5th Edition
Psychology
Stephen F. Davis
Emporia State University
Joseph J. Palladino
University of Southern Indiana
PowerPoint Presentation by
Cynthia K. Shinabarger Reed
Tarrant County College
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Copyright © Prentice Hall 2007
11-1
Chapter 11
5th Edition
Personality
Copyright © Prentice Hall 2007
11-2
Analyzing Personality
• Psychologists define personality as a
relatively stable pattern of thinking, feeling,
and behaving that distinguishes one
person from another.
• Two important components of this
definition are distinctiveness and relative
consistency.
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11-3
Analyzing Personality
• The methods psychologists use to
examine personality include case studies,
interviews, naturalistic observations,
laboratory investigations, and
psychological tests.
• To be useful, a psychological test must
have three characteristics: reliability,
validity, and standardization.
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11-4
Analyzing Personality
• Some of the best-known and most widely used
personality measures are self-report
inventories that require individuals to respond to
statements about themselves in the form of yesno or true-false answers.
• Among the widely used self-report inventories of
personality are the Minnesota Multiphasic
Personality Inventory (MMPI) and the California
Psychological Inventory (CPI).
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11-5
Analyzing Personality
• The MMPI was designed to help diagnose
psychological disorders.
• The CPI is used to assess personality in
the normal population.
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11-6
Analyzing Personality
• Projective tests are assessment
techniques that require individuals to
respond to unstructured or ambiguous
stimuli.
• The assumption underlying projective tests
is that people project their personality
characteristics onto the ambiguous stimuli.
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11-7
Analyzing Personality
• One of the most
frequently used
projective tests is
the Rorschach
inkblot test.
• Administering
and interpreting
projective tests
requires
extensive
training.
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11-8
Analyzing Personality
• The Barnum effect is the tendency to
accept generalized personality
descriptions as accurate descriptions of
oneself.
• The effect results from the use of
favorable personality descriptions that
apply to many people.
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11-9
Analyzing Personality
• Walter Mischel advised psychologists to turn their
attention from the search for traits to the study of
how situations influence behaviors.
• Some characteristics, such as intelligence,
emotional reactions, and physical appearance,
are consistent over time.
• Although a number of studies have failed to
demonstrate consistency of behavior across
situations, there may be limitations in the methods
used to study consistency.
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11-10
Analyzing Personality
• Epstein proposes that both sides of the
consistency issue are correct.
• Behavior depends on the situation, but
there are consistent behavioral tendencies
across situations.
• The situation also influences the likelihood
that a person will exhibit a specific
behavior.
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11-11
Trait Approaches
• Traits are summary terms that describe
tendencies to respond in particular ways that
account for differences among people.
• Psychologist Gordon Allport set out to compose a
list of traits, which he described as the building
blocks of personality.
• After eliminating words that referred to temporary
moods, social evaluations, or physical attributes,
Allport found that 4,500 words remained.
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11-12
Trait Approaches
• Raymond Cattell
proposed 16
source traits to
describe
personality and
make predictions
of future
behaviors.
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11-13
Trait Approaches
• Cattell used the term surface traits to
describe traits that were easy to identify.
• He assumed that these surface traits were
in turn directed by a smaller number of traits
called source traits.
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11-14
Trait Approaches
• Eysenck said we can describe personality as consisting
of three basic traits: extraversion, neuroticism, and
psychoticism.
• Extraversion has been associated with a number of
differences in everyday behavior.
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11-15
Trait Approaches
•
There is a growing consensus that personality
traits can be reduced to five basic ones,
although there is some disagreement about the
precise labels for the five.
• The most common names for the “Big Five” are
1) openness to experience,
2) conscientiousness,
3) extraversion,
4) agreeableness, and
5) neuroticism.
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11-16
Trait Approaches
• Advances in the technology of genetics and
neuroscience have led to an increase in the
ability to detect genetic and neurological bases
of complex behavior.
• Recent assessments of the heritability of the Big
Five have concluded that all five traits are
moderately and equally heritable.
• A growing body of research suggests that
personality traits have considerable long-term
stability.
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11-17
Trait Approaches
• Gregory Hurtz and John Donovan completed
an extensive search for research that
investigated the relation between measures
of the Big Five factors and job or training
performance.
• Their results showed that conscientiousness
had the highest correlation across
occupations with job performance criteria (r =
0.14), which was low to moderate but stable
across studies.
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11-18
Trait Approaches
• Not everyone views the factors of the fivefactor model as capturing the essence of
personality.
• Drew Westen and Jonathan Shedler are
psychotherapists and research
psychologists who don’t think
questionnaire items address the deeper
organizing principles of personality.
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11-19
Trait Approaches
• According to these psychologists, if we
use questionnaires to provide a glimpse of
personality, what we get is a description
on a selection of traits that are just
statistical entities and only skim the
personality’s surface.
