14

Personality

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module 14.1
Personality Theories

After studying this module, you should be able to:

• Discuss and evaluate Sigmund Freud’s theories and some of the
changes he made in them.
• List Freud’s stages of psychosexual pleasure.
• Define and give examples of Freud’s defense mechanisms against
anxiety.
• Explain what Carl Jung meant by the collective unconscious.
• Discuss how Alfred Adler advanced the idea that mental health is
more than the absence of mental illness.
• Explain how the learning approach deals with apparent
inconsistencies in personality.
• State the distinctive features of humanistic psychology.

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 Personality
• Personality – all the consistent ways in which
the behavior of one person differs from that of
others, especially in social situations

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 Sigmund Freud and the Psychodynamic Approach

Sigmund Freud interpreted dreams,

slips of the tongue, and so forth to
infer unconscious thoughts and
motivations.

• Psychodynamic theory – view that relates

personality to the interplay of conflicting forces,
including unconscious ones, within the individual
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Freud’s Search for the Unconscious
• Catharsis – a release of pent-up emotional
tension
• Psychoanalysis – method that tries to bring
unconscious thoughts and emotions to
consciousness
• Unconscious – according to Freud, the
repository of memories, emotions, and thoughts,
many of them illogical, that affect our behavior
even though we cannot talk about them

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 Changes in Freud’s Theory
• Initially, Freud pointed to childhood sexual abuse
as the cause of personality problems.
• Later, he said the problem was childhood sexual
fantasies, such as the Oedipus complex.
– Oedipus complex – according to Freud, period when
a boy develops a sexual interest in his mother and
competitive aggression toward his father
• His only evidence for his view was that he
thought he could infer these childhood events
from his patients’ dreams and symptoms.

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 Table 14.1 Freud’s Stages of
Psychosexual Development
Stage Effects of Fixation
(approximate ages) Sexual Interests at This Stage
Oral stage Sucking, swallowing, Lasting concerns with
(birth to 1½ years) biting dependence and
independence; pleasure
from eating, drinking, and
other oral activities
Anal stage Expelling feces, retaining Orderliness or sloppiness,
(1½ to 3 years) feces stinginess or wastefulness,
stubbornness
Phallic stage Touching penis or clitoris; Difficulty feeling closeness.
(3 to 5 or 6 years) Oedipus complex Males: fear of castration
Females: penis envy
Latent period Sexual interests —
(5 or 6 to puberty) suppressed
Genital stage Sexual contact with other —
(puberty onward) people

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 Structure of Personality
• Freud’s three aspects of personality:
1. Id – sexual and other biological drives that demand
immediate gratification
2. Ego – the rational, decision-making aspect of the
personality
3. Superego – the memory of rules and prohibitions we
learned from our parents and others

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 Defense Mechanisms against Anxiety
• Defense mechanisms – method employed by ego to defend itself
against anxiety
– Repression – according to Freudian theory, the motivated removal of
something to the unconscious
– Denial – the refusal to believe unpleasant information
– Rationalization – attempt to demonstrate that one’s actions are
justifiable
– Displacement – diversion of a behavior or thought away from its natural
target toward a less threatening target
– Regression – return to a more immature level of functioning
– Projection – attributing one’s own undesirable characteristics to other
people
– Reaction formation – presenting oneself as the opposite of what one
really is in an effort to reduce anxiety
– Sublimation – the transformation of sexual or aggressive energies into
culturally acceptable, even admirable, behaviors
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 Karen Horney, a Neo-Freudian
• Neo-Freudians – psychologists who kept part of
Freud’s theory while modifying others

Karen Horney, a neo-Freudian, revised

some of Freud’s theories and paid
greater attention to cultural influences.
She pioneered the study of feminine
psychology.

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 Carl Jung and the Collective Unconscious

• Collective unconscious – inborn thoughts and

images that relate to the cumulative experience of
preceding generations

Carl G. Jung rejected Freud’s concept that

dreams hide their meaning from the conscious
mind: “To me dreams are a part of nature, which
harbors no intention to deceive, but expresses
something as best it can” (Jung, 1965, p. 161).

