3. Eysenck’s Dimensions of Personality
• Eysenck’s Dimensions of Personality:
Hans Eysenck (1967) presented the basic traits of personality. He
gave personality tests to large numbers of people and enlarged each
person’s responses.
Eysenck said that three main dimensions are needed to explore
personality. He named them as follows:
i. Introversion-Extroversion
ii. Stability-Instability
iii. Psychoticism
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4. Eysenck’s Theory (Continue)
Introversion-Extroversion: An introverted person is quite
unsociable, passive and careful. An extraverted person is active,
optimistic sociable, tough minded and outgoing. They enjoy parties
and other social activities; take risks and love excitement and
change.
Introverts tend to be quite, thoughtful and reserved, enjoy solitary
pursuits and avoid excitement and social involvement.
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5. Eysenck’s Theory (Continue)
Stability-Instability: It is also known as neuroticism dimension. A
stable person is calm, even-tempered, carefree and capable of
leadership. They are relaxed and emotionally stable. Unstable
person is moody, anxious, restless and touchy. People at this end
show anxiety and other negative emotions.
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6. Eysenck’s Theory (Continue)
Psychoticism:
This dimension reflects the degree to which people are in contact with
reality, control their impulses and are carrying toward others.
People high on psychoticism show such traits as cruelty, hostility,
coldness, oddness and rejection of social customs.
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7. Psychodynamic Approach
• Personality: is define as an individual’s relatively stable and enduring pattern of thoughts,
emotions and actions.
Psychologists assess, describe, explain, and predict personality according to different
theoretical orientation.
Psychodynamic approaches / theories emphasize childhood experiences as critically
important in shaping adult personality. Psychologists attached with this school stress the
role of the unconscious actions. Psychodynamic theories of personality are rooted in the
work of Sigmund Freud. Therefore it is important to discuss the basic concepts of
Freudian theory.
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8. Psychodynamic Approach (Contd.)
• Psychodynamic Approach
Pioneer of psychodynamic approach is Freud. Many psychologists joined his movement, later they
developed their own theories and labeled as Neo-Freudian, Jung, Adler, Karen Horney and Anna
Freud are considered Neo-Freudian.
• Freud’s Theory of Personality
Freud evolved one of the most comprehensive and influential theories of personality ever
presented.
Freud created the psychodynamic approach to personality, which holds that the interplay of various
unconscious psychological processes determine thoughts, feelings and behavior. Understanding
personality requires exploring the unconscious and Freud developed several methods for doing so.
Psychoanalytic theory is also concerned with the way in which personality develops.
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9. Psychodynamic approach
Fundamental concepts of psychodynamic approach are as following:
• Psychic Determinism
For Freud all behavior is motivated, every human action has a purpose and
cause. There is no room for chance events in his theory, all acts are determined
by motives. Psychic determinism is the idea that human behavior does not
occur randomly, but in accordance with intra-psychic causes.
Freud believed that the conflict between the id impulses and the restraining
influences of the ego and the superego constitutes the motivating source of
much behavior. The more restraints a society places on impulse expression, the
greater the potential for conflict among the three parts of personality.
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10. • Drives and Instincts
According to Freud, people are born with basic instincts or needs, not only for food, water
and air. He believed that needs for love, knowledge, security and the like are derived from
their more fundamental desires.
• Life and Death Instincts
Freud differentiated between life and death instincts. The life instincts were collectively
referred to as EROS (named after the Greek god of love), and the energy associated with
them was called Libido.
Besides life instinct, there is a death instinct called THANATOS (named after Greek god
of death). Life instincts seek to perpetuate life and death instinct seeks to terminate it.
Therefore, all the conflicts that occur among the id, ego, and superego is life-death
struggle. He viewed that Thanatos drove people toward aggressive and destructive
behavior.
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11. PERSONALITY
Model of the Mind or Structure of the Mind
Freud formulated a model of the mind and explained its three parts as follows:
The conscious Mind: It represents the part which is clearly visible and
apparent to the individual.
The sub-conscious Mind: It is the second part of mind, which consists of
thoughts, ideas and beliefs which might temporarily be forgotten, but which
could be retrieved easily, when they were wanted. Sometimes it is labeled as
pre-conscious mind.
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12. The Unconscious Mind:
It is large, invisible submerged part represented the unconscious mind. This
contained all kinds of disturbing and emotionally significant ideas and
memories and exerted a powerful, unseen influences on the conscious or pre-
conscious mind.
It was this unconscious portion of the mind that Freud sought to explore by the
technique of free association. By analyzing free associations including the
recall of dreams and early childhood memories, Freud helped his patients as he
became aware of much that had been unconscious.
