P.E.R.S.O.N.A.L.I.T.Y

Why study personality?

•          Personality is a central topic in psychology.

•          Aims to understand causes of behavior in ourselves and others by attributing unique individual characteristics.

What is Personality?

“An individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting.”

What is Personality?

•          A person’s general style of interacting with the world.
•          Differences between people which are  relatively consistent over time and place.
•          Personality is the set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that is organized and relatively enduring and that influences his or her interactions with, and adaptations to, the environment (including the intrapsychic, physical, and social environment).
•          Individuals can be studied in two ways: 

              Nomothetically: As individual instances of general characteristics that are distributed in the population  

           Idiographically: As single and unique cases

Current Issues in Personality

•          Appropriate Units of Personality

–        Traits

–        Motives

–        Cognitions

–        Which traits, motives, cognitions, etc.

   Current Issues in Personality

•          Nomothetic:  scientific, analytic, common units

                                                                vs.

•          Idiographic:  individual level, study individual lives in depth

Major theoretical perspectives

•          Psychoanalytic

•          Trait

•          Humanistic

•          Social-Cognitive

•          Biological (not covered)

Psychodynamic Perspective

•          Developed by Sigmund Freud

•          Psychoanalysis is both:

–         an approach to therapy and

–         a theory of personality

•          Emphasises unconscious motivation

•          Conscious: Information in your immediate awareness; all things we are aware of at any given moment

•          Pre-conscious: Information which can easily be made conscious; everything that can, with a little effort, be brought into consciousness; stores temporary memories

•          Unconscious: Thoughts, feelings, urges, wishes, and other information of which we are unaware and that is difficult to bring to conscious awareness; inaccessible warehouse of anxiety-producing thoughts and drives

Psychodynamic Personality Structure

Personality arises from one’s efforts to resolve conflicts between 3 interacting systems of the mind:

•          Id (Biological – aggression & pleasure-seeking)

Instinctual drives present at birth

Seeks to satisfy basic biological urges

Operates on the ‘pleasure principle’, unconstrained by logic or reality

Does not distinguish between reality and fantasy

•          Ego (Rationality)

Develops ~ 6-8 months, out of the Id

Operates on the ‘reality principle’

Seeks to satisfy urges in a realistic way

Understands reality and logic

Mediates between Id and Superego

•          Superego (Social)

Develops ~ 5 years

Represents internalised societal and parental morals, values, ideals

Strives for the ideal

Responsible for guilt

Its sole focus is on how one ought to think and behave