Transcript Chapter 9 - faculty.piercecollege.edu

Personality and
Individual Differences
Chapter 9
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Psychodynamic Approaches to Personality
• Learning Outcomes
– Explain Freud’s psychoanalytic theory
– Discuss Neo-Freudian psychoanalysis
• Personality: the pattern of enduring
characteristics that produce consistency and
individuality in a given person
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Social Development
• Psychodynamic approaches to personality:
personality is motivated by inner forces and
conflicts about which people have little
awareness and over which they have no
control
• Psychoanalytic theory: Sigmund Freud’s
theory that unconscious forces act as
determinants of personality
3
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Social Development
• Unconscious: a part of the personality that
contains the memories, knowledge, beliefs,
feelings, urges, drives, and instincts of which
the individual is not aware; a “safe haven” for
memories of threatening events
4
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The 3 Components of Personality
• The id: the raw, unorganized, inborn part of
personality; reduces tension created by
primitive drives related to hunger, sex,
aggression, and irrational impulses
– Operates on the pleasure principle: reduce
tension and maximize satisfaction
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The 3 Components of Personality
• The ego: the part of personality that provides
a buffer between the id and the outside world
– Operates on the reality principle: instinctual
energy is restrained to keep individual safe and to
help integrate the person into society
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The 3 Components of Personality
• The superego: the final component of
personality to develop, it represents the rights
and wrongs of society as handed down by a
person’s parents, teachers, and other
important people
– Includes the conscience: makes you feel guilty if
you do something morally wrong
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Freud’s Psychosexual Stages
• Freud’s Psychosexual Stages: how personality
develops; individuals encounter conflicts
between the demands of society and their
own urges for pleasure
– Fixations: unresolved conflicts that persist beyond
the stage in which they first occur; come from
having needs ignored or being overindulged
during that stage
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Freud’s Psychosexual Stages
• Oral stage (birth – 1 ½): infant’s center of pleasure is
the mouth; fixation may lead to adult who is
unusually interested in oral activities (eating, talking,
smoking)
• Anal stage (1 ½ - 3): child’s center of pleasure is the
anus; toilet training – pleasure comes from retaining
and expelling feces; fixation may lead to adult who is
unusually rigid, orderly, and punctual, or the
opposite
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Freud’s Psychosexual Stages
• Phallic stage (3 – 6): child’s center of pleasure is the
genitals
– Oedipal conflict: a child’s unconscious sexual interest in
the opposite-sex parent, typically resolved by
identification with the same-sex parent (wanting to be like
that person; imitating his or her behavior and adopting
similar beliefs and values)
– Difficulties in phallic stage may lead to improper sex-role
behavior & failure to develop a conscience
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Freud’s Psychosexual Stages
• Latency period (6 – adolescence): children’s sexual
concerns are temporarily put aside
• Genital stage (adolescence – adulthood): sexual
feelings reemerge; focus on mature, adult sexuality
(sexual intercourse)
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Freud’s Psychosexual Stages
• Defense mechanisms: unconscious strategies
people use to reduce anxiety by concealing its
source from themselves and others
– Repression: primary defense mechanism, in which
unacceptable or unpleasant id impulses are
pushed back into the unconscious
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Neo-Freudian Psychoanalysts
• Neo-Freudian psychoanalysts: psychoanalysts
who were trained in traditional Freudian
theory but who later rejected some of its
major points
• Collective unconscious: a common set of
ideas, feelings, images, and symbols that we
inherit from our ancestors, the whole human
race, and even animal ancestors (Carl Jung)
– Archetypes
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Neo-Freudian Psychoanalysts
• Karen Horney’s perspective: championed women’s
issues; believed personality develops in the context
of social relationships & depends on the relationship
between parents and child
• Inferiority complex: feelings of inferiority in adults
that they developed as children, when they were
small and limited in their knowledge about the world
(Alfred Adler)
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Trait, Learning, Biological and Evolutionary,
and Humanistic Approaches to Personality
• Learning Outcomes
– Explain trait approaches to personality
– Explain learning approaches to personality
– Explain biological and evolutionary approaches to
personality
– Explain humanistic approaches to personality
– Compare and contrast approaches to personality
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Trait Approaches
• Trait theory: seeks to identify basic traits
(consistent personality characteristics and
behaviors displayed in different situations)
necessary to describe personality
– Propose that all people possess certain traits, but
the degree varies and can be quantified
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Trait Approaches
• Eysenck’s three dimensions of personality
– Extraversion: degree of sociability
– Neuroticism: emotional stability
– Psychoticism: the degree to which reality is
distorted
• The “Big Five” Model of Personality
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Figure 2
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Learning Approaches
• Learning theories of personality emphasize
the external environment
– Skinner’s behaviorist approach: personality is a
collection of learned behavior patterns
– Social cognitive approaches: emphasize influence
of a person’s cognitions, as well as observation of
others’ behavior
• Self-efficacy
• Self-esteem
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Biological & Evolutionary Approaches
• Biological and evolutionary approaches: the
important components of personality are
inherited
– Temperament: the basic, innate disposition that
emerges early in life
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Humanistic Approaches
• Humanistic approaches: emphasize people’s
innate goodness and desire to achieve higher
levels of functioning
– Self-actualization: a state of self-fulfillment in
