Readings: Self, Identity & Personality

Lecture 1:

Chapter 1: The study of the person

1. The goals of personality psychology

- Personality = individual’s characteristic pattern of thought, emotion, behaviour,
together with the psychological mechanisms behind
• Mission impossible
- ‘basic approach’ is necessary; trait approach most all-encompassing
BASIC APPROACH FOCAL TOPICS
(theoretical view of personality that
focusses on some phenomena and
ignores others)
- Trait approach - Conceptualization of individual
(theoretical view of personality that differences
focusses on individual differences in - Measurement of individual differences
personality and behvaiour and the - Consequences of individual differences
psychological processes behind - Personality development
them) - Personality change

- Biological approach - Anatomy

(view that focusses on the way
behavior and personality are
influenced by neuroanatomy,
biochemistry, genetics and evolution)
- Psychoanalytic approach
(based on the writings of Freud,
emphasizes unconscious processes
of the mind)
- Phenomenological approach
(view that emphasizes experience,
free will and the meaning of life.
Closely related to humanistic
psychology and existentialism)
- Learning & cognitive
approaches
(focus on how behavior changes as a
function of rewards and punishments,
also called behaviorism)
- Physiology
- Genetics
- Evolution
- unconscious mind
- Internal mental conflict
-
- conscious awareness & experience
- Free will
- Humanistic psychology
- Cross-cultural psychology
- Behaviorism
- Social learning theory
- Cognitive personality psychology

• Competitors or complements
- Different approaches often perceived as ‘competitors’
- Not helpful to regard approaches as mutually exclusive – they complement each
other
- At the same time, each tends to ignore key concern of the other approaches
• Distinct approaches vs the one big theory
- Some would like a big theory (new or combine approaches)
- Some believe that it is good the way it is, because each approach answers a
different question
• Advantages as disadvantages (and vice versa)
 - The strong points come with and are even sometimes a consequence of the
weak points (& vice versa) = Funder’s First Law (great strengths are usually great
weaknesses, often opposite is true as well)
2. The plan of this book
3. Pigeonholing vs appreciation of individual differences
- Personality psych tends to emphasize differences (rather than similarities as in
other areas of psych)
- Real mission: appreciate ways in which each individual is unique
4. Wrapping it up

Chapter 2: Personality Research Methods

1. Psychology’s emphasis on method

- Everything is open to question (no facts-facts), no ‘fact’ presented without both
description of experiment that found it and discussion of whether evidence was
persuasive
• Scientific education and technical training
- Research emphasizes thinking over memorizing because it entails seeking new
knowledge, not cataloging facts already known
- Fundamental difference between scientific education and technical training
(medical training = technical rather than scientific)
- Scientists in training: taught to question what is already known and learn methods
to find out more
- Research : exploration of the unknown, finding out something that nobody knew
before one discovered it
2. Personality data
- Psychologist trying to understand individual’s personality is like a detective
solving a mystery: clues may be abound but the trick is to interpret them correctly
- Healthy skepticism that some clues might be misleading
- Funder’s Second Law: there are no perfect indicators of personality, there are
only clues, and clues are always ambiguous
- Funder’s Third Law: Something beats nothing, two times out of three (gather the
data/clues because only alternative is no clues at all).
• Four kinds of cues
Advantages Disadvantages
S Data: Self-reports 1. Large amount of 1. Error (lack of
information awareness in
2. Access to reporting,
thoughts, feelings, careless filling in)
intentions 2. Bias (self-serving
3. Some S data are or more negative,
true by definition desirability )
(e.g. self-esteem) 3. Too simple and
4. Causal force (self- easy
efficacy and self-
verification)
5. Simple & easy

I Data: Informants’ 1. Large amount of 1. Limited behavioral

reports information information
2. Real-world basis 2. Lack of access to
(not psychologist’s private experience
office) 3. Error
3. Common sense 4. Bias
 4. Some I data are
true by definition
(e.g. likeability)
5. Causal force

L Data: Life outcomes 1. Objective and 1. Multi-

verifiable determination
2. Intrinsic 2. Possible lack of
importance psychological
3. Psychological relevance
relevance

B Data: Behavioural 1. Wide range of 1. Difficult and

observations contexts (both real expensive
and contrived) 2. Uncertain
2. Appearance of interpretation
objectivity

• Quality of data
a) Reliability
Factors that undermine reliability - Low precision
- State of the participant
- State of the experimenter
- Variation in the environment

Techniques that improve reliability - Care with research

procedure
- Standardized research
protocol
- Measure something
important
- Aggregation (averaging of
multiple measurements –
over the long haul, random
influences cancel each other
out, Spearman-Brown
formula)

b) Validity: degree to which measurement actually measures what it is supposed

to measure
- Face validity: appears to measure what it is supposed to measure
c) Generalizability
3. Research design
• Case method: closely studying particular event/person
- Yields explanations for specific events but also useful lessons / even scientific
principles
- Advantages
a) Does justice to the topic, describes whole phenomenon
b) Source of ideas
c) Necessary!
- Disadvantages
a) Degree of generalizability is unknown
• An experimental and a correlational study
 - Both methods attempt to assess relationship between two variables
• Comparting the experimental and correlational methods
- Experimental: presumably causal variable is manipulated
à advantage: ability to ascertain what causes what
- Correlational: variable measured as it already exists
à cannot tell us the direction of causality
à correlation coefficient: number between -1 and 1 that reflects degree to which
one variable (y) is a linear function of the other (x)
4. Conclusion
5. Wrapping it up
• Topics
- Psychology’s emphasis on method
- Personality data
- Research design
Lecture 2: Traits

Chapter 6: Traits & types – the Big Five and beyond

What is a trait?: traits characterize best a person’s average behavior across situations
- Personality is the baggage you always carry with you
- Even small effects of

