What is Personality?

• Personality:  as the distinctive and relatively enduring ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that characterize a person’s responses to life situations

• Id:  is the innermost core of the personality, the only structure present at birth, and the source of all psychic energy.

• Pleasure Principle: it seeks immediate gratification or release, regardless of rational considerations and environmental realities

• Ego: has direct contact with reality and functions primarily at a conscious level.

• Reality Principle: testing reality to decide when and under what conditions the id can safely discharge its impulses and satisfy its needs

• Superego: the moral arm of the personality

• Defense mechanisms: unconscious mental operations that deny or distort reality

• Repression: the ego uses some of its energy to prevent anxiety-arousing memories, feelings, and impulses from entering consciousness

• Sublimation: taboo impulses may even be channeled into socially desirable and admirable behaviors, completely masking the sinister underlying impulses

• Psychosexual Stages:  during which the id’s pleasure-seeking tendencies are focused on specific pleasure-sensitive areas of the body––the erogenous zones

• Fixation: a state of arrested psychosexual development in which instincts are focused on a particular psychic theme

• Regression: a psychological retreat to an earlier psychosexual stage,

• Oedipus Complex: A conflictual situation involving love for the mother and hostility toward the father

• Electra Complex: female counterpart of the Oedipus complex

• Neoanalytic: were psychoanalysts who disagreed with certain aspects of Freud’s thinking and developed their theories

• Personal Unconscious: based on their life experiences

• Collective Unconscious: that consists of memories accumulated throughout the entire history of the human race

• Archetypes: inherited tendencies to interpret experiences in certain ways

• Object Relations Theories: focus on the images or mental representations that people form of themselves and other people as a result of early experiences with caregivers

The Phenomenological-Humanistic Perspective

• Phenomenology: emphasis on the primacy of immediate experience is known as

• Personal Constructs: Cognitive Catagories into which they sort the people and events in their lives

• Role Construct Repertory Test (Rap Test): to assess individuals’ personal construct systems

• Self: an organized, consistent set of perceptions of and beliefs about oneself

• Self-Consistency: an absence of conflict among self-perceptions

• Congruence: consistency between self-perceptions and experience

• Threat: In Rogers’s theory, any experience we have that is inconsistent with our self-concept, including our perceptions of our own behavior. Threat evokes anxiety

• Need for Positive Regard: we are born with an innate need for acceptance, sympathy, and love from others

• Unconditional Positive Regard: communicates that the person is inherently worthy of love, regardless of accomplishments or behavior

• Need for Positive self-regard: the desire to feel good about ourselves

• Conditions of Worth: that dictate the circumstances under which we approve or disapprove of ourselves

• Fully Functioning Persons: individuals who were close to achieving self-actualization

• Self-Esteem: how positively or negatively we feel about ourselves

• Self-Verification: refers to this need to confirm the self-concept

• Self-Enhancement: a strong and pervasive tendency to gain and preserve a positive self-image

• Personality Traits: are relatively stable cognitive, emotional, and behavioral characteristics of people that help establish their individual identities and distinguish them from others

• Factor analysis: is used to identify clusters of behaviors that are highly correlated (positively or negatively) with one another, but not with behaviors in other clusters

Biological Foundations of Personality

• Genetic factors account for as much as half of the group variance in personality test scores, with individual experiences accounting for most of the remainder.

• Evolutionary theories of personality attribute some personality dispositions to genetically controlled mechanisms based on natural selection.

The Social-Cognitive Perspective

• Social Cognitive Theories: combine the behavioral and cognitive perspectives into an approach to personality that stresses the interaction of a thinking human with a social environment that provides learning experiences

• Reciprocal Determinism: the person, the person’s behavior, and the environment all influence one another in a pattern of two-way causal links

• Internal-External Locus of Control: an expectancy concerning the degree of personal control we have in our lives

• Efficacy: their beliefs concerning their ability to perform the behaviors needed to achieve desired outcomes

• Cognitive-Affective Personality System (CAPS): an organized system of fi ve person variables that interact continuously with one another and with the environment, generating the distinctive patterns of behavior that characterize the person

• Behavior Outcome Expectancies: represent the “if-then” links between alternative behaviors and possible outcomes

• Self-Regulation Processes:  refer to internal, self-administered rewards and punishments

Culture, Gender, and Personality

• Gender Schemas:  organized mental structures that contain our understanding of the attributes and behaviors that are appropriate and expected for males and females

• Structures Interviews: contain a set of specific questions that are administered to every participant.

• Behavioral Assessment: psychologists devise an explicit coding system that contains the behavioral categories of interest.

• Remote Behavior Sampling: researchers and clinicians can collect self-reported samples of behavior from respondents as they live their daily lives

• Rational-Theoretical Approach: items are based on the theorist’s conception of the personality trait to be measured.

• NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI): which measures the Big Five personality traits of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism

• Empirical Approach: in which items are chosen not because their content seems relevant to the trait on rational grounds but because each item has been answered differently by groups of people (for example, introverts and extraverts) known to differ in the personality characteristic of interest.

• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory - 2 (MMPI-2): is a widely used personality test developed according to the empirical approach.

• Projective Tests: present subjects with ambiguous stimuli and ask for some interpretation of them

• Rorschoch Test: consists of 10 inkblots

• Thematic Apperception Test (TAT): consists of a series of pictures derived from paintings, drawings, and magazine illustrations