which people realize their highest potential, each
in a unique way (Rogers and Maslow)
– Unconditional positive regard: an attitude of
acceptance and respect on the part of an
observer, no matter what a person says or does
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Comparing Approaches to Personality
• No single approach is the best explanation of
personality
• No clear way to scientifically test the theories
against each other
• Personality can be viewed from a number of
perspectives simultaneously
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Assessing Personality
• Learning Outcomes
– Discuss self-report measures of personality
– Define projective methods
– Explain behavioral assessment
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Assessing Personality
• Psychological tests: standard measures
designed to assess behavior objectively
– Reliability
– Validity
– Tests are based on norms: standards of test
performance that permit the comparison of one
person’s score with the scores of others who have
taken the same test
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Self-Report Measures of Personality
• Self-report measures: gathering data about
people by asking them questions about a
sample of their behavior
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Self-Report Measures of Personality
• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality
Inventory-2 (MMPI-2): a widely used selfreport test that identifies people with
psychological difficulties and can predict a
variety of other behaviors
• Test standardization: validates questions in
personality tests by studying the responses of
people with known diagnoses
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Projective Methods
• Projective personality tests: tests in which a
person is shown an ambiguous (unclear)
stimulus and asked to describe it or tell a story
about it
• Rorschach test: shows a series of symmetrical
visual stimuli; people are then asked what the
figures represent to them
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Projective Methods
• Thematic Apperception Test (TAT): a series of
pictures about which a person is asked to
write a story
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Behavioral Assessment
• Behavioral assessment: direct measures of an
individual’s behavior used to describe
personality characteristics
– May be carried out naturalistically, by observing
people in their own settings, or in the laboratory,
by observing people in controlled situations
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Intelligence?
• Learning Outcomes
– Summarize the theories of intelligence
– Compare and contrast practical and emotional
intelligences
– Explain approaches to measuring intelligence
– Identify variations in intellectual ability
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Theories of Intelligence
• g or g-factor: the single, general factor for
mental ability assumed to underlie
intelligence in some early theories
• Fluid intelligence: reflects informationprocessing capabilities, reasoning, and
memory
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Theories of Intelligence
• Crystallized intelligence: the accumulation of
information, skills, and strategies that are
learned through experience and can be
applied in problem-solving situations; reflects
our ability to call up information from longterm memory
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Theories of Intelligence
• Theory of multiple intelligences: proposes eight
spheres of intelligence, each relatively independent
of the others (Howard Gardner)
– musical, bodily kinesthetic, logical-mathematical,
linguistic, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and
naturalist
• Information-processing approach: the most
accurate measure of intelligence is provided by the
way people store material in memory and use that
material to solve intellectual tasks
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Practical & Emotional Intelligence
• Practical intelligence: intelligence related to
overall success in living (Robert Sternberg)
• Emotional intelligence: the set of skills that
underlie the accurate assessment, evaluation,
expression, and regulation of emotions
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Assessing Intelligence
• Intelligence tests: tests devised to quantify a
person’s level of intelligence
– First tests developed by French psychologist
Alfred Binet
– Mental age: the average age of individuals who
achieve a particular level of performance on a test
– Chronological age: actual, physical age
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Assessing Intelligence
• Intelligence quotient (IQ): a score that takes
into account an individual’s mental and
chronological ages
– IQ score = (MA/CA) x 100
– Deviation IQ scores: the way IQ scores are calculated
today; scores assigned to individuals based on the
difference between that score and the average score
for everyone of that age (average score would
translate to an IQ score of 100)
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Assessing Intelligence
• Contemporary IQ tests
– Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale: types of
questions are based on age
– Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-III (WAIS-III)
and Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-IV
(WISC-IV): divided into a verbal scale and
performance (non-verbal) scale
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Variations in Intellectual Ability
• Intellectual disability (mental retardation): a
condition characterized by significant
limitations both in intellectual functioning and
in conceptual, social, and practical adaptive
skills
–
–
–
–
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Mild intellectual retardation: IQ scores from 55-69
Moderate retardation: IQ scores from 40-54
Severe retardation: IQ scores from 25-39
Profound retardation: IQ scores below 25
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Variations in Intellectual Ability
• Biological causes of intellectual disabilities
(almost 1/3 of cases)
– Fetal alcohol syndrome
– Down syndrome
• Familial retardation: no apparent biological
defect exists, but there is a history of retardation
in the family
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Variations in Intellectual Ability
• Intellectually gifted: having an IQ score greater than
130 (about 2 – 4% of the population)
• Culture-fair IQ test: a test that does not discriminate
against the members of any minority group
• Intelligence shows a high degree of heritability (the
degree to which a characteristic is related to genetic,
inherited factors), but environmental factors play a
large role in influencing intelligence also
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