4th Edition
Psychology
Stephen F. Davis
Emporia State University
Joseph J. Palladino
University of Southern Indiana
PowerPoint Presentation by H. Lynn Bradman
Metropolitan Community College-Omaha
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Chapter 11
4th Edition
Personality
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Analyzing Personality
• Psychologists define personality as a
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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Analyzing Personality
• 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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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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Analyzing Personality
• Projective tests use ambiguous stimuli and
require a great deal of interpretation by the
test administrator.
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Analyzing Personality
• The most frequently
used projective test is
the Rorschach inkblot
test.
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Analyzing Personality
• The Barnum effect is the acceptance of
generalized personality descriptions.
• The effect results from the use of
favorable personality descriptions that
apply to many people.
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Analyzing Personality
• Critics of the concept of consistency in
behavior argue that behavior is controlled
by situations.
• In defense of the idea of consistency,
some researchers note that there are
some problems with the methods used
and the assumptions made in this
research.
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Analyzing Personality
• Seymour Epstein proposes that both sides
of the consistency issue are correct:
– Situations control behavior in a given
instance, and broad consistencies do exist.
– Consistencies become visible when we add
behaviors together, an approach termed
aggregation.
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Trait Approaches
• Traits are summary terms that describe
tendencies to act and interact in particular
ways that are consistent across situations.
• Gordon Allport developed a list of trait
terms.
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Trait Approaches
• Raymond Cattell
proposed 16 source
traits to describe
personality and make
predictions of future
behaviors.
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Trait Approaches
• Hans Eysenck proposed the existence of
three major traits.
• Extraversion has been associated with a
number of differences in everyday
behavior.
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Trait Approaches
• Current research offers a model of five
major traits that seem to be relatively
stable across the life span and across
cultures.
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Biological Factors in Personality
• Efforts to connect personality to biological
factors can be traced to Hippocrates’
theory of "humors" and later to phrenology.
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Biological Factors in Personality
• William Sheldon suggested a relationship
between body type and personality.
• Subsequent research demonstrated that
his findings were influenced by his
preconceptions.
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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.
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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.
• 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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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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Biological Factors in Personality
• Recent evidence suggests that nonshared experiences exert a major
influence on the personality of siblings.
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The Psychodynamic Perspective
• Freud suggested that behaviors, feelings,
and thoughts result from past events.
• Because this psychic determinism occurs
at an unconscious level, we are often
unaware of the true reasons for our
behavior.
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The Psychodynamic Perspective
• Freud compared the mind to an iceberg,
with three levels of consciousness
(conscious, preconscious, and
unconscious) and three structures
(Id, ego, and superego).
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The Psychodynamic Perspective
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The Psychodynamic Perspective
• Conflicts among the structures of the mind
occur beneath the level of conscious
awareness.
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The Psychodynamic Perspective
• Severe unconscious conflict produces
anxiety or guilt that warn the ego.
• The ego uses defense mechanisms to
protect itself from being overwhelmed by
anxiety or guilt.
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The Psychodynamic Perspective
• According to Freud, at different stages of
development the id centers its pleasureseeking behavior on different parts of the
body, called erogenous zones.
• The resulting psychosexual stages begin
with the oral stage and continue through
the anal and phallic stages.
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The Psychodynamic Perspective
• The Oedipal and Electra complexes occur
during the phallic stage.
• This stage is followed by the latency stage
and then by the genital stage and the
emergence of adult sexual desires.
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The Psychodynamic Perspective
• The neo-Freudians-including Jung,
Horney, and Adler disagreed with a
number of Freud's views (for example,
those emphasizing the sexual and
unconscious roots of behavior).
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The Psychodynamic Perspective
• 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
• Critics of psychodynamic theory note that Freud
based his ideas on small, unrepresentative
samples of disturbed individuals.
• Additionally, many of his 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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The Social-Cognitive Perspective
• Behavioral and learning psychologists
avoid commonly used terms such as traits.
• They explain the distinctiveness of a
person's behavior as resulting from unique
learning histories.
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The Social-Cognitive Perspective
• While acknowledging the importance of
learning, Julian Rotter and Albert Bandura
incorporated cognitive factors into their
theories of personality.
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The Social-Cognitive Perspective
• Rotter's social learning theory recognizes that
most reinforcers are social and that most
learning takes place in social situations.
• Expectancy about obtaining a reinforcer in a
given situation is an important cognitive variable.
• Individuals differ in the degree to which they see
themselves or chance ("fate") as responsible for
their successes and failures.
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The Social-Cognitive Perspective
• Measures of generalized expectancy,
known as locus of control, are 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
• Self-efficacy is a person's judgment about
his or her ability to succeed in a given
situation.
• Unlike a trait, self-efficacy is specific to the
situation and can change over time.
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The Humanistic Perspective
• Humanistic approaches evolved in
opposition to the behavioral and
psychodynamic perspectives.
• They propose that human beings are
basically good and are directed toward
development and growth.
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The Humanistic Perspective
• Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs
begins with deficiency needs and leads to
self-actualization at the top.
• The power of deficiency needs keeps most
people from reaching the level of self actualization, which Maslow defines as
doing the best that an individual is capable
of doing.
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The Humanistic Perspective
• On the basis of his work with disturbed people,
Carl Rogers concluded that efforts to achieve
personal fulfillment were being stifled.
• He proposed that people's self-concepts had
become distorted by conditions of worth
imposed from the outside.
• In his theory, healthy individuals have a real selfconcept that is consistent with their ideal selfconcept
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