CHAPTER 12 - PERSONALITY
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PERSONALITY
personality is a person’s long term pattern of
thinking, emotions, and behavior
 blend of talents, values, hopes, loves, hates, and
habits that makes each of us as a unique person
 Personality is also distinct from temperament sensitivity, irritability, distractibility, typical mood

TRAITS
Personality traits– stable qualities that a person
shows in most situations; inferred from behavior
 once identified, they can be used to predict future
behavior

TYPES
personality type refers to people who have several
traits in common:
 Carl Jung categorized personalities into two types
 1. Introverts – shy, egocentric person whose
attention is focused inward
 2. Extroverts – bold, outgoing person whose
attention is focused outward
 way of labeling people who have several key traits in
common.

SELF-CONCEPT
provide another way of understanding personality
 consists of all your ideas, perceptions, and feeling
about who you are; the mental picture you have of
your own personality
 created from daily experiences; slowly revised as we
have new experiences; tends to guide what we pay
attention to, remember, and think about.
Self-Esteem
 High
 Low

Personality Theories-a system of concepts,
assumptions, ideas, and principles proposed to
explain personality
 Trait theories attempt to learn what traits make up
personality and how they relate to actual behavior
 Psychodynamic theories focus on the inner
workings of personality, especially internal conflicts
and struggles
 Humanistic theories stress private, subjective
experience and personal growth.
 Behaviorist and social learning theories place
importance on the external environment and on the
effects of conditioning and learning.
 Social learning theories attribute differences in
personality to socialization, expectations and
mental processes
The Trait Approach-currently the dominant method
for studying personality
 theorists try to describe personality with a number
of key traits try to analyze, classify, and interrelate
traits; think of them as biological predispositions
Predicting Behavior
 knowing how you rate on this single dimension
allows us to predict how you will behave in a variety
of settings
CLASSIFYING TRAITS
Common Traits – tell us how people from a
particular nation or culture are similar, or which
traits a culture emphasizes
 Individual Traits define a person’s unique personal
qualities
 Cardinal Traits – so basic that all of a person’s
activities can be traced to the trait.

Central Traits – basic building blocks of personality
 just six traits would provide a good description of
personality: dominant, sociable, honest, cheerful,
intelligent, optimistic
Secondary Traits – less consistent, relatively
superficial aspects of a person
Source Traits
 surface traits-these often appeared together in
groups; these were so closely related they seemed to
represent a single trait
 source traits; they are the core of each individual’s
personality
Cattell identified 16 source traits; all 16 are needed
to fully describe a personality
 trait profile -draws a picture/graph of individual
personalities to compare them

The Big Five
 the five-factor model is a system that identifies the
five most basic dimensions of personality
 Extroversion
 Agreeableness
 Conscientiousness
 Neuroticism
 Openness to experience
PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY
believe that many of our actions are based on
hidden, or unconscious, needs, thoughts or
emotions.
The Structure of Personality
 Id is made up of innate biological instincts and
urges.
-operates on the pleasure principle
-acts as a well of energy for the entire psyche
-this energy is called libido and flows from life
instincts.
-thanatos - death instinct- produces aggressive and
destructive urges

ego –the executive -directs energies supplied by the
id.
-guided by the reality principle – It is a system of
thinking, planning, problem solving, and deciding.
It is in conscious control of the personality.
 superego acts as a judge or censor for the thoughts
and actions of the ego.
-conscience.
 the ego ideal reflects all behavior one’s parents
approved of or rewarded.
-acts as an internalized parent to bring behavior
under control.

all of these are conflicting mental processes –
internal struggles
-you feel anxiety when your ego is threatened or
overwhelmed.
 impulses from the id cause neurotic anxiety when
the ego can barely keep them under control.
 threats of punishment from the superego cause
moral anxiety
 many resort to ego-defense mechanisms to lessen
internal conflicts – these deny distort or block our
sources of threat and anxiety.

Freud believed that our behavior often expresses
unconscious (hidden) forces
-the unconscious holds repressed memories and
emotions, plus the instinctual drives of the id
-the conscious level includes everything you are aware
of at a given moment
-the preconscious contains material that can be easily
brought to awareness

Personality Development
 Freud theorized that the core of personality is
formed before the age 6 in a series of psychosexual
stages.
-at each stage, a different part of the body becomes an
erogenous zone
 a fixation is an unresolved conflict or emotional
hang-up caused by overindulgence or by
frustration.
Oral Stage – during the first year of life, most of an
infant’s pleasure comes from stimulation of the
mouth
-a fixation in this stage produces an oral dependant
personality - are gullible, passive and need lots of
attention
 Anal Stage – Between the ages of 1-3, the child’s
attention shifts to the process of elimination.
-an anal retentive (holding in) personality is
obstinate, stingy, orderly, and compulsively clean.
-anal expulsive (letting go) personalities are
disorderly, destructive, cruel, or messy

Phallic Stage – these fixations develop between ages
3-6; increased sexual interest causes the child to be
physically attracted to the parent of the opposite
sex.
-Oedipus conflict (males) – the boy feels a rivalry with
his father for the affection of his mother
-girls experience the Electra conflict – the girl loves
her father and competes with her mother

Latency – from age 6 to puberty – a period of quiet
time during which psychosexual development is
dormant.
 Genital Stage – at puberty an upswing in sexual
energies activates all the unresolved conflicts of
earlier years.

