Personality Theories in brief

1. PSYCHOLOGY OF PERSONALITY
DR AARTI GORWADKAR

2. • Personality can be defined as the
distinctive and characteristic patterns of
thought, emotion, and behavior that
make up an individual’s personal style of
interacting with the physical and social
environment.

3. GENETICS OF PERSONALITY
• It has been widely accepted that personality
develops through the interaction of hereditary
dispositions and environmental influences.
• Genetic differences account for about half of the
variance in differences between people for most
normally distributed temperament traits.
• Of the remaining 50 percent of the variance in
differences among people, 30 to 35 percent is
explained by non shared environmental effects
(i.e., influences unique to each individual) and 10
to 15 percent by measurement error and non-
trait score fluctuations.

4. • Of note, adoption studies suggest somewhat
lower heritability of about 30 percent for
personality traits.
• Contrary to the common belief, environmental
influences that are shared by siblings (such as
having the same parents, living in the same
neighborhood, going to the same schools,
etc.) have only modest influences on the
differences among people.

5. Definition
• “Dynamic organization within the individual of
those psychophysical systems that determine
his/her unique adjustment to his/her
environment.”
Allport

6. • From the structural standpoint personality can
be decomposed into
Temperament
Character
Psyche
• Basic functions of personality are to feel,
think, and perceive and to incorporate these
into purposeful behaviors.

7. Temperament
• Temperament refers to the body’s biases in the
modulation of conditioned behavioral responses to
prescriptive physical stimuli.
• Four major temperament traits have been
identified and subjected to extensive
neurobiological, psychosocial, and clinical
investigation:
• Harm
• Avoidance
• Novelty Seeking
• Reward Dependence
• Persistence

8. • Each of the four major dimensions is a
normally distributed quantitative trait,
moderately heritable, observable early in
childhood, relatively stable in time, and
moderately predictive of adolescent and adult
behavior.
• Also known as the “emotional core” of
personality.

9. • Depending on whether a particular
temperament trait is high or low, certain
emotions will tend to dominate an individual’s
motivation, perception, and behavior.
• Even though some basic character
components develop early in life, such as trust
and confidence, it is the completion of self-
object differentiation (“me” vs. “not-me”)
between 18 months and 3 years of age that
sets the stage for the development of
character traits and secondary emotions like
empathy.

10. Effect of + & - reinforcements on
emotional states of 4 temperaments
TEMPERAMENT
DIMENSION
HIGH SCORES
+
HIGH SCORES
_
LOW SCORES
+
LOW SCORES
_
HARM
AVOIDANCE
ANXIOUS
(AGITATED)
DEPRESSED
(RETARDED)
CHEERFUL FEARLESS
NOVELTY
SEEKING
EUPHORIC ANGRY PLACID STOICAL
REWARD
DEPENDENCE
SYMPATHETIC DISGUSTED ALOOF INDIFFERENT
PERSISTENCE ETHUSIASTIC STEADFAST UNSTABLE DISCOURAGED

11. • Depending on whether a particular
temperament trait is high or low, certain
emotions will tend to dominate an individual’s
motivation, perception, and behavior.
• Each of the these character traits is associated
with a typical pattern of secondary emotions.

12. Character
• Character refers to the “mind” that is the
“conceptual core” of the personality.
• Whereas temperament involves basic
emotions like fear and anger, character
involves secondary emotions like purposeful
moderation, empathy, and patience and, in
even more mature individuals, hope, love, and
faith.

