Personality theories

1. PERSONALITY

2. • Personality - is the pattern of enduring
characteristics that produce consistency and
individuality in a given person.
• Psychodynamic approaches to personality approaches that assume that personality is
motivated by inner forces and conflicts about
which people have little awareness and over
which they have no control.

3. • psychoanalytic theory - Freud’s theory that
unconscious forces act as determinants of
personality.
• unconscious - a part of the personality that
contains the
memories, knowledge, beliefs, feelings, urges,
drives, and instincts of which the individual is
not aware.

4. STRUCTURING PERSONALITY:
ID, EGO, AND SUPEREGO
• id - the
raw, unorganized, inborn
part of personality whose
sole purpose is to reduce
tension created by
primitive drives related to
hunger, sex, aggression, a
nd irrational impulses.

5. • ego - the part of the personality that provides
a buffer between the id and the outside word.
• superego - according to Freud, the final
personality structure to develop; it represents
the rights and wrongs of society as handed
down by a person’s parents, teachers, and
other important figures.

6. PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY OF
PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT
1. Displacement – process of shifting focus
2. Sublimation - people divert unwanted
impulses into socially approved
thoughts, feelings, or behaviors.
• Identification - the process of wanting to be
like another person as much as
possible, imitating that person’s behavior and
adopting similar beliefs and values.

7. DEVELOPING PERSONALITY:
PSYCHOSEXUAL STAGES
• oral stage - according to Freud, a stage from
birth to age 12 to 18 months, in which an
infant’s center of pleasure is the mouth.
• anal stage - according to Freud, a stage from
age 12 to 18 months to 3 years of age, in
which a child’s pleasure is centered on the
anus.

8. • phallic stage - according to Freud, a period
beginning around age 3 during which a child’s
pleasure focuses on the genitals.
Oedipus complex - boy's feelings of desire for his
mother and jealously and anger
towards his father
Electra complex - girls feel desire for their fathers and
jealousy of their mothers.
• latency period - according to Freud, the period
between the phallic stage and puberty during
which children’s sexual concerns are temporarily
put aside.
• genital stage - According to Freud, the period
from puberty until death, marked by mature
sexual behavior (that is, sexual intercourse).

11. The Neo-Freudian Psychoanalysts
• neo-Freudian psychoanalysts - psychoanalysts
who were trained in traditional Freudian
theory but who later rejected some of its
major points.

12. 1. CARL JUNG
collective unconscious- according to Jung, a
common set of ideas, feelings, images, and
symbols that we inherit from our
ancestors, the whole human race, and even
animal ancestors from the distant past.
personal unconsciousmotives, conflicts, information that we hold
true to ourselves, that we repress and hold
down.
archetypes - according to Jung, universal
symbolic representations of a particular
person, object, or experience (such as good
and evil).

13. 2. KAREN HORNEY
- first feminist psychologist
- Horney suggested that personality develops
in the context of social relationships and
depends particularly on the relationship
between parents and child and how well the
child’s needs are met.

14. 3. ALFRED ADLER
• inferiority complex - according to Adler, a
problem affecting adults who have not been
able to overcome the feelings of inferiority
that they developed as children, when they
were small and limited in their knowledge
about the world.

15. Trait Approaches: Placing Labels on
Personality
• trait theory - a model of personality that
seeks to identify the basic traits necessary to
describe personality.
• traits - consistent personality characteristics
and behaviors displayed in different situations.

16. GORDON ALLPORT’S TRAIT THEORY:
IDENTIFYING BASIC CHARACTERISTICS
• Cardinal trait is a single characteristic that
directs most of a person’s activities.
• Central traits are an individual’s major
characteristics, they usually number from five
to ten that are unique to the person.
• Secondary traits are characteristics that affect
behavior in fewer situations and are less
influential than central or cardinal traits.

17. Raymond Cattell (1965) : FACTORING
OUT PERSONALITY
• Factor analysis is a statistical method of
identifying associations among a large number
of variables to reveal more general patterns.
• Cattell suggested that 16 pairs of source traits
represent the basic dimensions of personality.
Using those source traits, he developed the
Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire, or
16 PF, a measure that provides scores for each
of the source traits.

18. Hans Eysenck (1995)
• He found that personality could best be
described in terms of just three major
dimensions: extraversion, neuroticism, and
psychoticism.

19. THE BIG FIVE PERSONALITY TRAITS

20. Learning Approaches:
We Are What We’ve Learned
B.F. SKINNER’S BEHAVIORIST APPROACH
Personality is a collection of learned behavior
patterns (Skinner, 1975). Similarities in
responses across different situations are
caused by similar patterns of reinforcement
that have been received in such situations in
the past.

21. SOCIAL COGNITIVE APPROACHES TO
PERSONALITY
• social cognitive approaches to personality theories that emphasize the influence of a
person’s cognitions—
thoughts, feelings, expectations, and values—
as well as observation of others’ behavior, in
determining personality.
• Reciprocal determinism is the theory set forth
by psychologist Albert Bandura that a person's
behavior both influences and is influenced by
personal factors and the social environment.

22. • self-esteem - the component of personality
that encompasses our positive and negative
self-evaluations.

23. Biological and Evolutionary Approaches:
Are We Born with Personality?
• biological and evolutionary approaches to
personality - theories that suggest that
important components of personality are
inherited.
• temperament - the innate disposition that
emerges early in life.

24. Humanistic Approaches:
The Uniqueness of You
• humanistic approaches to personality - theories
that emphasize people’s innate goodness and
desire to achieve higher levels of functioning.
• The major proponent of the humanistic point of
view is Carl Rogers (1971) along with humanistic
theorist, Abraham Maslow.
• All people have a fundamental need for selfactualization, a state of self-fulfillment in which
people realize their highest potential, each in a
unique way.

25. • unconditional positive regard - an attitude of
acceptance and respect on the part of an
observer, no matter what a person says or
does.
• self-concepts - the set of beliefs they hold
about what they are like as individuals.