11.8 CHAPTER REVIEW

KEY POINTS

• Personality is defined as an individual’s unique and relatively consistent patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. Personality theories attempt to explain how people are similar in these patterns, why they are different, and why every individual is unique.

• The four major theoretical perspectives on personality are the psychoanalytic, humanistic, social cognitive, and trait perspectives.

• Psychoanalysis was founded by Sigmund Freud. It stresses the unconscious, the importance of sex and aggression, and the influence of early childhood experience. Freud’s theory was extremely controversial throughout his lifetime and remains so today.

• Freud believed that behavior is strongly influenced by the unconscious. The contents of the unconscious can surface in disguised form in free associations, dreams, slips of the tongue, and apparent accidents.

• Personality consists of three psychological processes: id, ego, and superego. The id is fueled by instinctual energy and ruled by the pleasure principle. The two instinctual drives are Eros, the life instinct, and Thanatos, the death instinct. Libido is the psychological and emotional energy associated with the sex drive. The ego is partly conscious and is ruled by the reality principle. The superego is partly conscious and represents internalized moral values and rules.

• Anxiety results when the demands of the id or the superego threaten to overwhelm the ego. Ego defense mechanisms reduce anxiety by distorting either thoughts or reality. Repression is involved in all ego defense mechanisms. Displacement is a defense mechanism involving the unconscious shifting of emotional impulses to a less threatening substitute target. Sublimation is a special form of displacement.

• The psychosexual stages are age-related developmental periods in which sexual impulses are expressed through different bodily zones and activities associated with those areas. The foundations of adult personality are established during the first five years of life by the child’s progression through the oral, anal, and phallic stages. One result of the Oedipus complex is that children come to imitate the behavior and characteristics of the same-sex parent, a process Freud called identification. Fixation at a particular stage may result if the developmental conflicts are not successfully resolved. The latency and genital stages occur during late childhood and adolescence, respectively.

• The neo-Freudians believed in the importance of the unconscious and early childhood experience but disagreed with other aspects of Freud’s theory. Carl Jung emphasized psychological growth and proposed the existence of the collective unconscious and archetypes. Karen Horney emphasized the role of social relationships in protecting against basic anxiety. Horney objected to Freud’s views on female development, particularly his idea of penis envy. Alfred Adler believed that the most fundamental human motive was to strive for superiority.

• Freud’s theory has been criticized for resting on insufficient evidence, being difficult to test, and being sexist.

• Humanistic psychology was championed as the “third force” in psychology. It emphasized human potential, psychological growth, self-awareness, and free will. Important humanistic theorists were Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow.

• Rogers believed that the most basic human motive was the actualizing tendency. He viewed the self-concept as the most important aspect of personality. Conditional positive regard by parents or other caregivers causes a person to deny or distort aspects of experience, leading to a state of incongruence with regard to the self-concept. In contrast, unconditional positive regard leads to a state of congruence. The fully functioning person experiences congruence, the actualizing tendency, and psychological growth.

• The humanistic perspective on personality has been criticized for being difficult to validate or test scientifically and for being too optimistic.

• Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory stresses the role of conscious thought processes, goals, and self-regulation. Reciprocal determinism emphasizes the interaction of behavioral, cognitive, and environmental factors in behavior and personality.

• Self-efficacy beliefs influence behavior, performance, motivation, and persistence.

• Social cognitive theories emphasize the interaction of multiple factors in determining personality and behavior. Although a key strength of this perspective is its grounding in empirical research, it has been criticized for its limited view of human personality, which ignores unconscious conflicts and emotions.

• Trait theories focus on measuring and describing individual differences, or traits. Surface traits can be easily inferred from observable behaviors. Source traits are thought to represent the basic, fundamental dimensions of personality.

• Raymond Cattell believed that there were 16 basic personality factors. Hans Eysenck proposed that there were three basic personality dimensions: extraversion–introversion, neuroticism–emotional stability, and psychoticism. Eysenck believed that the extraversion–introversion dimension might reflect physiological differences.

• According to the five-factor model, there are five basic personality dimensions: extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience.

• Traits are generally stable over time and across situations, although situations do influence how and whether traits are expressed.

• Behavioral genetics research uses twin and adoption studies to measure the relative influence of genetics and environment. Extraversion, neuroticism, openness to experience, and conscientiousness seem to have a significant genetic component.

• The trait perspective is useful in describing individual differences and in predicting behavior. Trait theories have been criticized for their failure to explain human personality and the development of individual differences.

• Valid psychological tests accurately reflect personal characteristics on some dimension and predict future psychological functioning or behavior. The two basic types of personality tests are projective tests and self-report inventories. Projective tests developed out of the psychoanalytic approach and include the Rorschach Inkblot Test and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT).

• Projective tests provide qualitative information about an individual. They have some limitations: Responses may be affected by the examiner or the situation; scoring is very subjective; results may be inconsistent; and they do not predict behavior well.

• Self-report inventories are objectively scored and differentiate among people on particular personality characteristics. Selfreport inventories include the MMPI, CPI, and 16PF. The reliability, validity, and predictive value of self-report inventories are high. However, people do not always respond honestly or accurately to items in self-report inventories. Psychological tests provide just one measure of personality at a particular point in time.

KEY TERMS

KEY PEOPLE