Personality Psychology: Theories and Concepts

Personality: A Person's Pattern of Thinking, Feeling, and Acting

Type A and Type B Personalities

• Type A: Feel time pressure, easily angered, competitive and ambitious, work hard, more prone to heart disease.
• Type B: Relaxed and easygoing, work steadily, disregard physical or mental stress when they do not achieve.

Freud's Psychosexual Stage Theory

Freud believed that libido (psychosexual energy) moves to different parts of the body during different stages of development:

• Oral Stage (0-2 years): Sucking, mouth (drinking, eating, dependence, independence)
• Anal Stage (2 years): Bowel movements (orderly, stubborn/messy, wasteful)
• Phallic Stage (3-5 years): Play with genitals, feel attracted to the opposite parent
• Latent Stage (5 years to adolescence): Suppress psychosexual interest
• Genital Stage (puberty): Strong sexual interest in others

Oedipus Crisis

Freud's theory suggests that boys experience a sexual interest in their mothers and competitive aggression towards their fathers.

Consciousness

• Conscious: Aware of
• Preconscious: Aware if we think about it
• Unconscious: Deeply hidden, holds the true us

Id, Superego, and Ego

• Id: Unconscious, pleasure principle, biological drives, and instant gratification
• Superego: Develops last (at 5 years), conscience, rules, and prohibitions we learned (right or wrong)
• Ego: Reality principle, rational, personality, negotiates between id and the environment, in conscious and unconscious mind. Ego mediates between superego and id.

Ego Defense Mechanisms

• Repression: Rejecting and pushing thoughts into the unconscious
• Denial: Not accepting the truth
• Displacement: Redirecting feelings toward another person or object
• Projection: Attribution of one's own undesirable character to other people
• Reaction Formation: Expressing the opposite of how one truly feels
• Regression: Returning to an earlier, comforting form of behavior
• Rationalization: Coming up with a beneficial result of an undesirable outcome, attempt to prove that their actions are justifiable
• Intellectualization: Undertaking an academic, unemotional study of the topic
• Sublimation: Channeling one's frustration towards a different goal

Criticisms of Freud's Theory

• Only wealthy women in Australia tested, hard to test, no predictive power
• There is a"womb env"

Neo-Freudians

Carl Jung

• Collective Unconscious: Cumulative experiences of preceding generations
• Archetypes: Vague images we inherited from experiences of our ancestors
• Personal Unconscious: Each person's own experiences

Alfred Adler

• Inferiority vs. Superiority Complex

Trait Theory

• Traits: Long-lasting tendency in behavior (shyness, talkativeness)
• State: Temporary activation of a particular behavior
• Nomothetic: Same traits can be used to describe all people's personalities (Big Five)
• Idiographic: Disagrees with the first one, each person may have a few traits that are unique to them (selfish)