Theories of Personality : Finals

• Gordon Allport

  Psychologist who developed dispositional theory and five factor theory of personality
• Allport's early life "was marked by plain Protestant piety"
• In 1939, Allport was elected president of the American Psychological Association (APA)
• Allport's approach to personality theory

  • What is personality?
  • What is the role of conscious motivation in personality theory?
  • What are the characteristics of the psychologically healthy person?
• Personality


  The dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine his unique adjustments to his environment
• Personality


  • Includes both overt behaviors and covert thoughts
  • It not only is something, but it does something
• Conscious motivation


  Healthy adults are aware of what they are doing and their reasons for doing it
• Some motivation is driven by hidden impulses and sublimated drives
• Psychologically mature people


  • Characterized by proactive behavior
  • Capable of consciously acting on their environment causing their environment to react to them
  • Motivated by conscious processes
  • Relatively trauma-free childhood
• Six criteria for the mature personality

  • Extension of the Sense of Self
  • Characterized by a "warm relating of self to others"
  • Emotional security or self-acceptance
  • Possess a realistic perception of their environment
  • Insight and humor
  • Unifying philosophy of life
• Personal dispositions


  Most important structure for describing the person in terms of individual characteristics
• Generalized neuropsychic structure


  More important than common traits because it permits researchers to study a single individual
• Common traits


  General characteristics held in common by many people
• Three levels of personal dispositions

  • Cardinal dispositions
  • Central dispositions
  • Secondary dispositions
• Motivational dispositions


  Intensely experienced dispositions that initiate action
• Stylistic dispositions


  Personal dispositions that are less intensely experienced but possess some motivational power and guide action
• Proprium


  Behaviors and characteristics that people regard as warm, central, and important in their lives
• Non-propriate behaviors


  • Basic drives and needs
  • Tribal customs (clothing, saying "hello")
  • Habitual behaviors
• Assumption: people not only react to their environment but also shape their environment and cause it to react to them
• Functional autonomy


  If a motive is functionally autonomous, it is the explanation for behavior, and one need not look beyond it for hidden or primary causes
• Perseverative functional autonomy


  Perseveration - tendency of an impression to leave an influence on subsequent experience
• Propriate functional autonomy


  Refers to those self-sustaining motives that are related to the proprium
• Processes that are not functionally autonomous


  • Biological drives (ex: eating, breathing, sleeping)
  • Motives linked to reduction of basic drives (reflection actions such as an eye blink)
  • Constitutional equipment (physique, intelligence, temperament)
  • Habits in the process of being formed
  • Patterns of behavior that require primary reinforcement
  • Sublimations that can be tied to childhood sexual desires
  • Some neurotic or pathological symptoms
• 4 requirements of an adequate theory of motivation

  • Acknowledges the contemporaneity of motives
  • It is a pluralistic theory—allowing for motives of many type
  • Ascribes dynamic force to cognitive processes (ex: planning and intention)
  • Allows for the concrete uniqueness of motives
• Nomothetic


  Seeks general laws
• Idiographic


  Peculiar to the single case (same as morphogenic)
• Morphogenic


  Patterned properties of the whole organism and allows for intraperson comparisons
• Methods of morphogenic psychology


  • Verbatim recordings, interviews, dreams, confessions
  • Diaries, letters, autobiographies
  • Questionnaires, expressive documents, projective documents
  • Literary works, art forms, automatic writings, doodles, handshakes, voice patterns, body gestures, handwriting, gait
• Cattell's divisions of traits

  • Common Traits
  • Unique Traits
  • Source Traits & Surface Traits
  • Temperament
  • Motivation
  • Ability
• Cattell's multifaceted approach yielded 35 primary, or first-order, traits. 23 characterize the normal population and 12 measure the pathological dimension
• Cattell's 16 personality factors is the largest and most frequently studied of the normal traits and is found on the 16 PF Scale
• NEO-PI yields scores on only five personality factors
• Correlation coefficient


  A mathematical procedure for expressing the degree of correspondence between two sets of scores
• Factor analysis


  Can account for a large number of variables with a smaller number of more basic dimensions called traits
• Traits


  Factors that represent a cluster of closely related variables
• Unipolar traits


  Scaled from zero to some large amount (ex: height, weight, intellectual ability)
• Bipolar traits


  Extend from one pole to an opposite pole, with zero representing a midpoint (ex: introversion vs. extraversion, liberalism vs. conservatism)
• Orthogonal rotation


  Usually results in only a few meaningful traits
• Oblique method


  Preferred by Cattell, ordinarily produce a larger number of traits
• The Five Factor Model (FFM) started with three factors: N (Neuroticism), E (Extraversion), and O (Openness to Experience)