by Jerry M. Burger. 2008.
Chapter 1: What Is Personality?
Personality can be defined as consistent behavior patterns and intrapersonal processes originating within the individual.
To help make sense of the wide range of personality theories proposed over the past century, we’ll look at six general approaches to explaining personality. These are the psychoanalytic approach, the trait approach, the biological approach, the humanistic approach, the behavioral/social learning approach, and the cognitive approach.
Psychologists who subscribe to the psychoanalytic approach argue that people’s unconscious minds are largely responsible for important differences in their behavior styles. Other psychologists, those who favor the trait approach, identify where a person might lie along a continuum of various personality characteristics. Psychologists advocating the biological approach point to inherited predispositions and physiological processes to explain individual differences in personality. In contrast, those promoting the humanistic approach identify personal responsibility and feelings of self-acceptance as the key causes of differences in personality. Behavioral/social learning theorists explain consistent behavior patterns as the result of conditioning and expectations. Those promoting the cognitive approach look at differences in the way people process information to explain differences in behavior.
Chapter 6: The Neo-Freudian Theories
Examples of Coping Strategies
Problem-Focused Strategies
I obtained as much information as I could about the situation.
I made a plan of action.
I considered alternatives and weighed the pros and cons.
I talked with people who had had similar experiences.
I tried harder to make things work.
I sought out help from someone who knew more than I did.
I set aside time to work on the problem.
Emotion-Focused Strategies
I discussed my feelings with friends.
I thought about how I could learn from the experience.
I accepted what had happened and moved on.
I tried to put things into perspective.
I looked for the silver lining.
I talked about my feelings with a professional counselor.
Avoidance Strategies
I tried not to think about the problem.
I pretended the problem didn’t exist.
I used alcohol or drugs to feel better.
I tried to distract myself with other activities.
I avoided people and situations that reminded me of the problem.
I slept more than usual.
I refused to acknowledge the scope of the problem.
Attachment Style and Adult Relationships
Thus our earliest experiences with caretakers become the foundation upon which we approach later relationships. If our parents were caring, attentive, and responsive, we come to see relations with others as sources of love and support. If our needs for attachment and attention were not met, we become suspicious and mistrusting. Consistent with the psychoanalytic flavor of the object relations theorists, these mental models of attachment are said to be largely unconscious.
Adult Attachment Styles
Results of additional studies indicate that the connection between early parent-child relationships and adult attachment style is more than speculative. When asked about family members, secure adults are more likely than others to describe positive relationships with parents and a warm and trusting family environment (Brennan & Shaver, 1993; Diehl, Elnick, Bourbeau, & Labouvie-Vief, 1998; Feeney & Noller, 1990; Hazan & Shaver, 1987; Levy, Blatt, & Shaver, 1998). In contrast, anxious-ambivalent people on these studies recall little parental support, and avoidant people describe their relationships with family members as distrustful and emotionally distant. People who describe their parents’ marriage as unhappy are more likely to fall into the avoidant category and less likely to develop a secure attachment style.
Alternate Models and Measurement
People classified in the other two quadrants of the model suffer from feelings that they are unlovable, which burdens them with a constant fear that their loved ones will abandon them. Those who are comfortable with closeness fall into the anxious-ambivalent category (sometimes call preoccupied). Because these individuals lack internal feelings of self-worth, they seek self-acceptance by becoming close and intimate with others. In a sense, they are trying to prove that they must be worthy of love if this other person finds them lovable. Unfortunately, their lack of self-worth leaves preoccupied people vulnerable to heartbreak when their partner fails to meet their strong intimacy needs.
Additionally, we have disoriented (sometimes called fearful) people. These adults seem themselves as unworthy of love and doubt that romantic involvement will provide the much-needed intimacy. They avoid getting close to others because they fear the pain of rejection.
Attachment Style and Adult Relationships
As you might expect, several studies find that adults with a secure attachment style tend to be more satisfied with their relationships than people in the other categories. This phenomenon also works in the other direction. That is, people are more likely to be happy with their relationship if they have a partner with a secure attachment style.
By age 52, 95% of the secure adults had been married, and only 24% had ever been divorced. In contrast, only 72% of the avoidant adults had ever been married, and 50% of them had experienced a divorce.
Conversations between secure partners tend to be warmer and more intimate than those with avoidant or anxious-ambivalent partners (Simpson, 1990). And compared to people with other attachment styles, secure adults are more likely to share personal information when appropriate (Mikulincer & Nachshon, 1991; Tidwell, Reis, & Shaver, 1996).
