There are many definitions of “personality”, usually reflecting the approach/theory/methodology of the person explaining it to you
personalty psychology address three issues: “(1) human universals, (2) individual differences, and (3) individual uniqueness.” (Cervone & Pervin, 2010, p. 7)
“All personality psychologists use the term personality to refer to psychological qualities that contribute to an individual’s enduring and distinctive patterns of feeling, thinking, and behaving..” (Cervone & Pervin, 2010, p. 8)
enduring: consistent over time and across situations
distinctive: features that differentiate one person from another
contribute to: causally influence or explain
Cervone and Pervin suggest that personality psychologists address four basic topics:
personality structure: what are the basic units or building blocks of personality?
personality process: what are the dynamics, motives, energizing principles of personality?
growth and development: how does personality develop, how stable or fluid is it?
psychopathology and behavior change: how can deliberate change be brought about to facilitate adjustment?
Psychodynamic approaches
Freud & psychoanalysis: why we still talk about old, dead, Europeans
Object relationship approaches & ego psychology
social and adaptive aspects of personality become prominent
Anna Freud and ego defense mechanisms
Winnicott, Guntrip, and object relationship therapists
Sullivan and the neo-Freudians
Defense mechanisms: ego coping mechanisms
George Vaillant & the Harvard Study of Adult Development
longitudinal study of 250 men evaluated in college and in 40’s, 60’s, and 70’s
Vaillant interpreted his continuing outcomes as providing support for Erikson’s stages of adult development (he also suggest adding two other stages: a “career consolidation” stage arising for men between Intimacy and Generativity: his subjects, usually 25 to 35 were very oriented to their careers, worked very hard, and showed unquestioning conformity to work values; and a stage following the generativity crisis in the late 40’s and early 50’s: “keeping the meaning vs. rigidity”: Vaillant says that those men who worked to “keep the meaning” developed an acceptance of the weaknesses and imperfections of their fellow human beings and worked to maintain and protect their culture even while recognizing that it was imperfect)
comparing the 30 “best outcomes” with the 30 “worst outcomes” Valliant say strong relationships between life outcome and coping mechanisms:
45% of the best outcome men used mature defense mechanisms vs. less than 20% of the worst outcome men; 25% of the worse outcome men employed immature or psychotic defenses, and only 5% of the best outcome men (Vaillant 1977)
Vaillant also saw, in later work (Vaillant, 2008), movement toward more mature ego defense mechanisms in many of his men with advancing age
Jungian psychology and adult development (Hollis 2005; Richo, 1991)
Attachment Theory
John Bowlby
Mary Ainsworth and styles of attachment: the “strange situations” assessment
secure
insecure
ambivalent
Motivation: instincts, drives, emotion
While Freud focused on one (Eros) and then two (Thanatos) basic drive, modern neuroscience investigations of emotions suggest there are multiple emotional/motivation factors operating, often outside our awareness
Richard Davidson’s emotional styles
Dr. Davidson believes neuroscience has identified several dimensions of emotional responding that reflect relatively patterns of activation in area of our brain and lead to important individual differences in people:
Resilience style: “Can you usually shake off setbacks, or do you suffer a meltdown?”; “Fast to recover”, “Slow to Recover” (Davidson & Begley, 2012, p. 5); similar toopics would be “emotional regulation”; the low resilience pole would correspond to Dr. Aron’s “Highly Sensitive Person” profile
Outlook style: “Do you seldom let emotional clouds darken your sunny outlook on life . . . . maintain a high level of energy and engagement even when things don’t go your way?”; “Positive”, “Negative” (p. 5); related concepts would include: mood
Social Intuition style: “Can you read people’s body language and tone of voice like a book . . . . Or are you puzzled by–even blind to–the outward indications of people’s mental and emotional state?”; “Socially Intuitive”, “Puzzled” (p. 5); a related concept would be empathy (Baron-Cohen, 2011)
Self-Awareness style: “Are you aware of your own thoughts and feelings and attuned to the messages your body sends you?; “Self-Aware”, “Self-Opaque” (pp. 5-6); a related concept to low self-awareness would be alexithymia (inability to recognize/describe emotions in yourself)
Sensitivity to Context style: “Are you able to pick up the conventional rules of social interaction”, “are you baffled when people tell you that your behavior is inappropriate?”; “Tuned In”, “Tuned Out”; other authors might speak of social awareness, intuition
Attention style: “Can you screen out emotional and other distractions and stay focused?”; “Focused”, “Unfocused” (p. 6); a related concept would be Baron-Cohen’s notion of “systematizers”
Influencing your emotional style: Davidson believes that emotional styles tend to be stable (cross situational and enduring) but are not immutable; in particular he believes we can deliberately take certain actions to influence our emotional style, use “neural exercises” (such as meditation) to change our characteristic pattern of responding
Jaak Panksepp’s primary- process affective systems (Panksepp & Biven, 2012)
Dr. Panksepp reviews extensive observation and research literature on humans and other animals (including much of his own) which he concluds indicates a number of basic neurological processing at a subcortical level which have evolved to support adaptation and survival and strongly influence individual differences of behavior:
SEEKING (Expectancy)
appetitive vs consumatory behavior
approach motivation system
pathologies of Seeking:
addiction
depression
FEAR (anxiety)
RAGE (anger)
LUST (sexual excitement)
CARE (nurturance)
PANIC/GRIEF (sadness)
separation distress
PLAY (social joy)
Trait Approaches: does personality in adulthood remain stable or change?
