INTRODUCTION - Like intelligence, personality is an abstract concept that cannot be seen, touched, or directly measured. to psychologists, personality is one's relatively consistent and distinctive pattern of thinking. We have examined four major perspectives on personality, each valuable for the light it sheds on our complex workings. SIGMUND FREUD AND PSYCHOANALYSIS - Psychoanalytic assessment aims to reveal unconscious aspects of personality. Although some criticize projective tests, such as Rorschach inkblots, because they have only modest reliability and validity, the Rorschach continues to be used by many clinicians.

• The Conscious, The Preconscious, and the Unconscious: Levels of Awareness
• The Conscious - The thoughts, feelings, sensations, or memories of which a person is aware at any given moment.
• The Preconscious - Information that is not conscious, but is retrievable into conscious awareness.
• The Unconscious - According to Freud, a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories. According to contemporary research psychologists, a level of information processing of which we are unaware.
• Sigmund Freud's treatment of emotional disorders led him to believe that they sprang from unconscious dynamics, which he sought to analyze through his own and his patients' free association and dreams. Freud saw personality as composed of pleasure-seeking psychic impulses (the id), a reality-oriented executive (the ego), and an internalized set of ideals (the superego).
• The Id, The Ego, and the Superego: Warring Components of the Personality
• The Id - A reservoir of unconscious psychic energy that, according to Freud, strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives.
• The Ego - The largely conscious, "executive" part of personality that, according to Freud, mediates among the demands of the id, superego, and reality.
• The Superego - The part of personality that, according to Freud, represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgement (the conscience) and for future aspirations.
• Tensions between demands of the id and superego cause anxiety. The ego copes by using defense mechanisms, of which repression is the most basic.
• Defense Mechanisms: Protecting the Ego - In psychoanalytic theory, the ego's protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality.
• Repression - The basic defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts and feelings from consciousness.
• Projection - The defense mechanism by which people disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others.
• Denial - Refusing to acknowledge consciously the existence of danger or a threatening condition.
• Rationalization - A defense mechanism that offers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one's actions.
• Regression - An individual's retreat, when faced with anxiety, to a more infantile psychosexual stage where some psychic energy remains fixated.
• Reaction Formation - A defense mechanism by which the ego unconsciously switched unacceptable impulses into their opposites. Thus, people may express feelings that are the opposite of their anxiety-arousing unconscious feelings.
• Displacement - The defense mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person, as when redirecting anger toward a safer outlet.
• Sublimation - The defense mechanism by which people rechannel their unacceptable impulses into socially approved activities.
• The Psychosexual States of Development - Freud believed that children develop through psycho-sexual stages, which he labeled the oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital stages. He suggested that people's later personalities are influenced by how they resolve conflicts associated with these stages and whether they remain fixated at any stage.
• Oral - The first of Freud's psychosexual stages, from birth to about 18 months, during which sensual pleasure centers on the mouth via sucking, biting, and chewing.
• Anal - The second of Freud's psychosexual stages, from about 18 months to 3 years, during which pleasure focuses on bowel and bladder elimination, retention, and control.
• Phallic - The third of Freud's psychosexual stages, from about ages 3 to 6, during which the pleasure zone is the genitals and sexual feelings arise toward the parent of the other sex.
• Latency - The fourth of Freud's psychosexual stages, from about age 6 to puberty, during which sexual impulses are repressed.
• Genital - The last of Freud's psychosexual stages, during which sexuality matures and the person seeks pleasure through sexual contact with others.
• Freud's Explanation of Personality - Freud believed that personality was almost completely formed by age 5 or 6, when the Oedipal Conflict is resolved and the Superego is formed. He also believed that there were two primary sources of influence on personality: (1) traits that develop as a result of fixations, and (2) the relative strengths of the id, ego, and superego.
• Oedipal Complex (Electra Complex for females) - According to Freud, a boy's sexual desires toward his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for his father.
• Fixations - According to Freud, a lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, where conflict were unresolved.
• Evaluating Freud's Contribution - Critics say many of Freud's specific ideas are implausible, unvalidated, or contradicted by new research, and that his theory offers only after-the-fact observations. Nevertheless, Freud drew psychology's attention to the unconscious, to the struggle to cope with anxiety and sexuality, and to the conflict between biological impulses and social restraints. His cultural impact has been enormous.