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13. Structure of Personalities
Structure of Personality:
To describe the structure of personality Freud developed a comprehensive theory
which held that personality consisted of three separate but interacting parts: The
Id, Ego and Super Ego. As the schematic show only a small portion of personality
is conscious
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14. Structure of Personality
i. Id: The id is the raw, unorganized, inherited part of personality whose sole purpose is
to reduce tension created by primitive drives related to hunger, sex, aggression and
irrational impulses. The id operates according to the pleasure principle, in which t he
goal is the immediate reduction of tension and the maximization of satisfaction.
ii. Ego: As child grows up, another mental structure develops which is comprised of
information that the child perceives and remembers. Freud called this mental structure
ego. The ego is conscious and operates according to the reality principle, in which
instinctual energy is restrained in order to maintain the safety of the individual and help
integrate the person into society. In this sense then, ego is the “executive” of
personality. It makes decisions, controls actions and allows thinking and problem
solving of higher order than the id is capable of. In short the ego is a reality-oriented
mental process that develops out of early experience to help the id obtain satisfaction.
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15. Structure of Personality (Contd.)
iii. Super Ego: The final personality structure to develop represents the right
and wrong of society.
At the age of five this major structure of personality develops. The super ego
contains moral principles and values which have been acquired from the
parents and society. It actually consists of two subparts. One part is the
conscience which prevents us from doing morally bad things or what one
should not do while in second, ego ideal motivates us to what is normally
proper, and what one should do. In short super Ego help to control impulses
coming from the id, making them less selfish and more virtuous.
Conscious, Preconscious and Unconscious Regions: Freud felt that the
three structures of personality, the Id, Ego and Super Ego, functioned within
overlapping portions of conscious, preconscious and unconscious regions of
the mind. 15
16. Defense Mechanism
The Ego Defense Mechanisms:
Freud proposed that ego uses several defense mechanisms to minimize anxiety
produced by demands of the id, dictates of the super ego, and external threats.
The defense mechanisms form a portion of the ego that operates
unconsciously. People use them unconsciously. This defense mechanism
includes those that direct behavior, such as identification, displacement and
sublimation. On the other hand, there are the defense mechanisms that distort
some aspects of self or reality, such as identification, sublimation, projection,
reaction formation and rationalization.
Freud also identified a series of defense mechanism individuals use
unconsciously, distorting reality to reduce anxiety, chief among these
mechanisms are :
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17. Defense Mechanism (Contd.)
i. Identification: Identification is first used in solving the internal conflict.
Later in life people who are anxious about their behavior sometimes resolve
their conflict by identifying with person who appears successful, realistic
and moral, trying to act as much like that person as possible. Freud regarded
identification as a relatively healthy mechanism.
ii. Sublimation: People divert unwanted impulses into socially approved
thoughts, feeling or behavior. For example a person with strong feeling of
aggression may become a butcher and hack away at meat instead of people.
iii. Repression: In which the unacceptable or unpleasant impulses are pushed
back into unconscious. Repression is the direct method of dealing with
anxiety.
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18. Defense Mechanism (Contd.)
iv. Regression: Regression might be used where people behave as if they were
at an earlier stage of development. For example, regression is frequently
seen in young children when a new baby arrives.
v. Denial: Denial is the defense mechanism used to keep threatening
perception of the external world, rather than internal drives and feelings, out
of awareness. For example a smoker may deny that cigarettes are hazardous
to his or her health.
vi. Projection: Projection is a mean of protecting oneself by attributing
unwanted impulses and feeling to some one else. For example, a selfish
person, who sees everyone selfish, is projecting his own feelings to others.
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19. Defense Mechanism (Contd.)
vii. Reaction Formation: Reaction formation is acting the strong opposite of
one’s true unconscious feelings because the true feelings are threatening.
For example, a girl who hates her father may repress strong feelings or
affection for him instead. These feelings are due to reaction formation.
viii.Rationalization: Rationalization is a very common defense mechanism. It
occurs when we distort reality by justifying what happens to us. We develop
explanations that allow us to protect our self-esteem. For example, a person
may rationalize aggression by saying that another person deserved to be
punished or harmed.
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20. Personality Assessment / Measurement
•Personality assessment is general term that refers to the process of
describing or evaluating individual behavior. Psychologists have many
practical and theoretical reasons for wanting to assess personality.
•For example, the industrial psychologist is faced with the problem of
selecting the right people for particular kinds of jobs. The clinical
psychologist is concerned with understanding the personality functioning of
person in distress, and evaluating the personality changes that result from
psychological treatment. Sometimes, as in clinical assessment (diagnosis),
we are interested in more global evaluation that will reveal something about
the individuals functioning in many different areas.
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21. Personality Assessment / Measurement
• In the following sections we will describe some of the major approaches to
personality assessment. These assessments include:
Non Projective Techniques:
i. Interviewing- Direct identifying the personality characteristic
ii. Rating scales – is a device for quantifying (value) , observations of an
individual’s bahaviour, the rater must make the judgement about the
degree to which a person exhibits certain traits.
iii. Personality inventory / Objective tests – Standardized questionnaires
that are designed to give quantitative information about personality.
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22. Personality Assessment / Measurement
Projective Techniques:In psychology, a projective test is a personality
test designed to let a person respond to ambiguous stimuli, presumably
revealing hidden emotions and internal conflicts.
i. The Rorschach test
ii. The Thematic apperception test
iii. The Sentence completion test
iv. The Blacky test
v. The Draw-a-man test and House-tree-person test.
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