AP Psychology Notes

Chapter Outlines

Chapter 10: Personality

Overview
1. Personalities
  1. The unique attitudes, behaviors, and emotions that characterize a person
  2. Type A vs. Type B
    1. Type A
      1. tend to feel a sense of time and pressure
      2. easily angered
      3. higher risk for heart disease
    2. Type B
      1. tend to be relaxed and easygoing
    3. some people are neither
Psychoanalytic (Freudian) Theory
1. Psychosexual Stage Theory of Personality
  1. Phallic Stage
    1. boys and girls notice their physical differences
      1. girls develop penis envy (desire for a penis)
      2. boys get castration anxiety (fear of castration by fathers or for misbehavior)
    2. identification
      1. when people emulate and attach themselves to an individual they believe threatens them
      2. prevents boys from fearing their fathers
      3. encourages boys to break away from attachment to mom and act like men
  2. latency
    1. sexual feelings are repressed out of conscious awareness
    2. turn attention to other issues
  3. fixation
    1. results from being undergratified or overgratified
    2. oral fixation
      1. overeat, chew gum, smoke
    3. anal fixation due to traumatic toilet training
      1. anal expulsive personality
      2. → messy and disorganized
      3. anal retentive
      4. → meticulously neat and organized
    4. phallic fixation
      1. excessive sexual assurance and aggression or
      2. consumed by their perceived sexual inadequacies
    5. result from the libido (psychic energy) getting stuck in one of the psychosexual stages
2. Unconscious vs. Conscious
  1. Unconscious mind
    1. we don’t have access to the thoughts in it
    2. we use lots of psychic energy to keep threatening thoughts in it
  2. Conscious mind
    1. contains everything we are thinking about at any one moment
  3. Preconscious mind
    1. contains everything that we could potentially summon to conscious awareness with ease
3. The Personality
  1. Consists of the id, ego, and superego
  2. The id
    1. contains instincts and psychic energy
    2. instincts
      1. Eros- the life instincts.
      2. → often evidences as a desire for sex
      3. → directed by libido
      4. Thanatos- the death instincts
      5. → seen in aggression
    3. propelled by the pleasure principle
      1. it wants immediate gratification
    4. in the unconscious mind
  3. The ego
    1. located partly in the conscious, partly in the unconscious
    2. follows the reality principle
      1. negotiates between the desires of the id and the limitations of the environment
    3. acts as a mediator between superego and id
    4. uses defense mechanisms to protect the unconscious mind from the threatening thoughts in the unconscious
  4. The superego
    1. operates on both the conscious and unconscious level
    2. sense of conscience about right and wrong
4. Defense Mechanisms
  1. Repression
    1. blocking thoughts out from conscious awareness
  2. Denial
    1. not accepting the ego-threatening truth
  3. Displacement
    1. redirecting one’s feelings toward another person or object
  4. Projection
    1. believing that the feelings one has toward someone else are actually held by the other person and directed at oneself
  5. Reaction formation
    1. expressing the opposite of how one truly feels
  6. Regression
    1. returning to an earlier, comforting form of behavior
  7. Rationalization
    1. coming up with a beneficial result of an undesirable occurrence
  8. Intellectualization
    1. undertaking an academic, unemotional study of a topic
  9. Sublimination
    1. channeling one’s frustration toward a different goal
    2. viewed as particularly healthy
5. Criticisms of Freud
  1. Freudian theory
    1. little empirical evidence supports it
    2. proving it is impossible
    3. overestimates the importance of early childhood and of sex
    4. has little predictive power
    5. able to interpret both positive and negative reactions to the theory as support
  2. Feminists
    1. Freudian theory is objectionable
    2. penis envy
      1. grew from the assumption that men are superior to women
      2. if women were jealous of men, it was probably due to the advantages men had in society
      3. ex. Karen Horney and Nancy Chodorow
    3. womb envy
      1. men’s jealousy of women’s reproductive abilities
      2. Karen Horney
    4. men don’t have stronger superegos
6. Impact of Freudian Theory
  1. Impact on culture greater than impact on contemporary psychology
  2. Terms used in our language
    1. ego, penis envy, denial, unconscious
  3. Arts
    1. Salvador Dali
      1. paintings depict the unconscious
    2. Woody Allen
      1. films often feature a character undergoing psychoanalysis and playing out a Freudian drama
Psychodynamic Theories
1. Neo-Freudian (Psychodynamic) Approaches
  1. offshoots of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory
  2. Carl Jung
  3. Alfred Adler
2. Carl Jung
  1. The unconscious has two parts:
    1. collective
    2. personal
  2. Personal unconscious
    1. contains complexes
      1. the painful/threatening thoughts and memories that you don’t want to confront
  3. Collective unconscious
    1. passed down through the species
    2. explains certain similarities between cultures
    3. contains archetypes
      1. universal concepts we all share as part of the human species
      2. ex. shadow represents the evil side of personality
      3. → persona is people’s creation of a public image
      4. evidence: fear of dark, importance of circle
3. Alfred Adler
  1. Ego psychologist
    1. downplayed the importance of the unconscious
    2. focused on the ego
  2. People are motivated by:
    1. inferiority
      1. the fear of failure
    2. superiority
      1. the desire to achieve
  3. Known for work on the importance of birth order in shaping personality
Trait Theories
1. Trait Theorists
  1. Believe we can describe people’s personalities by specifying their main traits
    1. these traits are stable and motivate behavior
2. Nomothetic Approach
  1. Belief that the same basic set of traits can be used to describe all people’s personalities
    1. Hans Eyesenck
      1. introversion-extroversion and stable-unstable scale can fully describe personality
  2. The big five personality traits
    1. extraversion
    2. agreeableness
