Psychology Dersi 7. Ünite Özet

Introduction

Personality is one of the most important and intriguing concepts in psychology. In this chapter, we will touch upon how psychologists define and assess personality, the nature vs. nurture debate on personality, and the most popular theoretical approaches to personality: psychoanalytic and psychodynamic, behavioral, socialcognitive, cognitive, humanistic, and trait approach.

Defining and Measuring Personality

Personality is a psychological construct that characterizes our relatively enduring patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting, which is unique to us and differentiates us from other people. Personality is the psychological mechanism that organizes how people perceive and interact with their environment, so that their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors occur in accordance with each other. How we define personality certainly influences how we measure it. Considering that there are various theoretical approaches to personality, our perspective inevitably determines our method of assessment. Specifically, psychologists decide which questions to ask and which factors to focus on the most by taking into account their theoretical orientations. Hence, it should be of no surprise that there are various methods and tools for personality assessment in psychology.It is possible to classify these tools under three general categories: subjective measures of personality, objective measures of personality, and projective tests.

Nature vs Nurture Debate on Personality

The claim that our personality is biologically determined is a long-standing and widely-accepted theory in personality psychology. Relying on factor analysis, Eysenck and his wife Sybil developed the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) and suggested that personality could be understood in terms of three dimensions: neuroticism versus emotional stability, extraversion versus introversion, and psychoticism versus impulse control. Apart from Eysenck’s studies, 20th and 21st century research modified how we conceive personality, suggesting that both biological and environmental factors shape our characteristics, and neither shall be ignored. In order to specify how much contribution each has on the personality, researchers generally conducted twin studies. In this way, the similarities are attributed to the shared genetic makeup while the differences are attributed to the environmental factors, especially if the twins were raised apart.

Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Approaches to Personality

Among personality theories, Freud’s psychoanalytic theory is one of the most influential, and the most controversial. As a result of his studies, he developed a comprehensive explanation about the organization of human mind and personality. His works, which are still popular, inspired several psychologists and gave rise to many studies, as well as theories about personality.

The Structure of Personality

Before understanding the structure of personality, first we need to explain the structural model of the mind . Psychoanalytic theory represents the mind as an iceberg, which is composed of three layers. The first layer is the conscious part. It is the top of the iceberg, the visible part, meaning that the information in our conscious layer of the mind is available to us. However, the capacity of the conscious mind is limited and it is not possible (or necessary) to be aware of all the information in our minds. We keep information such as what we have done last summer, or what we ate yesterday, or the meanings of the words we know in the preconscious layer of the mind. The preconscious is larger than the conscious, as it keeps more information. At the very bottom of the iceberg there is the unconscious layer, which has the largest area, meaning that the amount of information it holds is inconceivable.

Psychoanalytic theory depicts Id, Ego and Superego as the three basic dynamic structures of personality. Id involves biological impulses, drives and motives. Superego represents moral rules, social norms and values. Ego , which functions at the conscious and preconscious level. Ego operates according to the reality principle .

Defense Mechanisms

Defense mechanisms are, in general, normal, automatic, and unconscious responses that are generated by the ego. The way that the ego solves a conflict and the defense mechanism that is utilized might vary from situation to situation, and from person to person.

There are ten most common defense mechanisms: Suppression, repression, regression, reaction formation, projection, rationalization, displacement, denial, intellectualization, and sublimation.

Psychosexual Development

Psychoanalytic theory proposes that personality develops in accordance with the sexual development. Psychosexual development begins at infancy, follows through five stages, and lasts into adulthood. The stages (i.e., Oral, Anal, Phallic, Latency and Genital) are consecutive, meaning that every child goes through these stages in the same order. In each stage, the psychic energy (libido) is located at a different erogenous zone and looks for a satisfaction at that zone. Hence, the conflict arising at each stage is specific to itself, having unique contributions to the personality. The child’s needs and expectations vary in each stage. Failure to meet those needs or over-satisfying them results in the fixation of the libido at the erogenous zone of that stage.

Psychodynamic Approach and Neo-Freudians

Neo-Freudians accepted the basic notions of psychoanalytic approach. However, they mainly discussed the generalizability and universality of Oedipus complex and libido. Rather than theorizing personality in psychosexual terms, they focused more on the role of the conscious mind and non-sexual motives. In this section we will introduce the main ideas of six Neo-Freudian psychologists: Karen Horney, Carl Gustav Jung, Alfred Adler, Harry Stack Sullivan, Erich Fromm, and Erik Erikson.

Karen Horney basically opposed the assumption that personality is shaped through the roles of aggressive and sexual impulses. Rather, she highlighted the effect of interpersonal relations and social factors on the development of personality.

Carl Gustav Jung mainly criticized the theory of psychosexual development in the sense that the theory gave an excessive emphasis on aggressive and sexual instincts. Rather, Jung suggested that the primary emphasis should be given to the concept of unconscious.

Alfred Adler thought that the conscious efforts (rather than unconscious forces) play a more significant role on the personality and behavior. He later developed the theory of Individual Psychology and the most important term in his theory is Inferiority Complex .

Harry Stack Sullivan’s views diverged from that of Freud’s especially in the sense that Sullivan gave a special emphasis on the role of interpersonal relations (especially the relations with significant others) in shaping one’s personality. Moreover, he suggested the term personafication : one’s mental representations of herself/himself and other people.