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11-20
Biological Factors in Personality
• The idea that physical and biological factors
hold a key to personality has a long history.
• Trephining involves the opening of a hole in
the skull, leaving the membranes surrounding
the brain intact.
• The main concept of the modern trepanation
movement lies in the word brainbloodvolume
(the amount of blood supplied to the brain).
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11-21
Biological Factors in Personality
• Trepanation supposedly allows greater
flow of blood in the capillaries of the brain.
• Most researchers and physicians do not
have a high opinion of the supposed
benefits of trepanation.
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11-22
Biological Factors in Personality
• Hippocrates, a Greek philosopher and
physician, believed that the human body
contained four bodily “humors” or fluids:
black bile, blood, phlegm, and yellow bile.
• The humor that predominated in a person
was believed to determine that person’s
characteristics.
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11-23
Biological Factors in Personality
• In the 1800s, phrenologists (phrenology
was an attempt to study a person by
analyzing bumps and indentations on the
skull) attempted to link personality with
features of the brain.
• Eventually it became clear that any bumps
on the skull had no connection to personal
characteristics, and interest in phrenology
faded.
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11-24
Biological Factors in Personality
• William Sheldon suggested a relationship
between body type and personality.
• He developed a scheme consisting of
three body types: Endomorphs are round,
mesomorphs are rectangular, and
ectomorphs are thin.
• Subsequent research demonstrated that
his findings were influenced by his
preconceptions.
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11-25
Biological Factors in Personality
• Additional support for the belief that
biological factors influence personality is
found in the negative correlation between
sensation-seeking scores and levels of the
enzyme MAO.
• A growing body of research points to the
importance of biological factors in several
personality characteristics.
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11-26
Biological Factors in Personality
• The study of identical twins reared apart
allows researchers to identify the effects of
heredity independently of the influence of
environmental factors.
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11-27
Biological Factors in Personality
• Evidence from such
studies indicates that
heredity plays a role
in a wide range of
personality
characteristics as
evidenced by
heritability estimates
between 20 and 50%.
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11-28
Biological Factors in Personality
• The evolutionary perspective would predict that
those aspects of our personality that help us
adapt to environmental demands are passed
along to subsequent generations.
• Researchers have generated considerable data
in support of the theory of psychologist David
Buss that evolution has had an impact on the
type of people that men and women choose as
dates and mates.
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11-29
The Psychodynamic Perspective
• Three concepts form the backbone of
Freud’s theory: psychic determinism,
instincts, and levels of consciousness.
• Psychic determinism refers to the
influence of the past on the present.
• Freud believed that much of our behavior,
feeling, and thinking is determined by
events that occurred earlier in our lives.
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11-30
The Psychodynamic Perspective
• Freud believed we are driven by the
energy of certain instincts in much the
same way that a car is propelled by the
energy contained in gasoline.
• He described two key instincts: eros for
lifegiving and pleasure-producing
activities, including sex, and thanatos for
aggression or destruction.
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11-31
The Psychodynamic Perspective
• The third major concept in psychodynamic
theory is Freud’s proposal that there are
various levels of consciousness.
• Freud described three levels of
consciousness.
• The conscious level refers to the thoughts,
wishes, and emotions you are aware of at
this moment.
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The Psychodynamic Perspective
• The level just below consciousness is called the
preconscious; its contents are waiting to be
pulled into consciousness like fish from a pond.
• The third – and in Freud’s theory the most
important – level of consciousness (or
awareness) is below the preconscious and is
called the unconscious.
• The unconscious consists of thoughts, wishes,
and feelings that exist beyond our awareness;
we can gain access to them only with great
effort.
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11-33
The Psychodynamic Perspective
• According to Freud’s comprehensive theory,
the mind consists of three separate but
interacting elements: the id, the ego, and the
superego.
• This model compares the mind to an iceberg.
• Just as most of an iceberg lies beneath the
surface of the water, much of what is truly
significant in psychodynamic theory lies below
conscious awareness.
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11-35
The Psychodynamic Perspective
• The id represents the primitive biological
side of our personality.
• This reservoir of pleasure-seeking and
aggressive instinctual energy aims to
reduce tension that builds up when our
wishes are thwarted.
• Operating on the pleasure principle, it
impulsively seeks immediate gratification
of wishes through the ego.
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11-36
The Psychodynamic Perspective
• The ego is sometimes called the executive
of the personality because it has a realistic
plan for obtaining what the id wants;
therefore it is said to operate on the reality
principle.
• The superego, has two components: the
conscience and the ego ideal.
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11-37
The Psychodynamic Perspective
• The conscience, the moral part of the
superego, is like a little voice that tells us
when we have violated our parents’ and
society’s rules.