1. Four ways to study personality

1) Single-trait approach
- Examines link between personality and behavior by asking: what do people like
THAT do? (THAT = personality trait)
- How specific traits correlates with different behaviors
2) Many-trait approach
- Asks: Who does THAT? (THAT = behavior)
- Which traits correlate with specific behavior
3) Essential-trait approach
- Asks: Which traits are the most important?
- Tries to narrow traits that really matter: e.g. Big Five
4) Typological approach
- Focus on identifying types of individuals = each type characterized by specific
pattern of traits
- A doubt: is it valid to compare people on same trait dimensions? (apples and
oranges???)
- A hope: researchers can groups of people who resemble each other enough and
are different enough to everybody else, so it makes sense to treat them as the
same ‘type’
2. The single-trait approach
• Self-monitoring (inner reality vs external image presented to others)
- Discrepancy between inner and outer selves varies across individuals
- Big difference = high self-monitors , largely same = low self-monitors
- There is no value judgment in self-monitoring
- High self-monitors:
à skilled in social techniques if pretending and imaginative play
à talkative
à self-dramatizing, exaggerates emotion
à initiates humor
à verbally fluent
à expressive in face & gestures
à having social poise and presence
- Low self-monitors:
à distrustful
à perfectionistic
à touchy
à anxious
à introspective
à independent
à feeling cheated and victimized by life
• Narcissism (basic trait of people with such high self-regard and neglect of
concern for others)
- Excessive self-love
- Often charming and make good first impression
- Can be manipulative, entitles, vain, arrogant
 - They might not like themselves very much though! (may feel superior but still not
good about themselves)
- Crave feelings of power, success and glory
- Why? Theory: dealing with life by seeking to defend unrealistically inflated self-
concept
3. The many-trait approach
- Several lists have been developed
• The California Q-Set
- 100 phrases: each describes aspect of personality that might be important for
characterizing individual
- Raters sort items into 9 categories: 1 (highly uncharacteristic) to 9 (highly
characteristic)
• Talking
- LIWC programme: filters out ‘certainty words’ (that’s just one category) à what
does it say about personality?
• Political beliefs
- Connection: childhood personality – adult political beliefs
4. The essential trait approach
• Reducing the many to the few: theoretical approaches
à Murray: 20 ‘needs’
à Block: ego resilience (high: can adjust level of control) vs ego control (high:
inhibit impulses, low: give in to impulses; based on Freud’s idea that people
constantly experience impulses)
• Reducing the many to the few: factor analytic approaches
- Factor analysis: correlating every measured variable with every other variable
(result: correlation matrix à can get very large very fast)
à Cattell: 16 traits essential
• The Big 5 and beyond
- Lexical hypothesis: idea that, if people find something that is important, they will
develop a word for it à major personality traits will have synonymous terms in
many different languages
- Discovery of the Big 5: atm most accepted factor analytic solution
à search began: if something is important, people have invented word for it (e.g.
‘rain’) = important aspects of human life are labelled
à Allport: listed all personality-descriptive English words (almost 18000) à
selected 4500
à Cattell: selected 35 of those
à Fiske: selected 22 of those à found 5 factors
à Tupes & Christal: found same 5 factors
à Since then: have been found again and again
- Each factor: collection of facets that have something in common
à thus: although factors are useful, they are necessarily oversimplified &
potentially misleading
• Extraversion
• Neuroticism
• Conscientiousness
• Agreeableness
• Openness to experience/culture/intellect
• Beyond the Big 5
- HEXACO: honesty-humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness,
conscientiousness, openness
5. Typological approaches to personality
• Evaluating typologies
- Hm…, what are types of people?
- Limitations:
a) Are different types of people qualitatively and not just quantitatively different
from each other? (= are they different from each other in ways that
conventional trait measurements cannot capture?) à turns out: NO
b) Cut off scores: let’s say 12 in a normal distribution (lower: unfriendly, higher:
friendly à 11 vs 13 would be different ‘types’ as 16 vs 23 would not be)
• The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
- Measures which of two opposing tendencies in four pairs better characterize you:
a) Extroversion (E) vs Introversion (I)
b) Sensing (S) vs Intuition (N)
c) Thinking (T) vs Feeling (F)
d) Judging (J) vs Perception (P)
- Problem also: scores are distributed normally
- Measurement is not reliable: might score differently when you are in different
mood
- For entertainment purposes only
• Uses of personality types
- Useful to think of people in terms of personality types?
à Maybe yes: each personality type serves as summary of how person stands
on large number of traits; Advertisements, politics: campaigns designed to appeal
to specific types; many traits summarized into ‘single label’
à maybe no: not useful for psychometric measurement and prediction
c) From assessment to understanding
d) Wrapping it up
Lecture 3: Stability, Development & Change

Chapter 7: Personality stability, development and change

- Personalities change à in response to dramatic event or just because of

passage of time
- Fundamental traits remain consistent
- Changing personality on purpose: difficult - but not impossible
1. Personality stability
- Rank-order consistency: consistency of personality in general, people tend to
maintain the ways in which they are different from other people the same age
(does not mean that people do not change)
• Evidence for stability
- Maintain ‘core personality traits’ (umm but what are they???)
• Causes of stability
a) Physical body/genetics: ‘temperament’ (‘personality’ in young preverbal
children to some degree determined by genes = fundamental tendencies
(basic attributes such as activity level, emotional reactivity and cheerfulness)
à Heterotypic continuity: effects of fundamental tendencies change with age
(behavioral pattern associated with trait might be different, according to age
group)
à 3 basic aspects: 1. Positive emotionality 2. Negative emotionality 3.
Effortful control
b) Physical / environmental factors:
à female/male body, tall/short, culturally attractive/unattractive à affect
experiences one has, thus, the person one becomes
à rich/poor, city/countryside, family size
à alle these factors: out of one’s control & will affect how you think, feel,
behave (3 elements of personality triad)
c) Birth order: firstborn = more likely to support traditional values and
establishment, laterborn = more likely to be independent, rebellious, open-
minded à true??? DEBATABLE
d) Early experience
e) Person-environment transactions: people respond to, seek out, create
environments that are compatible with their traits

Transaction Process Examples

Active Person seeks out Introvert avoids social
compatible gatherings
environment and
avoids incompatible
ones
Reactive Different people Extravert finds part xyz
respond differently to enjoyable, introvert
same situation finds same party
unbearable
Evocative Aspect of an Disagreeable person
individual’s personality starts argument over
leads to behavior that minor matter
changes the situation
they experience

f) Cumulative continuity and maturity: individual differences in personality

become more stable as one gets older (cumulative continuity principle)
 à one possible reason: environment gets more stable (is that so???)
à stability stems from psychological maturity (self-control, interpersonal
consistency, emotional stability)
- We expect to change less in future than we have in the past (the end of history) –
we feel like finished products à well, personality continues to develop across the
life span (so we’re probably not right)

2. Personality development
• Cross-sectional studies
- Survey people at different ages

à Cohort effects!: gather data from people who were born in different
years, different settings (much of psychology might actually be history = study
of a particular group in a particular time and place)

• Longitudinal studies
- Same people repeatedly measured over the years from childhood through
adulthood
- Luckily findings have been roughly consistent with cross-sectional studies
• Causes of personality development
a) Physical development: intelligence, linguistic ability, hormone levels
b) Social roles change: Erikson à 8 stages: different challenges at different
ages (foundation of life-span development study)
• The social clock
 - Pressures to accomplish certain things at certain ages
- Person who stays ‘on time’ receives social approval enjoys the feeling of being in
sync with society (otherwise might receive less approval and feel out of step)
• The development of narrative identity
- Task: development sense of who you are

à actor: mission to develop social skills, traits and roles that allow to take place
in society
à agent: person who is guided by goals and values
à author: self-authored book that comprises ever-evolving narrative identity
(reveals how one views one’s entire life)
• Goals across the lifespan
- Different goals/priorities at different ages
3. Personality change
• The desire for change
- Most people want to change some trait somehow
- A lot of people try to change some aspect of their personality
- Hope that having different personality might make life better
- Four methods that can potentially change personality
1) Psychotherapy
- Can work
- Some drugs work too (fluoxetine, psilocybin)
2) General interventions
- General: aimed at completing education, less criminal behavior, improving
prospects for employment
3) Targeted interventions
- Cultural investments (opera, museums) à openness
- Self-affirmations: write about important values and when and why they matter the
most à tolerance for stress, decrease in defensiveness
- Self-control: meditation, relaxing, etc.
• Socio-genomic trait intervention model: first step in personality change is to
identify thoughts, feelings and behaviors that person wants to change / then
person needs to do things outside of comfort zone to act out those changes, over
and over, until they become habitual and automatic / environment should be
supportive of change
4) Behaviors and life experiences
- Exercise: associated with more stability over time
 - Certain life experiences can have effects
• Overcoming obstacles to change
à most people like their personality pretty much the way it is
à people have tendency to blame negative experiences and failures on external
forces rather than recognizing role of own personality
à people generally like their lives to be consistent and predictable
- Steps to overcome obstacles: (CHANGE BHEVIOR IN ORDER TO CHANGE
TRAIT, RATHER THAN VICE VERSA)
1) Precondition 1: changing trait-related behaviors is considered desirable or
necessary
2) Precondition 2: changing trait-related behaviors is considered feasible
à self-regulated behavioral changes
3) Precondition 3: self-regulated changes become habitual
à trait change
4. Principles of personality continuity and change
- Seven principles of personality development
Cumulative continuity principle Traits increase in rank-order
consistency as people get older
Maturity principle People become better equipped to
deal with demands of life as they
acquire experience and skills
Plasticity principle Personality can change at any time
Role continuity principle Taking on roles/images can lead
personality to be consistent over time
Identity development principle People seek to develop stable sense
of who they are, the strive to act
consistently with self-view
Social investment principle Changing social roles at different
stages in life can change personality
Corresponsive principle Person-environment transactions can
cause traits to remain consistent or
even magnify over time

