AP Psychology Chapter 10 Personality

Chapter 10 Personality ● Personalities: the unique attitudes, behaviors, and emotions that characterize a person o Type A vs. Type B (some are neither) ▪ Type A: tend to feel a sense of time and pressure, easily angered, higher risk for heart disease but also success ▪ Type B: tend to be relaxed and easygoing ● Freud’s id, ego, and superego: personalities are the enduring conflict between impulses and our restraint of those urges o The id: primitive and instinctive, gratification and pleasure ▪ Eros- the life instincts, often evidences as a desire for sex, directed by libido ▪ Thanatos- the death instincts, seen in aggression, propelled by the pleasure principle, wants immediate gratification o The ego: located partly in the conscious, partly in the unconscious and follows the reality principle (negotiates between the desires of the id and the limitations of the environment, largely conscious) ▪ uses defense mechanisms to protect the unconscious mind from the threatening thoughts in the unconscious o The superego: operates on both the conscious and unconscious level, sense of conscience about right and wrong (internalized ideals) o o Freud’s defense mechanisms (ego’s methods of reducing anxiety) ▪ Repression: blocking thoughts out from conscious awareness ▪ Denial: not accepting the ego-threatening truth ▪ Displacement: redirecting one’s feelings toward another person or object (ex: if you’re mad at your boss, taking it out on your kid) ▪ Projection: believing that the feelings one has toward someone else are actually held by the other person and directed at oneself ▪ Reaction formation: expressing the opposite of how one truly feels (being kind to someone you want to slap) ▪ Regression: returning to an earlier, comforting form of behavior (acting like a child) ▪ Rationalization: coming up with a beneficial result of an undesirable occurrence (ex: justifying our behaviors in other ways) ▪ Intellectualization: undertaking an academic, unemotional study of a topic ▪ Sublimation: channeling one’s frustration toward a different goal (actually viewed as particularly healthy) o Other Freud vocab: ▪ Freudian slips: when you “misspeak”, it’s actually reflective of unconscious thought ▪ Free association: random thoughts and images that fill the mind (freeflowing unfiltered talking reveals unconscious thought) o Criticisms of Freud: ▪ little empirical evidence supports it ▪ proving it is impossible ▪ overestimates the importance of early childhood and of sex ▪ has little predictive power ▪ able to interpret both positive and negative reactions to the theory as support ▪ Feminists say penis envy grew from the assumption that men are superior to women (Karen Horney and Nancy Chodorow) ● womb envy: men’s jealousy of women’s reproductive abilities ● Karen Horney encouraged self-help and disliked the idea we are all about sex and agression o Impact of Freudian Theory: Terms used in our language (ego, penis envy, denial, unconscious) ● Carl Jung said the unconscious has two parts: collective and personal o Personal unconscious: contains the painful/threatening thoughts and memories that you don’t want to confront o Collective unconscious: passed down through the species, explains certain similarities between cultures ▪ contains archetypes: universal concepts we all share as part of the human species ▪ ex. shadow represents the evil side of personality, fear of dark o Said we are driven to achieve a full knowledge of self ● Alfred Adler downplayed the importance of the unconscious and focused on the ego, said people are motivated by social tensions (inferiority and superiority) ▪ Inferiority: the fear of failure/being worse ▪ Superiority: the desire to achieve/being the best ▪ Known for work on the importance of birth order in shaping personality ● Humanistic Theories of Personality o Determinism: the belief that what happens is dictated by what happened in the past (causes and conditions) ▪ doesn’t support the existence of free will ▪ central to humanistic psychology o Principles ▪ People are innately good ▪ People are able to determine their destinies with free will ▪ Focus on importance of self concept and self esteem (these have a positive correlation) ▪ Self-concept: a person’s global feeling about himself o Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers: people are motivated to self-actualize and reach their full potential ▪ Maslow: hierarchy of needs (deficiency needs=physical and psychological needs like sleep, food, love and growth needs=higher level things like truth and goodness) ▪ Roger’s self theory: people need unconditional positive regard to self actualize (unconditional positive regard=blanket acceptance towards others) ● We are all good and will have a healthy self-concept as long as we are raised in a nurturing environment with: 1. Genuineness: parents and teachers should be open 2. Acceptance: open and comfortable environment 3. Empathy: the ability to share and understand others’ feelings o Criticism of Humanistic Theories: too optimistic about human nature ● Trait Theories: trait theorists believe we can describe people’s personalities by specifying their main traits (these traits are stable and motivate behavior) o Nomothetic Approach: belief that the same basic set of traits can be used to describe all people’s personalities ▪ Hans Eyesenck: introversion-extroversion and stable-unstable scale can fully describe personality o The big five personality traits ▪ Extraversion ▪ Agreeableness: how easy to get along with ▪ Conscientiousness: high = hardworking, responsible, organized ▪ Openness to experience ▪ Neuroticism: emotional stability/how consistent your mood is ▪ ▪ Factor Analysis: allows researchers to use correlations between traits to see which traits cluster together as factors ▪ Example: factor: conscientiousness has the traits- punctuality, diligence, neatness (strong correlation) o Idiographic Theorists: using the same set of terms to classify all people is impossible, people need to be seen in the few terms that best characterize them o Gordon Allport: common traits are useful but a full understanding of someone is impossible without looking at their personal traits o Types of personal traits ▪ Cardinal dispositions: play a pivotal role in everything you do (most dominant trait) ▪ Central dispositions: common traits, basic building blocks ▪ Secondary dispositions: less apparent and describe less significant traits, appear in certain scenarios ● Behaviorist Theories of Personality o personality is determined by the environment o reinforcement contingencies create personality o we can alter personalities by changing the environment o we act based on past conditioning by and from the environment o Criticism: fails to recognize the importance of cognition ● Social-Cognitive Theories: the interaction between our traits and social context o Albert Bandura: personality is created by an interaction between the person (traits), the environment and the person’s behavior ▪ This is based on triadic reciprocity (reciprocal determinism, both influencing each other) ▪ Traits influence environment which influences behavior which influences traits (they all influence each other) ▪ Also believed that personality is determined by self-efficacy (high = optimistic about their ability to get things done vs low = feel a sense of powerlessness) o George Kelly: Personal-Construct theory, says that in attempts to understand the world, people develop systems of personal constructs of pairs of opposites to evaluate the world ▪ Ex: smart vs dumb ▪ behavior is determined by interpretation of the world ▪ behavior is influenced by cognitions, and we can predict future behavior with past behavior o Julian Rotter’s locus of control ▪ Internal locus of control: feel as if you are responsible for what happens to you, correlated with higher health, political activity, and grades ▪ External locus of control: believe that luck and other forces outside of your own control determine your destiny ● Biological Theories on Personality o Heritability: a measure of the percentage of a trait that is inherited, little evidence exists for specific personality traits o Temperament: emotional style and characteristic way of dealing with the world ▪ Infants seem to differ immediately at birth, thought to be born with different temperaments that influence personality development ▪ Easy (40%): happy and regular, not easily upset ▪ Slow-to-warm-up (15%): less cheery, less regular in sleep & eating ▪ Difficult (10%): glum, erratic sleeping, resistant to change ▪ Mixture (35%) o Hippocrates: believed personality was determined by the relative levels of four humors in the body (one of the first people to recognize that biology impacts personality) 1. Blood 2. Yellow bile 3. Black bile 4. Phlegm o Somatotype Personality: William Sheldon said certain personality traits are associated with each of the three body types (correlation, not causation): 1. endomorphs (fat) 2. mesomorphs (muscular) 3. ectomorphs (thin) ● Personality Assessment Techniques o Projective Tests: used by psychoanalysts, involves asking people to interpret ambiguous stimuli, people’s interpretations should reflect unconscious thoughts ▪ Rorschach inkblot test: involves showing people a series of inkblots and having them describe what they see (projections of associations) ▪ Thematic apperception test (TAT): consists of cards with a picture of people in an ambiguous situation, people are asked to describe what is happening in the cards o Free association: Freud and Jung encouraged free-flowing thought o Dream analysis: Freud saw dreams as a gateway into the unconscious o Self-Report Inventories: questionnaires that ask people to provide information about themselves; used by many types of psychologists, including humanistic, cognitive-behavioral, and trait theorists ▪ Myers-Briggs: 16 personality types o MMPI-Z (Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory): usually used to address mental health/clinical issues o Barnum Effect: people have the tendency to see themselves in vague, stock descriptions of personality (named after P.T. Barnum) Random Things ● William Wundt: introspection ● Big 3 of behaviorism: Pavlov (classical), Skinner (operant), Watson (more classical) ● Eclectic psychologist: doing stuff from multiple branches, whatever works for patients ● Concept Application vs Research Question o Concept Application: define and apply to a specific scenario o Research: analyze data, challenge/understand the premise behind a study ● Fusiform gyrus: facial recognition (none=prosopagnosia) ● Gestures are not universal but facial expressions are Branches of Psychology ● Historical Branches o Structuralist: analyzing the metaphorical parts of the mind (William Wundt) o Functionalist: inspired by Darwin’s survival of the fittest, focuses on biology and reasons for mental processes (William James, influenced by Darwin) ● More modern branches o Behaviorist: we act based on environment o Psychoanalytic/psychodynamic: unconscious thoughts o Sociocultural view: emphasis on the importance of social interaction, social learning, and a cultural perspective o Evolutionary psychology: looking at how the human race has developed and how existing traits are the products of natural selection (darwin) o Cognitive view: Our actions stem from our mental processes and the way we process info (mind not brain: thoughts, perceptions, expectations) o Biological view: how our physical makeup and brain operations influence our personality, preferences, behavior patterns, and abilities (Ex: depression is a lack of serotonin)