UNIT 6 Personality

• Personality


  The unique patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that distinguish a person from others
• Personality is a product of both biology and environment, and remains fairly consistent throughout life
• Reactions to situations


  • Laughing, texting boss, turning to phone vs huffing and fuming
• Personality


  The enduring characteristics and behavior that comprise a person's unique adjustment to life, including major traits, interests, drives, values, self-concept, abilities, and emotional patterns
• Definitions of personality in psychology

  • Allport: "Personality is the dynamic organization within the individual, of those psycho-physical systems that characterize his/ her characteristic adjustment to the environment"
  • Pervin: "It refers to the unique and consistent pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving"
  • APA: "Personality refers to, individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving"
  • Morton Prince: "It is the sum total of all biological, innate dispositions, impulses, tendencies, appetites and instincts of the individual and the acquired dispositions and tendencies acquired by experiences"
  • Eysenck: "It is the more or less stable and enduring organization of a person's character, temperament, intellect and physique that determine his unique adjustment to his environment"
  • Baron: "Individual's unique and relatively stable patterns of behavior, thoughts and emotions"
• Personality


  • Unique and specific to each individual
  • Similarities and differences among individuals
  • Identifies an individual
  • Product of heredity and environment
  • Stable but dynamic and continuously changing
  • Learning and experience contribute to growth and development
• Dynamic organization


  Psychological elements of the system are independent but function in a linking manner, and can change
• Psycho-physical systems


  Psychological elements like traits, emotions, intellect, temperament, character are based in the neurology and endocrinology of the body
• Unique


  Everyone will have a different personality
• Consistent pattern


  An individual behaves in the same way in different situations
• Thinking, feeling, behaving


  The three components of personality
• Determinants of personality


  • Biological factors (body build, physical defects, physical attractiveness, health conditions)
  • Psychological factors (intellectual determinants, emotional determinants, excessive love and affection, self-disclosure, aspiration and achievements, goal setting)
  • Environmental factors (social acceptance, social deprivation, educational factors, family determinants, emotional climate of home and ordinal position, size of the family)
• Self-concept


  Knowing about one's own tendencies, thoughts, preferences and habits, hobbies, skills, and areas of weakness
• Self-worth/self-esteem


  What we think or how we evaluate about ourselves, developed in early childhood and influenced by interactions with parents
• Self-image/real self


  How we see ourselves or who we are, essential for good psychological health, effects how a person thinks, feels, and behaves

  
• Ideal self


  The person we would like to be, consisting of our goals and ambitions in life, which keeps changing
• Self-actualization


  The life-long process of maintaining and enhancing the individual's self-concept through reflection, reinterpretation of experience, allowing the individual to recover, develop, change, and grow
• Unconditional positive regard


  Acceptance, respect, sympathy, and love regardless of performance, plays a crucial role in the development of self-concept
• Conditional positive regard


  When parents or society insists upon the person being valued for what he/she does, not for who he/she is, leading to feeling worthy only if matching defined conditions
• Fully functioning person


  Aware of all experiences, lives fully and richly in every moment
• Self


  An organized, fluid but consistent conceptual pattern of perceptions of characteristics and relationships of the 'I' or the 'me', together with the values attached to these concepts

  
• Development of Personality


  • Unconditional positive regard plays crucial role
  • People nurtured in environment of unconditional positive regard have opportunity to fully actualize themselves
  • People raised in environment of conditional positive regard feel worthy only if they match conditions defined by others
• Fully functioning person


  • Aware of all experiences
  • Lives fully and richly in every moment
  • Trusts in their own organism, doesn't get guided by other's opinions
  • Feels free to make choices without constraints or inhibitions and doesn't get compelled by anything
  • Creative and lives constructively and adaptively as environmental conditions
  • May face difficulties
• Self-image


  Reflects what we would like to be like, our ideal self

  
• Congruence


  The closer our self-image and ideal self are to each other, the more consistent or congruent we are and the higher our sense of self-worth

  
• Incongruency


  Discrepancy between the actual experience of the organism and the self-picture of the individual
• Defense mechanisms


  Used to feel less threatened by undesirable feelings, like denial, perceptual distortions, or repression
• Maintenance needs


  Help in maintaining the individual by satisfying basic needs and preserving self
• Enhancement needs


  Expressed through curiosity, self-exploration, maturation, and friendship to develop and extend the self
• Three Dimensions of Personality According to Hans Eysenck

  • Psychoticism vs. Normality
  • Extraversion vs. Introversion
  • Neuroticism vs. Emotional stability
• Psychoticism


  Refers to certain antisocial behaviors, not mental illness
• Extraversion


  Sociable and outgoing, readily connect with others
• Introversion


  Higher need to be alone, engage in solitary behaviors, and limit interactions with others
• Neuroticism


  Tend to be anxious, have overactive sympathetic nervous system, go into flight-or-fight reaction even with low stress
• Emotional stability


  Need more stimulation to activate flight-or-fight reaction, more emotionally stable
• Psychoticism


  Independent thinkers, cold, nonconformist, impulsive, antisocial, and hostile
• Socialization


  High impulse control, altruistic, empathetic, cooperative, and conventional
• Ways to measure personality


  • Get information from the person itself
  • Get information from others
  • Observe individual's behavior
• Techniques to gather personality information

  • Questionnaire
  • Essays written by himself/ Personality inventories
  • Peer evaluation
  • Socio-metric method
  • Observational Method
  • Situation test
  • Interviews
  • Rating Scale
• How teachers contribute to student's personality development

  • Seeing the student with a positive attitude and acquiring skills to identify the student
  • Assisting the students to develop their intellectual capability
  • Assisting the students to develop emotional stabilities
  • Assisting the students to acquire social skills and to be socialized citizens
  • Act as an observer, explorer, faithful and intimate person
  • Act as the second parent
  • Assisting the student to think rationally