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Psychoanalytic/Psychodynamic Theories
Trait Theories
Humanistic Theories
Social-cognitive Theories
Biological Theories
Personality Assessment
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Things You’ll Learn in Chapter 11
Q1
Q2
Are some people with highly negative attitudes
toward gay people repressing their own sexual
desires?
Can personality traits predict the type of music
we like?
Q3
What parenting skills are also associated with
increased marital satisfaction?
Q4
Does helping parents prepare a meal increase a
child’s preference for healthy foods?
Q5
Can our genes predict how much we will give to
charity?
Q6
Why do people from different states vary in their
entrepreneurial spirit?
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Personality
• Personality = a unique and relatively stable
pattern of thoughts, feelings, and actions
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
PSYCHOANALYTIC/PSYCHODYNAMIC
THEORIES
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory
• Freud said the mind (the “psyche”) contains
three levels of consciousness or awareness:
• Conscious = thoughts or motives that a person
in currently aware of or is remembering
• Preconscious = Freud’s term for thoughts,
motives, or memories that exist just beneath
the surface of awareness and can be called to
consciousness when necessary
• Unconscious = Freud’s term for part of the
psyche that stores repressed urges and
primitive impulses
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Freud’s unconscious
• The unconscious contains our most primitive, instinctual motives
and anxieties
• These are blocked from normal awareness but still have
extraordinary impact on our behavior
• Because these thoughts and motives are unacceptable and
threatening, they are repressed (held out of awareness) unless
they are unintentionally revealed in dreams and slips of the
tongue
• Most psychological disorders come from repressed memories and
sexual/aggressive instincts; psychoanalysis was created to treat
these disorders
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Personality structure
• Id = according to Freud, the primitive, unconscious component of
personality that operates irrationally and acts on the pleasure
principle
– Pleasure principle = seeking immediate gratification
• Ego = the rational, decision-making component of personality
that operates according to the reality principle (“ego” = “I”)
– Reality principle = seeks to delay gratification of the id’s impulses until
appropriate outlets can be found
• Superego = represents internalization of society’s values,
standards, and morals; the conscience or moral personality
component that incorporates parental and societal standards
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Personality structure
• The ego is faced with satisfying both the id
(biological drives) and the superego (society’s
expectations). When it fails, anxiety slips into
conscious awareness
• To diminish anxiety, we use defense
mechanisms = the ego’s protective method of
reducing anxiety by self-deception and
distorting reality
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Freud’s theory, continued
• Much of Freud’s theory is controversial
• Freud believed strong biological urges push children
through five psychosexual stages = five
developmental periods (oral, anal, phallic, latency,
and genital) during which particular kinds of
pleasures must be gratified if personality
development is to proceed normally
• If child’s needs aren’t met, he or she could become
fixated, or stuck, at that stage
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Psychodynamic/Neo-Freudian Theories
• Adler – theory of individual psychology: that we
are motived by our goals in life, especially goals
to achieve security and overcome feelings of
inferiority
– Inferiority complex = Adler’s idea that feelings of
inferiority develop from early childhood
experiences of helplessness and incompetence
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Psychodynamic/Neo-Freudian Theories
• Jung – developed analytic psychology, believing the
unconscious contains positive and spiritual motives as well as
sexual and aggressive forces. Two forms of the unconscious
mind:
– Personal unconscious = created from our individual experiences
– Collective unconscious = the part of the individual’s unconscious that is
inherited, evolutionarily developed, and common to all members of the
species
• Archetypes = universal, inherited, primitive, and symbolic
representations of a particular experience or object that reside
in the collective unconscious
• Archetypes cause us to react in certain predictable ways, such
as gender roles: anima (feminine) and animus (masculine)
aspects of personality
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Psychodynamic/Neo-Freudian Theories
• Horney – said Freud’s theory was based on male bias
and misunderstanding of women
• Women’s everyday experience with inferiority led to
power envy, not penis envy
• Believed adult personality is shaped by childhood
relationship with parents and how people respond to
basic anxiety
• Basic anxiety – feelings of helplessness and insecurity
that adults experience because as children they felt
alone and isolated in a hostile environment
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Evaluating Psychoanalytic Theories
Major criticisms of psychoanalytic theories
• Inadequate empirical support
• Overemphasis on sexuality, biology, and unconscious forces
• Sexism
Q1
Are some people with highly negative attitudes toward
gay people repressing their own sexual desires?
• People who identify as heterosexual but show a strong
attraction to same-sex people in psychological tests also
report more homophobic attitudes and greater hostility
toward gay people (Weinstein et al., 2012)
• How does Freud’s theory suggest these negative attitudes
spring from unconscious repression of same-sex desires?
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
TRAIT THEORIES
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Early Trait Theorists
• Trait = a relatively stable personality characteristic
that can be used to describe someone
• Allport was the first to attempt to arrange a person’s
unique traits into a hierarchy
• Cattell used factor analysis to condense a large list of
traits into 16 source traits
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Modern Trait Theory
• Five-factor model
(FFM) =
a comprehensive
descriptive
personality system;
informally called
the Big Five
• These five traits
emerge, even when
different tests are
used
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Evaluating Trait Theories
• Big Five is the first to successfully achieve the goal of
trait theories: to describe and organize personality
traits using the smallest number of traits
• Cross-cultural support for the Big Five
Q2
Can personality traits predict the type of music
we like?