      1. how easy to get along with
    3. conscientiousness
      1. high = hardworking, responsible, organized
    4. openness to experience
    5. emotional stability (neuroticism)
      1. how consistent your mood is
3. Factor Analysis
  1. Allows researchers to use correlations between traits to see which traits cluster together as factors
  2. Example:
    1. factor- conscientiousness
    2. traits- punctuality, diligence, neatness
      1. strongly correlate
4. Idiographic Theorists
  1. Using the same set of terms to classify all people is impossible
  2. People need to be seen in the few terms that best characterize them
5. Gordon Allport
  1. Common traits are useful
    1. but a full understanding of someone is impossible without looking at their personal traits
  2. Types of personal traits
    1. cardinal dispositions
      1. play a pivotal role in everything you do
    2. central dispositions
    3. secondary dispositions
      1. less apparent
      2. describe less significant traits
6. Criticism of Trait Theories
  1. Underestimate the importance of the situation
Biological Theories
1. Heritability
  1. A measure of the percentage of a trait that is inherited
  2. Little evidence exists for specific personality traits
2. Temperament
  1. Emotional style and characteristic way of dealing with the world
  2. Infants seem to differ immediately at birth
    1. thought to be born with different temperaments
      1. these influence personality development
3. Hippocrates
  1. Believed personality was determined by the relative levels of four humors in the body
  2. The four humors (fluids)
    1. blood
    2. yellow bile
    3. black bile
    4. phlegm
  3. One of the first people to recognize that biology impacts personality
4. Somatotype Personality
  1. William Sheldon
  2. Three body types:
    1. endomorphs (fat)
    2. mesomorphs (muscular)
    3. ectomorphs (thin)
  3. Certain personality traits are associated with each of the body types
  4. Showed correlation, but not causation
Behaviorist Theories
1. Principles
  1. Personality is determined by the environment
    1. reinforcement contingencies create personality
  2. We can alter personalities by changing the environment
2. Criticism
  1. Fail to recognize the importance of cognition
Social- Cognitive Theories
1. Albert Bandura
  1. Personality is created by an interaction between:
    1. the person (traits)
    2. the environment
    3. the person’s behavior
  2. This is based on triadic reciprocality (reciprocal determinism)
    1. each of these three factors influence both of the other two in a constant loop like fashion
  3. Also believed that personality is determined by self-efficacy
    1. high = optimistic about their ability to get things done
    2. low = feel a sense of powerlessness
    3. affects actions
2. George Kelly
  1. Personal-Construct theory
    1. in attempts to understand the world, people develop systems of personal constructs
      1. consist of pairs of opposites
      2. ex. smart vs. dumb
      3. used to evaluate the world
    2. behavior is determined by interpretation of the world
    3. based on a fundamental postulate
      1. which states that behavior is influenced by cognitions, and we can predict future behavior with past behavior
3. Locus of control
  1. Julian Rotter
  2. Internal locus of control
    1. feel as if you are responsible for what happens to you
    2. correlated with higher health, political activity, and grades
  3. External locus of control
    1. believe that luck and other forces outside of your own control determine your destiny
Humanistic Theories
1. Determinism
  1. The belief that what happens is dictated by what happened in the past
  2. Psychoanalysts and behaviorists
  3. Doesn’t support the existence of free will
    1. an individual’s ability to choose his own destiny
    2. third force
      1. arose in opposition to determinism
    3. central to humanistic psychology
2. Principles
  1. People are innately good
  2. People are able to determine their destinies with free will
  3. Focus on importance of self concept and self esteem
    1. these have a positive correlation
  4. Self concept
    1. a person’s global feeling about himself
3. Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers
  1. People are motivated to self-actualize
    1. reach their full potential
  2. Maslow
    1. hierarchy of needs
  3. Roger’s self theory
    1. people need unconditional positive regard to self actualize
    2. unconditional positive regard
      1. blanket acceptance
4. Criticism of Humanistic Theories
  1. Theory of human nature too optimistic
Assessment Techniques
1. Projective Tests
  1. Used by psychoanalysts
  2. Involve asking people to interpret ambiguous stimuli
    1. Rorschach inkblot test
      1. involves showing people a series of inkblots and having them describe what they see
    2. thematic apperception test (TAT)
      1. consists of cards with a picture of people in an ambiguous situation
      2. people are asked to describe what is happening in the cards
  3. People’s interpretations should reflect their unconscious thoughts
  4. Scoring is complicated and unreliable
    1. it relies on the therapist’s interpretations
2. Self-Report Inventories
  1. Questionnaires that ask people to provide information about themselves
  2. Used by many types of psychologists, ex:
    1. humanistic
    2. cognitive-behavioral
    3. trait theorists
  3. MMPI-Z
    1. Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory
    2. widely used
    3. some have “lie scales” built in
3. Radical Behaviorists
  1. Observing behavior is the only way to measure personality
4. Reliability vs. Validity
  1. Reliability
    1. consistency
  2. Validity
    1. accuracy
5. Barnum Effect
  1. People have the tendency to see themselves in vague, stock descriptions of personality
  2. Named after P.T. Barnum
    1. circus owner
    2. “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

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Aboukhadijeh, Feross. "Chapter 10: Personality" StudyNotes.org. Study Notes, LLC., 12 Oct. 2013. Web. 19 Apr. 2024. <https://www.apstudynotes.org/psychology/outlines/chapter-10-personality/>.

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Chapter 10: Personality

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