WEEK 8

• Personality is the scientific study of how and why people differ in characteristic patterns of thinking, feelings, and behaving.
• Personality refers to the enduring patterns of thought, feeling, motivation, and behaviour that are expressed in different circumstances.
• Cognitive-social theories developed from behaviourists and cognitive roots and consider learning, beliefs, expectations, and information processing to be central to personality.
• George Kelly proposed constructs substantially influence people's behaviour. People tend to focus on select behaviours and situations that have personal value to them, which are relevant to their goals or life tasks.
• For people to respond to a situation, they must first encode it as relevant.
• A behaviour-outcome expectancy is a belief that a certain behaviour will lead to a particular outcome.
• Traits are emotional, cognitive, and behavioural tendencies that constitute underlying personality dimensions on which individuals vary.
• Freud believed that psychological forces such as wishes, fears, and intentions have a direction and an intensity and that these unconscious motives and forces determine a person’s behaviour.
• Freud’s topographic model divided mental processes into three types: conscious mental processes, preconscious mental processes, and unconscious mental processes.
• Analytical psychology or Jungian psychology is the theory of mind that emphasises the importance of the individual psyche and the pursuit of wholeness for each individual.
• Jungian psychology incorporates both experiences from the outer world and from the inner world of fantasies, symbols, and dreams.
• Object relations theories focus on interpersonal disturbances and the mental processes that underlie the capacity for relatedness to others.
• Personality assessment involves tapping into a person’s unconscious motives and conflicts using projective tests.
• Freud’s psychodynamic theory emphasises that human thought and action is laden with meaning. A major limitation is the theory’s inadequate basis in scientifically sound observation.
• Eysenck identified three overarching psychological types, or constellations of traits: extroversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism.
• According to the five-factor model (FFM), personality can be reduced to five factors - openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism - each of which include several lower-order factors or facts.
• The HEXACO model of personality comprises six factors: Honesty-Humility (H), Emotionality (E), Extraversion (X), Agreeableness (A), Conscientiousness (C), and Openness to Experience (O), each factor includes four lower-order facets.
• The trait approach to personality has several advantages, including the measurement of traits that help assess the heritability or consistency of personality. Limitations include the reliance on self-report and factor-analytic methods. The number of traits necessary to explain personality remains the subject of debate.
• Genetic views on personality suggest that many personality traits are inherited; heritability refers to the proportion of variance in a particular trait that is due to genetic influences.
• Interactionist approaches view causality as multidirectional, with personality, economics, and culture mutually influencing one another.
• Humanistic approaches focus on distinctively human aspects of personality, such as how to find meaning in life or be true to oneself.
• According to Carl Rogers’ person-centred approach, psychology should try to understand individuals’ phenomenal experience - the way they conceive of reality and experience themselves and their world - through empathy.
• According to existential approaches to psychology, people have no fixed nature and must therefore create themselves.
• A major contribution of humanistic psychology is its unique focus on the ways humans strive to find meaning in life. A limitation is that it does not offer a comprehensive theory of personality that is testable through empricial research methods.
• Personality traits are influenced by a complex interplay of factors, including innate individual predispositions, genetics, gender, and the environment in which you grow up.
• The psychosexual stages define Freud’s developmental model, his model of how children develop. These stages reflect the child’s evolving quest for pleasure and the growing realisation of the social limitation on the quest. At each stage libido is focused on a particular part of the body, or erogenous zone (region of the body that can generate sexual pleasure).
• During the oral stage (roughly the first 18 months of life), children explore the world through their mouths. Many parents are aghast to observe that their infants literally put anything that is not nailed down into their mouths. During the oral stage, sucking the breast or bottle is the means by which infants gain nourishment, but it is also a prime avenue for social nourishment - that is, warmth and closeness.
• According to Freud, people with fixations at the oral stage may be extremely clingy and dependent, with an exaggerated need for approval, nurturance, and love.
• The anal stage (roughly ages two to three) is characterised by conflicts with parents about compliance and defiance, which Freud linked to conflicts over toilet training.
• According to Freud, people with anal fixations exhibit a variety of behavioural tendencies. On the one hand, they may be overly orderly, neat, and punctual (can occur if toilet training is too harsh or begins too early) or, on the other hand, extremely messy or disorganised, stubborn, or constantly late (can occur if toilet training is too late or too careless).
• Children can also regress to anal issues, particularly in times of stress. Regression means those whose parents are undergoing a divorce suddenly start soiling themselves again (an anal regression) or sucking their thumbs (regression to the oral stage).
• During the phallic stage (roughly aged four to six), children enjoy the pleasure they can obtain from touching their genitals and even from masturbating. During this stage, children also become very aware of biological sex differences.