B

BY COURSE INSTRUCTOR
SARIA RAFIQ
Contents

 Introduction
 Dimensions of Personality
 Theories of Personality
 INTRODUCTION

Personality is 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.
Personality refers to individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking,
feeling and behaving. The study of personality focuses on two broad areas:
 One is understanding individual differences in particular personality
characteristics, such as sociability or irritability.
 The other is understanding how the various parts of a person come together as a
whole.
 Personalitypsychology is a branch of Psychology which
studies the concept of personality and how it differs
among people.
 This area of psychology looks at the overall psychological
makeup of people, the psychological differences among
individuals and the similarities found within human
nature.
 The word personality has been derived from the Latin word ‘Persona.’ At first
this word was used for the mask worn by the actors (Roman and Greek) in
ancient times, to indicate to the audiences whether they played the villain’s or
the hero’s role in a drama. Thus the mask gave the actor his characteristic
features.
 Personalityincludes the behavior patterns, a person shows across situations or
the psychological characteristics of the person that lead to those behavior
patterns.
 Personality traits reflect people’s characteristic patterns of thoughts,
feelings, and behaviors. Personality traits imply consistency and stability
on a specific trait.
 Traits are known as the stable characteristics, they are consistent and long
lasting.
 States are temporary behaviors or feelings that depend on a person’s
situation and motives at a particular time.
 Positive Personality Traits

 Some personality traits are positive:

 Being honest and taking responsibility for your actions are admirable
qualities.
 Adaptability and compatibility are great traits and can help you get
along with others.
 Courage will help you do what’s right in tough situations.
 Here are a few more to consider:
• Adventurous
• Fearless
• Observant
• Independent
• Optimistic
• Intelligent
• Charming
• Encouraging
• Reliable
 Negative Personality Traits

 Other personality traits are negative. For example:

• Lazy
• Dishonest
• Sarcastic
• Arrogant
• Cowardly
• Rude
• Quarrelsome
• Impulsive
• Self-centered
 Determining Personality Types

 Your personality type can be determined by many factors. One way to

discover your personality type is to approach it scientifically, by testing
yourself and having a psychologist analyze you
 There are two types of tests done to determine personality, which are:
 Projective Personality Tests
 Objective Personality Tests
 Projective Tests

■ A projective test is a type of personality test in which an individual offers

responses to ambiguous scenes, words, or images.
■ The goal of such tests is to uncover the hidden or unconscious conflicts
or emotions .
■ By interpreting the responses to ambiguous cues, psychoanalysts hope to
uncover these unconscious feelings that might be causing problems in a
person's life.
■ Projective personality tests are : Thematic Apperception Test, Rorschach
Projective Tests
 Objective Personality Test

■ An objective personality test exposes subjects to a

series of questions with restricted answers, such as
true/false or scale rating.
■ For example, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality
Inventory (MMPI) is a psychological test that assesses
personality traits and psychopathology.
 Traits of the Big Five personality test

 Five super ordinate factors have emerged and are referred to as

the Big Five Model of Personality or the Big Five Personality
traits or the Five-Factor Model.
 Numerous amounts of research have been carried out to
determine the basic personality traits. And the big five factor is
supported by most of them.
 Human resources professionals often use the Big Five personality dimensions to help place
employees.
 That is because these dimensions are considered to be the underlying traits that make up an
individual’s overall personality.
 5 Traits are:
 Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism or
OCEAN:
 Openness - People who like to learn new things and enjoy new experiences usually score
high in openness. Openness includes traits like being insightful and imaginative and
having a wide variety of interests.
 Conscientiousness - People that have a high degree of conscientiousness are reliable and
prompt. Traits include being organized, methodic, and thorough.
 Extraversion - Extraverts get their energy from interacting with others, while introverts
get their energy from within themselves. Extraversion includes the traits of energetic,
talkative, and assertive.
 Agreeableness - These individuals are friendly, cooperative, and compassionate. People
with low agreeableness may be more distant. Traits include being kind, affectionate, and
sympathetic.
 Neuroticism - Neuroticism is also sometimes called Emotional Stability. This dimension
relates to one’s emotional stability and degree of negative emotions. People that score
high on neuroticism often experience emotional instability and negative emotions. Traits
include being moody and tense.
Theories of Personality
Psychoanalytic/Freudian perspective
Psychodynamic/Neo-Freudian perspectives
Behavioral perspectives
Humanistic perspectives
Psychoanalytic/Freudian Perspective

 The psychoanalytic approach focuses on the importance of the

unconscious mind.
 In other words, psychoanalytic perspective dictates that behavior is
determined by your past experiences that are left in the
Unconscious Mind (people are unaware of them).
 This perspective is still based on Freud's psychoanalytic
perspective about early experiences being so influential on current
behavior.
 Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of personality
argues that human behavior is the result of the interactions
among three component parts of the mind: the id,
ego, and superego.
 This theory, known as Freud’s structural theory of
personality, places great emphasis on the role of
unconscious psychological conflicts in shaping behavior
and personality.
 Freud divided personality structure into three
components: the id, ego and superego.
 The id is the instinctive component that follows
the pleasure principle,
 the ego is the decision making component that
follows the reality principle and
 the superego is the moral component that
follows the morality principle.
 The Id, the most primitive of the three structures, is
concerned with instant gratification of basic physical needs
and urges. It operates entirely unconsciously (outside of
conscious thought).
 The Superego is concerned with social rules and morals. It
develops as a child learns what their culture considers right
and wrong.
 The Ego One of the three components of the psyche,
it is the part of the psyche that deals with reality. Ego
balances the demand of Id and Superego in the
practical context of reality.
 The Libido - Psychic energy derived from the
sex drive
 Levels of Consciousness

According to Freud, there are three levels of consciousness:

 conscious (small): this is the part of the mind that holds what you are aware of. You can
verbalize about your conscious experience and you can think about it in a logical way.
 preconscious (small-medium): this is ordinary memory. So although things stored here
are not in the conscious, they can be readily brought into conscious.
 unconscious (enormous): Freud felt that this part of the mind was not directly
accessible to awareness. In part, he saw it as a dump box for urges, feelings and ideas
that are tied to anxiety, conflict and pain. These feelings and thoughts have not
disappeared and according to Freud, they are there, exerting influence on our actions and
our conscious awareness.
 Freud believed that life was built round tension and pleasure. Freud also
believed that all tension was due to the build up of libido (sexual energy) and
that all pleasure came from its discharge.
 In describing human personality development as psychosexual Freud meant
to convey that what develops is the way in which sexual energy accumulates
and is discharged as we mature biologically.
PSYCHOSEXUAL STAGES

 Freud (1905) proposed that psychological development in

childhood takes place in a series of fixed psychosexual stages:
 oral,
 anal,
 phallic,
 latency, and
 genital
 Each of the psychosexual stages is associated with a particular conflict that
must be resolved before the individual can successfully advance to the
next stage.
 Or possibly the person's needs may have been so well satisfied that he/she
is reluctant to leave the psychological benefits of a particular stage in which
there is overindulgence.
 Both frustration and overindulgence (or any combination of the two) may
lead to what psychoanalysts call fixation at a particular psychosexual
stage
)
 Oedipus Complex : The most important aspect of the phallic stage
is the Oedipus Complex. In the young boy, the Oedipus complex
or conflict, arises because the boy develops sexual (pleasurable)
desires for his mother.

 Electra Complex: The girl develops the pleasurable desire for the
father.
 Penis envy is a theory in Freudian psychoanalytic theory that
proposes that very young girls feel deprived and envious that they
do not have a penis. These feelings later lead to a desire for normal
heterosexual development.
 Castration anxiety is a Freudian concept in which a child is afraid their
genitals will be harmed by the parent of the same sex as they develop sexual
feelings for the other parent. This can occur in both males and females and
presents itself during the phallic stage (occurring between the ages of 3-7).
 For example, a son fears his father will damage his genitals because of his
sexual feelings towards his mother.
 The little boy then sets out to resolve this problem by
imitating, copying and joining in masculine dad-type
behaviors and is how the three-to-five year old boy
resolves his Oedipus Complex.
 Similarly,
a girl starts copying her mother, she resolves an
Electra Complex.
 DEFENSE MECHANISMS

In order to deal with conflict and problems in life, Freud stated that the ego
employs a range of defense mechanisms.
Defense mechanisms operate at an unconscious level and help ward off
unpleasant feelings (i.e. anxiety) or make good things feel better for the
individual.
 We use defense mechanisms to protect ourselves from
feelings of anxiety or guilt, which arise because we feel
threatened, or because our id or superego becomes too
demanding.
 With the ego, our unconscious will use defense
mechanism protect us when we come up against a
stressful situation in life.
Psychodynamic Perspective
Carl Jung

A Swiss Psychiatrist who was the follower of Freud but

he criticized on Freud’s concept of Oedipus Complex.
 Jung agreed with Freud that a person’s past and childhood
experiences determined future behavior, he also believed
that we are shaped by our future too.
 He proposed that the unconscious consists of two layers.
 The first layer called the personal unconscious contains
temporality forgotten information and well as repressed
memories.
 The other concept is the collective unconscious
comprising latent memories from our ancestral and
evolutionary past.
 Archetypes
 Archetypes are images and thoughts which have universal meanings
across cultures which may show up people, ideas, literature, art or
religion.
 For Jung, our primitive past becomes the basis of the human psyche,
directing and influencing present behavior.
 Jung was one of the first people to define introversion and
extraversion in a psychological context.
 The introvert is focused on the internal world of
reflection, dreaming and vision.
 The extravert is focused on the outside world of objects,
sensory perception and action.
Alfred Adler
INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY
Alfred Adler’s Theory

 Adler’s individual psychology presents an optimistic view

of people.
 He mainly focused on the social interest.
 Socialinterest is a way of life; it is an optimistic feeling of
confidence in oneself, and a genuine interest in the welfare
and well-being of others.
 He gave an idea of superiority and inferiority complex.
 For example:
 If we are moving along, doing well, feeling competent,
we can afford to think of other but if we feel the sense of
incompetency we may develop an inferiority complex:
become shy and timid, insecure, indecisive, cowardly,
submissive, compliant, and so on.
 A person with an inferiority complex tends to lack social
interest; instead they are self-interested: focused on
themselves and what they believe to be their deficiencies.
 They may compensate by working hard to improve in the
skills at which they lack, or they may try to become
competent at something else, but otherwise retaining their
sense of inferiority.
 We may also develop a superiority complex, which
involves covering up our inferiority by pretending to be
superior.
 For example, If we feel small, one way to feel big is to
make everyone else feel even smaller! Bullies, big-heads,
and petty dictators everywhere are the prime example.
However, feelings of inferiority are not all bad.
Adler suggested that such feelings can motivate us
to improve; this is referred to as compensation.
 Striving for Superiority The one dynamic force behind
people’s behavior is the striving for success or superiority
 According to Adler,
character traits and
behavior effects
personality including
birth order.
Behavioral Perspective
B.F. SKINNER (REINFORCEMENT SHAPES PERSONALITY)
ALBERT BANDURA’S THEORY (SOCIAL LEARNING AND SELF-EFFICACY)
Behavioral perspective

 Behaviorists believe that personality is shaped by operant

conditioning principles. When we receive positive
reinforcement such as attention or praise for a behavior, we
are likely to repeat that behavior. We will avoid negative
situations becoming negatively reinforced for avoiding,
reducing or terminating the painful stimulus.
 Over time these responses become Habit Patterns or
Response Tendencies known as personality by behaviorists
SKINNER’S THEORY

 Skinner and other behaviorists believe all behavior is

Learned, Determined by what we have learned from our
Environment. They emphasize the importance of
Environmental Factors.
 They believe that the environment may shape normal or
abnormal behavior but emphasize that "There is no such
thing as an abnormal person, only a normal person in an
abnormal environment."
 BANDURA’S THEORY

 Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory posits that people learn

from one another, via observation, imitation, and modeling by using
cognitive factors such as attention, memory, and motivation.
 It is the bridge between behavior and cognition.
 One of Bandura's most famous theories is his theory of
self-efficacy. Self-efficacy literally means the belief of a
person that his or her actions are effective or make a
difference.
 The person with self-efficacy believes that his thoughts
and actions will have some influence over the outcome
and it is related to motivation.
HUMANISTIC
PERSPECTIVE
CARL ROGER’S THEORY
ABRAHAM MASLOW'S THEORY
Carl Roger’s Theory

 Central to Rogers' personality theory is the notion of real-

self or self-concept. This is defined as "the organized,
consistent set of perceptions and beliefs about oneself".
 According to Rogers (1959), we want to feel, experience
and behave in ways which are consistent with our self-
image and which reflect what we would like to be like,
our ideal-self.
 The humanistic approach states that the self is composed of
concepts unique to ourselves. The self-concept includes three
components:
 Self worth (or self-esteem) – what we think about ourselves
 Self-image – How we see ourselves, our body image, our inner
personality. Self-image has an effect on how a person thinks, feels and
behaves in the world.
 Ideal self – This is the person who we would like to be. It consists of
our goals and ambitions in life.
 The closer our self-image and ideal-self are to each other, the
more consistent or congruent we are and the higher our sense
of self-worth.
 A person is said to be in a state of incongruence if a
difference may exist between a person’s ideal self and actual
experience.
 According to Rogers, highly incongruent self concepts are
prone to recurrent anxiety.
Maslow’s Theory

 Abraham Maslow proposed that human motives are

organized into a hierarchy of needs in which basic
needs must be met before less basic needs are aroused.
 At the top is the self-actualization need which fulfill
one’s potential so according to Maslow, self
actualizing people are with very healthy personalities
marked by continued personal growth.