Personalities:Normal to Not so Normal

Personalities: Not a new topic• Galen: 4 Humors in the 2nd century• Yellow bile: bad tempered (Tommy Lee)• Black bile: gloomy and pessimistic (the future of

our environment)• Phlegm: sluggish and boring (Gore before the

makeover)• Blood: cheerful and passionate (Roberto Begnini)

Personality Traits: our only way to know what personality is

• Allport: Dictionary search stimulated further research

• Cattel’s 16 Personality factors (source and surface traits)

• Eysenck’s 3 Factors (personality has biological roots)

• 5 Factor model (personality has, yep, you guessed it... 5 dimensions)

Psychobiological Approaches: How much of our strange personalities can we

blame on our parents?

Or: How much did

this “woman’s”

parents have to do with this?

- biological factors studied through twins (identical vs. fraternal)

- evidence suggests heredity resp. for 50-70% of personality

- environment resp. for 0-7%.

- where’s the rest?? - Ex: identical twins raised together and apart

It’s fuzzy math!: if it’s not environmental or hereditary, where’s the influence coming

from?

• Environment and genetics combine

• genetic make-up will determine how family members interact in their environment.

What role does our gray matter

play in our personalities?

• Brain damage can permanently alter personality

• Drug use can also affect our demeanor and traits (so I’ve heard)

• Zuckerman: our personality traits are controlled by neural systems

Evidence that shows…brace yourself…our brains are influential in our

personalities

• Extroverted people will seek reinforcement

• research with cats shows that “bold” will seek out unfamiliar territory, “timid” will avoid it.

• This ties into Eyesenk’s 3 Factor theory

The Social Learning Approach: how does

our environment create our quirks?

EXPECTANCIES & OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING

* expectancy - the belief that a specific consequence will follow an action* observational learning - learning through observing others (i.e. : capitalizing on others’ misfortunes)

Fear not! Here’s more Social Learning Theory!!

• RECIPROCAL DETERMINISM & SELF-EFFICACY

• (RD): it’s not environment or traits, but both that determine our personality (a BOLD statement)

• (SE): our expectation of success in a given situation– the behavior we choose to engage in depends on

how much we think people will like that behavior (except for these two people)

Try to contain you’re excitement, we’re not done yet! Person Variables

• 5 main variables where people differ:– competencies

– encoding strategies

– expectancies

– subjective values

– plans

• Says that individual differences in the way we think (person variables) account for differences in personality– ANOTHER AMAZINGLY OBVIOUS

STATEMENT, but hey, I didn’t think of it.

Can anyone name the differences between these two people?

Locus of Control: Are you your own man (or woman)? Or a pawn in the

hands of fate?

• Our actions are either controlled by us, or by external factors

• internal or external– internal: a person’s fate lies in his own hands, he can control his

rewards by his actions

– external: a person’s fate is controlled by unseen factors that he reacts to

The Psychodynamic Approach: we aren’t aware of what we’re doing, and our mind is a battlefield for some pretty

strange things.

Or, (and you thought I’d forgotten him) FREUD’S ideas!

• Our instinctual drives are triggered by traumatic events

• individual is then forced to repress emotion

• emotion is then expressed neurotically (because it can’t be expressed normally)

• then we end up like these people

Everyone’s favorite: The Id, Ego and Superego (Celine Dion)

• Unconscious, conscious and preconscious (we can be messed up and not even know it)

• ID: completely unconscious, contains the libido (always looking for immediate gratification)– the pleasure principle - act without thinking (Hugh Grant)

• ego: controls behavior, a mediator, driven by the reality principle - satisfy the ID realistically

• superego: divided into conscience and ego-ideal (what behavior is okay, what are the individual’s goals?)

Defense mechanisms: What $10,000 credit card debt? I think I’ll buy

myself a new wardrobe.• Repression: keeping the bad thoughts away from our

consciousness (“forgetting” about 50 page papers, bills, confrontations, traumas, etc…)

• Reaction formation: replacing a bad idea with a good one (being two-faced - hating someone but acting like you would gladly play to clean their toilet)

• Projection: denying your feelings and finding them in others (I’m not paranoid, everyone really IS out to get me!)

• Sublimation: channeling your energy (someone with homicidal rage running a marathon to blow off steam)

• Rationalization: i.e. LYING to yourself (“I read Playboy for the articles”)

• Conversion: developing a physical reaction to a psychological problem (becoming blind if subjected to campaign ads one too many times)

Freud’s “I’m eating this sandwich because I’m sexually frustrated” (Psychosexual Theory of

Personality Development)

• Psychosexual stages of development: trying to satisfy a different erogenous zone at each stage

• ORAL STAGE: getting sexual gratification from chewing on things (can lead to “biting sarcasm” or excessive talking)

• ANAL STAGE (as pleasant as it sounds): enjoying going to the bathroom. EX. -----> that child is “enjoying emptying his feces”. (can lead to cruel or anal retentive behavior later)

• PHALLIC STAGE: discovering sexual gratification from touching the genitals (starts around age 3)

Freud’s groupies: Jung, Adler and Erikson

• Carl Jung: came up with collective unconscious - memories and ideas inherited from our ancestors

• Alfred Adler: we realize at a very young age that everyone is smarter than we are. Spend our lives trying to compensate for this.

• Karen Horney: people suffer from basic anxiety (move toward, against and away from others)

• Erik Erikson: our personalities don’t stop evolving when we become adults, social interactions continue to

change us.

The warm and fuzzy approach: The Humanistic Approach

• Abraham Maslow: human motivation based on a hierarchy of needs

• our motivation for different activities goes through several levels•Self-actualization

•aesthetic needs

•cognitive needs

•esteem needs

•attachment needs

•safety needs

•physiological needs

The Humanistic Approach Continued...

• Maslow’s levels: can’t get to a higher level without achieving the one beneath it.

• Studied people he felt had achieved actualization (Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Thoreau, the Beetles (kidding), etc…)

Conditions of Worth: Mr. Rogers’ ideas

• Carl Rogers, that

is: believed that our personality depends on our image of ourselves and how we’re treated by others

• all people need to be liked

• there are certain criteria that need to be met before people will give us positive regard– these criteria are

conditions of worth

Personality tests: Trying to measure something that can’t really be measured.

• Rorschach

• Thematic Apperception Test– shown ambiguous situation and asked to

describe it

Important to evaluate these tests:

•poor reliability and little validity (shocker)

•scores are very sensitive to moods

Gender Differences in personality: who’s really smarter?

• Classic stereotypes– men: competent, decisive,

logical– women: the opposite of all

that

Most of these not confirmed: boys more aggressive - but can depend on culture (Israeli girls)

Congratulations, you made it to the end!

• Questions?

• Basics:– personality hard

to define

– everyone is unique

– including the psychologists that define personality