THE NEO-FREUDIANS

• Carl Jung - Jung developed a complex theoretical approach called analytical psychology. He does not emphasize the early years of life as Freud did. Instead, he sees life as a series of periods identified by different uses of psychic energy. People reach one of the most important points in their late thirties or early forties when a decisive transition occurs. The energy used earlier in youthful interests and pursuits is transferred to more cultural and spiritual interests. If the equilibrium of a person's energies is upset at this period, he or she may be permanently crippled psychologically.
• Jung's View of the Personality - Jung postulated two basic personality types: the introvert and the extrovert. Introverts sped a good deal of time alone, behave as if they were shy, exhibit interests in solitary intellectual pursuits, and when confronted by stressors, withdraw into themselves. Extraverts tend to be outgoing, assertive, oriented toward social activities, and deal with stress by seeking companionship and the support of a group. In addition to these attitude types, Jung postulated four psychological functions: thinking and feeling (rational functions) and intuition and sensation (irrational functions).
• The Collective Unconscious - Carl Jung's concept of a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species' history. A storehouse of memory traces inherited from our ancestral past, which includes not only the racial history of mankind but also of prehumans and animals.
• Archtypes - Inherited predispositions within the collective unconscious to respond to specific events with great emotion. These predispositions include the anima and the animus, the Hero, God, the shadow, and the persona. Jung regarded them as evidence for an inborn capacity for symbol-making that humans have inherited from their ancestors.
• Alfred Adler - Like Jung, Alder's conception of human nature was more optimistic than Freud's. He insisted that humans are inherently social beings who are motivated by positive interpersonal needs. In his Individual Psychology, he emphasized the conscious determinants of behavior, while acknowledging the role of unconscious factors in though and action. Alder believed that striving for superiority is an innate drive, an expression of life itself. By superiority he meant, not social distinction or a prominent position in society, but a striving for perfection and self-actualization, a "great upward drive." He viewed neurotic individuals as striving for egoistic or selfish goals, such as power or fame; he saw well-adjusted persons as striving toward more community-oriented goals. Alder postulated the everyone has a fictional final goal in the sense of a subjective, unconscious, and creative striving to surmount the obstacles in their lives. He also developed a typology of personality based on the principles of activity level and social interest.
• Karen Horney - Karen Horney's theoretical approach to personality rests upon the growth principle, which asserts that there is an innate human capacity for growth, with humans striving for, yet never achieving, the fullest realization of their capacities. Also of focal importance in her theory is the influence of culture on the development and functioning of both the normal and deviant personality. In order to cope with basic anxiety, people develop neurotic trends. For Horney, neurosis includes all disturbed or disordered behavior patterns, regardless of their degree of severity.
• Eric Fromm - Fromm, a social philosopher, is concerned with both the individual and society, and with their interaction. He postulates needs that are basic to humans; relatedness, transcendence, rootedness, sense of identity, and frame of reference. Society also has needs, and the fulfillment of both individual and societal needs is a function of the interaction between the person and the social group. This interaction is largely determined by people's character types, which are expressed as one or more of several distinct orientations.
• Neo-Freudians Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and Karen Horney accepted many of Freud's ideas. But they also argued that we have more positive motives than sex and aggression and that the ego's conscious control is greater than Freud supposed.

TRAIT THEORIES - Rather than explain the hidden aspects of personality, trait researchers describe the predispositions that underlie our actions. To assess traits, psychologists have devised self-report inventories, such as the empirically derived MMPI-2. Peer reports may provide even more trustworthy clues to a person's behavioral traits. For example, through factor analysis, researchers have isolated five distinct dimensions of personality. Most such traits are biologically influenced by genetic predispositions and perhaps by autonomic reactivity.