Neo-freudians- those who stayed close to the core of
Freud’s thinking; accepted the broad features but
revised parts of it
 Alfred Adler – we are social creatures governed by
social urges, not biological instincts.
-the main driving force in personality is a striving for
superiority – a struggle to overcome imperfections,
an upward drive for competence, completion, and
mastery of shortcomings
-this creates a person’s style of life; is formed by age 5
and is revealed by the earliest memory that can be
recalled
Karen Horney
-a core of basic anxiety occurs when people feel
isolated and helpless in a hostile world; rooted in
childhood.
-emotional health reflects a balance in moving
toward, away from, and against others.
 Carl Jung
-a persona (mask) exists between the ego and the
outside world.
-the persona is the public self presented to others; we
adopt particular roles or hide our deeper feelings.

Humanistic Theory
 focuses on human experience, problems, potentials,
and ideals.
 the core of humanism is a positive image of humans
as creative beings capable of free will
 emphasize the immediate subjective experienceprivate perceptions of reality -there are as many
real worlds as there are people
Maslow and Self-Actualization -referred to the process of
fully developing personal potentials as self-actualization
-a continuous search for personal fulfillment
 Efficient perceptions of reality
 Comfortable acceptance of self, others, nature
 Spontaneity
 Task centering
 Autonomy
 Continued freshness of appreciation
 Fellowship with humanity
 Profound interpersonal relationships
 Comfort with solitude
 Nonhostile sense of humor
 Peak experiences
Carl Rogers’ Self Theory
 the fully functioning person lives in harmony with his or
her deepest feelings and impulses; open to experience
and trust their inner urges and intuitions
-Rogers emphasizes -self – a flexible and changing
perception of personal identity
-Information or feelings inconsistent with the self-image
as said to be incongruent –incongruence
-being authentic is vital for healthy functioning; we need to
feel that our behavior accurately expresses who we are
-it is essential to have congruence between the self-image
and the -ideal self-the person you would most like to be
-our ideal self is only one of a number of -possible selvespersons we could become or are afraid of becoming
Humanistic View of Development
the development of a self-image depends greatly on
information from the environment
 positive and negative evaluations by others cause
children to develop internal standards of
evaluations called conditions of worth
 learning to evaluate some experience or feelings as
“good” and others as “bad” is directly related to a
later capacity for self-esteem, positive selfevaluation or -positive self-regard

Learning Theories
 Behavioral personality theories emphasize that
personality is no more or less than a collection of
learned behavior patterns.
-personality is acquired through classical and operant
conditioning, observational learning,
reinforcement, extinction, generalization, and
discrimination
How Situations Affect Behavior
 what is predictable about personality is that we
respond in consistent ways to certain types of
situations
-Personality = Behavior
-habits make up the structure of personality. They are
governed by four elements of learning:
-drive – any stimulus strong enough to goad a person
into action
-cues-signals from the environment that guide
responses
-responses-actions-so that they are most likely to
bring about reward
Social Learning Theory
 affected by situation, expectancy, and
reinforcement value
-situation – how a person interprets or defines the
situation
-expectancy – anticipation that a response will lead to
a reinforcement
-expected reinforcement may be more important than
actual past reinforcement
-reinforcement value – we attach different values to
various activities or rewards
Self-Efficacy – the capacity for producing a desired
result- one of the most important expectancies we
develop
 Self-Reinforcement- refers to praising or rewarding
yourself for having made a particular response
(completing an assignment)
-self praise and self-blame become an important part
of personality – closely related to self-esteem

Behaviorist View
-childhood is a time of urgent drives, powerful
rewards and punishments, frustration and social
reinforcement
-During childhood there are 4 Critical Situations that
are capable of leaving a lasting imprint on
personality:
 Feeding
 toilet training
 sex training
 learning to express anger or aggression
-when parents accept their children and give them
affection, the children become sociable, positive,
and emotionally stable…high esteem
Personality and Gender
 identification and imitation contribute greatly to
personality development and to sex training
-Identification leads to imitation, a desire to act like
the admired person
Nature and Nurture
 temperament – the raw material from which our
personalities are formed – the biological
predispositions to be sensitive, irritable,
distractible.
-starts to stabilize around age 3 continues to harden
through age 50
-behavioral genetics-the study of inherited behavioral
traits
-intelligence, some mental disorders, temperament,
and other complex qualities are influenced by
heredity
Studying Twins
 medical and psychological tests reveal that reunited
twins are very much alike, even when they are
reared apart; despite the wide difference in
childhood environment
 studies of twins make it clear that heredity has a
sizable effect on each of us; reasonable to conclude
that heredity is responsible for 25 to 50 percent of
the variation in many personality traits