Ash Walsh

• Personality


  Enduring patterns of thought, feeling, motivation and behaviour that are expressed in different circumstances
• Personality research aims


  • Construct general theories that describe the structure of personality
  • Assess individual differences in personality (the way people vary)
• Personality Theories


  • Psychodynamic
  • Cognitive-Social
  • Trait
  • Humanistic
• Psychodynamic Views of Personality

  • Freud emphasised the role of unconscious processes in the control of behaviour
  • Conflict occurs between the different aspects of consciousness (opposing motives)
  • Successful resolution of conflict requires compromise formation
• Psychodynamic interactions


  1. Topographical model: Suggested three levels of consciousness

  2. Freud's drive (instinct) model
• Libido


  Pleasure-seeking, sensuality and love, as well as desire for intercourse
• Freud's developmental model


  1. Libido follows a developmental course during childhood

  2. Stages of psychosexual development

  3. Fixed progression of change from stage to stage

  4. Notion of fixation at a particular libidinal stage
• Freud's Psychosexual Stages


  • Reflect the child's evolving quest for pleasure and growing realisation of the social limitations on this quest
• Freud's Structural Model of Personality

  • Conflict seen as being between three 'forces': Id, Superego, Ego
  • Conflict among various forces leads to a compromise forged by the ego
• Defence Mechanisms


  • Repression
  • Denial
  • Projection
  • Reaction formation
  • Sublimation
  • Rationalisation
  • Displacement
  • Regression
  • Passive aggression
• Object relations


  Enduring patterns of behaviour in intimate relationships and to the motivational, cognitive and affective processes that produce those patterns
• Assessing Unconscious Patterns


  • Life History Methods
  • Projective Tests (e.g. Rorschach inkblot test, Thematic Apperception Test (TAT))
• Cognitive–social personality theory


  Places emphasis on learned aspects of personality as well as expectations and beliefs of the person
• Cognitive–Social Model of Behaviour


  Whether people carry out an action depends on expectancies and competencies: Behaviour-outcome expectancies, Self-efficacy expectancies, Competencies, Self-regulation
• Self-regulation


  Considered the final variable required to execute a behaviour successfully
• Trait


  Refers to emotional, cognitive and behavioural tendencies that constitute underlying personality dimensions on which individuals can vary
• Trait Theorists


  • Gordon Allport
  • Raymond Cattell (16PF)
  • Hans Eysenck
  • The Five-Factor Model
• Eysenck's Theory


  • Emotional Stability, Introversion/Extroversion, Psychoticism
• The Big Five Factors of Personality

  • Openness to experience
  • Conscientiousness
  • Extroversion
  • Agreeableness
  • Neuroticism
• Consistency across situations: Mischel argues that situational variables largely determine behaviour
• Consistency across time: a basic personality disposition is heavily influenced by genes (temperament)
• Humanistic personality theorists


  • Reject the behaviourist and psychodynamic notions of personality
  • Focus on aspects of personality that are distinctly human
  • Intent is to assist people in developing to their maximal potential
• Rogers' Person-Centered Approach


  • Human beings are good by nature but personality becomes distorted by interpersonal experiences
  • Each person has multiple selves: True-self, False-self, Ideal-self
  • Actualising tendency
• Existential Approaches


  • Importance of subjective experience
  • Central quest for the meaning of life
  • Danger of losing touch with feelings
  • Danger of conceiving oneself as thing-like rather than as changing, ever-forming and the creative source of will and action
• Mortality Salience


  • Existential dread: ultimately we all face death, of ourselves and of our loved ones
  • Death Anxiety: cultural values and beliefs symbolically deny death and allow hope in the face of mortality
• Heritability


  Refers to the proportion of variance in a particular trait that is due to genetic influences
• Personality and Culture


  • Freud viewed cultural phenomena as reflections of individual psychodynamics
  • The culture pattern approach sees culture as an organised set of beliefs, rituals and institutions that shape individuals to fit its patterns
  • The interactionist approaches suggest that personality, economics, and culture mutually influence one another