PSY101 Week 10 personalities

1. Week 10 Personality
Dr. Russell Rodrigo

2. How do we become who we are?
Why do people do what they do?
What makes us different from each other?

3. Traits vs Personality
I see by your
handwriting you
like bananas.

4. Ways of Looking at Personality
§ Approaches to Personality
§ Trait Theories
§ Preferences - MBTI
§ Big Five Factors/Dimensions
§ Social and Cognitive Influences on Personality
Different perspectives can help us examine:
§ What we have in common: Personality
components, basic drives, stages of
development, categories of traits
§ Ways in which we differ: individual
paths through stages, ways of managing
basic drives and needs, levels of Trait
dimensions

5. Personality
• "Personality" is a dynamic and
organized set of characteristics
possessed by an individual that
uniquely influences their
environment, cognition, emotions,
motivations, and behaviors in
various situations.
• The word personality originates
from the Latin persona, which
means "mask".

6. Personality
• Personality also pertains to the pattern of
thoughts, feelings, social adjustments,
and behaviors persistently exhibited over
time that strongly influences one's
expectations, self perceptions, values,
and attitudes.
• Personality also predicts human reactions
to other people, problems, and stress.

7. Personality: An individual’s characteristic
patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors
[persisting over time and across situations]
Sensitive,
Reactive
Naïve
Agreeable, Open
Introverted
Neurotically
irritable
Conscientious
Contentedly
lethargic

8. Approaches
to
Personality
1 - 6
Psychoanalytic
• Unconscious mind is
responsible for
important differences in
behavior styles
Trait
• An individual lies along
a continuum of various
personality
characteristics

9. Approaches
to
Personality
1 - 7
Biological
• Inherited predispositions
and physiological
processes contribute to
differences in personality
Humanistic
• Personal responsibility
and feelings of self-
acceptance cause
differences in personality

10. Approaches
to
Personality
1 - 8
• Consistent
behavior patterns
are the result of
conditioning and
expectations
Behavioral/
social
learning
• People process
information to
explain differences
in behavior
Cognitive
Theories

11. Trait Theories
of Personality

12. Trait Theory of Personality
Trait theory of personality: That we are made up
of a collection of behavioral predispositions that
can be identified and measured and differ from
person to person.
Trait: An enduring quality that makes a person tend to
act a certain way.

13. Carl Jung’s
Collective Unconscious
• The collective unconscious
is the accumulated universal experiences
of humankind, with each of us inheriting
the same cumulative storehouse of all
human experiences
• These experiences are manifested in
archetypes, which are images and
symbols of all the important themes in
the history of humankind (e.g., God,
mother, hero)
• Notions of collective unconscious and
archetypes are more mystical than
scientific and cannot be empirically tested

14. Carl Jung’s
Collective Unconscious
Jung proposed two main personality attitudes,
extraversion and introversion
Jung also proposed four functions/styles of
gathering information
• Sensing is the reality function in which the world is
carefully perceived
• Intuiting is more subjective perception
• Thinking is logical deduction
• Feeling is the subjective emotional function
The two personality attitudes and four
functions are the basis for the Myers-Briggs
Type Indicator, still in wide use today

15. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
(MBTI)
• Myers and Briggs wanted to study individual
behaviors to find how people differed in
personality.
• The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a
questionnaire categorizing people by preferences.

16. A
descriptions
of the scales
on the Myers-
Briggs:
Energy:
Extraversion vs.
Introversion
Decisions:
Thinking vs. Feeling
Learning:
Senses vs. Intuition
Relating:
Judging vs. Perceiving.

17. Extraversion
Introversion
Neuroticism-
Emotional
stability
Psychoticism-
Impulse
control
Eysenck’s Three-Factor
Theory
Eysenck argued that these traits are
determined by heredity.