5. Is personality change good or bad?

- Depends on what changes
- Downside of change: instability / inconsistency can cause problems, difficult to
choose consistent goals that can be pursued over long-term
- Upside: slow & steady kind is usually good
Lecture 4: Genetics & Evolution

Chapter: genetics and evolution – the inheritance of personality

1. Behavioral genetics
- How inherited biological materials (genes) can influence broad patterns of
behavior (personality traits)
• Controversy
- Controversial ideas of eugenics and cloning à neither is feasible luckily
• Calculating heritability
- Classic technique: twin studies
à monozygotic (identical, splitting of single fertilized egg) vs dizygotic (fraternal,
two eggs fertilized by two different sperm at same time) twins
- 99% of human genes are identical in humans
- Behavioral genetics: focus on last 1% that varies across individuals
à MZ twins: identical
à DZ twins: share half of it (as do other siblings, parents, etc.)
(evolutionary psych looks at species-specific traits that all humans share, look at
all genes – behavioral genetics looks at individual differences, only the 1%)
- Heritability coefficient: reflects degree to which variance of trait in population can
be attributed to variance in genes
à Heritability quotient = (rMZ – rDZ ) × 2
à across many traits: MZ twins = 0.60, DZ twins = 0.40 à difference = 0.20 à
x2 = 0.40 à average heritability of many traits is ~0.40 à 40% of
phenotypic/behavioral variance is accounted for by genetic variance
• What heritability tells you
1) Genes matter
- Heritability of
a) Personality
b) Psychiatric illness
c) Social attitudes
2) Insight into the effects of the environment
- Window into non-genetic effects
• What heritability can’t tell you
1) Nature vs nurture
- Puzzle not solved
2) How genes affect personality
• Molecular genetics
- Seeks to unravel how specific genes influence life outcomes by diving into actual
DNA
• Gene-environment interactions
- Genes cannot cause anybody to do anything, any more than you can live in the
blueprint of your house
- Genotype only provides design, so affects behavioral phenotype indirectly, by
influencing biological structure and physiology as they develop within
environment
- Environment can even affect heritability itself
à how person is treated due to genetically influenced things (e.g. being short)
à how people choose their environments (‘niche picking’)
à the same environment can produce good and bad outcomes for different
people
à
• Genome-wide association studies
 - Another approach to understanding the molecular genetic roots of behavior is the
genome-wide association study (GWA)
- Data of thousands of genes and patterns in thousands of people are dumped into
computer + data about individuals’ personalities
à computer searches to find which genes/patterns are associated with which
traits
à each major personality trait will turn out to be associated many different genes,
each of which has small effect that depends on effect of other genes &
environment
• Epigenetics
- Nongenetic influences on a gene’s expression, such as stress, nutrition etc.
- how experience (especially in early life) can determine how/whether gene is
expressed during development
- experience of social stress can activate expression of genes that lead to
vulnerability to depression and viral infections
• The future of behavioral genetics
- If we understood a person’s genetic predispositions, we might be able to help
them find an environment where their personality and abilities can lead to good
outcomes, rather than bad ones

2. Evolutionary personality psychology

• Evolution and behavior
- Crazy stuff that we’re here at all – consider magnitude of this family achievement
– back to the origins of everything
- Assumption that human behavioral patterns developed because our long-ago
ancestors found them to be helpful or necessary for survival
- Evolutionary mismatch: evolution is not the same as progress, just because
tendency is natural doesn’t mean it can’t be harmful, modern environment is
mismatch with human history à loneliness and tendency to consume every
resource in sight
- Aggression and altruism:
a) Aggression: can help to protect territory, property, mates, lead to dominance
in social group BUT ALSO to fight and murder
b) Altruism: tendency to aid and protect others, might help ensure survival of
own genes into next generations (inclusive fitness)
- Self-esteem: why does it feel so important? à Sociometer theory (Leary):
feelings of self-esteem evolved to monitor degree the degree to which person is
accepted by others à signs that we are not adequately valued cause self-esteem
to go down
- Depression: depression after social loss = characterized by pain, crying and
seeking social support; depression after failure = fatigue, pessimism, shame and
guilt à reactions may have promoted survival à sometimes good/useful/
purposeful to feel sad
• Individual differences
- Basic mechanism of evolution requires individual differences à species only
change through selective propagation of the genes of most successful individuals
(cannot happen if everyone is the same)
- Adaptation: diversity is what makes adaptation to changing conditions possible
- Accounting for individual differences:
1) Behavioral patterns as reactions to particular environmental experiences
2) People may have evolved several possible behavioral strategies but use the
one that makes the most sense in their context
3) Some biologically influenced behaviors may be frequency dependent: adjust
according to how common they are in population at large
 - Human nature has evolved to be flexible!!
• Five stress tests / challenges for evolutionary psych
1) Methodology
2) Reproductive instinct
3) Conservative bias
4) Human flexibility
5) Biological determinism or social structure?
3. Inheritance is the beginning, not the end
4. Will biology replace psychology?
- Nope
5. Wrapping it up
Lecture 5: Intelligence