Chapter 8: The Trait Approach
Emotional Expressiveness
Emotional expressiveness refers to a person’s outward display of emotions. Some people tend to be particularly expressive of their feelings. … We hear the enthusiasm in their voices … As with affectivity and intensity, researchers find relatively stable differences in the extent to which we express our emotions. Like other personality traits, we can place people along a continuum from those who are highly expressive to those who show few outward signs of how they are feeling. Consistent with common observations, researchers find that women tend to be more expressive of their emotions than men. Interestingly, women also tend to be better than men at reading the emotions in other people’s faces.
How well we express our feelings has important implications for how we get along with others. In particular, the more people express their emotions, the fewer problems they have in romantic relationships. Communication is aided when partners understand what the other person is feeling, and communication almost always contributes to harmony and satisfaction in relationships. Moreover, people who express their emotions freely tend to experience less confusion when trying to read another person’s emotions.
Expressing emotions also seems to be good for our psychological health. … The participants identified as highly expressive were happier and experienced less anxiety and guilt than those who were low in expressiveness. Other researchers using similar procedures found that expressive people were less prone to depression. Highly expressive people also tend to be higher in self-esteem than those on the other end of this trait dimension. In short, emotional expressiveness is good for us.
Optimism and Pessimism
For many years, researchers have recognized that a positive outlook is related to high achievement and a positive mood (Taylor, 1989). People who approach an upcoming event believing they will do well tend to perform better and feel better about themselves than those who enter the situation thinking things will likely turn out poorly. Similarly, when people face a specific problem, those who believe they will beat the odds tend to do better than and feel better than those who think the odds will beat them.
Optimists tend to set their goals higher and believe they can reach those goals. Just like the moral of so many stories, researchers find that having confidence in one’s abilities is often the key to success. In particular, optimists are less likely to allow setbacks and temporary failures to get them down.
Investigators find clear differences in the way optimists and pessimists deal with unexpected, stressful events. …
Optimists are more likely to deal with problems head-on—that is, to use active coping strategies. On the other hand, pessimists are more likely to distract themselves or resort to denial when faced with a difficult problem.
Coping Strategies
Active Strategies:
- Problem Solving
- Cognitive Restructuring
- Express Emotions
- Social Support
Avoidance Strategies:
- Problem Avoidance
- Wishful Thinking
- Self-Criticism
- Social Withdrawal
Chapter 12: The Humanistic Approach
“The good life,” Rogers said, “is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination. (1961). Like other humanistic theorists, Rogers maintained that we naturally strive to reach an optimal sense of satisfaction with our lives. He called people who reach this goal fully functioning.
Fully functioning people learn to trust their own feelings. If something feels right, they’ll probably do it. They aren’t insensitive to the needs of others, but they aren’t overly concerned with meeting the standards of behavior society sets for them.
Maslow identified two basic types of motives. One is a deficiency motive, which results from the lack of some needed object. Basic needs such as hunger and thirst fall into this category. Deficiency needs are satisfied once the needed object has been obtained.
But Maslow also talked about what he called growth needs. These needs include the unselfish giving of love to others and the development of one’s unique potential. Unlike deficiency needs, growth needs are not satisfied once the object of the need is found. Rather, satisfaction comes from expressing the motive. Satisfying a growth need may even lead to an increase in, rather than a satiation of, the need
Maslow identified five basic categories of needs:
- Physiology Needs
- Safety Needs
- Belongingness and Love Needs
- Esteem Needs
- Need for Self-Actualization
Belongingness and Love Needs
Maslow identified two kinds of love. D-Love, like hunger, is based on a deficiency. We need this love to satisfy the emptiness we experience without it. It is a selfish love, concerned with taking, not giving. But it is a necessary step in the development of the second type of love, B-love. B-love is a nonpossessive, unselfish love based on a growth need rather than a deficiency. We can never satisfy our need for B-love simply with the presence of a loved one. Rather, B-love is experienced and enjoyed and grows with this other person.
Need for Self-Actualization
People who obtain all the obvious sources of happiness and contentment in our society soon turn their attention to developing themselves. “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself,” Maslow wrote. “What a man can be, he must be. He must be true to his own nature.” (1970).
Maslow described every psychologically healthy person he studied as creative. However, he distinguished between the traditional definition of creativity, which is based on producing something traditionally associated with talent (for example, a poem), and what he called self-actualizing creativity. Self-actualizing creativity is revealed when people approach routine tasks in an unconventional manner.
In essence, self-actualizing creativity is a way of approaching life. Maslow compared it with the spontaneous way a child examines and discovers the world, ever in awe and admiration of the little things that make it such an interesting place. According to Maslow, most adults would express self-actualizing creativity if we didn’t succumb to enculturalization, which inhibits our spontaneity. Somehow psychologically healthy people retain or rediscover the fresh and naive way of looking at life they knew as children.
