the ids impulses and the counterforces of the ego and superego Anxiety results when the ego confronts impulses that threaten to get out of control
Defense Mechanisms: unconscious mental operations that minimise anxiety by denying or distorting reality
Almost everyone uses these at times; maladjusted people use them excessively
Repression: the ego uses energy to prevent anxiety-arousing memories, feelings, and impulses from entering consciousness
Primary defense mechanism
Psychosexual Stages: periods of development in which the ids pleasure-seeking tendencies are focused on specific pleasure-sensitive areas of the body (the erogenous zones) Fixation: a state of arrested psychosexual development in which instincts are focused on a particular theme
Too much or too little stimulation of erogenous zone
Children develop erotic feelings for their oppositesex parent Causes hostility toward the same-sex parent
Resulting guilt and fear is resolved through identification with the same-sex parent
Boys: castration anxiety Girls: anger over lack of a penis
Little empirical support Difficult to disprove - does not allow clear behavioral predictions
Research has vindicated Freuds belief in unconscious psychic events Childhood experiences are influential in the development of adult personality
Believed that our natural forces will direct us toward self-actualisation, the highest realisation of human potential The Self: an organized, consistent set of perceptions of and beliefs about oneself
It is an object of perception (the self-concept) It is an internal entity that directs behaviour
Develops as children begin to distinguish between me and not me Self-Consistency: an absence of conflict among self-perceptions Congruence: consistency between selfperceptions and experience
Continues to develop in response to life experiences
Well-adjusted individuals can modify the selfconcept Unhealthy individuals choose to deny or distort experiences Degree of congruence between the self-concept and experience defines ones adjustment level
Can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies
Need for Positive Regard: an inborn need for acceptance, sympathy, and love from others Unconditional Positive Regard: communicates that the person is inherently worthy of love, regardless of accomplishments or behaviour Conditional Positive Regard: dependent on how the child behaves
Conditions of Worth: conditions that dictate the circumstances under which we approve or disapprove of ourselves
Can cause incongruence between the self and experience Can foster a need to deny or distort important aspects of experience
Humanistic perspective relies to heavily on individuals reports of their personal experiences Theory can be measured and tested
Rogerss work on ideal self vs. perceived self
Personality Traits: relatively stable cognitive, emotional, and behavioural characteristics of people that help establish their individual identities and distinguish them from others
Describe the basic classes of behaviour that define personality Devise ways of measuring individual differences in personality traits Use these measures to understand and predict behaviour
Lexical Approach: proposing traits on the basis of words or concepts from our everyday language Factor Analysis: a statistical tool used to identify clusters of behaviours that are highly correlated with one another, but not with behaviours in other clusters
Clusters reflect a basic factor (a trait)
Cattells 16 Personality Factors: utilised factor analysis to identify 16 basic behaviour factors
16 Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF) developed by Cattell to measure individual differences on each of his dimensions
The Five Factor Model: proposes that five higher-order factors capture the basic structure of personality
Openness to Experience Conscientiousness Extraversion Agreeableness Neuroticism
Question comes up as to how consistent a persons behaviour actually is. Walter Mischel argues that there is more inconsistency than consistency in peoples behaviour
Primary variability is between situations rather than between people
Is the trait approach essentially an example of the Fundamental Error of Attribution in action?
Personality traits interact with other traits, as well as with characteristics of different situations Influenced by how important a given trait is for a person Differences in the tendency to tailor behaviour to a given situation
Self-monitoring: people who are attentive to situational cues and adapt behaviour to what they think would be most appropriate
Focuses attention on the value of identifying, classifying, and measuring stable, enduring personality dispositions Need to focus on how traits interact with each other Focuses only on description, not explanation
Social-Cognitive Theories: combine the behavioural and cognitive perspectives into an approach that stresses the interaction of a thinking human with a social environment that provides learning experiences Reciprocal Determinism: the person, the persons behaviour, and the environment all influence on another in a pattern of two-way causal links
Self-Efficacy (Albert Bandura): a persons beliefs concerning their ability to perform the behaviours needed to achieve desired outcomes Four determinants:
Previous performance expectancies in similar situations
Shape our beliefs about our capabilities Specific to particular situations
Affects (Emotions):
Color our perceptions and influence behaviour Can raise or lower outcome expectancies
Reconciling Inconsistency:
Many factors affect behaviour People behave similarly in situations that, to them, have important characteristics in common
They may behave inconsistently in situations that evoke different responses by the CAPS
Strong scientific base Brings together cognitive and behavioural approaches Helps to explain trait-behaviour inconsistencies