PERSONALITY

INTRODUCTION
Personality" is a dynamic and organized set of characteristics possessed
by an individual that uniquely influences their environment, cognition,
emotions, motivations, and behaviors in various situations. The word
personality originates from the Latin persona, which means "mask"

Personality also pertains to the pattern of thoughts, feelings, social

adjustments, and behaviors persistently exhibited over time that
strongly influences one's expectations, self-perceptions, values, and
attitudes.
 INTRODUCTION
• Personality also predicts human reactions to other people, problems, and
stress.
• Personality psychology is a branch of psychology that examines personality
and its variation among individuals. It aims to show how people are
individually different due to psychological forces.
• Its areas of focus include:
• construction of a coherent picture of the individual and their major psychological
processes
• investigation of individual psychological differences
• investigation of human nature and psychological similarities between individuals
 PERSONALITY THEORIES
There are different personality theories and this includes;
• Type theories
• Psychoanalytic theories
• Behaviourist theories
• Social cognitive theories
• Humanistic theories
• Biopsychological theories
• Evolutionary theories, and
• Drive theories
 TYPE THEORIES OF PERSONALITY
• Personality type refers to the psychological classification of people
into different classes. Personality types are distinguished from
personality traits, which come in different degrees.
• According to type theories, there are two types of people, introverts
and extroverts. According to trait theories, introversion and
extroversion are part of a continuous dimension with many people in
the middle. The idea of psychological types originated in the
theoretical work of Carl Jung, specifically in his 1921 book
Psychologische Typen (Psychological Types) and William Marston
(Sharp, 1987).
 TYPE THEORIES OF PERSONALITY (Contd.)
• Briggs and Myers also added another personality dimension to their
type indicator to measure whether a person prefers to use a judging
or perceiving function when interacting with the external world.
Therefore, they included questions designed to indicate whether
someone wishes to come to conclusions (judgement) or to keep
options open (perception).
• During the 1950s, Meyer Friedman and his co-workers defined what
they called Type A and Type B behavior patterns. They theorized that
intense, hard-driving Type A personalities had a higher risk of
coronary disease because they are "stress junkies." Type B people, on
the other hand, tended to be relaxed, less competitive, and lower in
risk. There was also a Type AB mixed profile.
 PSYCHO-ANALYTICAL THEORIES
• Psychoanalytic theories explain human behavior in terms of the
interaction of various components of personality. Sigmund Freud was
the founder of this school of thought. He drew on the physics of his
day (thermodynamics) to coin the term psychodynamics. Based on
the idea of converting heat into mechanical energy, Freud proposed
psychic energy could be converted into behavior. His theory places
central importance on dynamic, unconscious psychological conflicts.
 PSYCHO-ANALYTICAL THEORIES (Contd.)
• Freud divides human personality into three significant components:
the id, ego and super-ego. The id acts according to the pleasure
principle, demanding immediate gratification of its needs regardless
of external environment; the ego then must emerge in order to
realistically meet the wishes and demands of the id in accordance
with the outside world, adhering to the reality principle. Finally, the
superego (conscience) inculcates moral judgment and societal rules
upon the ego, thus forcing the demands of the id to be met not only
realistically but morally.
 PSYCHO-ANALYTICAL THEORIES (Contd.)
• Further, Freud proposed five psychosexual stages of personality development.
He believed adult personality is dependent upon early childhood experiences
and largely determined by age five. Fixations that develop during the infantile
stage contribute to adult personality and behavior.
• One of Sigmund Freud's earlier associates, Alfred Adler, agreed with Freud
that early childhood experiences are important to development, and believed
birth order may influence personality development. Adler believed that the
oldest child was the individual who would set high achievement goals in order
to gain attention lost when the younger siblings were born. He believed the
middle children were competitive and ambitious. He reasoned that this
behavior was motivated by the idea of surpassing the firstborn's
achievements. He added, however, that the middle children were often not as
concerned about the glory attributed to their behavior. He also believed the
youngest would be more dependent and sociable.
 PSYCHO-ANALYTICAL THEORIES (Contd.)
• Heinz Kohut thought similarly to Freud's idea of transference. He used
narcissism as a model of how people develop their sense of self.
Narcissism is the exaggerated sense of self in which one is believed to
exist in order to protect one's low self-esteem and sense of
worthlessness. Kohut had a significant impact on the field by
extending Freud's theory of narcissism and introducing what he called
the 'self-object transferences' of mirroring and idealization. In other
words, children need to idealize and emotionally "sink into" and
identify with the idealized competence of admired figures such as
parents or older siblings. They also need to have their self-worth
mirrored by these people. Such experiences allow them to thereby
learn the self-soothing and other skills that are necessary for the
development of a healthy sense of self.
 BEHAVIOURIST THEORIES
• Behaviorists explain personality in terms of the effects external
stimuli have on behavior. The approaches used to evaluate the
behavioral aspect of personality are known as behavioral theories or
learning-conditioning theories. These approaches were a radical shift
away from Freudian philosophy. One of the major tenets of this
concentration of personality psychology is a strong emphasis on
scientific thinking and experimentation. This school of thought was
developed by B. F. Skinner who put forth a model which emphasized
the mutual interaction of the person or "the organism" with its
environment.