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 Alfred Adler and Individual Psychology
• Individual psychology – psychology
of the person as a whole rather than
parts
• Striving for superiority – a desire to
seek personal excellence and
fulfillment
• According to Adler, the healthiest style
of life is one that emphasizes social
interest.
– Social interest – a sense of solidarity
and identification with other people that
Alfred Adler emphasized the ways leads to constructive action
in which personality depended on
people’s goals, especially their
way of striving for a sense of
superiority.
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 The Learning Approach
• Must of what we call personality is learned
through individual experience, imitation, or
vicarious reinforcement and punishment.

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 Humanistic Psychology
• Humanistic psychology – field emphasizing
consciousness, values, and abstract beliefs,
including spiritual experiences and the beliefs
that people live and die for
• According to humanistic psychologists:
– Personality depends on people’s beliefs and
perceptions of the world.
– People are essentially good and strive to achieve their
potential.
– People are free to make deliberate, conscious
decisions.

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Carl Rogers and Unconditional Positive Regard

Carl Rogers maintained that people

naturally strive toward positive goals
without special urging. He recommended
that people relate to one another with
unconditional positive regard.

• Unconditional positive regard – the complete,

unqualified acceptance of another person as he or
she is
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 Abraham Maslow and the Self-Actualized Personality

• Self-actualization – the
achievement of one’s full
potential
• Characteristics of a self-
actualized personality:
– An accurate perception of reality
– Independence, creativity, and
spontaneity
– Acceptance of themselves and
others
– A problem-centered outlook
rather than a self-centered Abraham Maslow, one of the
outlook founders of humanistic psychology,
– Enjoyment of life introduced the concept of a “self-
– A good sense of humor actualized personality,” a
personality associated with high
productivity and enjoyment of life.
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module 14.2
Personality Traits

After studying this module, you should be able to:

• Distinguish the nomothetic approach from the idiographic
approach, and distinguish states from traits.
• Use self-esteem as an example to illustrate the difficulty
of measuring personality.
• Describe how psychologists identified the Big Five
personality factors.
• List and describe the Big Five personality factors.
• Discuss the roles of heredity, age, culture, and cohort in
personality development.

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 Nomothetic and Idiographic Research

• Nomothetic approach – personality study that

seeks broad, general principles of personality
• Idiographic approach – personality study that
concentrates on intensive studies of individuals

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 Personality Traits and States
• Trait – a consistent tendency in behavior, such
as shyness, hostility, or talkativeness
• State – a temporary activation of a particular
behavior
• Both traits and states are descriptions of
behavior, not explanations.

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 The Search for Broad Personality Traits
• Trait approach to personality – study and measure of consistent
personality characteristics

Issues in Personality Measurement

• Personality researchers rely mostly on self-reports, which are not
entirely accurate.

An Example of Measurement Problems: Self-Esteem

• Self-esteem – the evaluation of one’s own abilities, performance,
and worth
• Researchers have a difficult time measuring self-esteem.
– Depending on the questionnaire items, what appears to be low self-
esteem might indicate high goals and therefore lack of satisfaction with
one’s current performance.
– It could also mean modesty (reluctance to brag).
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 Derivation of the Big Five Personality Traits

• An initial list of almost 18,000 words that might

be used to describe personality was narrowed
down to 35 traits.
– Although none of the 35 personality traits were
synonyms or antonyms of one another, many of them
overlapped.
• Psychologists looked for clusters of traits that correlate
strongly with one another, but don’t correlate with the other
clusters.
– Using this approach, researchers found what they call the Big
Five personality traits.
» Big Five personality traits (five-factor model) –
emotional stability, extraversion, agreeableness,
conscientiousness, and openness to new experience
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 Table 14.2 The Five-Factors Model of Personality

Typical true–false
Trait Description question to measure it
Emotional stability Resistance to unpleasant I have few major worries.
emotions
Extraversion Seeking excitement and I make friends easily.
social contact
Agreeableness Compassionate and I believe others have good
trusting intentions.
Conscientiousness Self-disciplined and I complete most tasks on
dutiful time or early.
Openness Stimulated by new ideas I believe art is important for
its own sake.