German psychologist Erich Fromm argued that the most anxiety provoking issue for the individuals is freedom , as it leads to feelings of loneliness and powerlessness. As a former psychoanalyst, Fromm also proposed that one’s struggle to deal with the anxiety shapes the personality.

Erik Erikson was a German-born American psychoanalyst. Rather than sexual development, Erikson was more interested in how socialization contributes to the personality. Hence, he named his theory as psychosocial development that lasted life-long.

Behavioral Approach to Personality

The Psychoanalytic approach mainly describes the innate dynamics of the personality structure. On the contrary, behavioral approach is not scientifically interested in what is happening inside the mind. It is rather concerned with only what is observable – the behavior and how situational determinants shape the behavior. In fact, the influence of environment is the most prominent feature of the behavioral approach. Behaviorists did not provide a specific theory on personality, as they applied learning principles to all behavior, including personality.

B. F. Skinner is one of the featured theorists of the behavioral approach. Following the works of Ivan Pavlov and John B. Watson he dedicated his research on understanding how behavior changes through learning and conditioning principles. Accordingly, he suggested that there are two kinds of behavior: respondent and operant behavior.

In addition to the theory of operant-conditioning, other learning models are also noteworthy for understanding how environment contributes to the patterns of behavior, that we call personality. Albert Bandura’s social-learning theory is one of them, which suggests that the behavior can be learned through observing others.

Social Cognitive Approach to Personality

Bandura asserts that, when we decide how to behave according to our expectations, we feel some control over our environment. However, he claims that we are in a constant interaction with our environment. All the individual variables such as cognitions and personality influence and are being influenced by the situational factors, which in turn shape the behavior. Bandura calls this relationship between the individual and the environment reciprocal determinism . Accordingly, your preferences (such as the books you read, the music that you prefer to listen, and the people that you make friends with) give information about your personality, as they are most probably shaped in parallel with your expectations.

Cognitive Approach to Personality

Cognitive theory basically claims that how we think, perceive, and give meaning to the events in our environment modify our behaviors, emotions, and ultimately our personality. These interpretations are subjective, and reflect our personal experiences as well as our personality characteristics. Hence, individual differences derivate from personal constructs of external events and in order to understand personality, examining how we interpret the events is more important than the actual events themselves.

Humanistic Approach to Personality

Humanistic approach differentiates from other perspectives in the sense that, it doesn’t focus on flaws and weaknesses of human beings. Instead, humanistic theory highlights the positives of mankind like dignity, free will, and responsibility, claiming that every individual possesses an inherent worth despite the behaviors might not be occasionally positive. The approach relies on the idea that individuals strive for actualizing their full potentials. Being psychologically healthy requires gaining self-awareness and taking responsibility of one’s actions. On the other hand, psychological disturbances occur when the person experiences an obstacle to the selfimprovement. The humanistic theory gives a special emphasis to the present rather than focusing on the past childhood experiences or predicting the future. Therefore, here and now is one of the most important concepts of humanistic theory.

Abraham Maslow and Carl Ransom Rogers are the two prominent humanistic theorists that attempted to understand personality in order to improve the overall satisfaction of individuals. Abraham Maslow’s noteworthy contribution to humanistic psychology includes the concepts of self-actualization and the hierarchy of needs. Self-actualization means that every individual is in a constant struggle of achieving their full potential, and this is what makes life meaningful for human beings. The most prominent characteristic of self-actualized people is selfawareness. When people improve their self-awareness, they are mostly aware of the reasons and motives behind their actions. However, Maslow suggests that one cannot achieve self-actualization before meeting certain needs, which are organized in a hierarchical pyramid system: the hierarchy of needs.

Self-actualization was the key concept in Carl Ransom Rogers theory as well. Rogers suggested that a selfactualizing person is fully functioning , that is s/he owns certain characteristics that contribute to a healthy psychological well-being.

Trait Approach to Personality

The trait approach to personality is basically concerned with understanding individual differences. However, the theory doesn’t aim to specify and predict the individual differences at the behavioral level. In fact, trait approach emerged to study the variations among individuals that lead to consistent cognitive, emotional and behavioral patterns, which are traits . Accordingly, the model’s assertion is to depict the systematic nature and core characteristics of individual differences26. You’ll remember from Hans Eysenck that the traits are dimensional, rather than categorical, meaning that each person possesses all the dimensions in varying degrees.

One of Wittgenstein’s students, Austin, as a philosopher of ordinary language, proposed that “Our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found worth marking, in the life-times of many generations: these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest” (1970, p.181 as cited in28). In parallel with Austin’s suggestions, Sir Francis Galton (1884) was the first to recognize the lexical hypothesis, indicating that all individual differences are encoded in the natural languages almost all around the world (as cited in29). Being stimulated from Sir Francis Galton’s early hypothesis, Allport & Odbert (1936) conducted their pioneering study in which they investigated the second edition of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary and reduced 4,500 trait names from a list of 18,000 adjectives to make the language more manageable (as cited in30) which later formed the basis of the original factor analytic study of Raymond Cattell31. Cattell extended Allport and Odbert’s trait list and after conducting thorough investigation he ended up with 16 personality factors or traits (Cattell, 1947 as cited in25).

Later, several researchers examined both Cattellian variables32 and the phenotypic vocabulary30, converging upon five factors. Hence the model was labelled as the Five-Factor Model (FFM). These factors (or Big Five Traits) are;

• Neuroticism (N),
• Extraversion (E),
• Conscientiousness (C),
• Agreeableness (A), and
• Openness to Experience (O).