personality

• Personality


  Relatively enduring predispositions that influence our behavior across many situations
• Trait


  Enduring—consistently predicts behaviors across time and situations
• State


  Malleable—your current feeling or attitude toward a situation or object
• Causes of Personality


  • Genetic factors
  • Shared environmental factors (e.g., all children have the same experiences)
  • Nonshared environmental factors (e.g., children have different experiences)
• Twin and adoption studies

  • Used to disentangle factors
• Genetics: Fraternal twins (dizygotic) vs. Identical twins (monozygotic)
• Environment: Reared together vs. reared separately
• Shared Environment Makes Little Contributions
• Personality Difficult to Predict Based on Genes
• Molecular genetic studies


  Investigation that allows researchers to pinpoint genes associated with specific personality traits
• Epigenetics


  Separating genotype vs. phenotype
• Psychoanalytic Theory


  Developed by Sigmund Freud
• Psychoanalytic Theory's three primary assumptions


  • Psychic determinism: No free will—we're at the mercy of our inner unconscious mind
  • Revealed through dreams and "Freudian slips"
  • Dream interpretation
• Symbolic meaning


  All actions/quirks have a latent meaning
• Unconscious motivation


  We rarely understand why we do what we do
• Psychoanalytic Theory's three components

  • Id: basic instincts; operates on pleasure principle
  • Ego (the boss): principal decision maker; operates on reality principle
  • Superego ("above ego"): sense of morality
• Defense Mechanisms


  Unconscious behaviors intended to minimize anxiety
• Stages of Psychosexual Development (Freud)

  • Oral stage (birth to 18 mos.)
  • Anal stage (18 mos. to 3 yrs. old.)
  • Phallic stage (3 yrs. to 6 yrs.)
  • Latency stage (6 to 12 yrs.)
  • Genital stage (> 12 yrs.)
• Fixations


  • Occur due to deprivation of sexual gratification they were supposed to receive during that stage or were excessively gratified during that stage
• Major criticisms of Psychoanalytic Theory
• Freud's conception of the unconscious and repression
• Unrepresentative samples (generalizability)
• Freud's Influence


  • Repressed memories
  • Freudian slips
  • Dream symbolism
  • Expressing feelings
• Neo-Freudians


  Differ from Freud's theories in two key ways: Less emphasis on sexuality, more on social (including environmental) drives; More optimistic about personal growth
• Alfred Adler


  Principal motive is not sex or aggression, but the striving for superiority
• Erik Erikson


  Personality develops throughout lifespan (rather than just in early life)
• Carl Jung


  Collective unconscious: Storehouse of memories that our ancestors have passed down to us across generations
• Karen Horney


  Feminist personality theorist: Women's sense of inferiority stems not from their anatomy, but from their excessive dependency on men, which society has ingrained in them from an early age
• Behavioral Approach


  Differences in our personalities stem largely from our learning histories
• Social-cognitive Approach


  Reciprocal determinism: People mutually influence each other's behavior
• Observational (vicarious) learning


  Habits are required through watching other people's behaviors
• Locus of control


  External: You have NO control over situations; Internal: You have control over situations
• Carl Rogers


  Rejected determinism and embraced free will; Person/client-centered approach; The drive to develop our innate potential to the fullest possible extent
• Roger's Self-concept model


  The self (set of beliefs about who we are); Ideal self vs. real self; Conditions of worth: expectations we place on ourselves
• Trait Models


  Structures of personality; Factor analysis: Statistical technique to reduce diversity of personality descriptors to underlying traits
• Big 5 Personality Traits

  • Extraverted
  • Openness
  • Conscientiousness
  • Neuroticism
  • Agreeableness
• Real-world applications of Big 5 Personality
• Prevalence rates of Big 5 Personality Traits differ across cultures
• Dog (vs. cat) people vs. Cat (vs. dog) people
• Introversion vs. Extroversion


  Eysenck's theory: Extrovert has low baseline level of arousal, Introvert has high baseline of arousal