Personality (Chapter 17)

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Personality (Chapter 17)

• Lecture Outline
• What is personality?
• Psychodynamic approaches
• Assessment

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What do you see?
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What is personality?

• Historically people have always been interested
  in what people are like
• Definition A sum of all behaviours and
  dispositions that provide some coherence across
  time and situations
• Studied through case, observational, and
  empirical studies
• Descriptive and developmental approaches

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Psychodynamic approaches

• Freud People possess diverse sources of psychic
  energy
• Biological drives can come into conflict
• Example Act or restrain sexual impulses
• Push someone in front of a bus
• Energy, drives, and conflicts have developmental
  course
• Conscious and unconscious

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Personality Structure of Psychodynamic Theory
Ego
Conscious
reality
Preconscious
Superego
Id
Unconscious
idealistic
pleasure
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Defense Mechanisms

• Denial Is there an exam in this course?
• Repression Cannot remember bad events
• Projection They want to see Spiceworld
• Displacement After exam go for run
• Sublimation Sex-starved artist or poet
• Reaction formation Oedipus complex
• Rationalization Why study? Hes not.
• Regression Act like a baby when hurt
• Fixation Obsessive person is anal

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Neo-Freudians

• Alfred Adler We strive for superiority
• Inferiority complex when we can not
• Carl Jung Unconscious consists of personal and
  collective components
• archetypes are in the collective unconscious
• Persona, shadow (Mask), anima, animus
• Erik Erikson Importance of Ego
• Sullivan, Horney Environment

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Assessment of personality

• Projective tests
• Rorschach 10 symmetrical inkblots What do you
  see? Why is it that?
• TAT Stories told to ambiguous pictures
• Objective tests
• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
  (MMPI-2) 550 T/F items, 3 validity scales and 10
  clinical scales
• Other self-report questionnaires Example
• STAI

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Normal curve of personality trait scores
T-scores
20 30 40 50 60 70 80
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Humanism (1960s, 1970s)

• Humans are complex and distinct from other life
  forms
• Future-oriented and purposeful
• Carl Rogers Person-centered approach, ideal
  self
• Maslow Movement to self-actualize
• Rollo May, Existentialism Appreciation for
  death gives meaning to life