13. • Character is a “mental self-government”
which involves executive, legislative and
judicial functions.
• These functions are measured as 3 different
character traits :
Self Directedness
Cooperativeness
Self Transcendence

14. CHARACTER DIMENSIONS
CHARACTER DIMENSION HIGH LOW
SELF DIRECTEDNESS RESPONSIBLE,
RESOURCEFUL,
RESILIENT,
SPONTANEOUS,
PURPOSEFUL
BLAMING,
WISHFUL, PASSIVE,
GOAL-LESS.
CONFLICTED
COOPERATIVENESS TOLERANT, EMPATHETIC,
COMPASSIONATE,
HELPFUL,
PRINCIPLED
INSENSITIVE, SELFISH,
INTOLERANT, REVENGEFUL,
OPPORTUNISTIC
SELF TRANSCENDENCE CREATIVE, SPIRITUAL,
TRANSPERSONAL,
INSIGHTFUL,
ACQUIESCENT ,
HUMBLE
CONCRETE, AVOIDANT,
ALIENATED,
SKEPTICAL, CONTROLLING,
CONVENTIONAL,
PRETENTIOUS

15. • Normal character reflects one’s capacity to
postpone immediate gratification and process
internal needs through sublimation,
anticipation,altruism, and humor.
• Character development is modular and stepwise.
• The developing character traits (i.e., newly
internalized concepts about one’s self and the
external world) optimize the adaptation of
temperament (i.e., early emotionality) to the
environment by reducing discrepancies between
one’s emotional needs and norm-favoring social
pressures.

16. Psyche
• Psyche refers to a person’s consciousness, self-
awareness, or spirit.
• The growth of self-awareness is crucial to the
development of full coherence of personality,
which is manifest as creativity, well-being, and
wisdom.
• Cloninger observed five distinct levels of
intuitive awareness in human beings.

17. Assessment of psyche by the 5 levels
Conscious of being,
 Freedom of will,
 Beauty,
Truth, and
Goodness.

18. • Personality is conceptualized as a complex
adaptive system involving a multidimensional
interaction among temperament, character,
and psyche.

19. • WHAT’S YOUR PERSONALITY???????

21. Theories of Personlaity
Psychodynamic Theory
Behaviorist Theory
Humanistic Theory
Cognitive Theory
Evolutionary Approach
Trait Theory

22. Psychodynamic Approach
• Sigmund Freud was the creator of the
psychodynamic approach.
• Despite its shortcomings as a scientific theory, the
psychoanalytic account of personality remains the
most comprehensive and influential theory of
personality ever created.
• The basic premise is that much of what we do &
act is driven by unconscious processes.

24. Personality Dynamics
• Humans are closed energy systems.
• There is a constant amount of psychic energy for
any given individual, which Freud called libido.
• One corollary of the principle of conservation of
energy is that if a forbidden act or impulse is
suppressed, its energy will seek an outlet
somewhere else in the system, possibly
appearing in a disguised form.

25. DEFENSE MECHANISMS
• They help us over the rough spots until we can
deal with stressful situations more directly.
• Defense mechanisms become maladaptive only
when they become the dominant mode of
responding to problems.

26. MODIFICATION OF FREUD’S THEORIES
• Carl Jung ( collective Unconscious)
The collective unconscious consists of primordial
images or archetypes inherited from our ancestors.
• Harry Stack Sullivan ( Interpersonal Relations)
He argued that a personality can never be isolated
from the complex of interpersonal relations in
which the person lives and his being.

27. • These theorists and more recent
psychoanalytic theorists all place greater
emphasis on the role of the ego.
• It is now hypothesized by some that ego
develops independently from the ID.
• Current approaches to ego ties it more closely
to cognitive processes.

28. CRITICAL EVALUATION
• Freud’s recognition that unconscious
processes play an important role in much of
our behavior is almost universally accepted.
• Very different behaviors may share the same
underlying motive.
• Most of its concepts are ambiguous and
difficult to define or measure objectively.
• Difficult to make predictions that can be
empirically verified.

29. • Freud’s theory of anxiety & defense
mechanisms has withstood the test of time,
research & observation.
• It was he who first proposed that childhood
experiences are responsible for shaping adult
personality .
• First introduced the centrality of both
“conflicts” & “unconscious” in human mental
life.

30. BEHAVIORIST THEORY
• Emphasizes the importance of environmental, or
situational, determinants of behavior.
• In this view, behavior is the result of a continuous
interaction between personal and environmental
variables.
• Persons & situations influence each other.
• Focuses on environmental determinants of
behavior.

