Perspectives on Personality



Perspectives on Personality

- each perspective has a set of basic assumptions about what personality involves

- the assumptions act like filters or lenses, shaping how personality is understood

Trait/Disposition Perspectives

(Building Blocks of Personality)

Ch. 4 & 5

Trait: A durable tendency to behave in a particular way in a variety of situations.

Needs/Motives: "inner" states that are reflected in actions

1. People display consistency and continuity in their actions, thoughts and feelings over time.

2. Trait theories are organized hierarchically. There are central or core traits, surface traits and specific behaviors.

E.g., an Extroverted person (central trait) may be gregarious and fun-loving (surface traits) and may spend a lot of time socializing with friends (specific behavior).

3. Trait theories differ in the number of central traits that make up the personality.

4. Personality consists of a pattern of dispositional qualities.

5. The pattern differs from person to person.

- which qualities

- their salience

- the interaction

Biological Perspectives

Ch. 6 & 7

1. Many personality characteristics are genetically determined.

2. Human behavioral tendencies derive from our evolutionary history.

3. Human behavior emerges from a complex biological system.

Psychodynamic Perspectives (Conflict Models)

- emphasis on the past

Psychoanalytic ch. 8 & 9

1. Personality is a dynamic set of processes.

2. Forces within the personality compete with each other for control of the personality.

3. The unconscious plays an important role in human behavior, in fact determining human behavior.

4. Human experience is permeated with sexuality and aggression.

5. Human sexuality is important at all stages of development, from birth until maturity.

6. Personality is greatly influenced by early childhood experiences.

7. Defense is an important component of human functioning.

8. Mental health depends on a balance of the forces in one's life.

Neoanalytic Perspectives ch. 10 & 11

- similar to psychoanalytic perspective

- different emphases

- emphasize the ego processes

- emphasize transactions with the world

- de-emphasize sexuality

- very diverse

Learning Perspective (Adaptation Models)

- focus on the present

- ch. 12 & 13

Behaviorist Perspective

1. Personality is a set of learned tendencies that have been acquired over a lifetime.

2. Learning is a kind of conditioning that occurs independent of the person.

3. Changes in behavior occur in predictable ways as a result of experience.

4. Learning occurs by means of classical conditioning and operant conditioning.

(Neobehaviorists – cognitive processes mediate learning)

Social-Learning Perspectives

1. Behavioral – focus on overt behaviors rather than on needs, traits, drives, and conflict

2. Cognitive – behaviors emerge from the beliefs and habits of thought that are learned through interaction with a social environment.

3. Research based – social learning perspectives draw inferences from careful observation of behavior in the laboratory.

4. Social learning perspectives focus on specific parts of the personality rather than the whole, e.g., self-efficacy, locus of control

Phenomenological/Humanistic Perspectives (Growth model)

- focus on the future

ch. 14 & 15

1. Our reality is immediate, personal consciousness.

2. Each person has her own way of experiencing the world, her own frame of reference.

3. Behavior can be understood only from the individual's point of view.

4. People determine for themselves what their frame of reference will be.

5. Human beings by nature tend to greater health, to self-perfecting.

Self-Regulation Perspective

- adaptation

- cognitive processing

ch. 16 & 17

1. Behavior emerges from how information is processed.

2. Personality involves a continuous flow of decision making.

3. Human beings are goal directed. They are continually monitoring their progress, i.e., they are self-regulating.

Self Perspective (?)

- Allport reading

1. Is there a self?

2. What is it?

3. Is it important?

In science, as in life, I believe that we must mix commitment with humility – commitment to particular goals and views, humility in appreciation that we may be totally wrong and that our views will have to change. I am fond of saying that life without commitment is passionless, and life without humility leaves one possessed by ideology and resistant to change.

…Given how much is yet to be learned about human personality, changes in the field need not reflect progress, but we can be sure that a lack of change reflects a lack of progress.

(Lawrence Pervin)

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