- Concept of intelligence is laden with meaning that can be deeply personal

- Perhaps considered a more valuable characteristic than other characteristics?
- Intelligence interacts with personality in a complex way, affects many domains of
life
Why does intelligence matter?
- Is intelligence important factor in determining successful life outcome? à Issue
fundamentally important to study of intelligence
- Other personality traits might be more important when it comes to
success/business performance etc. (e.g extraversion)
- Personality traits predict typical work behavior better
- Intelligence predicts maximum level of work performance
- Together, they explain other aspects of careers (such as work expertise,
performance etc.)
- Health – intelligence relationship (not direct obviously, intelligence influences
behavior and decisions)
Defining intelligence
- Mental construct that is difficult to define because it cannot be observed directly
- Implicit theories of intelligence: judgements based on non-expert beliefs
- Explicit theories of intelligence: more formally derived, usually proposed by
researchers and can be tested empirically
- Various definitions:
a) Ability to reason & acquire knowledge
b) Mental speed & adaptation
c) Shaping & selection of one’s environment
- Top 6 essential components:
1) Abstract reasoning
2) Problem-solving ability
3) Capacity to acquire knowledge
4) Memory
5) Adaptation to environment
6) Mental speed
- HOWEVER: settling on single definition has proven to be DIFFICULT
Implicit theory of intelligence
- Incremental theory: intelligence is malleable
- Entity theory: intelligence is fixed
- Teachers’ beliefs about intelligence can influence students’ beliefs à can affect
outcomes
- Cultural differences
à Western: problem-solving, gaining new knowledge
à some African cultures: social skills, mature reflection
à US vs Germany: intelligence-diligence correlation, malleability of intelligence
à perceived intelligence differs across cultures
à Western view of intelligence often dominates other views BUT important to
remain aware of other views
Approaches to and history of intelligence
- Different approaches taken to study and measure intelligence
• Psychometric approaches to intelligence
- Psychometrics = measurement of psychological functions and processes
- Extensively used in intelligence testing
- Focus on measurement / testing (not necessarily on explaining sources of
individual differences)
- Cattell (influenced by Galton): first to use term ‘mental test’
 à Plan of testing functions of senses, quickness of movement, time perception
and memory à overshadowed by development of …
- Intelligence test by Binet à development Binet-Simon Scale of Intelligence
à series of 30 tasks
à level at which task was completed gave indication of mental age
à could then be compared to performance of other children of similar age
- Stern: introduction of Intelligence Quotient (IQ): (Mental age / chronological age)
x 100
à useful for children, not so much for adults because their cognitive development
does not increase at same rate as children’s
• General intelligence theory
- Spearman: theory of general intelligence (g), 1927
- Used factor analysis to examine interrelationships between intellectual task
performance (method that reduces/summarizes complexities of a group of
variables/tasks à tasks that are highly intercorrelated are grouped together
statistically to form broader but fewer elements = factors à method aims to
find smallest number of factors that can account for correlations between
many task scores)
- Spearman proposed that factor underlying all intercorrelated intelligent human
behaviors is g (= ’mental energy possessed by each person’)
- Positive manifold: person’s score on range of task intercorrelated
- Wechsler-Adult Intelligence Test: followed
à same test items for all individuals
à deviation IQ = (actual test score / expected score for age) x 100
- Multifactor theories:
a) Multifactor theory: seven primary mental abilities (Thurstone)
b) crystallized vs fluid intelligence (Cattell, two-factor theory)
à challenging factor g
à gc: accumulative, increases over time, factual knowledge
à gf: ability to see relationships, processing speed, etc.
- Hierarchical theories:
à examine hierarchical organization of components within theories
à Vernon: hierarchy characteristic of how mental abilities are structured
à Carroll: three-stratum-model (III: single factor g, II: 8 broad factors, I: 69
different abilities)
- Multiple intelligences theory:
à Gardner: 7+ intelligences that are independent of each other (musical,
linguistic, interpersonal, verbal, spatial, mathematical, intrapersonal, bodily-
kinaesthetic)
à popularity among educators, little empirical support
- Successful intelligence theory
à Sternberg: Triarchic theory of intelligence: environmental challenges and how
individual adapts to those (analytical, practical and creative)
• Cognitive-experiential approaches to intelligence
- Intelligence examined in terms of underlying cognitive processes
- Use of elementary cognitive tasks
à reductionistic because it attempts to explain complex concept such as
intelligence by reducing it to smaller components
à benefit: super easy, considered more objective
• Biological approaches to intelligence
- Intelligence cannot simply be isolated as required by imaging experiments
- Measured activation can only show correlation, not causation
- PET and fMRI in attempt to localize intelligence
 - Idea of neural efficiency: higher ability = less expenditure of glucose in the brain
à more efficient in use of brain resources than lower ability individuals
- EEG & ERP (event-related potentials): electric signals recorded on human scalp:
ERP parameters (amplitude, latency, string length)
- Brain structures; cortical thickness, brain volume
- Genetic aspects
Intelligence tests
1. Stanford-Binet & Wechsler Scales
- Often considered the gold standard
- Stanford-Binet: domains: fluid reasoning, knowledge, quantitative reasoning,
visual-spatial processing, working memory (nonverbal vs verbal)
- Wechsler Scale: also yields IQ (WAIS-IV): sample of 2000+ people, 200 per age
group
2. General intelligence tests: Raven’s progressive matrices
- To measure general intelligence g
- Identify missing item in matrices
3. Modern intelligence tests
- STAT: to measure 3 sub-theories of Triarchic Model of Intelligence (analytical,
creative, practical intelligences)
à 4 subtests for each
- Naglieri-Das Cognitive Assessment System (CAS):
4. Other approaches to intelligence tests
• Psychophysiological measurements
- Elementary cognitive tasks, e.g. mental speed (e.g. choice reaction time or
inspection time task)
Genetics, environment & race issues in intelligence
• Genetics
- Some important info on heritability of intelligence
• Environment
- Includes many different factors from SES, socialization, breastfeeding, nutrition,
cognitive stimulation, … à important contributions to intelligence
- Flynn effect: IQ increases in each generation
• Race
- Most tests are developed in context of Western culture and tradition
- Research is highly problematic
Lecture 6: Psychoanalytic approaches I

Chapter 10: Basics of psychoanalysis

Freud himself
Key ideas
1. Psychic determinism
- Determinism = idea that everything that happens has a cause (that in theory can
always be identified)
- Assumption that everything that everything that happens in a person’s mind(and
therefore think and does) has specific cause
- Leaves no room for miracles, free will, random accidents
2. Internal structure
- Mind has internal structure made of parts that can function independently and
sometimes be in conflict with each other
- Mind divided into 3 parts
a) Id: irrational and emotional part
b) Ego: rational
c) Superego: moral
3. Psychic conflict & compromise
- Parts can be in conflict = mind can be in conflict with itself
- Compromise formation: ego’s main job (=find compromise between other two
when they are in conflict)
à result of compromise is what the individual consciously thinks and does
4. Mental energy
- Apparatus of mind needs energy to make it function
- Mental/ psychic energy/ libido
- Only fixed and finite amount available at given moment
- Not really applicable
Controversy
- Emphasis on what cannot be seen and cannot conclusively be proved = complain
that theory is unscientific
- People don’t like being analyzed lol
Psychoanalysis, life & death
- Two fundamental motives
a) Toward life
b) Toward death
à both motives are always present and always competing
- In the end, death always wins
- Life drive: libido / sexual drive
- Death drive: Thanatos (Greek: death)
- Doctrine of opposites: idea that everything implies or contains its opposite
Psychosexual development
- Follow the energy: psychic energy necessary and limited
- 4 stages, each has aspects: 1) physical focus = energy is concentrated and
gratification is obtained 2) psychological theme = physical focus 3) adult
character type = being fixated in particular stage
- If an individual fails to resolve the issues that arise at a particular stage, the
experience will leave psychological scar tissue, and the issues will remain
troublesome throughout life
 - Mental health (according to Freud): ability to both love and work
- Fixation: leaving a disproportionate share of one’s libido behind at an earlier
stage of development
- Regression: retreating to an earlier stage psychosexual development, usually
because of stress but sometimes in the service of play and creativity
1. Oral stage
2. Anal stage
3. Phallic stage
4. Genital stage
5. Moving through stages
Thinking and consciousness
 - Secondary process thinking: ordinary ‘thinking’ = conscious part of ego, rational,
practical, prudent à secondary because
a) Appears only as ego begins to develop (infant cannot)
b) Less important
- Primary process thinking: way the unconscious mind operates
à strange and primitive style of unconscious thinking manifested in id
à Condensation: method of primary process thinking in which several ideas are
compressed into one
à Symbolization: one thing stands for another
- Preconscious: thoughts and ideas that temporarily reside just out of
consciousness but can be brought to mind quickly and easily
Parapaxes
- Parapaxis = Freudian slip à leakage from the unconscious mind manifesting as
a mistake, accident, omission, memory lapse à unintentional utterance or action
caused by leakage from unconscious parts of the mind
1. Forgetting
2. Slips
Anxiety and defense
- Defense mechanisms of the ego
 - each defense mechanism serves to shield from reality (temporarily)
à defense mechanisms
- In psychoanalytic theory, the mechanisms of the ego that serve to protect an
individual from experiencing anxiety produced by conflicts with the id, superego,
or reality.
denial
- In psychoanalytic theory, the defense mechanism that allows the mind to deny
that a current source of anxiety exists.
repression
In psychoanalytic theory, the defense mechanism that banishes the past from
current awareness.
- reaction formation
- In psychoanalytic theory, the defense mechanism that keeps an anxiety-
producing impulse or thought in check by producing its opposite.
projection
- In psychoanalytic theory, the defense mechanism of attributing to somebody else
a thought or impulse one fears in oneself. rationalization
In psychoanalytic theory, the defense mechanism that produces a seemingly
logical rationale for an impulse or thought that otherwise would cause anxiety.
- intellectualization
- In psychoanalytic theory, the defense mechanism by which thoughts that
otherwise would cause anxiety are translated into cool, analytic, non-arousing
terms.
displacement
- In psychoanalytic theory, the defense mechanism that redirects an impulse from
a dangerous target to a safe one.
sublimation
In psychoanalytic theory, the defense mechanism that turns otherwise dangerous
or anxiety-producing impulses toward constructive ends

