PSYC104 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Morton Prince, Personality Psychology, Libido
13 Jun 2018
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Lecture Six – Personality
Personality
- Personality psychology studies the personalities that tend to remain stable across different
situations (e.g., being anxious or extraverted)
- Social psychology examines the effects whereby a situation on a person remains stable
across different types of people
- Burton – pesoalit efes to the eduig pattes of thought, feelig, otiatio ad
behaviour that are expressed in different circustaes
- Pervin – genes and environment influence personality (memories, past experiences)
- General theories of personality:
o The structure
▪ How personality processes are organised
▪ The basic elements (if any)
▪ Is personality stable across time?
o Individual differences
▪ The way people vary in their personality characteristics
Personality Research
Issues to be aware of:
- What is good evidence?
- Empirical does not mean experimental
o Many valid approaches
We see othes though ou o glasses, ou iases, eliefs and understandings
Issues and questions in research
- Structure of personality
- Personality processes (e.g., development)
- Individual differences in personality
- Causal contributions of biology, culture, history to personality development
- The effect of situation; reciprocal forces
- The impact of personality on important aspects of life such as relationships etc
Three traditions:
- Clinical approach
- Correlational approach
- Experimental approach
Clinical Approach
- Systematic, in-depth research of individuals
- Observation and self-report methods
- Charcot – hysteria brought on or alleviated with hypnosis, greatly influence Freud
- Janet – believed that suggestions could be therapeutic
- Morton Prince – dissociation of personality, different selves exist within all of us
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
- Freud – first comprehensive theory of personality development – ambivalence of conflicts,
compromise formations (solutions and defences to resolve such conflicts)
- Murray – used clever methods to test personality – interviews, questionnaires, fantasy
measures and projective tests, situational tests
- Strengths of this approach:
o Observes a great deal of phenomena and often in detail (case studies for example)
o Considers the functioning of whole person
o Does not assume that everyone has the same degree of insight into their own
functioning as self-report questionnaire measures do
o Only approach to look at the individual level – other approaches look at the larger
amount and average people
- Drawbacks of this approach:
o Difficult to confirm observations
o May be difficult to formulate lab-style tests of hypotheses
o Hard to replicate with questionnaires
Correlational Approach
- Establishes associations between sets of measures on which people have been found to
differ
o Doesnt stud peso as a hole, ut elatioships etee eleets
- Self-report measures and factor analysis (1940s)
- Sir Francis Galton – explored differences due to heredity, especially intellectual abilities
- Gordon Allport, Raymond Cattell, Hans Eysench – Five Factor model of personality
- Assumes that traits are fundamental units of personality
- Aimed to seek a periodic table of elements of personality
- Strengths of this approach:
o Self-report is easy to use on large groups, cost effective
o Compares an individual to the average via numerical score; clinical utility
- Drawbacks of this approach:
o Correlation does not equal causation
o Factor analysis has subjective elements
o Self-reports are subject to biases and errors – self-deception, social desirability
Experimental Approach
- Wundt – how do changes in stimuli influence changes in immediate experience?
- Pavlov – induced neuroticism in dogs with shocks, gradually increase stimulus similarity
- Watson – emotional reaction conditioned in children
- Hull – Stimulus-Response theory
- Dollard, Doob, Miller, Mowrer and Sears – frustration-aggression hypothesis
- BF Skinner – instrumental conditioning, behaviour modification
- Strengths of this approach
o Close to scientific ideal
o No need to worry about whether subjects know the truth about self or is telling
truth
- Weaknesses of this approach
o Important parts of personality hard to test
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
o Not i the otet of the hole peso
o Participants bring own expectations into lab
o Experiment is a social situation
Several Influential Approaches to Personality in Detail:
- Genetic approach – temperament
- Trait approaches (currently dominant)
- Social Cognitive Theories
- Psychodynamic Theories
- Humanistic Theories
- Biological Approaches
- Culture Approaches
Temperament
- One aspect of personality, valuable to first examine this – strong claims for consistency
across the life span and does have a significant genetic component
- As they are influenced by genes they are difficult aspects of personality change
- Temperament variables include:
o How one does something
o Inhibition to the unfamiliar
▪ A cluster of attributes found in some children – shyness, anxiety with novel
stimuli
▪ 10% of children – they cry, are upset and display other characteristic facial
expression when confronted with unfamiliar stimuli
▪ Assumed biological substrate
▪ Showing this pattern from 4 months – more fearful when confronted with
novel stimuli at ages 9, 14 and 21 months; more fearful about a range of
common situations at age 7 ½
▪ Children who did not change had mothers who were not over protective and
placed reasonable demands on them
▪ Moffit – children inhibited at aged 3 were more likely to be depressed by 21
▪ Zuckerman – stimulus hungry people, issues of impulsivity and sensation-
seeking
o Reactivity
o Impulsivity
▪ Zuckerman – places sensation seeking in the limbic system rather than the
cortex (deeper in the brain, more primal) – dopamine seen as driving
sensation (linked with pleasure seeking) – serotonin seen as inhibiting as
sensation seeking (linked with inhibition)
▪ Those at age 3 described with this more likely to be depressed at age 21
▪ Impulsivity linked with aggression, psychopathy, anti-social behaviour,
addictions
o Oes igou o eeg leel
o The stegths of oes atios
o Temporal features of a response
o The rhythm of responding
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Personality psychology studies the personalities that tend to remain stable across different situations (e. g. , being anxious or extraverted) Social psychology examines the effects whereby a situation on a person remains stable across different types of people. Burton (cid:862)pe(cid:396)so(cid:374)alit(cid:455) (cid:396)efe(cid:396)s to the e(cid:374)du(cid:396)i(cid:374)g patte(cid:396)(cid:374)s of thought, feeli(cid:374)g, (cid:373)oti(cid:448)atio(cid:374) a(cid:374)d behaviour that are expressed in different circu(cid:373)sta(cid:374)(cid:272)es(cid:863) Pervin genes and environment influence personality (memories, past experiences) General theories of personality: the structure, how personality processes are organised, the basic elements (if any) Individual differences: the way people vary in their personality characteristics. Empirical does not mean experimental: many valid approaches. We see othe(cid:396)s th(cid:396)ough ou(cid:396) o(cid:449)(cid:374) (cid:858)glasses(cid:859), ou(cid:396) (cid:271)iases, (cid:271)eliefs and understandings. Causal contributions of biology, culture, history to personality development. The impact of personality on important aspects of life such as relationships etc. Charcot hysteria brought on or alleviated with hypnosis, greatly influence freud. Morton prince dissociation of personality, different selves exist within all of us.
