Personality: Quick Review

Personality is the collection of characteristic thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that make up a person.
Personality traits are consistent and long lasting, while states are temporary.
The Greeks thought that four types of humors corresponded to personality types.
Raymond Cattell used factor analysis to cluster traits into sixteen groups.
Many psychologists believe that there are five basic traits.
These Big Five traits include neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.

Psychodynamic Theories

Psychodynamic theories are based on Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis and emphasize unconscious motives and the importance of childhood experiences in shaping personality.
Freud believed that the mind has three levels of awareness: the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious.
Information in the unconscious emerges in slips of the tongue, jokes, dreams, illness symptoms, and associations between ideas.
The personality is made up of three components that are in constant conflict: the id, the ego, and the superego.
The id contains biological impulses, is governed by the pleasure principle, and is characterized by primary process thinking.
The ego manages the conflict between the id and reality. It is governed by the reality principle and is characterized by secondary process thinking.
The superego is the moral component of the personality.
Anxiety arises when the ego is unable to balance adequately the demands of the id and superego.
People use defense mechanisms to protect themselves from anxiety.
Freud proposed that children go through five stages of development, each characterized by sexual gratification from a particular part of the body.
Fixation is an inability to progress normally from one developmental stage to another.
The Oedipus complex is a critical phase of development that occurs in the phallic stage. It refers to a male child’s sexual desire for his mother and his hostility toward his father.
According to Carl Jung’s analytical psychology, people have a personal unconscious and a collective unconscious. The latter contains universal memories of people’s common human past.
According to Alfred Adler’s individual psychology, the main motivations for behavior are strivings for superiority.
Object relations theorists believe that people are motivated most by attachments to people.
Critics of psychodynamic theories argue that these theories are not falsifiable, that they generalize from a few patients to all people, and that they rely on retrospective accounts.

Behaviorist Theories

Behaviorist explanations of personality focus on learning.
B. F. Skinner believed that people’s personalities arise from response tendencies and that consequences shape the responses.
Albert Bandura said that people learn responses by watching others. He believes that thinking and reasoning are important in learning.
Walter Mischel’s research showed that people behave differently in different situations.
Psychologists agree that personality is formed through a two-way interaction between personal characteristics and the environment. This interaction is called reciprocal determinism.
Critics argue that behaviorists often generalize inappropriately from animal studies to humans and that they often underestimate biological factors.

Humanistic Theories

Humanistic theories emphasize subjective viewpoints when studying personality. They have an optimistic view that focuses on humans’ rationality, consciousness, and freedom.
Abraham Maslow studied the healthy personality and described the characteristics of the self-actualizing personality.
Carl Rogers’s person-centered theory suggests that the self-concept is the most important feature of personality. Children’s self-concepts match reality if their parents give them unconditional love. Rogers said that people experience anxiety when reality threatens their self-concepts.
Critics argue that humanistic theories and concepts are too naïvely optimistic, vague, difficult to test, and biased toward individualistic values.

Biological Approaches

Hans Eysenck believes that genetics largely determine personality.
Studies of temperament and heritability provide the most empirical evidence for genetic contributions to personality.
Environment influences peer relationships and situations.
Sharing a family environment does not lead to many similarities in personality.
Evolutionary theorists explain personality in terms of its adaptive value.

Culture and Personality

American culture promotes a view of the self as independent, while Asian cultures generally promote a view of the self as interdependent.
Culture influences both aggressiveness in males and altruism.
Cultural psychologists face the challenge of avoiding stereotypes and acknowledging universal features while studying differences among cultures.

Assessing Personality

Personality assessments are used to help diagnose psychological disorders, counsel people about normal day-to-day problems, select personnel for organizations, and conduct research.
Objective personality tests are usually self-report inventories. They include the MMPI-2, the 16PF, and the NEO Personality Inventory.
Projective personality tests require subjects to respond to ambiguous stimuli. They include the Rorschach test and the Thematic Apperception Test.
Assessment centers allow psychologists to assess personality in specific situations.
Each way of assessing personality has its advantages and disadvantages.