Lecture No.

7
 Personality,
 Theories of Personality,
 Issues and Controversies in Personality
Theories.
“Personality is the distinctive patterns of
behavior that characterizes each individual’s
adaptation to the situations of his or her life”.

Personality includes the behavior patterns a

person shows across situations or
psychological characteristics of the person that
lead to those behavior patterns.
The theories of Personality are grouped into four
main categories:

Type & Trait Approaches,

Dynamic Approaches,
Learning & Behavioral Approaches,
Humanistic Approaches.
 The theory focus on people’s characteristics
i.e. stubbornness, shyness, introverts,
extroverts etc.

 Theorist differ in the way in which they use

those characteristics to describe people.
 A type is simply a class of individuals said to
share a common collection of characteristics.

 Classifying people into types is one device that

can be used to make sense out of other’s
behavior and to anticipate how they will act in
the future.
 Typologies have been with us for centuries and
date back to 400 B.C by Greek physician
Hippocrates who grouped people in four
temperament types.

 The groupings or sets of types are called

typologies, i.e. in American Culture people are
often classified as leaders or followers, liberals or
conservatives etc.
 One approach has been to develop theories
about specific types by treating each type as a
personality dimension.

 Individuals can be scored or rated to determine

their position on each dimension.

 Eysenck identified the major components of

personality as a small number of personality
types.
 This approach is commonly used in diagnosing
psychological disorders.

 People must show certain specific

characteristics to a certain degree before they
are typed as having a specific disorder.
Descriptive terms which describe characteristics that lead
people to behave in more or less distinctive and
consistent way across situations, represents “traits”.

The main Trait Theories include:

 Allport Theory,
 Raymond Cattell 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire,
 Eysenck’s three dimensions of Personality,
 Five Factor theory of Personality.
Allport categorized personality traits into three
main types:

 Cardinal Traits,
 Central Traits,
 Secondary Traits.
 Dynamic approaches involve a search for the
processes by which needs, motives and
impulses often hidden from view interact to
produce individual’s behavior.

 Dynamic theory involves a tendency to over

interpret, i.e. to attribute deeper meaning to
behavior than the behavior shows.
 Sigmund Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory of Personality
argued that human behavior is the result of the interaction
of three component parts of the mind: the id, ego, and
superego.

 His structural theory placed great importance on the role

of unconscious psychological conflicts in shaping
behavior and personality.
 Defense Mechanisms reduce/redirect anxiety by
distorting reality.

 The coping process of the ego that helps keep it

functioning properly.

 Different strategies that mind uses to reduce

anxiety and stress.

 When the inner war gets out of hand, the result is

Anxiety.
 Learning theories believe that the personality
essentially arises from the molding that individuals
receive from their environment i.e., the patterns of
behavior are shaped by experience.

 The underlying assumption of the learning

perspective is that all behavior is learned through
experiences and by interaction with the
environment. 
 The humanistic theories are optimistic about the
core of human nature.

 For humanists, personality is not driven by

unconscious conflicts and defenses against anxiety
but rather by needs to adapt, learn, grow, and
excel.

 Self as object and self as process.

 Abraham Maslow described a healthy personality
as one that is not only free from illness but is also
satisfied, he also came up with the idea that an
individual is motivated by hierarchy of needs.

 Maslow described people who have met healthy

personality, such as Abraham Lincoln, are Self-
Actualization Personalities.
 Morgan, King, Weisz and Schopler (2009)
Introduction to Psychology, 7th Edition, Prentice Hall.