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 Heredity and Environment
• Studies of twins and adopted children indicate
that heredity contributes to the observed
differences in personality.
– However, no single gene controls much of the
variance.
• Family environment evidently contributes rather
little.
• Some personality variation relates to unshared
environment.
– Unshared environment – the aspects of environment
that differ from one individual to another, even within a
family
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 Influences of Age, Culture, and Cohort

• The older people get, the more slowly they change.

– One reason for personality to become more fixed is that older
people usually stay in the same environment, doing the same
things year after year.
• Self-ratings from one country are not easily comparable
to those from another.
– The best way to compare personalities across cultures is to
observe actual behavior.
• Researchers have found generational differences in
personality.
– Results from research show that the era in which you live exerts
a major influence on personality development.

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 Figure 14.5

► Figure 14.5 Six

aspects of personality
show different
patterns of change
over age based on the
means of longitudinal
research studies. The
numbers along the
vertical axis represent
changes from the
earliest age tested,
measured in terms of
standard deviations.
(From Roberts,
Walton, &
Viechtbauer, 2006)

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module 14.3
Personality Assessment

After studying this module, you should be able to:

• Explain why people’s testimonials that “this personality
test described me accurately” cannot be taken as good
evidence.
• Describe several objective personality tests.
• Explain how the MMPI and other tests detect when
someone is lying.
• Describe the pros and cons of projective personality
tests.
• Discuss the difficulty of using a personality test to
diagnose an uncommon psychological disorder.
• Evaluate the usefulness of criminal profiling.
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People’s Tendency to Accept Personality Test Results

• Barnum effect – tendency to accept vague

descriptions of one’s own personality
• Because most people accept almost any
interpretation of their personality based on a
personality test, tests must be carefully
scrutinized to ensure that they are measuring
what they claim to measure.

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 Standardized Personality Tests
• Standardized test – method of examination that
is administered according to rules that specify
how to interpret the results
• An important step for standardizing a test is to
determine the distribution of scores.
– Such information determines whether a particular
score on a personality test is within the normal range
or whether it is more typical of people with a disorder.

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 An Objective Personality Test:
The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory

• MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) –

standardized test consisting of true–false questions intended to
measure certain personality dimensions, especially for identifying
clinical conditions

Revision of the Test

• MMPI–2 – second edition of MMPI

Detecting Deception
• The MMPI guards against lying by including items about common
faults and rare virtues.
– Anyone who denies common faults or claims rare virtues is probably
lying.

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 The NEO PI-R
• NEO PI-R (NEO personality inventory-
revised) – test that measures neuroticism,
extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and
conscientiousness

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 The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
• MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) – a test of
normal personality, loosely based on Carl Jung’s
theories
• The MBTI classifies people as:
– Extraverted or introverted
– Sensing or intuitive
– Thinking or feeling
– Judging or perceiving

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 Projective Techniques
• Projective techniques – procedures designed to
encourage people to project their personality
characteristics onto ambiguous stimuli
• Two well-known projective techniques:
1. Rorschach inkblots – a projective technique based on people’s
interpretations of 10 ambiguous inkblots
2. Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) – a projective personality
technique in which someone is asked to make up a story for each
picture, describing what events led up to this scene, what is
happening now, and what will happen in the future
• The results from projective techniques have unimpressive
validity for making decisions about any individual.

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 Implicit Personality Tests
• Implicit personality test – procedure that
measures some aspect of your personality
without your awareness
• The implicit association test and affective
priming paradigm are attempts to measure
personality traits that people do not or cannot
describe about themselves.
• So far, such tests are useful for research but not
for decisions about an individual.

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 Uses and Misuses of Personality Tests

• Personality tests can help assess personality,

but their results should be interpreted cautiously.
– Because the tests are not entirely accurate, a score
that seems characteristic of a psychological disorder
may occur in many people without that disorder.

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 Personality Tests in Action: Criminal Profiling

• Some psychologists try to aid police investigations

by constructing personality profiles of the kind of
person who would commit a certain crime.
• Research so far suggests low accuracy of
personality profiles.

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