lesson 1

• Personality


  A pattern of relatively permanent traits and unique characteristics that give both consistency and individuality to a person's behavior
• Traits


  • Contribute to individual differences of behavior, consistency of behavior over time, and stability of behavior across situations
• Characteristics


  • Unique qualities of an individual that include such attributes as temperament, physique, and intelligence
• Theory


  A set of related assumptions that allows scientists to use logical deductive reasoning to formulate testable hypotheses
• Psychodynamic Theories


  • Focused on the importance of early childhood experiences and relationships with parents as guiding forces that shape personality development
  • Sees the unconscious mind and motivates as much more powerful than the conscious awareness
  • Traditionally used dream interpretation to uncover the unconscious thoughts, feelings, and impulses as a main form of treatment neurosis and mental illness
• Humanistic-Existential Theories


  • The primary approach is that people strive toward meaning, growth, well being, happiness and psychological health
  • State of positive emotion and happiness foster psychological health and pro social behavior
  • Assume that not only are we driven by a search for meaning, but also that negative experiences such as failure, awareness of death, death of a loved one, and anxiety, as a part of the human condition and can foster psychological growth
• Dispositional Theories


  • Argue that the unique and long term tendencies to behave in particular ways are the essence of our personality
  • These unique dispositions, such as extraversions or anxiety, are called traits
  • The field has converged on the understanding that there are five main trait dimensions in human personality: extraversion (or extroversion), agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism
• Biological-Evolutionary Theories


  • Emphasizes that we think, feel, and do is always an interaction between nature (biological) and nurture (environment)
  • Personality have been shaped by forces of evolution
  • Behavior, thought, feelings and personality are influenced by differences in basic genetic, epigenetic, and neurological systems between individuals
• Learning-(Social) Cognitive Theories


  • Focuses only on behavior, not only hypothetical and unobservable internal states such as thoughts, feelings, drives, or motives
  • All behaviors are learned through association and/or its consequences
  • Personality is shaped by how we think and perceive the world
• Dimensions for Concept of Humanity

  • Determinism vs Free Choice
  • Pessimism vs Optimism
  • Causality vs Teleology
  • Conscious vs Unconscious
  • Biological vs Social Influences on Personality
  • Uniqueness vs Similarities