• Gordon Allport - Allport differentiated the importance of traits for a person's personality with the concepts of cardinal traits, central traits, and specific dispositions. Allport also is known for the concept of functional autonomy, suggesting that adult motives may become independent of earlier roots, and for his emphasis on the utility of in-depth study of individuals (idiographic research).
• Hans Eysenck - According to Eysenck, the basic dimensions of personality are introversion-extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism. Questionnaires have been developed to assess people along these trait dimensions. Research has focused particularly on the introversion-extraversion trait dimension, where differences in activity level and activity preferences have been found. Eysenck suggests that individual differences in traits have a biological and genetic (inherited) basis. However, he also suggests that through behavior therapy important changes in personality functioning can occur.
• Raymond Cattell: The 16PF - Cattell distinguished among bivariate, multivariate, and clinical approaches to research in personality, favoring the multivariate study of interrelationships among many variables. Cattell also distinguished among ability, temperament, and dynamic traits, as well as between surface and source traits. Source traits represent an association of behavior discovered through the use of factor analysis and are the building blocks of personality. Although his main research efforts have involved the use of questionnaires (16 P.F. Questionnaire), he has attempted to demonstrate that the same factors show up with the use of ratings and objective tests. Finally, Cattell suggested that behavior in a specific situation reflects motivation variables, such as ergs and sentiments, as well as more temporary variables, such as states and roles.
• Trait theorists such as Allport, Eysenck, and Cattell share an emphasis on broad dispositions to respond as central to personality. However, their approaches differ in many ways, most importantly concerning the use of factor analysis to discover traits and the number of traits to be used in the description of personality.
• The Five-Factor Theory of Personality - FIVE-FACTOR MODEL - An emerging consensus among trait theorists suggesting five basic factors to human personality: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.
• Extroversion - Assesses quantity and intensity of interpersonal interaction; activity level; need for stimulation; and capacity for joy.
• Neuroticism - Assess adjustment vs. emotional instability. Identifies individuals prone to psychological distress, unrealistic ideas, excessive cravings or urges, and maladaptive coping responses.
• Conscientiousness - Assesses the individual's degree of organization, persistence, and motivation in goal-directed behavior. Contrasts dependable, fastidious people with those who are lackadaisical and sloppy.
• Agreeableness - Assess the quality of one's interpersonal orientation along a continuum from compassion to antagonism in thoughts, feelings, and actions.
• Openness to Experience - Assesses proactive seeking and appreciation of experience for its own sake; toleration for and exploration of the unfamiliar.
• Evaluating the Trait Perspective - Critics of traits question the consistency with which they are expressed. Although people's traits do seem to persist over time, human behavior varies widely from situation to situation. Despite these variations, a person'saverage behavior across different situations is fairly consistent.

LEARNING THEORIES AND PERSONALITY

• B. F. Skinner - The Behaviorist View - In place of such theoretical constructs as ego, unconscious, self, and anxiety that rest on inferences concerning unseen inner states of the individual, Skinner substituted a functional analysis of behavior, which is aimed at the determination of lawful cause-effect relationships. Skinner recognized two categories of behavior: respondents, which are responses elicited by identifiable stimuli, and operants, which are responses that occur without reference to a specific known stimulus. Skinner assumed the adult personality to be a collection of behaviors developed through the varied histories of reinforcement during a person's earlier life. The basic objective of a Skinnerian science of behavior is to produce direct control over specific behaviors in individual subjects, thus enabling a cause-effect relationship that becomes the basis for scientific laws. In Skinner's view, a science of behavior must progress from the relatively simple to the more complex in order to determine the extent to which the laws discovered at one stage or level of complexity are adequate for the next.
• Social Cognitive Theorists - The social-cognitive perspective applies principles of learning, cognition, and social behavior to personality, with particular emphasis on the ways in which our personalities influence and are influenced by our interaction with the environment. It assumes reciprocal determinism - that personal-cognitive factors combine with the environment to influence people's behavior. By studying variations among people in their perceived locus of control and in their experiences of learned helplessness, researchers have found that an inner locus of control helps people to cope with life.
• ASSESSING BEHAVIOR IN SITUATIONS - Social-cognitive researchers observe how people's behaviors and beliefs both affect and are affected by their situations. They have found that the best way to predict someone's behavior in a given situation is to observe that person's behavior pattern in similar situations.
• Albert Bandura - Albert Bandura's theoretical approach to personality is based on the contention that behavior, environmental influences, and internal personal factors (including expectations, beliefs, thoughts, preferences, and self-perceptions) operate in what he calls reciprocal determinism. The major structural element in Bandura's theoretical approach to personality is the self-system. This system is cognitive in nature and constitutes a regulatory influence, partially through the self-efficacy expectations held by the individual. Bandura identifies two major sources of motivation: biological motivators similar to those seen in other theories, and cognition, which has dynamic as well as structural properties.
• Julian Rotter - Julian Rotter's reinforcement-expectant model of personality emphasizes the importance of a person's subjective expectancies about the future and the perceived reinforcement value of the outcome of that person's behavior.
• Evaluating the Social-Cognitive Perspective - Although faulted for slighting the importance of unconscious dynamics and inner traits, the social-cognitive perspective builds on psychology's well-established concepts of learning and cognition and reminds us of the power of social situations.

HUMANISTIC PERSONALITY THEORIES - Humanistic psychologists have sought to turn psychology's attention from baser motives and environmental conditioning to the growth potential of healthy people, as seen through the individual's own experiences. They assess personality through questionnaires on which people report their self-concept and by seeking to understand others' subjective personal experiences in therapy.

