Theories of Personality

A Paper Submitted to the Faculty of Pharmacy UST

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements in General Psychology

By Kristiana Marian E. Calupitan 15 March 2011

Each of us, as human beings, influences much that is within us and around us. Each of us has many psychological attributes -- feelings, thoughts, motivations, and the like. It is our personality that orchestrates our psychological qualities.

Our feelings -- strong or slight -- determine some of how we act and react. Our thoughts guide us and influence others, who may be entertained by our wit or attracted to our wisdom.

Our sense of self helps inform us of how to make choices among alternatives - choices that may help us grow, or, that may harm us. This personality of ours slowly and persistently influences how we feel, what we do, who we are, and how we influence the world around us.

Most of us can't help but wonder how our personality works, how our personality came to be -- and what it might mean for our future. We also wonder about the personalities of others -- how they are the same or different from us.1

Theories of Personality

Psychoanalytic Theory

One of the main criticisms of most theories of personality is that they have difficulty accounting for the irrational, less predictable patterns of human thinking and behavior. Psychoanalytic theory, on the other hand, heads straight for the jugular, the deep, mysterious core of the human psyche, in search of understanding the psychology of the human.

In fact, psychoanalytic theory developed initially by Sigmund Freud during the latter part of the 1900s and during the early decades of the 21st century, formed the foundation of modern psychology. Much of the theory and research that came later, even if it disagreed with psychoanalytic thinking, was nevertheless shaped and influenced by its perspectives. 2

In considering personality, the broad, unique contribution of psychoanalytic theory is the suggestion that much of the explanation for human behavior, which is often bizarre and seemingly contradictory, lies largely hidden in the unconscious, and is the result of how a person negotiates conflicting, deep-rooted desires and instincts. There is overlap with learning theory in that psychoanalytic theory see the early years of development as making a critical contribution to the adult psyche, depending on various psycho-sexual stages are resolved.3

Here's an example. Why do humans have addictive behaviors, even though it seems to have ill long-term effects? Sigmund Freud explained in "Civilization & Its Discontents": Life as we find it, is too hard for us: it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it, we cannot dispense with palliative measures. There are three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitute satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensitive to it.

Psychoanalytic theory is also closely connected with evolutionary perspectives on personality. Freud accepted the basic insights of Darwin's evolutionary theory, particularly with regard to the idea that humans have evolved with particular instincts that were advantageous to survival. Freud was a medical practitioner and researcher

who transformed himself into the world's first psychologist. His evidence was mostly based on case studies of his work with people who were suffering neuroses of one variety or another.4

The Conscious and Unconscious Mind: The Structure of the Mind According to Freud Many of us have experienced what is commonly referred to as a Freudian slip. These misstatements are believed to reveal underlying, unconscious thoughts or feelings. Consider this example: James has just started a new relationship with a woman he met at school. While talking to her one afternoon, he accidentally calls her by his ex-girlfriend's name. If you were in this situation, how would you explain this mistake? Many of us might blame the slip on distraction or describe it as a simple accident. However, a psychoanalytic theorist might tell you that this is much more than a random accident. The psychoanalytic view holds that there are inner forces outside of your awareness that are directing your behavior. For example, a psychoanalyst might say that James misspoke due to unresolved feelings for his ex or perhaps because of misgivings about his new relationship. The founder of psychoanalytic theory was Sigmund Freud. While his theories were considered shocking at the time and continue to create debate and controversy, his work had a profound influence on a number of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, anthropology, literature, and art. The term psychoanalysis is used to refer to many aspects of Freuds work and research, including Freudian therapy and the research methodology he used to develop his theories. Freud relied heavily upon his observations and case studies of his patients when he formed his theory of personality development.

Before we can understand Freud's theory of personality, we must first understand his view of how the mind is organized.

According to Freud, the mind can be divided into two main parts:

1. The conscious mind includes everything that we are aware of. This is the aspect of our mental processing that we can think and talk about rationally. A part of this includes our memory, which is not always part of consciousness but can be retrieved easily at any time and brought into our awareness. Freud called this ordinary memory the preconscious. 2. The unconscious mind is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that outside of our conscious awareness. Most of the contents of the unconscious are unacceptable or unpleasant, such as feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict. According to Freud, the unconscious continues to influence our behavior and experience, even though we are unaware of these underlying influences.

The Id, Ego and Superego: The Structural Model of Personality According to Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory of personality,

personality is composed of three elements. These three elements of personality-known as the id, the ego and the superego--work together to create complex human behaviors. The Id The id is the only component of personality that is present from birth. This aspect of personality is entirely unconscious and includes of the instinctive and primitive behaviors. According to Freud, the id is the source of all psychic energy, making it the primary component of personality.

The id is driven by the pleasure principle, which strives for immediate gratification of all desires, wants, and needs. If these needs are not satisfied immediately, the result is a state anxiety or tension. For example, an increase in hunger or thirst should produce an immediate attempt to eat or drink. The id is very important early in life, because it ensures that an infant's needs are met. If the infant is hungry or uncomfortable, he or she will cry until the demands of the id are met. However, immediately satisfying these needs is not always realistic or even possible. If we were ruled entirely by the pleasure principle, we might find ourselves grabbing things we want out of other people's hands to satisfy our own cravings. This sort of behavior would be both disruptive and socially unacceptable. According to Freud, the id tries to resolve the tension created by the pleasure principle through the primary process, which involves forming a mental image of the desired object as a way of satisfying the need. The Ego The ego is the component of personality that is responsible for dealing with reality. According to Freud, the ego develops from the id and ensures that the impulses of the id can be expressed in a manner acceptable in the real world. The ego functions in the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious mind. The ego operates based on the reality principle, which strives to satisfy the id's desires in realistic and socially appropriate ways. The reality principle weighs the costs and benefits of an action before deciding to act upon or abandon impulses. In many cases, the id's impulses can be satisfied through a process of delayed gratification--the ego will eventually allow the behavior, but only in the appropriate time and place.

The ego also discharges tension created by unmet impulses through the secondary process, in which the ego tries to find an object in the real world that matches the mental image created by the id's primary process. The Superego The last component of personality to develop is the superego. The superego is the aspect of personality that holds all of our internalized moral standards and ideals that we acquire from both parents and society--our sense of right and wrong. The superego provides guidelines for making judgments. According to Freud, the superego begins to emerge at around age five.

There are two parts of the superego:

1. The ego ideal includes the rules and standards for good behaviors. These behaviors include those, which are approved of by parental and other authority figures. Obeying these rules leads to feelings of pride, value and accomplishment. 2. The conscience includes information about things that are viewed as bad by parents and society. These behaviors are often forbidden and lead to bad consequences, punishments or feelings of guilt and remorse.

The superego acts to perfect and civilize our behavior. It works to suppress all unacceptable urges of the id and struggles to make the ego act upon idealistic standards rather that upon realistic principles. The superego is present in the conscious, preconscious and unconscious.

The Interaction of the Id, Ego and Superego

With so many competing forces, it is easy to see how conflict might arise between the id, ego and superego. Freud used the term ego strength to refer to the ego's ability to function despite these dueling forces. A person with good ego strength is able to effectively manage these pressures, while those with too much or too little ego strength can become too unyielding or too disrupting.

According to Freud, the key to a healthy personality is a balance between the id, the ego, and the superego.5 Behaviorism Theory

For as long as human beings can remember, they have always been interested in what makes them who they are and what aspects of their being set each of them apart from others of their species. The answer according to behaviorists is nothing more than the world in which they grew up. Behaviorism is the theory that human nature can be fully understood by the laws inherent in the natural environment.

As one of the oldest theories of personality, behaviorism dates back to Descartes, who introduced the idea of a stimulus and called the person a machine dependent on external events whose soul was the ghost in the machine. Behaviorism takes this idea to another level. Although most theories operate to some degree on the assumption that humans have some sort of free will and are moral thinking entities, behaviorism refuses to acknowledge the internal workings of persons. In the mind of the behaviorist, persons are nothing more than simple mediators between behavior and the environment (Skinner, 1993, p 428).