Types vs Traits
Jung suggested there were certain stable, enduring, pervasive personality types: introvert vs. extrovert
traits are typically conceptualized and stable (somewhat resistant to change), enduring (persist over time), pervasive (show cross situational effects) characteristics that influence our thoughts, emotions, and actions in a variety of settings
traits can be thought of as tendencies to behavior in certain ways in certain situations, generalized response tendencies, perceptual predispositions, habits of style
traits are seen as what gives our behavior consistency over time and across situations
traits are seen as what gives us individual differences and uniqueness
traits are (often) seen as the building blocks of personality
Five Factor Model; Costa & McCrae’s Big Five
common language analysis, factor analysis, and the “structure” of personality
Lewis Goldberg (1981) suggested that people from many cultures sought answers to five basic questions when they interacted with each other:
1. Is the other person smart? (O)
2. Can I depend on her or him? (C)
3. Is she or he dominant or submissive? (E)
4. Is he or she easy or hard to get along with? (A)
5. Is she or he sane and stable or emotionally volatile? (N) [note the OCEAN mnemonic]
The Fundamental Lexical Hypothesis
“the most important individual differences in human transactions will come to be encoded as single terms in some or all of the world’s languages” (Goldberg, 1990, p. 1216)
This assumes a direct correspondence between observable characteristics and the basic, underlying factors which lead to these characteristics. Such a model would would have problems, for instance, with understanding human genetics–when genotype is lawfully but often indirectly related to phenotype.
Is there one basic human personality?
The big three, or five, or six, or ???
description vs. explanation again
The Five Factor Model, the “Big Five” of personality traits
Extraversion (sociability, need for stimulation; also labeled surgency or assertiveness or interpersonal involvement in some analyses)
Neuroticism (anxiety proneness, emotional stability, speed of return to baseline; also labeled emotionality or chronic anxiety in some analyses)
Openness to Experience (the 5 factor model’s stand in for intelligence; also labeled inquiring intellect or culture in some analyses)
Agreeableness (dominance; also labeled conformity or sociability in some analyses)
Conscientious (rule adherence; also labeled dependability or self-control in some analyses)
The acronym “OCEAN” is sometimes used to remember the big five: Openness to experience, Conscientious, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism
issues and contentions
methodological problems
conceptual problems
What are traits?
How do you account for change?
responses to challenges:
facet scores
changes in personality
Social Learning Approaches (Social Cognitive) models
early behavioral model deemphasized “personality” and focused heavily on current situational determinates of behavior: reinforcement history, stimuli discrimintory for reinforcement (or punishment) in the environment, reinforcers (and aversive stimuli) available in the environment
more recent work has tended to be more modular, developing “mini-theories” to account for particular aspects of personality development or change
Bandura and Walter’s work on social imitation [observational learning involves cognitive mediation of events affecting others, this creates a three learning factor model (respondent conditioning, operant conditioning, and modeling) and we no longer have a purely “behavioral” theory
Mischel’s work on self-control/delay of gratification, the marshmallow test
Cognitive models
are usually an emphasis on phenomenological influences–your perceptions are an important determination of your actions
Comprehensive (integrative) models
Macadamize (1999; Hooker, 2002; Hooker & Macadamize, 2003) model of personality
original model proposed three parallel level of personality structure and functioning
Dispositional traits: aspects of personality that are consistent across different context & allow groups to be compared along continuous dimensions
Personal concerns: important motivations or primary goals, major life concerns
Life narrative: integrative aspects of personality, what pulls everything together and creates a sense of self or identity
an elaboration by Karen Hooker added three processes that act in tandem with the structural components
interacting with dispositional traits are state processes: transient, short-term changes in mood, emotion, hunger, anxiety, etc.
interacting with personal concerns are self-regulatory processes: primary and secondary control
interacting with life narratives are cognitive processes, such as recounting life narratives or self-narrating that act or organize life stories
while research on dispositional traits is extensive, research on personal concerns is more limited (but theoretical speculation is rich) but has yield interesting work:
for instance, the developmental models of Jung, Erikson
Carl Jung
emotional growth is in the direction of each aspect of personality becoming more in balance
two age-related trends:
young adults are more extraverted (need to find a mate, establish a career) than older adults; with increasing age the need for balance leads to a turning inward (increased introversion)
young adults tend to act strongly in accord with the gender expectations of their culture; with increasing age people begin to express the “suppressed” parts of their personality (Jung believed that we all have both masculine and feminine aspects of personality)
Jung also contributed the idea of a mid-life crisis, which has very mixed support; but his ideas of life “transitions” contributed to work by other investigators, such as Daniel Levinson’s “seasons of a man’s life” model (later he added “seasons of a woman’s life”)
Daniel Levinson
early adult transition (17-22)
entering the adult world (22-28)
age 30 transition (28-33)
settling down (33-40)
mid-life transition (40-45)
entering middle adulthood (45-50)
Levinson spoke at times of a later stage of development in older adult life
most of his work focused on healthy and intelligent males during a period in which families were relatively stable (post depression America)
Erikson’s theory stimulated the development of Levanter’s theory of ego development in adulthood (also a stage model)
Similarly, research and theorizing into life narrative, identity, and the self has been productive:
Macadam’s Life-Story model: our sense of identity cannot be understood from the perspective of either traits or motivations, it is a coherent narrative that constantly evolves and weaves our personal tale; the emotions experienced are like the score of a movie (reflecting tragedy, optimism, comedy, romance)
common themes are agency (power, achievement, autonomy), communion (love, intimacy, sense of belonging), andideology (one’s beliefs and values)
Whitbourne’s Identity theory
the limitations of stage theories
major influences on identity: family and work
Identify and Experience mutually influence each other
self-concept (and possible selves)
issues regarding the self, including whether it is an illusion, go beyond our class: