Personality - a summary of chapter 15 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)

Psychology
Chapter 15
Personality

Personality refers to a person’s general style of interacting with the world, especially with other people.
The development during childhood of chronic patterns of behavior that differ from one individual to another.

Personality as behavioral dispositions, or traits

The most central concept in personality psychology is the trait. This is a relatively stable predisposition to behave in a certain way.
This is considered to be part of the person, not the environment.
States (other than traits) of motivation and emotion are, defined as inner entities than can be inferred from observed behavior. Traits are enduring, but states are temporary.

A trait might be defined as an enduring attribute that describes one’s likelihood of entering temporarily into a particular state.
Traits are dimensions along which people differ by degree.

Trait theories: efficient systems for describing personalities

The goal of any trait theory of personality is to specify a manageable set of distinct personality dimensions that can be used to summarize the fundamental psychological differences among individuals.

Factor analyses as a tool for identifying an efficient set of traits

Factor analyses: a method of analyzing patterns of correlations in order to extract mathematically defined factors, which underlie and help make sense of those patterns.
Steps:

1. Collect data in the form of a set of personality measures taken across a large sampling of people.
2. Once the data is collected, the researcher statistically correlates the scores for each adjective with those for each of the other adjectives, using the method of correlation. The result is a matrix of correlation coefficients, showing the correlation for every possible pair of scores.
3. Factor extraction. Items that are strongly related to one another, or that cluster, is identified.
4. The researcher provides a label for the factors.

Factor analyses tells us that two dimensions of personality are relatively independent of each other.

Cattell’s pioneering use of factor analysis to develop trait theory

Cattell:
An infinite number of different personalities can be formed from a finite number of traits.
He identified 16 basic trait dimensions and made a questionnaire called the 16 PF questionnaire to measure them.

The five-factor model of personality

The five-factor model (or big five theory)
A person’s personality is most efficiently described in terms of his or her score on each of five relatively independent global trait dimensions:

• Neuroticism – stability (vulnerability to emotional upset)
• Extraversion - introversion
• Openness to experience – non openness
• Agreeableness - antagonism
• Conscientiousness – undirectedness

Nearly all of the thousands of adjectives commonly used to describe personalities correlate at least to some degree with one or another of these five traits.
The model also posits that each global trait dimension encompasses six subordinate trait dimensions referred to as facets of that trait. These faces correlate with one another, but the correlation is far from perfect.

Measurement of the big five traits and their facets

The most used questionnaire to measure the big five traits is the NEO personality inventory.
In its full form, the person being tested rates 240 statements on a 5 point scale ranging from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’. Each statement is designed to access on facet or one of the five major traits.

The relationship of personality measures to people’s actual behavior

A personality test is valid to the degree that scores on each of its trait measures correlate with aspects of the person’s real-world behavior that are relevant to that trait.

Personality differences do not reveal themselves equally well in all settings.
It may be most clearly revealed when people are in novel, stressful situations and in life transitions, where cues as to what actions are appropriate are absent or weak.

Continuity and change in personality over time

The general stability of personality

There is a higher stability of personality throughout adulthood.
Personality becomes increasingly stable with increasing age up to about age 50, and it remains at a relatively constant level of stability after age 50.

Patterns of change in personality with age

Over adult years,
Neuroticism and openness to experience tend to decline
Conscientiousness and agreeableness tend to increase

Individual’s personality can change, at least to some degree, in any direction, at any age, in response to a major life change. .
People who have a particular personality characteristic often make life choices that alter their personality even further in the pre-existing direction.

Genetic foundations of personality traits

The heritability of traits

The traits identified by trait theories are rather strongly heritable.
It is .5 for most traits, including all of the big five.

Relative lack of shared effects of the family environment

Being raised in the same family has an almost negligible effect on measures of personality.

Single genes and the physiology of traits

Genes affect personality primarily by influencing physiological characteristic of the nervous system.
Like their influence on neurotransmission in the brain. There is a significant correlation between specific personality characteristics and specific genes that alter neurotransmission.
Variation in personality derives from the combined effects of many genes interacting with influences of the environment.

Personality as adaption to life conditions

• Proximate explanation: focus on causal mechanisms that operate in the lifetime of the individual to produce the phenomenon in question.
  Ways by which differing genes and experiences work make us different.
• Distal explanations: focuses on function, or evolutionary survival value.
  How might personality differences help individuals survive longer and produce more offspring than they would if all individuals were identical in personality?

Advantages of being different from one another

Natural selection hedges its bets, producing organisms with a range of cognitive and behavioral disposition that may be adaptive for the range of environments it may encounter.
We find personality differences in the animal kingdom.
Many dimensions of personality identified in nonhuman animals have equivalents in the five-factor model.
Personality appears to be a basic, biological aspect of animal life.

Diversifying one’s investment in offspring

Diversified investment greatly reduces the potential for dramatic loss while maintaining the potential for substantial gains over the long run.
Over the course of evolution, mechanisms that ensure diversity of personality in offspring would be favored by natural selection.

Studies of the bold-cautious dimension in fish

Bold individuals eat more and grow more rapidly than do cautious individuals.
Boldness may be especially valuable when the narrow niche occupied by cautious individuals is nearly filled, so the risks entailed in exploring new objects, areas, and life strategies are offset by the potential for finding new, needed resources.
Individual fish can become either bolder or more cautious, depending on the number of other bold or cautious fish in their environment.

The big five traits as alternative problem-solving strategies

From an evolutionary perspective, personality traits in humans can be thought of as alternative general strategies for solving problems related to survival and reproduction.
Individual differences on trait dimensions are partly heritable and partly the product of environmental experience.

Differential susceptibility to environmental influence

Personal traits are viewed as relatively stable characteristics of a person.
There is one trait that is associated not with stability but whit change: differential susceptibility to environmental influence.

Children with fearful, anxious and difficult dispositions are more sensitive to the effects of parenting than other children.
Such environmentally sensitive children will readily change their behavior and personalities to novel environments, both positive and negative. So they fare especially poorly in less-than-optimal environments, but do well
in supportive environments.
Other children are stable and less influenced by their environment.

• Orchid children: sensitive children (biologically sensitive to context)
• Dandelion children: can survive, and perhaps thrive in any environment.

There is a gene associated with susceptibility to parental influence.

There is a highly sensitive personality (HPS) trait, in which people are more aware of subtleties in their surroundings, process experiences more deeply and are more easily overwhelmed in highly stimulating environments.
Such people are more affected by both positive and negative experiences.

Adapting to the family environment

The first social environment to which most new human beings must adapt is that of the family into which they are born.
Children come into the world with nervous systems predisposed for behaving in certain ways, but those ways of behaving are first exercised and built upon within the family.
BUT
The family environment plays little or no role in shaping personality.
Siblings have different family experiences.

Sibling contrast: carving out a unique niche within the family

Pre-existing small differences between siblings may become exaggerated in part because siblings tend to define themselves as different from one another and tend to accentuate those differences through their own behavioral choices.
Parents likewise tend to focus more on differences than on similarities then they describe two or more of their children.
This within-family emphasis on the differences between siblings is sibling contrast.

Possibly related to sibling contrast is split-parent identification. The tendency for each two siblings to identify with a different one of their two parents.

Sibling contrast and split-parent identification are devices by which parents and children consciously or unconsciously strive to reduce sibling rivalry, which can be highly disruptive to family functioning.
Evolutionary such differentiation may promote the survival of the two siblings and other member of their family by diversifying the parental investment.

Both phenomena are much stronger for adjacent pairs of siblings than for pairs who are separated in birth order. And stronger in same-sex pairs of siblings. And for age.

Adapting to one’s gender

Some gender differences in personality

Women score higher than men in agreeableness.
Women are, on average, more concerned than men with developing and maintaining positive social relationships.
Women report higher levels of anxiety and feelings of vulnerability than do men. They also score slightly, but significantly, higher on conscientiousness.

• Higher on warmth and generariousness facets of extraversion, but lower on the excitement-seeking facet.
• Higher on considerability on the feelings and aesthetics facets of openness to experience, but lower on the other facets.

Gender does not only influence the kind of personality one develops, but also affects the relationship of personality to life satisfaction.

Evolutionary foundations of gender differences

Personality measures are merely descriptions, not explanations of psychological differences among people.

The universality of certain gender differences and the long history of evolution in which males and females were subject to different reproductive challenges generation after generation.

• Females’ greater role in child care, and perhaps a need for cooperative relationships with other adults in relation to child care, may have led to selection for personality qualities promoting nurturance, cooperation, and caution.
• Males’ greater need to compete in order to reproduce may have led to selection for competitiveness, aggressiveness and risk taking.

Male and female mammals in general tend to respond differently to stressful situations.
Sex differences in hormones contribute to these differences in personality.

Cultural foundations of gender differences

(Sociologically)
The immediate causes of gender differences in personality are social forces that encourage girls and boys to behave differently.

Some gender differences in personality have changed, over historical time, in keeping with social roles and expectations.

Gender differences in personality are greater in developed, prosperous, egalitarian countries.
In wealthier, more egalitarian countries, where people are freer to choose their own routes in life, men and women choose ways of life that are consistent with and reinforce their inborn personality traits.

Personality as mental processes I: psychodynamic and humanistic views

Elements of the psychodynamic perspective

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

Developed a method of treatment in which patients would talk freely about themselves and he would analyze what they said in order to uncover buried memories and hidden emotions and motives.
The goal was to make the patient conscious of his or her unconscious memories, motives and emotions so that the patient’s conscious mind could work out ways of dealing with them.
Psychoanalysis: both the method of treatment and the theory of personality.

Psychodynamic theories: personality theories that emphasize the interplay of mental forces. Two guiding premises of psychodynamic theories are:

• People are often unconscious of their motives
• Processes called defense mechanisms work within the mind to keep unacceptable or anxiety-producing motives and thoughts out of consciousness.
  Personality differences lie in variations in people’s unconscious motives, in how those motives are manifested and in the ways that people defend themselves from anxiety.

The sex drive is a primary instinct, expressed in all stages of life.
The main source of pleasure satisfaction, or tension reduction, is centered in specific bodily zones, called erogenous zones. These zones change through the course of development, with erogenous centers shifting from the oral to the anal area over the course of early childhood, and then eventually to the genital area.
How parents deal with their children’s sexual (or pleasure-seeking) impulses has significant consequences for their later development.
But… there is little evidence for it.

The concept of unconscious motivation

The main causes of behavior lie deeply buried in the unconscious mind.
The reasons people give to explain their behavior often are not the true causes.

The technique is to sift the patient’s behavior for clues to the unconscious.
The elements of thought and behavior which are least logical, would provide the best clues to the unconscious.

Sex and aggression as motivating forces in Freud’s theory

(Unlike most modern psychologists) Freud considered drives to be analogous to physical forms of energy that build up over time and must somehow be released.
To live in peace in society, people must often inhibit direct expressions of the sexual and aggressive drives, so these are the drives that most likely build up and exert themselves in direct ways.
Freud concluded from his observations that much of human behavior consist of disguised manifestations of sex and aggression and that personality differences lie in the different ways that people disguise and channel these drives.

Social drives as motives in other psychodynamic theories

Freud viewed people as basically asocial, forced to live in societies more by necessity than by desire, and whose social interactions derive primarily from sex, aggression and displaced forms of these drives.

Most psychodynamic theories since Freud’s time have viewed people as inherently social beings whose motives for interacting with others extend well beyond sex and aggression.

Alfred Adler
Developed a psychodynamic theory that centers on people’s drive to feel competent.
Everyone beings life with a feeling of inferiority, which stems from the helpless and dependent nature of early childhood. The manner in which people learn to cope with or to overcome this feelings provides the basis for their lifelong personalities. 