• Extroverts prefer upbeat music like rap and
hip-hop, while people open to experience
prefer complex, rebellious music like
classical and rock
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
HUMANISTIC THEORIES
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Humanistic Theories
• Humanistic theories emphasize each person’s
internal feelings, thoughts, and sense of basic
worth
• Self-actualization = the humanistic term for
the inborn drive to realize one’s full potential
and to develop all one’s inherent talents and
capabilities
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Rogers’s Theory
• Self-concept = a person’s relatively stable selfperception, or mental model, based on life
experiences, particularly the feedback and
perception of others
Q3
What parenting skills are also associated with
increased marital satisfaction?
• To help children develop their fullest potential and
life potential, adults must create atmosphere of
unconditional positive regard = Roger’s term for
love and acceptance with no contingencies attached
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Maslow’s Theory
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Evaluating Humanistic Theories
• Humanistic theories play a major role in
modern counseling and psychotherapy
• Humanistic theories have been criticized for:
– Naïve assumptions – unduly optimistic and
overlook negative aspects of human nature
– Poor testability and inadequate evidence –
primary terms difficult to operationalize and test
– Narrowness – describes personality but doesn’t
explain it
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORIES
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Bandura’s and Rotter’s Approaches
• Self-efficacy = Bandura’s term for a person’s
learned expectations of success in a given
situation; also, another term for selfconfidence
Q4
Does helping parents prepare a meal increase a
child’s preference for healthy foods?
• Children who helped parents with
meal preparation reported higher selfefficacy for selecting and eating
healthy foods (Chu et al., 2013)
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Bandura’s and Rotter’s Approaches
• Reciprocal determinism = Bandura’s belief
that a complex reciprocal interaction exists
among the individual, his or her behavior, and
the environmental stimuli, and that each of
these components affects the others
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Bandura’s and Rotter’s Approaches
• Rotter’s theory says learning experiences create
cognitive expectancies that guide behavior and
influence the environment
• Your behavior or personality is determined by
1. what you expect to happen following a specific action and
2. the reinforcement value attached to specific outcomes
• Locus of control (Chapter 3) helps explain your
personality
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Evaluating Social-Cognitive Theories
Benefits of social-cognitive theories
• Testable, objective hypotheses and operationally defined
terms, rely on empirical data
• Emphasize how the environment affects and is affected
by individuals
• Mischel says personalities change according to situation
Critics say ….
• social-cognitive theorists focus too much on the
situation and don’t adequately address the stability of
the personality
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
BIOLOGICAL THEORIES
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Three Contributors to Personality
• Eysenck: personality traits are biologically
based
• Brain imaging shows specific areas of the brain
correlate with trait impulsiveness, riskaversion, risk-seeking personalities, shyness,
and sociability
• Neurochemistry also influences personality,
specifically MAO and dopamine
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Behavioral Genetics
• Behavioral genetic is a relatively new field that
determines the extent to which behavioral
differences are due to genetics as opposed to
the environment
Q5
Can our genes predict how much we will
give to charity?
• Participants with the “niceness gene”
reported higher levels of prosocial
behavior like giving blood or engaging in
volunteer work
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Evaluating Biological Theories
• Personality traits are never the result of a
single biological process
• There is a strong inherited basis for
personality, but the environment cannot be
discounted
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
PERSONALITY ASSESSMENT
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Interviews and Observation
• Psychologists use interviews to evaluate
personality:
– Unstructured interviews allow greater free
exploration of personality
– Structured interviews use specific questions to
objectively evaluate responses and compare to
others
• Psychologists directly and methodically
observe behavior
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Objective Tests
• Objective tests are preferred method of assessment
because they can be administered to many people and
can be evaluated in standardized way
• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) =
the most widely researched and clinically used selfreport personality test
– Primarily designed to diagnose psychological disorders
• NEO Personality Inventory-Revised assesses the FiveFactor model
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Projective Tests
• Projective tests = a method of
personality assessment in which an
individual is presented with a
standardized set of ambiguous
stimuli, such as inkblots or abstract
drawings, that allow the test taker
to project his or her unconscious
unto the test material; the
individual’s responses are assumed
to reveal inner feelings, motives,
and conflicts
• Rorschach and Thematic
Apperception Test (TAT)
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Are Personality Measurements Accurate?
• Interviews and observations are time
consuming and expensive; little agreement
between raters
• Objective tests incur three major criticisms:
– Deliberate deception and social desirability bias
– Diagnostic difficulties
– Cultural bias and inappropriate use
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Are Personality Measurements Accurate?
Q6
Why do people from different states vary
in their entrepreneurial spirit?
• A study of over 500,000 people
in the U.S. found greater
entrepreneurial spirit in western
states, perhaps reflecting
America’s historical migration
patterns of people moving from
east to west (Obschonka et al., 2013)
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Are Personality Measurements Accurate?
• Projective tests have weak reliability and
validity, but proponents say their open nature
allow subjects to discuss sensitive topics
• Because each method has its limits,
psychologists often combine methods
• Beware of pop-culture personality quizzes or
horoscopes – they may be entertaining, but
they aren’t based on science and shouldn’t be
used to make important decisions
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.