• Abraham Maslow - Abraham Maslow believed that if basic human needs are fulfilled and self-esteem is achieved, people will strive to actualize their highest potential. To describe self-actualization, he studied some exemplary personalities and summarized his impressions of their qualities.
• Self-Actualization - According to Maslow, the ultimate psychological need that arises after basic physical and psychological needs are met and self-esteem is achieved; the motivation to fulfill one's potential.
• Carl Rogers - To nurture growth in others, Carl Rogers advised being genuine, accepting, and empathetic. In such a climate, people can develop a deeper self-awareness and a more realistic and positive self-concept. Research on the self documents the importance of high self-esteem and the potency of self-serving bias.
• Unconditional Positive Regard - According to Rogers, an attitude of total acceptance toward another person.
• Evaluating the Humanistic Perspective - Humanistic psychology's critics complain that its concepts are vague and subjective, its values individualistic and self-centered, and its assumptions naively optimistic. Nevertheless, humanistic psychology helped to renew psychology's interest in the self.
• Personality Inventories
• The MMPI and MMPI-2 - The most widely researched and clinically used of all personality tests. Originally developed to identify the traits of emotionally troubled people (still considered its most appropriate use), this test is now also used for other screening purposes.
• The California psychological Inventory (CPI) - A highly regarded personality test used to assess the normal personality
• The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) - An inventory for classifying personality types based on Jung's theory of personality.
• Projective Tests - Personality tests for which subjects interpret ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger projection of one's inner dynamics.
• The Rorschach Inkblot Method - The most widely used projective test, designed by Hermann Rorschach; seeks to identify people's projected feelings by analyzing their interpretation of a set of 10 inkblots.
• The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) - A projective test in which people express their inner hopes, fears, and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes.
• The Sentence Completion Method - Consists of a number of incomplete sentences to be completed by the test taker. Potentially one of the most valid projective testing techniques
• Personality Theories: A Summary and Final Comment
• Theories differ on several basic issues relating to the origins and development of personality, including the respective roles of heredity and learning; whether personality development occurs in a series of discrete stages or follows a smooth and continuous path; whether the mature adult personality is the culmination of continuous development from childhood; and the significance of early development.
• A second set of issues concerns the dynamics of human behavior. Theorists differ substantially with regard to some of the major dimensions on which motivation varies; on the dimensions of time base, the number and centrality of motives, unconscious motivation, and the emphasis on determinism.
• Personality theorists are in general agreement that culture influences the development and functioning of personality, but they differ on the roles of the interpersonal environment and the psychological environment. On the controversial of whether behavior is determined predominantly by traits or situational factors, the suggestion that traits and situations interact to determine behavior offers a partial resolution to the argument.

Stage Focus Oral (0-18 months) Pleasure centers on the mouth - sucking, biting, chewing.
Anal (18-36 months) Pleasure focuses on bowel/bladder elimination; coping with demands for control.
Phallic (3-6 years) Pleasure zone is the genitals; coping with incestuous sexual feelings.
Latency (6 to puberty) Repressed sexual feelings.
Genital (puberty on) Maturation of sexual interests.

The "Big Five" Personality FactorsTrait dimension Description Emotional Stability Calm vs. anxious Secure vs. insecure Self-satisfied vs. self-pitying
Extraversion Sociable vs. retiring Fun-loving vs. sober Affectionate vs. reserved
Openness Imaginative vs. practical Preference for variety vs. preference for routine Independent vs. conforming
Agreeableness Soft-hearted vs. ruthless Trusting vs. suspicious Helpful vs. uncooperative
Conscientiousness Organized vs. disorganized Careful vs. careless Disciplined vs. impulsive
The Four Perspectives on PersonalityPerspective: Psychoanalytic Behavior springs from: Processing unconscious conflicts between pleasure-seeking impulses and social restraints. Assessment techniques: Projective tests aim to reveal unconscious motivations. Evaluation: A speculative, hard-to-confirm theory with enormous cultural impact.
Perspective: Trait Behavior springs from: Expressing biologically influenced dispositions, such as extroversion and introversion. Assessment techniques: Personality inventories assess the strength of different traits; peers rate behavior patterns. Evaluation: A descriptive approach criticized as sometimes underestimating the variability of behavior from situation to situation.
Perspective: Humanistic Behavior springs from: Processing conscious feelings about oneself in light of one's experiences. Assessment techniques: (a) Questionnaire assessments of self-concepts; (b) Empathetic understandings of people's unique experiences. Evaluation: A humane theory that reinvigorated contemporary interest in the self; criticized as subjective and sometimes naively self-centered and optimistic.
Perspective: Social-cognitive Behavior springs from: Reciprocal influences between people and their situations, colored by perceptions of control. Assessment techniques: (a) Questionnaire assessments of people's feelings of control; (b) Observation's of people's behavior in particular situations. Evaluation: An interactive theory that integrates research on learning, cognition, and social behavior; criticized as underestimating the importance of the unconscious, of emotions, and of enduring traits.
The Big Five Factors and Illustrative Scales:

Learning-Behavioral Views

Strengths