Erik Erikson
A psychosocial theory of development.
The role of society in shaping personality. Other people, and society in general, place demands on people as they develop, and who children handle these demands affect their personalities.
Important developmental milestones extended beyond childhood into adulthood and old age.
Eight stages of psychological development. People face conflicts, or crises, at each of these stages in their relationships with other people. How they deal with the crises at one stage influences how they will deal with crises at the next and following stages.

1. Basic trust versus mistrust (birth to 1 year)
2. Autonomy versus shame and doubt (1 to 3 years)
3. Initiative versus guilt (3 to 6 years)
4. Industry versus inferiority (6 years to puberty)
5. Identity versus identity confusion (12 to 18 years)
6. Intimacy versus isolation (young adulthood)
7. Generativity versus stagnation (middle adulthood)
8. Integrity versus despair (late adulthood)

In all psychodynamic theories, the first few years of life are especially crucial in forming of the personality.

The idea that the mind defends itself against anxiety

Mental processes of self-deception, defense mechanisms, operate to reduce one’s consciousness of wishes, memories, and other thoughts than would threaten one’s self-esteem or in other ways provoke a strong sense of insecurity or anxiety.
Examples:

• Repression: the process by which anxiety-provoking thoughts are pushed out or kept out of the conscious mind.
• Displacement: when an unconscious wish or drive that would be unacceptable to the conscious mind is redirected toward a more acceptable alternative. In some cases, displacement may direct one’s energies toward activities that are particularly valued by society, this is sublimation.
• Reaction formation: the conversion of a frightening wish into its safer opposite.
• Projection: when a person consciously experiences an unconscious drive or wish as though it were someone else’s.
• Rationalization: the use of conscious reasoning to explain away anxiety provoking thoughts or feelings.

Defensive styles as dimensions of personality

Repressive coping as a personality style

People often repress memories of traumatic or highly disturbing events so fully that they can be recalled only through psychotherapy, which uncovers them.
But almost no evidence for this.

Many people regularly repress the emotional feelings that accompany disturbing events in their lives. They are able to recall and describe the events, but they claim that such memories do not make them anxious or otherwise disturb them. These people are repressors.
Repressors report much less psychological distress in disturbing situations than do nonrepressors, but, by physiological indices, they manifest more distress than do nonrepressors.
Repressors avoid experiences of anxiety by diverting their conscious attention away from anxiety-arousing stimuli and by dwelling on pleasant rather than unpleasant thoughts.

Repressors my develop more health problems and experience more chronic pain than do nonrepressors. They experience stress physically rather than as conscious emotion.

Distinction between mature and immature defensive styles

Some defenses are more conductive to a person’s long-term well-being than are others.

• Immature defenses: those presumed to distort reality the most and lead to the most ineffective actions.
• Intermediate defenses: involve less distortion of reality and lead to somewhat more effective coping
• Mature defenses: involve the least distortion of reality and lead to the most adaptive behaviors.

As humans grow older, people rely less on defenses that deny or distort reality and more on defenses that allow them to accept reality.
The use of mature defenses correlates positively with measures of life satisfaction and success.

The humanistic perspective: the self and life’s meanings

Humanistic theories emphasize people’s conscious understanding of themselves and their capacity to choose their own paths to fulfillment. They center on an aspect of human nature that seems to distinguish us clearly from other animals, our tendency to create belief systems, develop meaningful stories about ourselves and the world, and to govern our lives in accordance with those stories.

Phenomenology: the study of conscious perceptions and understandings.
Phenomenological reality: each person’s conscious understanding of his or her world.

Being one’s self: making one’s own decisions

A central aspect of one’s phenomenological reality is the self-concept.

Rogers
People are often diverted from becoming themselves by the demands and judgments placed on them by other people.
To be oneself, is to live life according to one’s own wishes rather than someone else’s.
An important dimension of individual difference has to do with the degree to which a person feels in charge of his or her own life.
In different cultures, people tend to have different values and to choose different activities, but in each culture those who see those choices as their own claim to be most satisfied with their lives.