Maslow discovered several other characteristics common to psychologically healthy people. It may surprise you to find that these people have relatively few friends, but the friendships they have are deep and rewarding. They have a “philosophical, unhostile” sense of humor. They poke fun at the human condition, including themselves, rather than at any particular person or grouf-actualized people also have a strong need for solitude…
Another feature Maslow discovered in psychologically healthy people is what he called peak experiences. A peak experience is one in which time and place are transcended, in which people lose their anxieties and experience a unity of self with the universe and a momentary feeling of power and wonder.
Peak experiences are growth experiences, for afterward people report feeling more spontaneous, more appreciative of life, and less concerned with whatever problems they may have had beforehand.
The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Can people structure the events in their daily lives in a way that promotes a sense of personal fulfillment and worth?
The Causes of Loneliness
Lonely participants showed relatively little interest in their partners. They asked fewer questions, often failed to comment on what the other person said, and made fewer references to the partner. Instead, these lonely people were more likely to talk about themselves and introduce new topics unrelated to their partner’s interests. Another study found lonely people were more likely to give advice to strangers and less likely to acknowledge what the other person said (Sloan & Sloan, 1984).
Other researchers examine the way lonely and nonlonely people use self-disclosure. Studies find that lonely people generally reveal less about themselves than their partners (Berg & Peplau, 1982; Sloan & Solano, 1984). In one study, lonely people selected relatively nonintimate topics to talk about in a get-acquainted conversation (Solano, Batten, & Parrish, 1982). Not surprisingly, the lonely participants’ partners reciprocated with nonintimate topics as well. Other studies find lonely people are often not aware of social rules about when and how much to disclose (Chelune, Sultan, & Williams, 1980). Because of this, they may disclose too much or fail to reveal enough about themselves when the other person expects it. Consequently, others may see them as either weird or aloof, and respond accordingly.
Summary
High and low self-esteem people react differently to failure. Low self=esteem people become discouraged and unmotivated when they receive negative feedback, whereas high self-esteem people employ tactics to blunt the effects of failure.
People also differ in the extent to which their feeling of self-worth fluctuates. Researchers refer to this individual difference as self-esteem stability. Studies suggest that people base their self-esteem on how they perform in selected domains. Although people typically use areas in which they excel for their contingencies of self-worth, some individuals select contingencies that make it difficult for them to feel good about themselves.
Chapter 14: The Behavioral/Social Learning Approach
Because masculine people are more likely to use direct, problem-focus strategies, they are better able to deal with stressors than those low in masculinity (Helgeson & Lepore, 1997).
Support for the masculinity model is particularly strong when looking at the relationship between gender type and self-esteem (Whitley, 1983). People who possess traditionally masculine attributes (such as achieving, athletic, powerful) also feel good about themselves.
Chapter 16: The Cognitive Approach
Gender, Memory, and Self-Construal
Research suggests men and women do not differ in their general ability to memorize and recall information. However, investigators often find differences in what men and women remember.
The women recalled significantly more personal events than the men. This was true for both negative events and positive events. On the other hand, men did better recalling the impersonal information about American history. In short, women were better able to remember happy occasions with friends and times they embarrassed themselves, whereas men recalled better the facts they had learned in school or read about.
From an early age, females learn to pay attention to their emotions and the emotions of others. Consequently, women are more likely than men to encode information about themselves in terms of emotions (Feldman, Barrett, Lane, Sechrest, & Schwartz, 2000; Kuebli Butler, & Fivush, 1995).
Depressive Schemas
Although negative thoughts are often considered a symptom of depression , the cognitive perspective argues that these thoughts can also cause people to become depressed (Clark, Beck, & Alford, 1999).
A depressive schema is a cognitive structure containing memories about and associations with depressing events and thoughts. People processing information through this schema attend to negative information, ignore positive information, and interpret ambiguous information in a depressing way. They also recall depressing memories easily and often associate current sad experiences with sad incidents from their past.
Because depressed people filter information through a depressive schema, they also tend to interpret ambiguous information in the most negative light possible. When depressed people consider their performances, they tend to dwell on what they did wrong and fail to give themselves enough credit for what they did right (Crowson & Cromwell, 1995; Moretti et al., 1996).
Individuals who possess a negative cognitive style tend to attribute their problems to stable (enduring) and global (widespread) causes. They also tend to anticipate the most dreadful consequences and often believe the problem is the result of their own person shortcomings.