31. BEHAVIORIST THEORY
• For the behaviorist, it is classical conditioning
that produces the internalized source of
anxiety that Freud labeled the superego.
• Sees personality as the product of the
individual’s unique reinforcement history and
emphasizes the degree to which behavior
varies across situations.
• Focuses primarily on environmental
determinants as against the biological
determinants of the psycho-analytic approach.

32. BASIC TENET OF BEHAVIORISM
• People behave in ways that are likely to
produce reinforcement and that individual
differences in behavior result primarily from
differences in the kinds of learning
experiences a person encounters in the course
of growing up.

33. CRITICAL EVALUATION
• It has led us to see human actions as reactions
to specific environments, and it has helped us
focus on how environments control our
behavior and how they can be changed to
modify behavior.
• The systematic application of learning
principles has proved successful in changing
many maladaptive behaviors.
• Criticized for overemphasizing situational
influences on behavior.

34. COGNITIVE APPROACH
• Differences in personality stem from the
differences in the way individuals represent
information.
• Instead of explaining behavior simply in terms
of conditioning, it emphasizes the role of
observational learning.

35. BEHAVIOR POTENTIAL
• Likelihood of a particular behavior occurring in a
particular situation .
• Strength of the behavior is determined by 2
variables:
Expectancy
Reinforcement value
• For eg: staying up for an exam up all night.

36. Social-Cognitive Approach
• Developed by Albert Bandura and gave the
concept of “Reciprocal Determinism”.
• External determinants of behavior (such as
rewards and punishments) and internal
determinants (such as beliefs, thoughts, and
expectations) are part of a system of
interacting influences that affect both
behavior and other parts of the system.

37. KELLY’S PERSONAL CONSTRUCT
THEORY
• He proposed that the goal should be to
discover personal constructs, the dimensions
that individuals themselves use to interpret
themselves and their social worlds.
• He devised his own test for eliciting a person’s
personal constructs, the Role Construct
Repertory Test or ‘Rep Test’.
• The Rep Test is a very general procedure and is
not restricted to interpretations of other
people.

38. ME AAI BABA AMRUT ABHI AMMA SWATI CONTRUCT CONTRAST
EMOTION
AL
RATIONAL
CONTROLL
ING
EASY GOING
DELIGENT LAZY

39. • Walter Mischel, has attempted to incorporate
individual differences into social learning
theory by introducing the following set of
“cognitive variables”:
Competencies
Encoding Strategies
Expectancies
Subjective Values
Self Regulatory Systems & Plans

40. • The concept of personal agency is central to
the cognitive approach to personality and
behavior.
• “Personal agency” – belief that they can
influence important situations in their lives,
drives their choices of what situations to
approach and what to avoid, their level of
motivation and persistence, and their well-
being.

41. CRITICAL EVALUATION
• Although the cognitive perspective gives hope
and encouragement to some, it can lead to
‘blaming the victim’.
• Employs vague concepts.
• It suggests that individuals who do not
triumph over adversity are lacking the right
attitude – if they would just believe in
themselves, they could overcome their
circumstances.
• This may not be true for everyone

42. • Based on empirical research.
• It goes beyond the trait approach in explaining
personality characteristics.

43. HUMANISTIC APPROACH
• Human choice, creativity, and self-actualization
are the preferred topics of investigation.
• Meaningfulness must precede objectivity in the
selection of research problems.
• Ultimate value is placed on the dignity of the
person. People are basically good. The objective
of psychology is to understand, not to predict or
control people.
• The experiencing person is of primary interest.
• Humans are not simply objects of study.

44. • Basic force motivating the human organism is
the “actualizing tendency”.
• “Actualizing Tendency” – tendency toward
fulfillment or actualization of all the capacities
of the organization.
• Many people experience what Maslow called
peak experiences: transient moments of self-
actualization.

