Personality Theory &
Assessment
Chapter 14
Part I
William G. Huitt
Personality Theories
http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/perscontents.html
Last revised: May 2005
Summary
•A human being is inherently
– biological
– able to be conditioned
– sensing & perceiving
– emotional
– intelligent
– knowledge creating
– rational thinking
– creative thinking
– language using
– social
– motivated
– patterned
Defining Personality and Traits
• Personality
– Distinctive and relatively stable pattern of behaviors,
thoughts, motives, and emotions that characterizes
an individual throughout life.
• Trait
– A characteristic of an individual, describing a habitual
way of behaving, thinking, and feeling.
Personality Theories
• Distinctive, unique
– Patterns of behaviors, thoughts, motives, and
emotions that make a person different from
others
• Commonalities
– Dimensions on which all human beings can
be measured and compared
Temperament
• Physiological dispositions to respond to
the environment in certain ways.
– Ancient Greeks proposed temperaments
• Sanguine
• Melancholy
• Choleric
• Phlegmatic
– Thomas, Chess, and Birch
• Studied 2- to 3-month-old infants on 9 factors
and followed them into adolescence and
adulthood
Temperament
• Three general types of temperament emerged
from the study
– Easy (40%) –generally pleasant moods; adaptable;
approached new situations and people positively;
established regular sleeping, eating, and elimination
patterns
– Difficult (15%) –generally unpleasant moods;
reacted negatively to new situations and people;
intense in their emotional reactions; showed
irregularity of bodily functions
– Slow-to-warm-up (10%) – tended to withdraw; slow
to adapt; had a medium mood
Temperament
• Martin, Wisenbaker and Huttunen
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–
–
–
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Inhibition (approach-avoidance)
Negative emotionality
Adaptability
Activity level
Task persistence
• Similar to the Big Five factors identified in the
study of adult personality
Temperament
• Research indicates that
– temperament is strongly influenced by heredity
– environmental factors, such as parents’ childrearing
style, also affect temperament
– temperament is relatively stable over time; the
various dimensions of temperament can predict
behavioral problems that may appear later in
childhood or in adolescence
Personality Theories
• Psychoanalytic
– Freud
– Neo-Freudians
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•
•
•
Carl Jung
Erik Erikson
Alfred Adler
Karen Horney
• Humanistic
– Abraham Maslow
– Carl Rogers
– Viktor Frankl
• Learning
– B. F. Skinner
• Social Cognition
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–
–
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George Kelly
Walter Mischel
Albert Bandura
Albert Ellis
• Transpersonal
– Roberto Assagioli
– Ken Wilber
Sigmund Freud
• Psychoanalysis
– Freud’s term for his theory of personality and his
therapy for treating psychological disorders
• The conscious, the preconscious, and the
unconscious
– Freud believed that there are three levels of
awareness in consciousness: the conscious, the
preconscious, and the unconscious
Sigmund Freud
• The conscious, the preconscious, and the
unconscious
– Conscious
• The thoughts, feelings, sensations, or memories of which a
person is aware at any given moment
– Preconscious
• The thoughts, feelings, and memories that a person is not
consciously aware of at the moment but that may be
brought to consciousness
– Unconscious
• For Freud, the primary motivating force of behavior,
containing repressed memories as well as instincts and
wishes that have never been conscious
Sigmund Freud
• Freud proposed three systems of personality
– Id
• The unconscious system of the personality,
which contains the life and death instincts and
operates on the pleasure principle
– Ego
• The rational, largely conscious system of
personality, which operates according to the
reality principle
– Superego
• The moral system of the personality, which
consists of the conscience and the ego ideal
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
• Defense mechanisms
– An unconscious, irrational means used by the ego
to defend against anxiety; involves self-deception
and the distortion of reality
– Repression
• Involuntarily removing an unpleasant memory or barring
disturbing sexual and aggressive impulses from
consciousness
– Projection
• Attributing one’s own undesirable thoughts, impulses,
traits, or behaviors to others
• Allows people to avoid acknowledging unacceptable traits
and thereby to maintain self-esteem, but seriously distorts
their perception of the external world
Sigmund Freud
• Defense mechanisms
– Denial
• Refusing to acknowledge consciously the existence of
danger or a threatening condition
– Rationalization
• Supplying a logical, rational, socially acceptable reason
rather than the real reason for an action
• When people rationalize, they make excuses for, or justify,
failures and mistakes
– Regression
• Reverting to a behavior characteristic of an earlier stage of
development
Sigmund Freud
• Defense mechanisms
– Reaction formation
• Denying an unacceptable impulse, often sexual or
aggressive, by giving strong conscious expression to its
opposite
– Displacement
• Substituting a less threatening object for the original object
of an impulse
– Sublimation
• Rechanneling sexual or aggressive energy into pursuits
that society considers acceptable or admirable
Sigmund Freud
• The psychosexual stages of development
– Psychosexual stages
• A series of stages through which the sexual instinct
develops
– Fixation
• Arrested development at a psychosexual stage occurring
because of excessive gratification or frustration at that
stage
Sigmund Freud
• Evaluating Freud’s contribution
– Unconscious forces may motivate behavior,
– Emphasizing the influence of early childhood
experiences on later development
– Psychoanalysis is still viewed as a useful
therapeutic technique
Carl Jung
•
Disagreed with Freud
– the sexual instinct is not the main factor in
personality
– the personality is not almost completely formed in
early childhood
Carl Jung
• Personality consists of three parts
– Ego
• the rational, largely conscious system of personality, which
operates according to the reality principle
– Personal unconscious
• all of the thoughts and experiences that are accessible to
the conscious, as well as repressed memories and
impulses
– Collective unconscious
• contains the universal experiences of humankind
transmitted to each individual; not available to conscious
thought
• Archetype
– Existing in the collective unconscious, an inherited
tendency to perceive and respond in particular ways
to universal human situations (Joseph Campbell)
Carl Jung
• Personality functions
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Extroversion vs Introversion (orientation)
Sensing vs Intuition (data collection)
Thinking vs Feeling (making judgments)
Judging vs Perceiving (preferred function)
• Temperaments
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–
–
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SP (sanguine, artist)
SJ (melancholy, guardian)
NT (choleric, rational)
NF (phlegmatic, idealistic)
Alfred Adler
• Emphasized the unity of the personality rather
than the separate warring components of id,
ego, and superego
• Maintained that the drive to overcome feelings
of inferiority acquired in childhood motivates
most of our behavior
• Claimed that people develop a “style of life” at
an early age – a unique way in which the child
and later the adult will go about the struggle to
achieve superiority
Erik Erikson
• Developed theory of socioemotional
development
• Believed that a healthy adult personality
depends on acquiring the appropriate basic
attitudes in the proper sequence during
childhood and adolescence
• Developed lifespan approach to personality
development
Karen Horney
• Believed that personality could continue to
develop and change throughout life
• Believed that many of women’s psychological
difficulties arise from failure to live up to an
idealized version of themselves
• To be psychologically healthy, women, she
claimed, (and men for that matter) must learn
to overcome irrational beliefs about the need
for perfection