Personality Unit 10 Chapter 13

1. PersonalityUnit 10Chapter 13 AP Psychology ~ Ms. Justice

2. BIG IDEAS • The Psychoanalytic Perspective • Freud • The Humanistic Perspective • Maslow & Rogers • The Trait Perspective • The Social Cognitive Perspective • Exploring the Self

3. Personality An individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. Each dwarf has a distinct personality.

4. 1: What was Freud’s view of personality and its development?

5. Psychoanalytic Perspective In his clinical practice, Freud encountered patients suffering from nervous disorders. Their complaints could not be explained in terms of purely physical causes. = ? Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) Is he Psychology’s Elvis?

6. Psychodynamic Perspective Freud developed the first comprehensive theory of personality, which included the unconscious mind, psychosexual stages, and defense mechanisms. Culver Pictures

7. Exploring the Unconscious Freud said the unconscious mind is a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories. He asked patients to engage in free association – to say whatever came to their minds in order to tap the unconscious. http://www.english.upenn.edu

8. Dream Analysis Another method to analyze the unconscious mind is through interpreting manifest (the remembered storyline) and latent (hidden) contents of dreams. The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli (1791)

9. Psychoanalysis Psychoanalysisis the retrieval and release of painful, embarrassing unconscious memories through free association and dream analysis.

10. Model of Mind The mind is like an iceberg. It is mostly hidden, and below the surface lies the unconscious mind. The preconscious stores temporary memories. Figure 13.1 p. 555

11. Personality Structure Personality develops as a result of our efforts to resolve conflicts between our biological impulses and social restraints. Figure 13.1 p. 555

12. Id, Ego and Superego The id unconsciously strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives, operating on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification. The ego functions as the “executive” and mediates the demands of the id and superego. Thesuperego provides standards for judgment (the conscience) and for future aspirations.

14. Personality Development Freud believed that personality formed during the first few years of life is divided into psychosexual stages. During these stages the id’s pleasure-seeking energies focus on pleasure sensitive body areas called erogenous zones.

15. Psychosexual Stages Freud divided the development of personality into five psychosexual stages. Table 13.1, p. 556

16. Oedipus Complex A boy’s sexual desire for his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father. A girl’s desire for her father is called the Electra complex.

17. Identification According to Freud, children cope with threatening feelings by repressing them and by identifying with the rival parent. Through this process of identification, their superego gains strength that incorporates their parents’ values. From the K. Vandervelde private collection

18. 2: How did Freud think people defended themselves against anxiety?

19. Defense Mechanisms The ego’s protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality. 1. Repressionbanishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness. 2. Regressionleads an individual faced with anxiety to retreat to a more infantile psychosexual stage.

20. Defense Mechanisms • Reaction Formation causes the ego to unconsciously switch unacceptable impulses into their opposites. People may express feelings of purity when they may be suffering anxiety from unconscious feelings about sex. 4. Projectionleads people to disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others.

21. Defense Mechanisms 5. Rationalizationoffers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one’s actions. 6. Displacementshifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person, redirecting anger toward a safer outlet.

22. The Only Known Recording of Freud’s Voice “I started my professional activity as a neurologist trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients. Under the influence of an older friend and by my own efforts, I discovered some important and new facts about the unconscious in psychic life, the role of instinctual urges and so on. Out of these findings grew a new science, Psycho-Analysis, a part of psychology and a new method of treatment of the neuroses. I had to pay heavily for this bit of good luck. People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavory. Resistance was strong and unrelenting. In the end I succeeded in acquiring pupils and building up an International Psycho-Analytic Association. But this struggle is not yet over. Sigmund Freud.”

23. 3: Which of Freud’s ideas did his followers accept or reject?

24. The Neo-Freudians Like Freud, Adler believed in childhood tensions. However, these tensions were social in nature and not sexual. A child struggles with an inferiority complex during growth and strives for superiority and power. National Library of Medicine Alfred Adler (1870-1937)

25. The Neo-Freudians Karen Horney (1885-1952) [HORN-eye] Like Adler, Karen Horney believed in the social aspects of childhood growth and development. She countered Freud’s assumption that women have weak superegos and suffer from “penis envy.”