45. ABRAHAM MASLOW’S SELF
ACTUALIZATION THEORY

46. PEAK EXPERIENCE
• Peak Experience is characterized by happiness
and fulfillment – a temporary, nonstriving,
non-self-centered state of goal attainment.

47. CHARACTERISTICS OF SELF
ACTUALIZERS
• Perceive reality efficiently and can tolerate uncertainty
• Accept themselves and others for what they are
• Spontaneous in thought and behavior
• Problem-centered rather than self-centered
• Have a good sense of humor
• Highly creative
• Resistant to enculturation, although not purposely
• Unconventional
• Concerned for the welfare of humanity
• Capable of deep appreciation of the basic experiences of life
• Establish deep, satisfying interpersonal relationships with a few,
rather than many, people.
• Able to look at life from an objective viewpoint

48. • Emphasize the individual’s own role in
defining and creating his or her destiny, and
they downplay the determinism that is
characteristic of the other approaches.
• Take a positive & optimistic view of healthy
personality.

49. CRITICAL EVALUATION
• There is little empirical evidence for Maslow’s
hierarchy of needs.
• This theory relies solely on the observations
made on a few very healthy people.
• The applicability of these theories to
malfunctioning or disadvantaged individuals is
less apparent.

50. EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH
• One proxy for fertility is youth, and one proxy
for economic resources is older age.
• Men are more individualistic, domineering,
and oriented toward problem solving than
women because these personality
characteristics increased males’ ability to
reproduce often over history and thus were
selected for.

51. • Some critics argue that evolutionary
psychology simply provides a thinly veiled
justification for the unfair social conditions
and prejudices in today’s world.
• Evolutionary theory is attractive in its power
to explain a wide range of behaviors, however.

52. TESTS FOR PERSONALITY
MMPI
Q SORT METHOD

53. MMPI
• Based on the criterion-keyed method or
empirical construction.
• Was the 1st major inventory to incorporate a
number of validity scales within it.
• It does not really matter whether the person
says an answer is true. What is important is
the fact that he/she says it.

54. LIMITATION OF MMPI
• It is less successful in making finer distinction
among various forms of psychopathology.
• Not much theoretical understanding of
connection between the test responses & the
personality characteristics they identify.
• The scores that were considered healthy were
not representative of people from a wide
range of national, ethnic & racial backgrounds.

55. Q SORT METHOD
• A rater or sorter describes an individual’s
personality by sorting a set of approximately 100
cards into piles.
• Each card contains a personality statement, Eg:
Has a wide range of interests.
• The rater sorts the cards into nine piles, placing
the cards that are least descriptive of the
individual in pile 1 on the left and those that are
most descriptive in pile 9 on the right.

56. • The rater is explicitly comparing each trait with
other traits within the same individual.

57. TRAIT THEORY
• A consensus is emerging among many trait
researchers that five trait dimensions capture
most of what we mean by personality –
referred to as the ‘Big Five’.

58. BIG FIVE MODEL
• EXTROVERSION
• OPENESS TO EXPERIENCE
• NEUROTICISM
• CONSCIENTIOUSNESS
• AGREEABLENESS

59. INTRAVERSION Vs EXTRAVERSION

60. AGREEABLENESS

61. CONSCIENTIOUSNESS

62. NEUROTICISM

63. OPENNESS

64. CRITICAL EVALUATION
• Important aspects of personality are left out
while explaining personality solely on the basis of
the trait approach.
• It puts a lot of emphasis on the individual
differences but there is not much done to explain
common underlying processes of personality.
• By itself, the trait approach is not a theory of
personality but a general orientation and set of
methods for assessing stable characteristics of
individuals.

65. REFERENCES
• Atkinson & Hilgard’s Introduction to
Psychology, 15th Edition
• Kaplan & Sadock Concise Textbook of
Psychiatry, 9th edition
• USMLE Pre Test Behavioral Sciences
• Morgan & King’s Introduction to Psychology

66. • Think about your own tendency to be friendly
or unfriendly. To what extent is the situation
important in determining your level of
friendliness?
THANK YOU