The dismissal of the internal workings of human beings leads to one problem opponents have with the behavioral theory. This, along with its incapability of

explaining the human phenomenon of language and memory, build a convincing case against behaviorism as a comprehensive theory. Yet although these criticisms indicate its comprehensive failure, they do not deny that behaviorism and its ideas have much to teach the world about the particular behaviors expressed by humankind.6

Classical Conditioning

The Pavlovian experiment. While studying digestive reflexes in dogs, Russian scientist, Pavlov, made the discovery that led to the real beginnings of behavioral theory. He could reliably predict that dogs would salivate when food was placed in the mouth through a reflex called the "salivary reflex" in digestion. Yet he soon realized that, after time, the salivary reflex occurred even before the food was offered. Because the sound of the door and the sight of the attendant carrying the food "had repeatedly and reliably preceded the delivery of food to the mouth in the past," the dogs had transferred the reflex to these events (Schwartz & Lacy, 1982, p. 21).7 Thus, the dogs began salivating simply at the door's sound and the attendant's presence. Pavlov continued experimenting with the dogs using a tone to signal for food. He found that the results matched and the dogs had begun to salivate with the tone and without food (Schwartz & Lacy, 1982, pp. 20-24).

What Pavlov discovered was first order conditioning. In this process, a neutral stimulus that causes no natural response in an organism is associated with an unconditioned stimulus, an event that automatically or naturally causes a response. This usually temporal association causes the response to the unconditioned stimulus, the unconditioned response, to transfer to the neutral stimulus. The unconditioned stimulus no longer needs to be there for the response to occur in the presence of the formerly neutral stimulus. Given that this response is not natural and has to be

learned, the response is now a conditioned response and the neutral stimulus is now a conditioned stimulus. In Pavlov's experiment the tone was the neutral stimulus that was associated with the unconditioned stimulus of food. The unconditioned response of salivation became a conditioned response to the newly conditioned stimulus of the tone (Beecroft, 1966, pp. 8-10)8.

Second order conditioning. When another neutral stimulus is introduced and associated with the conditioned stimulus, even further conditioning takes place. The conditioned response trained to occur only after the conditioned stimulus now transfers to the neutral stimulus making it another conditioned stimulus. Now the second conditioned stimulus can cause the response without both the first conditioned stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus. Thus, many new conditioned responses can be learned (Schwartz & Lacy, 1982, p 48).

When second order or even first order conditioning occur with frightening unconditioned stimuli, phobias or irrational fears develop. In a study performed by Watson and Rayner (1920), an intense fear of rats was generated in a little boy named Albert. Whenever Albert would reach for a rat, the researchers would make a loud noise and scare him. Through classical conditioning, Albert associated rats with the loud fearful noise and transferred his fear with the noise to fear of rats. He then went further and associated rats, which are furry, to all furry objects. Due to second order conditioning, little Albert formed an irrational fear of all furry objects (Mischel, 1993, pp. 298-299)9.

Modern

classical

conditioning. Whereas

Pavlov

and

most

of

his

contemporaries saw classical conditioning as learning that comes from exposing an organism to associations of environmental events, modern classical conditioning

theorists, like R. A. Rescorla, prefer to define it in more specific terms. Rescorla emphasizes the fact that contiguity or a temporal relationship between the unconditioned stimulus and the conditioned stimulus is not enough for Pavlovian conditioning to occur. Instead, the conditioned stimulus must relate some information about the unconditioned stimulus (Rescorla, 1988, pp. 151-153)10.

The importance of this distinction can be seen in the experimental work done by Kamin (1969) and his blocking effect. In his experiment, rats were exposed to a tone followed by a shock. Following Pavlovian conditioning principles, the tone became a conditioned response. Yet, when the same rats were exposed to a tone and a light followed by a shock, no conditioning occurred with the light. This was because the tone had already related the information of the shock's arrival. So, any information the light would have given would have been useless. Even though the light was associated temporally with the shock, there was no conditioning because there was no information related (Schwartz & Lacy, 1982, p. 53).

Humanistic Theory

Some psychologists at the time disliked psychodynamic and behaviorist explanations of personality. They felt that these theories ignored the qualities that make humans unique among animals, such as striving for self-determination and selfrealization. In the 1950s, some of these psychologists began a school of psychology called humanism. Humanistic psychologists try to see peoples lives as those people would see them. They tend to have an optimistic perspective on human nature. They focus on the ability of human beings to think consciously and rationally, to control their

biological urges, and to achieve their full potential. In the humanistic view, people are responsible for their lives and actions and have the freedom and will to change their attitudes and behavior. Two psychologists, Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, became well known for their humanistic theories. Abraham Maslows Theory The highest rung on Abraham Maslows ladder of human motives is the need for self-actualization. Maslow said that human beings strive for self-actualization, or realization of their full potential, once they have satisfied their more basic needs. Maslows hierarchy of needs theory is described on page 247. Maslow also provided his own account of the healthy human personality. Psychodynamic theories tend to be based on clinical case studies and therefore lack accounts of healthy personalities. To come up with his account, Maslow studied exceptional historical figures, such as Abraham Lincoln and Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as some of his own contemporaries whom he thought had exceptionally good mental health. Maslow described several characteristics that self-actualizing people share:

Awareness and acceptance of themselves Openness and spontaneity The ability to enjoy work and see work as a mission to fulfill The ability to develop close friendships without being overly dependent on other people

A good sense of humor

The tendency to have peak experiences that are spiritually or emotionally satisfying

Carl Rogerss Person-Centered Theory Carl Rogers, another humanistic psychologist, proposed a theory called the person-centered theory. Like Freud, Rogers drew on clinical case studies to come up with his theory. He also drew from the ideas of Maslow and others. In Rogerss view, the self-concept is the most important feature of personality, and it includes all the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs people have about themselves. Rogers believed that people are aware of their self-concepts. Congruence and Incongruence Rogers said that peoples self-concepts often do not exactly match reality. For example, a person may consider himself to be very honest but often lies to his boss about why he is late to work. Rogers used the termincongruence to refer to the discrepancy between the self-concept and reality. Congruence, on the other hand, is a fairly accurate match between the self-concept and reality. According to Rogers, parents promote incongruence if they give their children conditional love. If a parent accepts a child only when the child behaves a particular way, the child is likely to block out experiences that are considered unacceptable. On the other hand, if the parent shows unconditional love, the child can develop congruence. Adults whose parents provided conditional love would continue in adulthood to distort their experiences in order to feel accepted.

Results of Incongruence Rogers thought that people experience anxiety when their self-concepts are threatened. To protect themselves from anxiety, people distort their experiences so that they can hold on to their self-concept. People who have a high degree of incongruence are likely to feel very anxious because reality continually threatens their self-concepts. Example: Erin believes she is a very generous person, although she is often stingy with her money and usually leaves small tips or no tips at restaurants. When a dining companion comments on her tipping behavior, she insists that the tips she leaves are proportional to the service she gets. By attributing her tipping behavior to bad service, she can avoid anxiety and maintain her self-concept of being generous. Criticisms of Humanistic Theories Humanistic theories have had a significant influence on psychology as well as pop culture. Many psychologists now accept the idea that when it comes to personality, peoples subjective experiences have more weight than objective reality. Humanistic psychologists focus on healthy people, rather than troubled people, has also been a particularly useful contribution. However, critics of humanistic theories maintain several arguments:

Humanistic theories are too navely optimistic and fail to provide insight into the evil side of human nature.

Humanistic theories, like psychodynamic theories, cannot be easily tested.

Many concepts in humanistic psychology, like that of the self-actualized person, are vague and subjective. Some critics argue that this concept may reflect Maslows own values and ideals.

Humanistic psychology is biased toward individualistic values.11

John D. Mayer, Personality Psychology: A Systems Approach, 2004-2009 <http://www.thepersonalitysystem.org/PFA%20What%20Is%20Personality/Why%20 study%20personality.htm>

2

Burger, J. M. (1997). Personality (4th ed.). Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.

Carver, C. S., & Scheier, M. F. (2000). Perspectives on personality (4th ed.). Needham Heights, MA: Simon & Schuster.
4

Engler, B. (1995). Personality theories: An introduction (3rd ed.). Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
5

Kendra Cherry, Psychoanalytic Theory, 27 Nov. 2011 psychology.about.com /od/theoriesofpersonality/a/consciousuncon.htm>

6

<http://

Skinner, B. F. (1984b). Selection by consequences. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 7, 477-481.

7

Schwartz, B., & Lacey, H. (1982). Behaviorism, science, and human nature. New York: Norton.
8

Beecroft, R. S. (1966). Method in classical conditioning. In R. S. Beecroft, Classical conditioning (pp. 8-26). Goleta, CA: Psychonomic Press.
9

Mischel, W. (1993). Behavioral conceptions. In W. Mischel, Introduction to personality (pp. 295-316). New York: Harcourt Brace.
10

Rescorla, R. A. (1988). Pavlovlian conditioning: It's not what you think it is. American Psychologist, 43, 151-160.
11

SparkNotes Editors. SparkNote on Personality. SparkNotes LLC. 2005. http:// www.sparknotes.com/psychology/psych101/personality/ (accessed February 24, 2011).