Personality Theory

• Phenomenal field


  The space of perceptions that makes up our experience - a subjective construction
• Feelings of authenticity


  People can realize a state in which their conscious experiences and goals are consistent with their inner, viscerally-felt values
• Positivity of human motivation


  Our most fundamental motivation is toward positive growth
• Phenomenological perspective


  An approach that investigates people's conscious experiences
• Self


  Key structural aspect of phenomenological experience - a subset of the phenomenal field that is recognized by the individual as "me" or "I"
• Actual self


  The self that we believe we are now
• Ideal self


  The self that we ideally see ourselves becoming in the future
• Intuitive self


  • People possess a true self that they can experience at a deep, intuitive level
• 1. Sort technique


  Psychologists give the test taker a set of cards, each of which contains a personality characteristic, and the test taker sorts them from "Most characteristic of me" to "Least characteristic of me"
• Semantic differential


  Individual rates a concept on a number of seven-point scales defined by polar adjectives such as good-bad, strong-weak, or active-passive
• Gender differences in self-esteem changes from early teens to early twenties


  On average, self-esteem increases for males and decreases for females over these formative years of life
• Self-actualization


  The most fundamental personality process - a forward-looking tendency toward personality growth
• Self-consistency and congruence


  The organism functions to maintain consistency among self-perceptions and achieve congruence between perceptions of the self and experiences
• Incongruence and defensive processes

  Anxiety is the result of discrepancy between experience and the perception of the self. Defense is against the loss of a consistent, integrated sense of self.
• Need for positive regard


  The need to be accepted and respected by others is so powerful that people can lose touch with their own true feelings and values in their pursuit of positive regard from others
• Conditions of worth


  If a child experiences conditions of worth, they may then cope by denying or distorting a feature of their true self
• Parent-child relationships


  • Acceptant, democratic parental attitudes facilitate the most growth
• Positive regard from significant individuals


  Can contribute directly to changes in views of self and psychological well-being across the course of life
• Self-experience discrepancy


  Healthy persons experience a congruence between self and experience, while neurotic persons deny awareness of significant sensory and emotional experiences that are incongruent with their self-structure
• Therapeutic conditions for change

  Congruence or genuineness, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding
• Rogerian therapy should bring about a greater congruence between ideal and actual self
• Rationalization


  A person distorts behaviour in such a way as to make it consistent with the self
• Fantasy


  A man who defensively believes himself to be an adequate person may fantasize that he is a prince
• Projection


  People whose self-concept involves no "bad" sexual thoughts may feel that others are making them have these thoughts
• Therapeutic Conditions Necessary for Change

  • Congruence or genuineness
  • Unconditional positive regard
  • Empathic understanding
• Before therapy, the relation between people's actual and ideal self was quite low; average correlation was zero
• After therapy, the congruence between these two aspects of self increased significantly: average correlation was .34
• At the time of follow-up, the actual-ideal correlation remained about the same, .31
• The group not seeking counseling displayed higher congruence between actual and ideal selves than did the therapy group
• Nonetheless, Rogerian therapy did produce significant gains
• Presence


  Interpersonal experiences between client and therapist that seem "beyond words and logic" are thought to foster deep psychological change
• The Human Potential Movement

  • Focuses on people who are exceptionally positive, unusually high-functioning, self-actualized individuals
  • Exceptional figures possess qualities that are informative because they tell us about human potentials
• The Positive Psychology Movement


  • Aims to portray the nature of human strengths and virtues
• Broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions

  Positive emotions "broaden" thought and action tendencies by widening the range of ideas that came to mind and actions that individuals pursue
• Positive emotions can further build human competencies and achievements
• People who experienced positive emotions during the study experienced less stress
• Positive emotions mediated the relation between individual differences in resilience and cardiovascular reactions
• Flow


  A feature of conscious experience characterized by a perceived match between personal skills and environmental challenge, a high level of focused attention, involvement in an activity such that time seems to fly by and irrelevant thoughts and distractions do not enter into consciousness, a sense of intrinsic enjoyment in the activity, and a temporary loss of self-consciousness
• Existentialism


  • Addresses the nature of the human experience and emphasizes Rogerian themes: "freedom, choice, authenticity, alienation"
• Terror management theory (TMT)


  Examines the consequences of the combination of people's desire to live and their awareness of the inevitability of death