 BEHAVIOURIST THEORIES (Contd.)
• Skinner believed children do bad things because the behavior obtains
attention that serves as a reinforcer. For example: a child cries
because the child's crying in the past has led to attention. These are
the response, and consequences. The response is the child crying, and
the attention that child gets is the reinforcing consequence. According
to this theory, people's behavior is formed by processes such as
operant conditioning. Skinner put forward a "three term contingency
model" which helped promote analysis of behavior based on the
"Stimulus - Response - Consequence Model" in which the critical
question is: "Under which circumstances or antecedent 'stimuli' does
the organism engage in a particular behavior or 'response', which in
turn produces a particular 'consequence'?"
 BEHAVIOURIST THEORIES (Contd.)
• Richard Herrnstein extended this theory by accounting for attitudes
and traits. An attitude develops as the response strength (the
tendency to respond) in the presences of a group of stimuli become
stable. Rather than describing conditionable traits in non-behavioral
language, response strength in a given situation accounts for the
environmental portion. Herrstein also saw traits as having a large
genetic or biological component, as do most modern behaviorists.
 SOCIAL COGNITIVE THEORIES
• In cognitive theory, behavior is explained as guided by cognitions (e.g.
expectations) about the world, especially those about other people. Cognitive
theories are theories of personality that emphasize cognitive processes, such
as thinking and judging.
• Albert Bandura, a social learning theorist suggested the forces of memory and
emotions worked in conjunction with environmental influences. Bandura was
known mostly for his "Bobo doll experiment". During these experiments,
Bandura video taped a college student kicking and verbally abusing a bobo
doll. He then showed this video to a class of kindergarten children who were
getting ready to go out to play. When they entered the play room, they saw
bobo dolls, and some hammers. The people observing these children at play
saw a group of children beating the doll. He called this study and his findings
observational learning, or modeling.
 SOCIAL COGNITIVE THEORIES (Contd.)
• Cognitive-Experiential Self-Theory (CEST) is another cognitive
personality theory. Developed by Seymour Epstein, CEST argues that
humans operate by way of two independent information processing
systems: experiential system and rational system. The experiential
system is fast and emotion-driven. The rational system is slow and
logic-driven. These two systems interact to determine our goals,
thoughts, and behavior.
• Personal construct psychology (PCP) is a theory of personality
developed by the American psychologist George Kelly in the 1950s.
Kelly's fundamental view of personality was that people are like naive
scientists who see the world through a particular lens, based on their
uniquely organized systems of construction, which they use to
anticipate events.
 HUMANISTIC THEORIES
• Humanistic psychology emphasizes that people have free will and that
this plays an active role in determining how they behave. Accordingly,
humanistic psychology focuses on subjective experiences of persons
as opposed to forced, definitive factors that determine behavior.[33]
Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers were proponents of this view,
which is based on the "phenomenal field" theory of Combs and Snygg
(1949).
• Rogers and Maslow were among a group of psychologists that worked
together for a decade to produce the Journal of Humanistic
Psychology. This journal was primarily focused on viewing individuals
as a whole, rather than focusing solely on separate traits and
processes within the individual.
 HUMANISTIC THEORIES (Contd.)
• Maslow spent much of his time studying what he called
"self-actualizing persons", those who are "fulfilling themselves and
doing the best they are capable of doing". Maslow believes all who
are interested in growth move towards self-actualizing (growth,
happiness, satisfaction) views. Many of these people demonstrate a
trend in dimensions of their personalities. Characteristics of
self-actualizers according to Maslow include the four key dimensions:
• Awareness
• Reality and problem centred
• Acceptance
• Unhostile sense of humor
BIO-PSYCHOLOGICAL MODELS
• Biology plays a very important role in the development of personality.
The study of the biological level in personality psychology focuses
primarily on identifying the role of genetic determinants and how
they mold individual personalities.
• Some of the earliest thinking about possible biological bases of
personality grew out of the case of Phineas Gage. In an 1848 accident,
a large iron rod was driven through Gage's head, and his personality
apparently changed as a result, although descriptions
 Genetic basis of personality
• Ever since the Human Genome Project allowed for a much more in depth
comprehension of genetics, there has been an ongoing controversy involving
heritability, personality traits, and environmental vs. genetic influence on
personality. The human genome is known to play a role in the development of
personality.
• DNA-environment interactions are important in the development of
personality because this relationship determines what part of the DNA code
is actually made into proteins that will become part of an individual. While
different choices are made available by the genome, in the end, the
environment is the ultimate determinant of what becomes activated. Small
changes in DNA in individuals are what leads to the uniqueness of every
person as well as differences in looks, abilities, brain functioning, and all the
factors that culminate to develop a cohesive personality.
 Genetic basis of personality
• Twin studies have also been important in the creation of the five
factor personality model: neuroticism, extraversion, openness,
agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Neuroticism and extraversion
are the two most widely studied traits. Individuals scoring high in trait
extraversion more often display characteristics such as impulsiveness,
sociability, and activeness. Individuals scoring high in trait neuroticism
are more likely to be moody, anxious, or irritable. Identical twins,
however, have higher correlations in personality traits than fraternal
twins. One study measuring genetic influence on twins in five
different countries found that the correlations for identical twins were
.50, while for fraternal they were about .20. (Lohelin & Nichols, 1976)
 EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
• Charles Darwin is the founder of the theory of the evolution of the
species. The evolutionary approach to personality psychology is based
on this theory. This theory examines how individual personality
differences are based on natural selection. Through natural selection
organisms change over time through adaptation and selection. Traits
are developed and certain genes come into expression based on an
organism's environment and how these traits aid in an organism's
survival and reproduction.
• Polymorphisms, such as sex and blood type, are forms of diversity
which evolve to benefit a species as a whole.
 EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
• The theory of evolution has wide-ranging implications on personality
psychology. Personality viewed through the lens of evolutionary
biology places a great deal of emphasis on specific traits that are most
likely to aid in survival and reproduction, such as conscientiousness,
sociability, emotional stability, and dominance.
• The social aspects of personality can be seen through an evolutionary
perspective. Specific character traits develop and are selected for
because they play an important and complex role in the social
hierarchy of organisms. Such characteristics of this social hierarchy
include the sharing of important resources, family and mating
interactions, and the harm or help organisms can bestow upon one
another.
 DRIVES THEORY
• In the 1930s, John Dollard and Neal Elgar Miller met at Yale
University, and began an attempt to integrate drives (see Drive
theory), into a theory of personality, basing themselves on the work
of Clark Hull. They began with the premise that personality could be
equated with the habitual responses exhibited by an individual – their
habits. From there, they determined that these habitual responses
were built on secondary, or acquired drives.
• Secondary drives are internal needs directing the behaviour of an
individual that results from learning.
 DRIVES THEORY
• Acquired drives are learned, by and large in the manner described by
classical conditioning. When we are in a certain environment and
experience a strong response to a stimulus, we internalize cues from
the said environment.
• When we find ourselves in an environment with similar cues, we
begin to act in anticipation of a similar stimulus. Thus, we are likely to
experience anxiety in an environment with cues similar to one where
we have experienced pain or fear – such as the dentist's office.
 PERSONALITY DISORDER
A personality disorder is a mental health condition that involves
long-lasting, all-encompassing, disruptive patterns of thinking,
behavior, mood and relating to others. These patterns cause a person
significant distress and/or impair their ability to function.
 TYPES OF PERSONALITY DISORDER
• The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5),
organizes the 10 types of personality disorders into three main
clusters (categories).
• Cluster A
• Paranoid personality disorder
• Schizoid personality disorder
• Schizotypal personality disorder
 CLUSTER A PERSONALITY DISORDERS
• Paranoid personality disorder: The main feature of this condition is
paranoia, which is a relentless mistrust and suspicion of others
without adequate reason for suspicion. People with paranoid
personality disorder often believe others are trying to demean, harm
or threaten them.
• Schizoid personality disorder: This condition is marked by a consistent
pattern of detachment from and general disinterest in interpersonal
relationships. People with schizoid personality disorder have a limited
range of emotions when interacting with others.
• Schizotypal personality disorder: People with this condition display a
consistent pattern of intense discomfort with and limited need for
close relationships. Relationships may be hindered by their distorted
views of reality, superstitions and unusual behaviors.
 CLUSTER B PERSONALITY DISORDER
• Antisocial personality disorder (ASPD): People with ASPD show a lack of
respect toward others and don’t follow socially accepted norms or rules.
• Borderline personality disorder (BPD): This condition is marked by difficulty
with emotional regulation, resulting in low self-esteem, mood swings,
impulsive behaviors and subsequent relationship difficulties.
• Histrionic personality disorder: This condition is marked by intense, unstable
emotions and a distorted self-image. For people with histrionic personality
disorder, their self-esteem depends on the approval of others and doesn’t
come from a true feeling of self-worth.
• Narcissistic personality disorder: This condition involves a consistent pattern
of perceived superiority and grandiosity, an excessive need for praise and
admiration and a lack of empathy for others.
 CLUSTER C PERSONALITY DISORDERS
• Avoidant personality disorder: People with this condition have chronic
feelings of inadequacy and are highly sensitive to being negatively judged by
others.
• Dependent personality disorder: This condition is marked by a constant and
excessive need to be cared for by someone else. It also involves
submissiveness, a need for constant reassurance and the inability to make
decisions. People with dependent personality disorder often become very
close to another person and spend great effort trying to please that person.
• Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD): This condition is marked
by a consistent and extreme need for orderliness, perfectionism and control
(with no room for flexibility) that ultimately slows or interferes with
completing a task. It can also interfere with relationships.
DIFERENCES BETWEEN PERSONALITY STYLE AND
DISORDER
The difference between personality style and a personality disorder can
often be determined by assessing how the person’s personality affects
different parts of their life, including:
• Work
• Relationships
• Feelings/emotions
• Self-identity
• Awareness of reality
• Behavior and impulse control
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