• The second component of the superego,
the ego ideal, represents the superego’s
positive side—the things that make us
proud.
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11-38
The Psychodynamic Perspective
• Freud proposes that there is a neverending battle between two irrational forces
(the id and the superego), with a mediator
(the ego) in the middle.
• Much of this conflict is unconscious, but
when it becomes serious, an alarm goes
off.
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11-39
The Psychodynamic Perspective
• When the anxiety or guilt alarm rings, the
ego defends itself through unconscious
efforts referred to as defense
mechanisms that tend to deny or distort
reality.
• The effect of defense mechanisms is to
reduce anxiety or guilt.
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11-40
The Psychodynamic Perspective
• Freud proposed that an individual’s personality
develops through a series of five stages
stretching from infancy to adulthood.
• These stages are called psychosexual stages
because each is characterized by efforts to
obtain pleasure centered on one of several parts
of the body called erogenous zones.
• According to Freud, the five stages of
psychosexual development are the oral, anal,
phallic, latency, and genital stages.
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11-41
The Psychodynamic Perspective
• Pleasure-seeking behavior in the oral stage
focuses on the baby’s mouth. Infants and
toddlers can often be seen biting, sucking, or
placing objects in their mouths.
• Freud hypothesized that if oral needs such as
the need for food are delayed, the child’s
personality may become arrested or fixated.
• A person whose development is arrested will
display behaviors as an adult that are
associated with the time of life during which the
fixation occurred.
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11-42
The Psychodynamic Perspective
• From about 18 months until about 3 years
of age, the child is in the anal stage.
• As the child gains muscular control, the
erogenous zone shifts to the anus, and the
child derives pleasure from the expulsion
and retention of feces.
• The key to this stage is toilet training.
• The way parents approach toilet training
can have lasting effects on their children.
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11-43
The Psychodynamic Perspective
• The phallic stage, which begins at about
age 4 to 5, is ushered in by another shift in
the erogenous zone and the child’s
pleasure-seeking behavior.
• During this stage, children derive pleasure
from fondling their genitals.
• The phallic stage is also the time when the
Oedipal complex (in boys) or the Electra
complex (in girls) occurs.
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11-44
The Psychodynamic Perspective
• Freud believed that young boys develop a
sexual interest in their mothers, see their father
as competitors for the mothers’ affection, and
therefore wish to get rid of their fathers.
• The young boy fears his father’s retaliation for
these forbidden sexual and aggressive
impulses.
• He fantasizes that the father’s retaliation would
involve injury to his genitals; as a result, he
experiences what is called castration anxiety.
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11-45
The Psychodynamic Perspective
• To reduce the fear, the boy represses his
sexual desire for his mother and begins to
identify with his father, which means that
he tries to be like Dad in his behavior,
values, attitudes, and sexual orientation.
• In the Electra complex young girls become
aware that they do not have penises,
which Freud believed they both value and
desire.
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11-46
The Psychodynamic Perspective
• Thus girls experience penis envy, which
leads to anger directed at their mothers
and sexual attraction toward their fathers.
• A girl’s attraction to her father is rooted in
a fantasy that seducing him will provide
her with a penis.
• Resolution of this complex occurs when
the girl represses her sexual desires and
begins to identify with her mother.
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11-47
The Psychodynamic Perspective
• At about age 6, children enter a period
when their sexual interests are suppressed.
• This period, which lasts until the beginning
of adolescence, is called the latency stage.
• Sexual interests are reawakened at puberty
and become stronger during the genital
stage.
• In this stage, sexual pleasure is derived
from heterosexual relationships.
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11-48
The Psychodynamic Perspective
• Some of Freud’s most outspoken critics were
formerly his greatest admirers who once
espoused his views, but for a variety of reasons
they developed new perspectives that
nonetheless fit the psychodynamic mold.
• For example, they did not accept Freud’s
emphasis on the id and the role of sexual motives;
instead they emphasized the ego and its role in
the development of personality, as well as the
social aspects of personality.
• These individuals are frequently referred to as
neo-Freudians.
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11-49
The Psychodynamic Perspective
• One of the best-known neo-Freudians,
Carl Jung, split from Freud on more than
one issue and developed his own
psychodynamic viewpoint.
• Jung did not want to place as much
emphasis on sexuality as did Freud.
• He suggested that a collective
unconscious contains images shared by
all people.
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11-50
The Psychodynamic Perspective
• Jung proposed the concepts of introversion and
extraversion to reflect the direction of the
person’s life force.
• Karen Horney, an early disciple of Freudian
thinking, rejected several Freudian notions and
added several of her own.
• She viewed personality disturbances not as
resulting from instinctual strivings to satisfy
sexual and aggressive urges but as stemming
from the basic anxiety that all people share.
