10.+Personality

=X. Personality (5–7%)= In this section of the course, students explore major theories of how humans develop enduring patterns of behavior and personal characteristics that influence how others relate to them. The unit also addresses research methods used to assess personality.

AP students in psychology should be able to do the following: • Compare and contrast the major theories and approaches to explaining personality: psychoanalytic, humanist, cognitive, trait, social learning, and behavioral. • Describe and compare research methods (e.g., case studies and surveys) that psychologists use to investigate personality. • Identify frequently used assessment strategies (e.g., the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory [MMPI], the Thematic Apperception Test [TAT]), and evaluate relative test quality based on reliability and validity of the instruments. • Speculate how cultural context can facilitate or constrain personality development, especially as it relates to self-concept (e.g., collectivistic versus individualistic cultures). • Identify key contributors to personality theory (e.g., Alfred Adler, Albert Bandura, Paul Costa and Robert McCrae, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers). © 2010 The College Board. Visit the College Board on the Web: [|www.collegeboard.com].

**Personality:** The characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. **Psychoanalysis:** Freud's theory of personality that attributes our thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts; the techniques used in treating psychological disorders by seeking to expose and interpret uncoscious tensions. **Unconscious:** According to Freud, a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories. According to contemporary psychologists, information processing of which we are unaware. **Preconscious:** information that is not conscious but is retrievable into conscious awareness **Id:** Contains a reservoir of unconscious pyschic energy that, according to Freud, strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives. The Id opperates on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification. **Ego:** The largely conscious "executive" part of personality that, according to Freud, mediates among the demands of the Id, Superego, and reality. The ego operates on the //reality principle//, satisfying the id's desires in ways that will realistically bring pleasure rather than pain. **Superego:** The part of personality that, according to Freud, represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgement (the conscious) and for future aspirations. **Psychosexual stages:** The childhood stages of development (oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital) during which, according to Freud, the Id's pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct errogenous zones.
 * Free Associtaion: ** In psychoanalysis, a method of exploring the uncoscious in which the person relaxes and says whatever comes to mind, no matter how trivial or embarrassing.

Psychosexual Stages:
(0-18 months) || Pleasure centers on the mouth - sucking, bitting, chewing. || (18-36 months) || Pleasure focuses on bowel and bladder elimination; coping with demands for control || (3-6 years) || Pleasure zone is the genitals; coping with incestuous sexual feelings || (6 to puberty) || Dormant sexual feelings || (Puberty on) || Maturation of sexual interests ||
 * Stage || Focus ||
 * Oral
 * Anal
 * Phallic
 * Latency
 * Genital