18. Eysenck’s
Three-
Factor
Theory
The biological basis for the
extraversion-introversion trait is
level of cortical arousal (neuronal
activity)
– Introverts have higher
normal-levels of arousal
than an extravert, so
extraverts need to seek out
external stimulation to raise
the level of arousal in the
brain to a more optimal level

19. Eysenck’s
Three-
Factor
Theory
• People who are high on the
neuroticism-emotional stability
dimension tend to be overly anxious,
emotionally unstable, and easily
upset because of a more reactive
sympathetic nervous system
• The psychoticism-impulse control
trait is concerned with
aggressiveness, impulsiveness, and
empathy
– A high level of testosterone and a
low level of MAO, a
neurotransmitter inhibitor, lead
to high levels of psychoticism

20. Factor Analysis and the Eysencks’
Personality Dimensions
§ Factor Analysis:
Identifying factors
that tend to cluster
together.
§ Using factor analysis,
Hans and Sybil
Eysenck found that
many personality
traits actually are a
function of two basic
dimensions along
which we all vary.
§ Research supports
their idea that these
variations are linked to
genetics.

21. The “Big Five” Personality Factors
§ The Eysencks felt that people
varied along two dimensions
§ Current cross-cultural research
and theory supports the expansion
from two dimensions to five
factors:
§ Openness: flexibility,
nonconformity, variety
§ Conscientiousness:
self-discipline, careful
pursuit of delayed
goals
§ Extraversion:
Drawing energy from
others, sociability
§ Agreeableness:
helpful, trusting,
friendliness
§ Neuroticism: anxiety,
insecurity, emotional
instability
to help us
remember the
five factors,
remember that
the first letters
spell
“OCEAN”…

22. The Big Five Personality
Trait Dimensions
Dimension High End Low End
Openness Independent, imaginative,
broad interests, receptive
to new ideas
Conforming, practical,
narrow interests, closed to
new ideas
Conscientiousness Well-organized,
dependable, careful,
disciplined
Disorganized,
undependable, careless,
impulsive
Extraversion Sociable, talkative,
friendly, adventurous
Reclusive, quiet, aloof,
cautious
Agreeableness Sympathetic, polite, good-
natured, soft-hearted
Tough-minded, rude,
irritable, ruthless
Neuroticism Emotional, insecure,
nervous, self-pitying
Calm, secure, relaxed, self-
satisfied

23. Impulsive
Trusting
Anxious
Conforming
Fun-Loving

24. Assessing Traits: Questionnaires
§ Personality Inventory: Questionnaire assessing
many personality traits, by asking which behaviors and
responses the person would choose
§ Empirically derived test: all test items have been
selected to because they predictably match the qualities
being assessed.
§ Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
(MMPI): Designed to identify people with
personality difficulties
§ T/F questionnaire; items were selected because
they correlated with various traits, emotions,
attitudes
§ Example: depressed people tend to answer “true”
to: “Nothing in the paper interests me except the
comics.”

25. Sample MMPI Test Profile

26. Change vs. Consistency: Shifts with Age
Over years of development, we change interests, attitudes,
roles, jobs, relationships; we develop skills, maturity. Do
traits stay stable through all this change?
The evidence
shows that it takes
time for
personality to
stabilize. Traits do
change, but less
and less so over
time. We change
less, become more
consistent.

27. Social-Cognitive Perspective
Albert Bandura believes that Personality is:
The result of an interaction that takes place between a person and
their social context, involving how we think about ourselves
and our situations.
Questions raised in this perspective:
How do the
personality
and social
environment
mutually
influence
each other?
How do our
memories,
expectations,
schemas,
influence our
behavior
patterns?
How do we
interpret and
respond to
external
events? How
do those
responses
shape us?

28. Multiple Influential Factors
“What kind of person does rock climbing?”
Avoiding the highway today
without identifying or
explaining any fear: the
“low road” of emotion.
Example: Someone
enjoys physical
challenges may extend
themselves beyond
their skill in situations
where friends
encourage them to
take risks.
Reciprocal Factors: Back and forth
influence, with no primary factor

29. Biopsychosocial Approaches to
Personality

30. Take the test
• https://www.humanmetrics.com/personality/intj-
type?EI=-31&SN=-56&TF=9&JP=50

31. Discussion
Questions
1. Cultural psychologists have observed that
in individualist cultures, people naturally
think about themselves in terms of
personality traits, but in collectivist
cultures, people think about themselves in
terms of roles and relationships. How, then,
can we study of personality traits in
collectivist cultures--or is this impossible?
2. How does the behavioristic view of
personality development differ from the
psychoanalytic view?
3. Is there a connection between personality
types and musical tastes? Do people who
share certain personality traits prefer the
same types of music?
4. How do personality factors influence a
person's use of social media such as
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter? Are
individuals who use social media
frequently more or less extroverted?