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11-51
The Psychodynamic Perspective
• Alfred Adler believed that Freud
overemphasized the sexual drive in explaining
personality.
• He argued that the primary drive is social rather
than sexual.
• Adler can be considered the first self theorist
due to the emphasis he placed on this concept.
• For him the self was the most important part of
the personality.
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11-52
The Psychodynamic Perspective
• Significantly, Freud’s theory is based on the
study of a small number of disturbed people,
who may not provide the basis for
generalizations applicable to most people.
• Freud is credited with pointing out the influence
of early childhood experiences and with
developing a stage theory of development
• In addition, he noted the potential importance of
unconscious experiences and the influence of
sexuality on human behavior.
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The Psychodynamic Perspective
• Many of Freud’s concepts and principles
are not directly testable; hence, there is
little scientific evidence to support his
theory.
• His subjective method of data collection
and views about women also have
attracted criticism.
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11-55
The Social-Cognitive Perspective
• According to Skinner, we can explain the
distinctiveness of individual personalities without
using terms such as traits.
• Each person’s behavior is distinctive because
each one experiences different histories of
reinforcement and punishment.
• Skinner focused attention on the environmental
factors that initiate and maintain behaviors that
ultimately distinguish one person from another.
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11-56
The Social-Cognitive Perspective
• Social learning theory is the theory that
learning occurs through watching and
imitating the behaviors of others.
• The concept of expectancy is one of the
most important elements of social learning
theory.
• People differ in their tendencies to view
themselves as capable of influencing
reinforcers or being subject to fate.
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11-57
The Social-Cognitive Perspective
• Some people, called internals, believe that
they can influence their reinforcers via
their skill and ability.
• Others, called externals, believe that
whether they attain a desired outcome is
due primarily to chance or fate.
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11-58
The Social-Cognitive Perspective
• Julian Rotter devised the Internal-External
(I-E) Scale to measure individuals’ locus of
control (internal or external); since then,
locus of control has become one of the
most studied concepts in psychology.
• Locus of control is related to a variety of
outcomes, including academic and health
behaviors.
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The Social-Cognitive Perspective
• According to Albert Bandura, individuals
not only are affected by the environment
but also can influence it.
• What's more, cognitive factors can
influence the person's behavior and his or
her environment.
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The Social-Cognitive Perspective
• This
combination of
cognitive,
behavioral,
and
environmental
effects is
called
reciprocal
determinism.
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The Social-Cognitive Perspective
• Another key concept in Bandura’s theory
is self-efficacy, a person’s beliefs about
his or her skills and ability to perform
certain behaviors.
• Unlike a trait, self-efficacy is specific to the
situation and can change over time.
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11-62
The Humanistic Perspective
• A group of theorists called humanistic
psychologists oppose the basic beliefs of both
psychodynamic theory and behaviorism.
• They focus on the present and the healthy
personality.
• What’s more, they view the individual’s
perceptions of events as more significant than the
learning theorist’s or therapist’s perceptions.
• For these reasons, they are often called
phenomenological psychologists.
• Phenomenology is the study of experience just as
it occurs.
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The Humanistic Perspective
• Abraham Maslow described humanistic
psychology as the “third force” in American
psychology because it offered an
alternative to psychodynamic theory and
behaviorism.
• According to Maslow, human beings have
a set of needs that are organized in a
hierarchy.
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11-64
The Humanistic Perspective
• These needs begin with physiological
needs and move on to needs for safety,
love and belongingness, and self-esteem.
• These basic needs exert a powerful pull
on our behavior.
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Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
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The Humanistic Perspective
• Carl Rogers shared Maslow’s belief that
people are innately good and are directed
toward growth, development, and personal
fulfillment.
• As we develop, our concept of self
emerges.
• The self is our sense of “I” or “me”; it is
generally conscious and accessible and is
a central concept in Rogers’s theory.
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The Humanistic Perspective
• The self-concept is our perception of our
abilities, behaviors, and characteristics.
• Rogers believed that we act in accordance with
our self-concept.
• Maslow and Rogers agreed that people have a
strong need to be loved, to experience affection.
• Sometimes, however, people experience
affection that is conditional—given only if they
engage in behaviors that are approved by
others.
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The Humanistic Perspective
• Rogers contrasted this conditional regard
with what he called unconditional positive
regard, in which a person is accepted for
what he or she is, not for what others
would like the person to be.
• According to Rogers, if you grow up
believing affection is conditional, you will
distort your own experiences in order to
feel worthy of acceptance from a wider
range of people.
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The Humanistic Perspective
• According to Rogers we have a real self,
the self as it really is, a product of our
experiences.
• We also have an ideal self, the self we
would like to be.
• Maladjustment results when there is a
discrepancy between the real self and the
ideal self.
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