26. The Neo-Freudians Jung believed in the collective unconscious,which contained a common reservoir of images derived from our species’ past. This is why many cultures share certain myths and images such as the mother being a symbol of nurturance. Archive of the History of American Psychology/ University of Akron Carl Jung (1875-1961)

27. 4: What are projective tests, and how are they used?

28. Assessing Unconscious Processes A projective test is a psychological instrumentintended to reveal the hidden unconscious mind.

29. Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) The TAT is a projective test in which people express their inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes.

30. Thematic Apperception Test Video

31. Rorschach Inkblot Test The most widely used projective test; uses a set of 10 inkblots and was designed by Hermann Rorschach. It seeks to identify people’s inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of the blots. Lew Merrim/ Photo Researcher, Inc.

32. Rorschach Inkblot Test Video

33. Projective Tests: Criticisms When evaluating the same patient, even trained raters come up with different interpretations (lack of reliability-consistency of results). 2. Projective tests may misdiagnose a normal individual as pathological (lack of validity-predicting what it is supposed to).

34. 5: How do contemporary psychologists view Freud and the unconscious?

35. Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective Modern Research tell us… • Personality develops throughout life and is not fixed in childhood. • Peer influence on the individual may be as powerful as parental influence. • Gender identity may develop before 5-6 years of age.

36. Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective Modern Research tells us… • There may be other reasons for dreams besides wish fulfillment. • Sexual inhibition has decreased, but psychological disorders have not.

37. Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective Modern Research tells us… 6. The majority of children who experience trauma, death camp survivors, and battle-scarred veterans are unable to repress painful experiences into their unconscious mind.

38. The Modern Unconscious Mind (p. 562) Modern research shows the existence of non-conscious information processing. This involves: schemas that automatically control perceptions and interpretations the right-hemisphere activity that enables the split-brain patient’s left hand to carry out an instruction the patient cannot verbalize parallel processing during vision and thinking implicit memories emotions that activate instantly without consciousness self-concept and stereotypes that unconsciously influence us

39. 6: How did humanist psychologists view personality, and what was their goal in studying personality?

40. Humanistic Perspective By the 1960s, psychologists became discontent with Freud’s negativity and the mechanistic psychology of the behaviorists. http://www.ship.edu Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) Carl Rogers (1902-1987)

41. Self-Actualizing Person Maslow proposed that we as individuals are motivated by a hierarchy of needs. Beginning with physiological needs, we try to reach the state of self-actualization—fulfilling our potential. Ted Polumbaum/ Time Pix/ Getty Images http://www.ship.edu

42. Person-Centered Perspective Carl Rogers also believed in an individual's self-actualization tendencies. He said that unconditional positive regardisan attitude of acceptance of others despite their failings.

43. 7: How did humanist psychologists assess a person’s sense of self?

44. Assessing the Self In an effort to assess personality, Rogers asked people to describe themselves as they would like to be (ideal) and as they actually are (real). If the two descriptions were close the individual had a positive self-concept.

45. 8: How has the humanist perspective influenced psychology? What criticisms has it faced?

46. Evaluating the Humanistic Perspective Positive self-concept, empathy, and the thought that people are basically good has had a pervasive impact on counseling, education, child-rearing, and management.

47. Evaluating the Humanistic Perspective Criticisms • Concepts in humanistic psychology are vague and subjective and lack scientific basis. • The individualism encouraged can lead to self-indulgence, selfishness, and an erosion of moral restraints. • Humanistic psychology fails to appreciate the reality of our human capacity for evil. It lacks adequate balance between realistic optimism and despair.

48. 9: How do psychologists use traits to describe personality?

49. The Trait Perspective An individual’s characteristic behaviors and conscious motives constitutes his or her personality.

50. Exploring Traits Each personality is uniquely made up of multiple traits. Allport & Odbert (1936), identified almost 18,000 words representing traits. One way to condense the immense list of personality traits is through factor analysis, a statistical approach used to describe and relate personality traits.