Summary Psychology of Personality:
Chapter 1: Introduction to personality psychology
-Trait-descriptive adjectives: adjectives that can be used to describe characteristics of
people. The adjectives describing personality refer to several very different aspects of
people.
Words such as ‘thoughtful’ refer to inner qualities of mind.
Words as ‘charming’ and ‘humorous’ refer to the effect a person has on other people.
Words as ‘domineering’ are relational and signify a person’s position, or stance, toward
others.
Words as ‘ambitious’ refer to the intensity of desire to reach our goals.
Words such as ‘creative’ refer both to a quality of mind and to the nature of the products
we produce.
Words such as ‘deceitful’ refer to the strategies a person uses to attain his/hers goals.
-Personality: is the set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are
organized and relatively enduring and that influence his or her interactions with, and
adaptations to, the intrapsychic, physical and social environments.
-Psychological traits are useful for at least three reasons:
1. They help describe people and help understand the dimensions of difference of between
people.
2. Traits are useful because they help explain behavior. The reason people act may be
partly a function of their personality traits.
3. Traits are very useful because they can help predict future behavior.
-Psychological mechanisms are like traits, except that the term mechanisms refers more to
the processes of personality.
Most psychological mechanisms have three essential ingredients:
1. Inputs
2. Decision rules
3. Outputs
A psychological mechanism may make people more sensitive to certain kinds of
information for the environment (input), may make them more likely to think about specific
options (decision rules) and may guide their behavior toward certain categories of actions
(outputs).
-Within the individual means that personality is something a person carries with him of
herself over time and from one situation to the next.
-Organized means that the psychological traits and mechanisms, for a given person, are not
simply a random collection of elements. Rather, personality is organized because the
mechanisms and traits are liked to one another in a coherent fashion.
Our personalities are organized in the sense that they contain decision rules that govern
which needs are activated, depending on the circumstances.
, Personality traits are also relatively enduring over time, particularly in adulthood, and are
somewhat consistent over situations.
-The influential forces of personality means that personality traits and mechanisms can
have an effect on people’s lives.
Personality influences how we act, how we view ourselves, how we think about the
world, how we interact with others, how we feel, how we select our environments, what
goals and desires we pursue in life and how we react to our circumstances.
-His or hers interaction with: this feature is the most difficult to describe, because the
nature of person-environment interaction is complex. Interactions with situations include
perceptions, selections, evocations and manipulations.
Perceptions refer to how we ‘see’, or interpret an environment. Two people may be
exposed to the same objective, yet what they pay attention to and how they interpret the
event may be very different.
Selection describes the manner in which we choose situations the enter, how we choose
our friends, hobbies, university classes and careers. How we go about making these
selections is, at least in part, a reflection of our personalities.
Evocations are the reactions we produce in others, often quite unintentionally. To some
extent, we create the social environment that we inhabit.
Manipulations are the ways in which we intentionally attempt to influence others.
Someone who is anxious or frightened easily may try to influence the group to avoid scary
movies or risky activities.
-Adaptation conveys the notion that a central feature of personality concerns adaptive
functioning, accomplishing goals, coping, adjusting and dealing with the challenges and
problems we face as we go through life.
-Environment often poses challenges for people. Some of these are direct threats to
survival. Extremes of temperature pose the problem of maintaining thermal homeostasis.
Heights, snakes, spiders and strangers can all pose threats to survival.
Human beings have evolved solutions to these adaptive problems. Hunger pangs
motivate us to seek food etc.
At a psychological level, or fears of heights, snakes, spiders and strangers, most common
fears, help us to avoid or safely interact with these environmental threats to our survival.
Our social environment also poses adaptive challenges. We may desire the prestige of a
good job, but there are many other persons competing for the same positions. The way
in which we cope with our social environment, the challenges we encounter in our struggle
for belongingness, love and esteem, are central to an understanding of personality.
In addition to our physical and social environments, we have an intrapsychic
environment. Intrapsychic means ‘within the mind’. Memories, dreams etc.
-Three levels of personality analysis:
1. Like all others human nature
2. Like some others the level of individual and group differences
3. Like no others the individual uniqueness level
, Nomothetically: that is, as individual instances of general characteristics that are
distributed in the population, or should be studied idiograpically, as single, unique case.
Nomothetic research typically involves statistical comparisons of individuals or groups,
requiring samples of subjects on which to conduct research. Nomothetic research is typically
applied to identify universal human characteristics and dimensions of individual or group
differences.
Idiographic research typically focuses on a single subject, trying to observe general
principles that are manifest in a single life over time. Often, idiographic research results in
case studies or the psychological biography of a single person.
-The various views of researchers in personality stem not from the fact that one perspective
is right and the others wrong but , rather, from the fact that they are studying different
domains of knowledge.
A domain of knowledge is a special area of science and scholarship, in which
psychologists have focused on learning about some specific and limited aspects of human
nature. A domain of knowledge delineates the boundaries of researchers’ knowledge,
expertise and interests.
-Researchers have formed natural clusters of topics that fit together and are distinct from
other clusters of knowledge. Within these identifiable domains, researchers have developed
common methods for asking questions; have accumulated a foundation of known facts; and
have developed theoretical explanations, which account for what is known about
personality from the perspective of each domain.
In this way, the field of personality can be neatly cleaved into six distinct domains of
knowledge about human nature:
1. Personality is influenced by traits the person is born with or develops
dispositional domain.
2. By biological events biological domain.
3. By conflicts within the person’s own mind intrapsychic domain.
4. By personal and private thoughts, feelings, desires, beliefs and other subjective
experiences cognitive experiential domain.
5. By social, cultural and gendered positions in the world social and cultural domain.
6. By the adjustments that the person must make to the inevitable challenges of life
adjustment domain.
Within each of these domains, we focus on two key elements:
1. The theories that have been proposed within each domain, including the basic
assumptions about human nature.
2. The empirical research that has been accumulating within each of these domains.
-Dispositional domain: deals centrally with the ways in which individuals differ from one
another. Cuts across all the other domains. The reason for this is that individuals can
differ in their habitual emotions, in their habitual concepts of self, in their physiological
propensities and even in their intrapsychic mechanisms. However, what distinguishes the
dispositional domain is an interest in the number and nature of fundamental dispositions.
, The central goal of personality psychologists working in the dispositional domain is to
identify the most important ways in which individuals differ from one another. They are also
interested in the origin of the important individual differences and in how they develop and
are maintained.
-Biological domain: humans are, first and foremost, collections of biological systems, and
these systems provide the building blocks for behavior, thought and emotion.
As personality psychologists use the term biological approaches typically refers to three
areas of research within this general domain: genetics, psychophysiology and evolution.
Psychophysiology: within this domain, researchers summarize what is known about the
basis of personality in terms of nervous system functioning.
-The intrapsychic domain: deals with mental mechanisms of personality, many of which
operate outside of conscious awareness.
The predominant theory in this domain is Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis. This theory
begins with fundamental assumptions about the instinctual system, the sexual and
aggressive forces that are presumed to drive and energize much of human activity.
Considerable research reveals that sexual and aggressive motives are powerful, and their
manifestations in actual behavior can be studied empirically.
The intrapsychic domain also includes defence mechanisms, such as repression, denial
and projection, some of which have been examined in laboratory studies.
-Cognitive-experiential domain: focuses on cognition and subjective experience, such as
conscious thoughts, feelings, beliefs and desires about oneself and others. The psychological
mechanisms involved in subjective experience differ, however, in form and content from
one another.
One important element of our experience entails the self and self-concept. Descriptive
aspects of the self organize how we view ourselves: our knowledge of ourselves, our images
of past selves and our images of possible future selves.
The second aspect of human psychology that is included in this domain is intelligence.
Almost since the beginning of psychology, psychologists have tried to understand
differences in mental abilities and how we learn.
-Social and cultural domain: the assumption is that personality is not something that merely
resides within the heads, nervous systems and genes of individuals. Rather, personality
affects, and is affected by, the social and cultural context.
Different cultures may bring out different facets of our personalities in manifest
behavior.
-The adjustment domain: refers to the fact that personality plays a key role in how we cope
with, adapt and adjust to the ebb and flow of events in our day-to-day lives.
In this domain, certain personality features are related to poor adjustment and have
been designated as personality disorders.
