Integrating Psychological Theories: Personality in Evolutionary Perspective

1. Chapter FourteenPersonality in Perspective: Overlap and Integration

2. Psychoanalysis and Evolutionary Psychology • Common features • Primitive force (id, genes) • Irrational, single-minded, self-serving • Mechanism to mediate with reality (ego, cortex) • Permit planfulness and careful decision making; foster survival • Connection to the social world (superego, sensitivity to social influences) • Reflect social influences on survival • Fixation and Mating Strategies • Male and female Oedipal fixation suggest similar behavior as evolutionary theories of mating behavior

3. Psychoanalysis and Self-Regulation • Similarities in behavior function within hierarchies • Id functioning and lower-level control behavior • Spontaneous and responsive to situational cues • Ego functioning and program-level control behavior • Involves pragmatic planning and decision making. Not impulsive. Not principled. • Superego and principle-level control behavior • Can be reflective of moral principles • Represents idealized self

4. Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Process • Similarities between concepts • Repression and preattentive filtering • Ego and executive control processes • Consciousness and attention • Transference and chronic partial activation of schemas • Shared focus on automated (unconscious) processes

5. Social Learning,Cognitive, and Self-Regulation Views • Shared importance of processes creating cognitive representations of the self and the world • Common view that expectancies are determinants of how hard people try to achieve things • See goals or incentives as the structures that underlie behavior

6. Hierarchies of Maslow and Self-Regulation • Higher levels of both hierarchies represent more abstract, subtle, and integrative concepts than do lower levels • When problems arise at lower levels of the hierarchies, they become more demanding (functionally superordinate) • Content of hierarchies are different • Maslow = motives • Self-regulation = actions

7. Self-Actualization and Self-Regulation • Both use the concepts: • Idealized self and actual (real) self • Both monitor incongruity between idealized and actual self

8. Traits and Other Models • Traits are developed early in life • Traits manifest in several other approaches under slightly different labels • Traits may be viewed as: • Biological temperaments • Transformations of sexual drives • Reflections of psychosocial crises • Learned motive qualities • Traits

9. Recurrent Themes • Impulse and Restraint • A core issue across a broad range of personality theories • Implicates a two-mode system of cognitive processing • Automatic, intuitive, superficial, fast, evolutionarily older • Rational, deliberative, slower, evolutionarily newer • Individual vs. Group Needs • Distinctions between self-interest and communal interests that are important issues across multiple theories

10. Eclecticism • Drawing useful elements from multiple theories • Different ideas are useful for different purposes • Not necessarily integrative, but often mutually supportive

11. Which Theory is Best People will believe those theories which “…are most interesting, those which appeal most urgently to our aesthetic, emotional, and active needs.” William James