Psychoanalysis as a therapy and as a route towards understanding

- Freud believes that the problems that make most people anxious and unhappy
have their roots in unconscious conflicts
 - Resolve them: bring them into open through dream analysis, analysis of slips and
lapses and free association
à Once brought into consciousness: rational part of ego can deal with it
- In a reality a bit more complicated
à unconscious conflicts must also be dealt with emotionally à takes time
- Transference: tendency to bring ways of thinking, feeling and behavior that
developed toward one important person into later relationships with different
persons
Psychoanalytic theory: a critique
1. Excessive complexity
2. Case study method
3. Vague definitions
4. Untestability
5. Sexism
Why study Freud?
Wrapping it up

Lecture 7: Psychoanalytic Approaches II

Chapter 11: Psychoanalysis after Freud – Neo-Freudians, object relations & current
research

- A lot of very personal criticism and rejection

Interpreting Freud
Latter-day issues and theorists
1. Common ideas of Neo-Freudian thought
- Most differ in 3 major respects
a) View sex as less important by interpreting libido as general motivation toward
life
b) Less emphasis on unconscious mental processes (more on conscious)
 à Ego psychology: focus on processes driving the perception and conscious
comprehension of reality
c) Less emphasis on instinctual drives and mental life as source of
psychological difficulties, focus on interpersonal relationships
2. Inferiority and compensation: Alfred Adler
- Freud too much focus on sex as ultimate motivator
- Of equal importance: social interest (=desire to relate positively and productively
with people)
- Organ inferiority: feeling about something as child à need to compensate as an
adult
- Masculine protest (overcompensating behavior): desire to act and become
powerful as adult because of feeling inferior as child
- Larger point: everyone felt inferior as a child; quest to overcome these feelings
continues as an adult
à needs for power, love and achievement all have roots in early experience
3. The collective unconscious, persona and personality: Carl Jung
- Feud with Freud more bitter and dramatic
- Increasing interest in mystical and spiritual matters
- Collective unconscious: all people share inborn ‘racial’ (human) memories and
ideas as result of history of human species that resides in unconscious
à some basic images = archetypes (core of how people think about the world,
incl. earth mother, hero, devil, supreme being), versions of archetypes show up in
dreams, fantasies, cultural mythologies etc. (sometimes disguised with symbols)
- Persona: social mask one wears in public à to some degree every persona is
false because everyone keeps some aspects of their real selves private (or at
least fails to show all of them)
à idea survives in modern psychology
à danger acc. to Jung: individual might identify more with persona than with real
self
- Anima: idea or prototype of the female, as held in the mind of the male
- Animus: idealized image of the male, as held in mind of female
à these two images cause everyone to have some aspects of the opposite sex in
their psychological make-up (=a woman’s animus is the basis of her masculine
side)
à concepts also shape responses to the opposite sex: man understands women
through lens of his anima: can lead to real problems when real women in life do
not match anima at all
- Introverts (turned inwards) vs extraverts (oriented towards external world)
- 4 basic ways of thinking: a) rational: recognize meaning b) feeling: tell value c)
sensing: establish what is present d) intuiting: points to possibilities
à people vary in which dominates
4. Feminine psychology and basic anxiety: Karen Horney
- No feud with the master
- Disagreed with Freud’s idea of women being obsessed with ‘penis envy’ and the
desire to be male
à implausible and objectionable
à women might lack confidence and overemphasize love relationship as source
of fulfillment, this is due to the structure of society rather than the structure of
their bodies
- Emphasis that adult behavior is often based on efforts to overcome basic anxiety
acquired in childhood (fear of being alone and helpless in a hostile world)
à Needs that people feel that are neither realistic nor desirable
 à Efforts to avoid such anxiety: neurotic needs, e.g. find life partner who solves
all problems, to be loved by everybody, to dominate everybody, to be
independent of everybody
à unrealistic and mutually contradictory, people often unconsciously try to
pursue them all anyways
5. Psychosocial development: Erik Erikson
- Most important revisionist
- Conflicts can also be conscious (e.g. making difficult choices)
- Stages of personality development
1. Trust vs mistrust (0-2): learns whether needs and wants will be met, ignored
or overindulged à appropriate ratio of satisfaction = development of hope
and confidence that basic needs will be met; corresponds with Freud’s oral
stage
2. Autonomy vs shame & doubt: who is in control à balance between self-
control and obedience
3. Initiative vs guilt (4-7): fantasies about adult life à response by adults can
influence whether child takes charge and initiative in development toward
adulthood
4. Industry vs inferiority (8-12): development of skills and attitudes to succeed in
society
5. Identity vs identity confusion (13+): striving to figure out who one is and what
is important; choosing values, goals that are useful and meaningful
6. Intimacy vs isolation: find intimate life partner to share important experiences
and further development
7. Generativity vs stagnation (middle age): passive comfort or turn concerns to
next generation
8. Integrity vs despair: regret earlier mistakes or has person developed wisdom?
- In sum: person progresses not according to physical or genital maturation but
according to developmental tasks required at different phases in life
6. Object relations theory: Klein & Winnicott
- Most active area of psychoanalytic thinking at present
- 4 principal themes
1) Every relationship has elements of satisfaction and frustration or pleasure and
pain à breast theory: love it but hate it
2) Mix of love and hate: inevitable, one cannot satisfy someone without
frustrating them sometimes
3) Distinction between the parts of the love object and the whole person: loving
parts and loving whole is NOT THE SAME AT ALL = using person’s attribute
for one’s own enjoyment is very different from loving the whole person, hard
to accomplish
4) Psyche is disturbed by these contradictory feelings
- Klein: child therapy à play pretend parents à splittingà paranoid position:
destroy bad parts due to fear of being destroyed by them, depressive position:
worship and protect good part due to fear of losing it
- Winnicott: niffle = transitional object à object that child uses to bridge gap
between real world and fantasy, can comfort child when adult comfort is
unavailable à transitional because 1) helps child to make change from caring
parents to facing world alone and 2) reality (there IS object) - fantasy (giving
magical meaning to object)
- Winnicott: false self (learn to put on to please other people)
- Purpose of psychotherapy according to ORT: minimize discrepancies between
true and false selves & to help rational resources of mind work through irrational
defenses
à ORT retains Freud’s idea: rationality can win over all à we can do what
makes sense and relate to others as real people when they disappoint us
 7. Where have all the Neo-Freudians gone?
- Research works differently today: thinkers’ approaches were based on informal
observations, clinical experience, personal insights = wave of the past à today:
experimental and correlational research scientifically to confirm, disprove and
alter specific psychoanalytic ideas
Current psychoanalytic research
- Uneasy to hostile relationship between research psychologists and clinical
psychoanalysis practitioners
- Remarkable amount of ignorance about psychoanalysis even among PhDs à
increased amount of separation between academic psychology and clinical
practice
- Westen: any research is at least ‘a little psychoanalytic’ as it includes any of the
following
• An examination of independent mental processes that occur simultaneously in
the same mind and can conflict with one another
• Unconscious mental processes
• Compromises among mental processes negotiated outside of consciousness
• Self-defensive thought and self-deception
• The influence of the past on current functioning, especially childhood patterns
that endure into adulthood
• Sexual or aggressive wishes as they influence thought, feeling, and behavior
1. Testing psychoanalytic hypotheses
A. Perceptual defense: ego tries to prevent stimuli that superego finds threatening
from even entering awareness à many studies, controversial finding, often found
that some unconscious part of mind could read words while conscious could not
B. Unconscious thought
C. Defense and catharsis: catharsis = freely expressing issues that trouble you
Psychoanalysis and perspective
Wrapping it up
Lecture 8: Personality & Culture

Chapter 13: Cultural variation in experience, behavior, and personality

Cross-cultural psychology: psychological research that attempts to account for the

psychological differences between and within different cultural groups
Culture and psychology
- Why culture comes into play
1) Individuals may differ from each other to some extent because they belong to
different cultural groups
2) Members of some groups may differ from each other in distinctive ways
1. Cross-cultural universals vs specificity
- Universal human nature vs cultural specificity
2. What is culture?
- Culture = psychological attributes of groups à include customs, habits, beliefs
and values that shape emotions, behavior and life patterns
à culture may include language, modes of thinking, fundamental views of reality
- Enculturation: process by which child learns culture in which they are born into,
process of socialization through which native culture is acquired (early in life)
- Acculturation: picking up culture from new living place, process by which person
partially/fully acquired new outlook (either though contact with or living in a
culture different from culture of origin)
The importance of cross-cultural differences
- Culture counts for understanding mental health disorders, interventions, and risk
factors
- 3 reasons:
1) Increase international understanding
2) Assessing degree to which psychology applies to people around the world
3) Appreciating the possible varieties of human experience
à siehe direct unten drunter
1. Cross-cultural understanding
- Examples of spraying in Singapore and Danish baby in New York
2. Generalizability of theory and research
- WEIRD
3. Varieties if human experience
Characteristics of cultures
1. Etics and emics
- Etics: universal components of an idea, aspects of a phenomenon that all
cultures have in common
- Emics: locally relevant components of an idea, aspects of a phenomenon that are
specific to a particular culture
2. Tough and easy
- Easy cultures: individuals can pursue many different goals and at least some are
simple to attain
 - Tough cultures: only a few goals are seen as valuable and few ways are
available to achieve them
3. Achievement and affiliation
- Cultural need for achievement: high or low?
- Cultural need for love (affiliation)
4. Complexity
- ‘Complex’ vs ‘simple’ cultures
5. Tightness and looseness
- Tight cultures: very little deviation from proper behavior
- Loose cultures allow large deviations from norms
à hypothesis: more tight when more homogenous, less diverse, less spread out
6. Head versus heart
- Strength of heart: fairness, mercy, gratitude, hope, love, religiosity
- Strength of head: artistic excellence, creativity, curiosity, critical thinking, learning
7. Collectivism and individualism
- Collectivism: needs of group are more important
à less need for positive self-regard
à more sociable
à c: more time with fewer people, i: less time with more people
à emotion experience: other-focused (e.g. empathy) vs self-focused (e.g. anger
or pride)
à self-determination: behavioral consistency, change behavior according to
situation
à verticality (assume that individual people are importantly different from each
other) vs horizontality (all persons are essentially equal)
à compassion:
- Individualism: single person is more important
 8. Honor, face and dignity
- Dignity cultures (e.g. most Western places): key idea = individuals are valuable in
their own right and this value does not come from what other people think of them
- Honor cultures (e.g. American south, Latin America): where forces of civilization
(e.g. laws, police) are weak and people must protect themselves, families and
property, norm of retaliation, signal willingness to use violence, highly sensitive to
threats to reputation
- Face cultures (e.g. China, Japan): protect each other’s’ social image by being
careful not to insult, overtly criticize, disagree with each other in public, authority
figures respected and obeyed, controversy avoided, protect 3 Hs: hierarchy,
humility, harmony
Cultural assessment and personality assessment
1. Comparing the same traits across cultures
2. Different traits for different cultures?
- Are the Big 5 meaningful across cultures?
- Contradictory findings
- Translating personality trait terms: problematic and difficult
3. Thinking
- Holistic perception: explain events in context rather than in isolation
- Holistic perception of self: more willingness to describe oneself in contradictory
terms
- Independent thinking: unclear findings
4. Values
- Seeking values that are universal to all cultures: 10 candidates (Schwartz &
Sagiv)
1) Power
2) Achievement
3) Hedonism
4) Stimulation
5) Self-direction
6) Understanding
7) Benevolence
8) Tradition
9) Conformity
10) Security
- Cultural differences in values: differences in moral reasoning
à individualistic: e.g. liberty, freedom of choice, rights, individual needs
à collectivist: obligations, reciprocity, duties to the group
The origins of cultural differences
1. Avoiding the issue
- Deconstructionism: reality has no meaning apart from what humans invent /
‘construct’
à applied to cultural psych: implies that any answer to why culture is the way it is
would itself have to be based on the assumptions of another culture = no
meaningful answer is possible
- One could also say: cultural differences are real and IT IS IMPORTANT to ask
why they exist
2. The ecological approach
- Idea: different cultures developed over long period of time, in different
circumstances, with need to deal with different problems
- Triandis (1994):
 = ecology is physical layout and resources of land where culture originated
- Graham (2010):

= everything affects everything else

3. Genetics and culture

- If they do play role it is very complicated
- Unlikely primary basis of cross-cultural differences
Challenges and new directions for cross-cultural research
1. Ethnocentrism
- Researchers are at risk of this (judging other culture from viewpoint of your own)
- Problematic: when profound values clash, it can be really challenging to
appreciate that opposing view might have some validity
2. The exaggeration of cultural differences
- Outgroup homogeneity bias: outgroup members seem more alike than members
of ingroup
3. Cultures and values
- Cross-cultural research can lead to cultural relativism (idea that all ideas of reality
are equally valid)
à seems fine until… (think of Nazi Germany culture or genital mutilation)
4. Subcultures and multiculturalism
- Bilingualism à how your language can influence personality traits (reports)
The universal human condition
Wrapping it up
Lecture 9: Personality processes: learning, motivation, emotion & thinking

Chapter 14:

Behaviorism
- Learning: a change in behavior as a result of experience
- Best vantage point to study person might be from outside: that is where visible
causes are found
- Implies: your personality is simply sum total of everything you do (does not incl.
traits, unconscious conflicts, etc.)
- Functional analysis: goal of behaviorism = maps out how behavior is product of
environmental situation
• Habituation
- Decrease in response to a stimulus on repeated applications (simplest kind of
learning)
• Classical conditioning
- The kind of learning in which an unconditioned response (such as salivating) that
is naturally elicited by one stimulus (such as food) becomes elicited also by a
new, conditioned stimulus (such as a bell)
- How it works: Pavlov’s dog story
- Learned helplessness: a belief that nothing one does matters, derived from an
experience of random or unpredictable reward and punishment and theorized to
be a basis of depression
- S-R conception of personality: (stimulus-response)
• Operant conditioning
- Skinner
a) Respondent conditioning: conditioned response is essentially passive with no
impact of its own
b) Operant conditioning: animal learns operate on its world in a way as to
change it to the animal’s advantage
à reinforcement: if behavior is followed by good result, it becomes more
likely (in case of punishment less likely), In operant conditioning, a reward
that, when applied following a behavior, increases the frequency of that
behavior. In classical conditioning, this refers to the pairing of an
unconditioned stimulus (such as food) with a conditioned stimulus (such as a
bell)
Social learning theory
• Shortcomings of behaviorism
1. It ignores thinking, motivation and emotion
à Social learning theorists on the other hand claim that the ways people think,
plan, perceive and believe are important parts of learning = research must
address these processes
2. It is largely based on research with animals -> BUT not species are the same
sooo… and humans are an extra SPECIAL case
à Social learning: wants more emphasis on human aspects, e.g. problem solving
by thinking
3. Ignores social dimension of learning: typical lab animals are alone, cannot
learn from / interact with others
à Social learning: highly sensitive to this issue
4. Treats animal or person as essentially passive
• Self-efficacy
- Most famous and influential version of social learning theory
- Albert Bandura!!
 - One’s belief about the degree to which one will be able to accomplish a goal if
one tries
- Self-efficacy can interact with other kinds of self-judgment, e.g. self-concept
- Self-concept: person’s knowledge or opinion about themselves
- Bandura: goal of psychotherapy should be to increase self-efficacy
• Observational learning
- Learning a behavior by watching someone else do it
- Role models!
- Bobo doll experiment
Motivation
- Assumption that organisms ‘want’ something, getting what they want reinforces
that behavior
- Self-contradictions very common: wanting / not wanting something but not acting
in accordance
• Goals
- The ends that one desires
- Idiographic goals: unique to the individual who pursues them
- Nomothetic goals: relatively small number of essential motivations that almost
everyone pursues
- Judgment goals and development goals
à judgment: seeking to judge or validate an attribute in oneself à response to
failure: helplessness
à development: desire to actually improve oneself (become more x) à response
to failure: mastery
- Entity and incremental theories of the world
à entity: belief that personal qualities (e.g. intelligence, ability) are not
changeable = that is why they respond helpless when there is indication that they
do not have what it takes
à incremental: belief that abilities and intelligence can change with time and
experience

• Strategies
- Means the individual uses to achieve goals
- Defensive pessimism: worst is likely to happen, produces negative outlook on life
but can also serve as motivator (driven by attempts to avoid doom)
Emotion
- Emotions as procedural knowledge
à Procedural knowledge: What a person knows but cannot really talk about,
sometimes called knowing how
• Emotional experience
- Basic stages of emotion: appraisal, physical response, facial expressions,
nonverbal behaviors, invocation of motives (do not have to be separate or in
concrete order)
• Varieties of emotions
- Many many many – but no one has counted
- Ekman: six basic emotions
- Emotions circumplex (useful to compare emotions, not to explain particular
emotions)

- Emotion X – typical stimulus – typical response – adaptive function

 • Individual differences in emotional life
- People differ in how they experience emotions, how intensely, how they change
- People also differ in preference for emotions
- People high in affect intensity: experience more intense joy and more intense
sadness
- High on extraversion: tendency to experience positive and energizing emotions
- Emotional intelligence: ability to perceive emotions accurately in oneself and
others and to control and use one’s own emotions constructively
à high: can regulate emotions with strategies e.g. focus on positive, planning for
the future and big events, remembering to take long breaths
- Cognitive control: using rational thinking to regulate one’s emotions and to control
how one reacts ton emotional feelings
à can help to prevent overreacting and resisting temptation
Cognitive theories of personality: CAPS and BEATS
• CAPS
- Cognitive-affective personality system (Mischel)
- Stable system that mediates how the individual selects, construes and processes
social information and generates social behaviors
 • BEATS
- Even more ambitious version of cognitive social learning theory (Dweck)
- Theory is organized around idea that personality emerges from individual’s
mental representations of the beliefs, emotions, actions tendencies that are
relevant to most important goals
- People have total of 7 fundamental needs:
à basic: trust, control, respect (from oneself and others)
à emergent: predictability, acceptance, competence
à final: self-coherence / feeling of meaning in life
Personality as a verb
…I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing—a noun. I seem
to be a verb, an evolutionary process—an integral function of the universe. (Fuller, 1970, p.
1)
- Cantor: personality is not something someone ‘has’ but ‘does’ à personality can
be seen as a verb
Wrapping it up
Lecture 10: Introduction to the Self

Chapter 14: The self – what you know about you

The I and the Me

- James: self can be ‘I’ or ‘Me’
à ‘I’: mysterious entity that does the observing and describing (ontological self),
little person in my head, soul which experiences life
à ‘Me’: a sort of object, can be observed and described (epistemological self),
collection of statements you could possible make about yourself
The contents and purposes of the self
- James:
à belief that ‘Me’ includes everything we hold dear, incl. personality traits but
also body, home, possessions, family members
à central aspect of ‘self’: psychological nature = our abilities and our
personalities
- Organization of knowledge is one of the important functions of the self
- Robins: four jobs of the self
1) Self-regulation: ability to restrain impulses and maintain focus on long-term
goals
2) Information processing filter: guides us to pay attention and remember
important info
3) Help relate to other people: understand others through lens of own
experience
4) Identity: reminds us where we fit in
- Two types of self-knowledge
1) Declarative knowledge: facts and impressions that we consciously know and
can describe (‘knowing that’)
2) Procedural knowledge: expressed through actions rather than words
The declarative self
- Comprises two kinds of knowledge or opinions you have about your personality
traits
1) Overall opinion: whether you are good or bad, worthy or unworthy,
somewhere in between = self-esteem
2) More detailed and contains everything you know, about your traits and
abilities (sometimes right, sometimes wrong, in between)
• Self-esteem
- High vs low evolutionary roots
à low: failed in eyes of group
à high: reflection of success and acceptance
• The self-schema
- Cognitive structure, memory system, hypothesized to contain a person’s self-
knowledge and to direct self-relevant thought
à includes all of one’s ideas about the self, organized into coherent system
• Self-reference and memory
- Another indication that self has deep roots is how it affects memory:
- LTM: long-term memory: final stage of information processing, in which nearly
unlimited amount of info can be stored in organized manner; not always
accessible though, depending on how it was stored and how it is looked for
- Enhancement of LTM = self-reference effect: enhancement of LTM that comes
from thinking about how info being memorized relates to the self
à explains why most personally meaningful memories are the ones that stick
with you the longest
• Self-efficacy
 - Our opinions about our capabilities set the limits for what we are willing to attempt
• Possible selves
- The images we have or can construct of the other ways we might be
- The possible self you envision for your future may affect your goals in life
• Self-discrepancy theory
- Idea that you have not one but two kinds of desired selves – and ten difference
between them and your actual self determines how you feel
à ideal self: view of what you could be at your best
à ought self: view of what you should be
The procedural self
- Patterns of behavior that are characteristic of an individual
à knowledge of this self: procedural knowledge
• Relational selves
- Relational self-schema: said to be based on past experiences that direct how we
relate with each of the important people in our lives
• Implicit selves
- In many cases, self-relevant behavior patterns are not accessible to
consciousness
- How to measure then?: IAT as measure of reaction time
• Acquiring and changing procedural knowledge
- Change: possible but only through practice and feedback
How many selves?
- Your experience of self may differ by situation, context, people, role
- Working self-concept: view of continuously changing self
à important influence: person you are with
- Future self-continuity: people who see their present and future selves as same
person
The really real self
- The I is unaltered as the me is changed (James)
- I = epiphenomenon = seems to exist but does not really influence anything? = the
really real self? = soul? = basis of free will?
Wrapping it up
Guest Lecture (Dr. Suzanne Oosterwijk): The Self & the Body

Herbert & Pollatos (2011) The Body and Mind: On the Relationship Between
Interoception and Embodiment

Abstract
- Processing, representation and perception of bodily signals (=interoception)
- Theory of embodied cognition: higher cognitive processes operate on perceptual
symbols à concept use involves reactivations of sensory-motor states that occur
during experience with the world
- Article gives overview of present findings/models on interoception
- Relevance for disorders that are believed to represent translation deficit from
bodily states into subjective feelings and slef-awareness
1. Defining embodiment with respect to bodily and internal signal processing
- Embodiment = feeling that we have a body
- it is well known that bodily responding and its perception are key processes in the
construction of emotion experience
- and bodily processes might be of enormous importance for many more
psychological functions
2. Interoception and interoceptive awareness: definitions and measurement
- Interoception: comprises sensing the physiological condition of the body, as well
as the representation of the internal state within the context of ongoing activities
à includes 2 forms of perception
a) Proprioception: signals from skin and musculoskeletal apparatus
b) Visceroperception: signals from the inner organs
- Exteroceptive / somatosensory: pain, itch, temperature
- Interoceptive awareness findings/theories
à trait-like sensitivity?
à training on concentration on cardiac activity possible
à It is not yet clear in how far the interoceptive perception of signals coming from
different bodily systems converges into general IA or if there are individual
differences across modal- ities. Both possibilities seem feasible
3. Interoception as a basis of embodied processes
• Evidence from neuroanatomy
- Relevance of an ‘‘interoceptive neural network’’

• The role of interoception for decision-making, emotions and behavior:

signs of embodiment
- William James (1884): stated that the experience of emotion could be defined as
the per- ception of bodily responses
 - foundation for our emotional feelings lies in the neural representation of the
physiological condition of the body, with ‘‘somatic markers’’ evoking feeling states
that influence cognition and behavior?
• Embodiment of time perception
- Recent debate connects time percep- tion with bodily responses and embodiment
by assuming that physiological states and emo- tions associated with changes in
physiological states underlie our perception of time
à Craig (2009a) who claims that our experience of time relates to emotional and
visceral processes because they share a common underlying neural system, the
insular cortex and the interoceptive system
à Wittmann (2009) follows that since emotions and physiological states seem so
fundamental to the experience of time, it is tempting to assign a pivotal role to
these processes related to a core timekeeping system
- In line with hypotheses: it is conceivable that the number and rate of body signals
accumulated in the insula over a given timespan create our perception of duration
4. Disturbances of embodiment: psychopathologic phenomena as translation
difficulty of bodily processes in constituting the self
- Fuchs and Schlimme (2009) presented the concept of embodiment as a novel
paradigm for an interdisciplinary approach to psychopathology and neuroscience
à The authors argued that the phenomenology of the lived body is able to
overcome dualistic con- cepts of the mind as an inner realm of representations
that mirror the outside world. They referred to a common phenomenological
distinction between the body that one pre-reflec- tively lives in, that is, the lived or
subject body (German: Leib), and the physical body that one can perceive or that
is perceived by others, in other words, the object body (German: Ko ̈rper). Fuchs
and Schlimme defined psychopathology of embodiment based on the pro- posed
distinction of subject and object body.
à Accordingly, disturbances of embodiment may be classified (a) as primarily
affecting the subject body or pre-reflective embodied sense of self; as is the case,
for example, in schizophrenia or depression, or (b) as being related to the body
image or explicit body awareness (e.g. body dysmorphic disorder, somatoform
disorders, or eating disorders (EDs) such as anorexia nervosa)
• Alexithymia
- a syndrome that involves a marked inability to identify, describe, regulate, and
express one’s emotions
- has been related to a broad range of physical and psychiatric disorders (e.g.,
EDs, depression, posttraumatic stress disorders etc.).
- At the present time, both within clinical and nonclinical populations, alexi- thymia
is considered a continuous personality trait, with persons differing in their ability
to identify and describe their feelings
- We here would like to introduce the idea that alexithymia as a personality trait is
characterized by a disturbance in translating bodily signals to conscious
awareness going beyond the field of a classification as an affec- tive disorder. In
a recent study we could demonstrate that high scores of alexithymia are
associated with low IA (Herbert et al., 2010a) as assessed by a heartbeat
perception task
à This study adds clear evidence that alexithymia can be described in terms of a
disturbance in embodiment.

• Eating disorders
- Studies: reported a decreased ability to discriminate hunger and satiety
sensations in EDs
 à extend these results in a study on anorectic females by showing that the
perception of bodily signals which was assessed in heartbeat perception tests is
also decreased in anorexia nervosa
à Patients with anorexia nervosa had not only problems in recognizing certain
visceral sensations related to hunger and satiety but also exhibited a generally
reduced capacity to accurately perceive cardiac bodily signals
• Implications for our ‘self’
- According to the presented overview, interoceptive states and emotional feelings
are directly related and build the fundament of self-awareness and the ‘‘self.’’
- The representation of bodily signals and the meta-representation of the state of
the body in the brain provide a subjective mental image of the ‘‘material self’’ as a
feeling or ‘‘sentient’’ entity (see Craig, 2008), that is, the anatomical basis for
emotional awareness.

Winkielman et al. (2018): Dynamic grounding of emotion concepts

Abstract

- Emotion concepts link realm of abstract – realm of bodily experience and actions
- Key question: how are such concepts created, represented, used?
- Embodied cognition theories: concepts are grounded in neural systems that
produce experiential and motor states + are contextually situated + conceptual
understanding unfolds in time, reflecting embodied as well as linguistic and
cultural influences
1. Intro: the challenge of emotion concepts
- Concepts: refer to affect, valence and emotion
à can be simple to complex
- We suggest that grounded cognition, the proposal that conceptual processing
uses somatosensory and motor resources, offers useful insights into emotion
concepts
- we emphasize the claim that links between concepts and somatosensory
resources are dynamically shaped by the current context
2. Emotion theories and embodiment of emotion concepts
- Basic idea: emotional thoughts = linked to the body
3. Potential accounts of embodiment effects in emotion concepts
- Different ways in which embodied responses are involved in the processing of
emotion concepts
a) Winstonian
- One reason emotion concepts might evoke a somatic response is that, like an
inspiring speech by Winston Church- ill, they provoke an emotional reaction that,
in turn, triggers the bodily manifestation of the induced emotion
b) Boy-band and somatic markers
- Two variants (differing in the importance of the somatic response for
conceptualization)
c) CODES
- we suggest that embodied simulation is depen- dent on cognitive needs and is
context specific. In other words, if somatic recruitment is actually in the service of
understanding, then the context should determine when and how embodiment is
triggered
4. Empirical work on embodiment in processing of emotion concepts
a) Simple embodiment effects revealed by physiological and neuroscience
measures
b) When is embodiment recruited/triggered?
c) What specifically is embodied?
 d) Causal, constitutive role of embodied reactions
e) Where and when: neural markers of comprehension suggest active use of
embodied resources
f) Emotional language and metaphor
5. Some complications for the embodied account
6. Conclusion
- conceptual processing involves the partial reuse and reinstatement of experiential
and motor states associated with concept acquisition, as well as active,
productive, context-sensitive, ‘as needed’ use of somatosensory resources
- Reactivation of the sensori- motor systems can play a causal and informative role
in understanding of emotional stimuli during real-world inter- actions
- However, embodied responses do not always appear to be necessary to perceive
or understand affective information
- Thus, while we embrace the strengths of the embodiment perspective, it is clear
that a satisfactory account must describe the interaction of embodied pro- cesses
with conceptual processes.