Self-actualization and Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs

Self-actualization is the process of becoming one’s full self, realizing one’s dreams and capabilities. The specific route to self-actualization will vary from person to person and form time to time within a person’s lifetime, but for each individual the route must be self-chosen.
Full actualization requires a fertile environment, but the direction of actualization and the ways of using the environment must come from within the organism.
To grow best, individuals must be permitted to make those choices and must trust themselves to do so.

Abraham Maslow:
To self-actualize one must satisfy five sets of needs that can be arranged in a hierarchy.

1. Physiological needs
2. Safety needs
3. Attachment needs
4. Esteem needs
5. Self-actualization needs

A person can focus on higher needs only if lower ones are sufficiently satisfied so that they do not claim the person’s full attention and energy.

Personality as mental processes II: social-cognitive views

Social-cognitive theories emphasize the roles of general beliefs about the nature of the world, which are acquired through one’s experiences in the social environment as the prime shapers of personality.
These beliefs may be conscious, but they may also be so ingrained and automatic that they exert their influence without the person’s conscious awareness.
They can be thought of as automatic habits of thought, which can influence many aspects of a person’s behavior.
Unconscious refers to automatic mental processes.

Beliefs viewed as personality traits

Beliefs about the locus of control over desired effects

People behave differently at various tasks or games in the laboratory depending on whether they believed that success depended on skill or luck.
People’s behavior depends not just on the objective relationship between their responses and rewards, but also on their subjective beliefs about that relationship.

In many life situations it is not clear to what degree we have control over rewards. In such situations, people tend to behave according to a generalized disposition acquired from past experience, to believe that rewards either are or are not usually controllable by people’s own efforts.
This is the locus of control.

• Internal locus of control: a belief that individuals control their own rewards
• External locus of control: a belief that rewards are controlled by factors outside themselves

Successful action in any realm tends to lead to a stronger sense of control, which may promote further successful action and vice versa.

Beliefs about one’s own ability to perform on specific tasks

Self-efficacy: people’s beliefs about their own abilities to perform specific tasks.
Self-efficacy may be quite specific to a very narrow range of tasks or quite general over a broad range of tasks.
Improved self-efficacy for a task predicts improvement in actual performance of the task.  It is no simply a correlate of good performance, nut is also a cause of it.

Beliefs about the possibility of personal improvement

The degree of malleability of one’s own personal qualities.
This position makes a big difference in life.
People who view themselves as malleable are more likely to strive for self-improvement in all realms of life.

The power of positive thinking

People with an optimistic style of thought are happier and tend to cope more efficiently with life’s stressors than do people who have a pessimistic style.
Optimistic thinking leads people to devote attention and energy to solving their problems or recovering from their disabilities, which in turn leads to positive results.

The optimistic child

The most optimistic on any people on the planet are young children.
Such optimism can be adaptive in young children. Children’s tendencies to overestimate their abilities and characteristics enhance their self-efficacy and give them the confidence to try things they would not otherwise try.

Adaptive and maladaptive optimism and pessimism

There is a danger of unrealistic, self-delusional forms of optimism.
Optimism of this sort, defensive optimism, may reduce anxiety by diverting thoughts away from fearful possibilities, but it may also lead to serious harm.

The idea of situation-specific personality traits

Cross-cultural differences in personality

Collectivism, individual as a personality dimension

Cultures vary in the degree to which they have a collectivist versus an individualist orientation.
Personalities of people in collectivist and individualist cultures differ from each other in predictable ways.

• People with collectivist orientation are highly concerned with personal relationships and promoting the interest of the groups to which they belong.
• Individualist focus more on their own interest and abilities and less on the interest of the group.

There is a relationship between personality style and life satisfaction depending on the cultural context.

Cultural differences in conceptions of personality

People in different cultures tend to differ not only on their average scores on various personality measures, but also in their views about the significance of personality and the relative importance of particular traits.