**Oedipus [ED-uh-puss] complex:** According to Freud, a boy's sexual desires toward his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father. **Identification:** The process by which, according to Freud, children incorporate their parent's values into their developing superegos. **Fixation:** According to Freud, a lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, where conflicts were unresolved. **Defense mechanisims**: In psychanalytic theory, the ego's protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality. **Repression**: In psychoanalytic theory, the basic defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness. **Regression:** Defense mechanism in which an individual faced with anxiety retreats to a more infantile psychosexual stage, where some psychic energy remains fixated. **Reaction formation:** Defense mechanism by which the ego unconsciously switches unacceptable impulses into their opposites. Thus, people may express feelings that are the opposite of their anxiety-arrousing unconscious feelings. **Projection:** Defense mechanism by which people disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others. **Rationalization:** Defense mechanism that offers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one's actions. **Displacement:** Defense mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person, as when redirecting anger toward a safer outlet. **Sublimation:** In psycholoanalytic theory, the defense mechanism by which people rechannel their unacceptable impulses into socially approved activities. **Projective test:** A personality test, such as the Rorschach or TAT, that provides ambigious stimuli designed to trigger projection of one's inner dynamics. **Thematic Apperception Test (TAT):** A projective test in which people express their inner feelings and interests through stories they make up about ambigious scenes. **Rorschach inkblot test:** The most widely used projective test, a set of 10 inkblots, designed by Herman Rorschach; seeks to identify people's inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of the blots. **Collective Unconscious:** Carl Jung's concept of a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species' history. **Trait:** A characteristic patter of behavior or a disposition to feel and act, as assessed by self-report inventories and peer reports. **Personality Inventory:** A questionnaire (often with true-false or agree-disagree items) on which people respond to items designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behavoirs; used to assess selected personality traits. **Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI):** The most widely researched and clinically used of all personality tests. Originally developed to identify emotional disorders (still considered its most apporpriate use), the test is now used for amny other screening purposes. **Emprically derived tests:** A test (such as the MMPI) developed by testing a pool of items and then selecting those that discriminate between groups. **Self-Actualization:** According to Maslow, the ultimate psychological need that arises after basic physcial and psychological needs are met and self-esteem is achieved; the motivation to fufill one's potential. **Unconditional positive regard:** According to Rogers, an attitude of total acceptance toward another person. **Self-Concept:** All our thoughts and feelings about ourselves, in answer to the question, "Who am I?" **Self-esteem:** One's feelings of high or low self-worth. **Self-serving bias:** A readiness to percieve oneself favorably. **Individualism:** Giving priority to one's own goals over group goals, and defining one's identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identifications. **Collectivism:** Giving priority to the goals of one's group (often one's extended family or work group) and defining one's identity accordingly. **Reciprocal determinism:** The interacting influence between personality and enviornmental factors. **Personal control:** Our sense of controlling our enviornment rather than feeling helpless. **External locus of control:** The perception that chance or outside forces beyond one's personal control determine one's fate. **Internal locus of control:** The perception that one controls one's own fate. **Learned helplessness:** The hopelessness and passive resignation an animal or human learns when unable to avoid repeated aversive events. **Positive Psychology:** The scientific study of optimal human functioning; aims to discover and promote conditions that enable individuals and communities to thrive. Secure - Insecure Self-satisfied - Self-pitying || Fun-loving - Sober Affectionate - Reserved || Preference for variety - Preference for routine Independent - Conforming || Trusting - Suspicious Helpful - Uncoorperative || Careful - Careless Disciplined - Impulsive || Abraham Maslow: Believed that if the basic human needs are fufilled, people will strive to actualize their highest potential; self-actualization. The Social-Cognitive Perspective: Applies principles of learning, thinking, and social influence, with particular emphasis on the ways in which our personality influences and is influenced by our interaction with the enviornment. It assumes reciprocal determinism - that personal-cognitive factors combine with the enviornment to influence people's behavior.They found that the best way to predict someone's behavior in a given situation is to observe that person's behavior pattern in similar situations. Faulted for slighting the importance of unconscious dynamics, emotions, and inner traits, the social-cognitive perspective builds on psychology's well-established concepts of learning and cognition and reminds us of the power of social situations.
 * The Psychoanlytic Perspective**: Freudian. Studying the unconscious, psychosexual stages, and mechanisms for defending against anxiety. It offers after-the-fact explanations of any characteristic yet fails to //predict// such behavoir and traits. His idea of repression, rarely, if ever, occurs.
 * Neo-Freudians:** Accepted Freud's basic ideas - the personality structures of Id, Ego, and Superego; the importance of the unconscious; the shaping of personality in childhood; and the dynamics of anxiety and teh defense mechanisms. However, they placed more emphasis on the role of the conscious mind both in interpreting experience and in coping with the enviornment. And they doubted that sex and aggression were all-consuming motivations - instead placing more emphasis on loftier motives and social interaction.
 * The Trait Perspective**: Rather than explain hidden aspects of personality, trait researchers describe the predispositions that underlie our actions. For example, through factor analysis, researchers have isolated five importent dimensions of personality ("The Big Five"). Genetic predispositions influence most such traits.
 * The Big Five: Personality factors**
 * ~ Trait Dimension ||~ Endpoints of the Dimension ||
 * Emotional Stability || Calm - Anxious
 * Extraversion || Sociable - Retiring
 * Openness || Imaginative - Practical
 * Aggreableness || Soft-headed - Ruthless
 * Conscientiousness || Organized - Disorganized
 * Factor Analysis:** A newwer technique at analyzing triats by statistical procedure to identify clusters of test items that tap basic components of intelligence
 * The Humanistic Perspective:** Led by Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, humanistic psychologists __emphasize the growth potential of healty people__. They want to turn psychology's attention __away__ from baser motives and enviornmental conditioning. With personalized moods, they study personality in hopes of __fostering personal growth__. Scientific researches outside the humanistic tradition have picked up on one idea from humanistic theory - that our sense of self is at the center of our personality and outlook.