Psychology of Personality - Lecture Notes

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Psychology Of Personality - Lecture notes - psych jan 12

January 12 - Class 2 

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

2:24 PM 

Chapter 1: The study of the person

Persona: Latin for "mask"

Book: An individuals characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior, together with the psychological mechanisms - hidden or not - behind these patterns 

Better definition: "Set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individuals that are organized and relatively enduring and that influence his or her interactions with, and adaptations to, the environment." 

Strong situation: lots of pressure for you to act in a particular way

● Unlikely to see personality  

Psychology triad: How people

1. Think 
2. Feel 
3. behave 

• Sub disciplines intersect, but the greatest overlap is with clinical psychology 
• Personality disorders 
• Personality psychology: Normal personality or normal individual difference - Clinical :

extreme manifestation of personality psychology 

• Personality is a risk factor for psychopathology 

3 levels of personality analysis : most are studied in Human Nature, and Individual and Group

Differences  

1. Human Nature

• How we are "like all others" 
• Focus on identifying traits and mechanisms

1. Individual and Group Differences 

• How we are "like some others"
• Ex) Sex, gender, social class

1. Individual Uniqueness 

• How we are like "no others"  

Idiographic Approach

Really good ways to do it, and may be very useful to use across radars

Person Centered: Goal is to understand one person, what makes people unique PROS:

• Complete understanding of a single individual 
• Great for important people CONS:
• Subjective, not easily falsifiable
• Need to be able to get a lot of information about the person 
• Not generalized
• Need a biographer

Example: Dodge Morgan: First American to sail to nonstop around he world, a feat in which he cut the prior time in half

• Completed battery of psychology tests on an almost daily basis 
• Results correlated with content analysis from Morgan's log; biographical, historical information 
• Goal: To learn about what kind of person can persevere to successfully  

Nomothetic Approach:

Variable-centered approach: Focus on the relation between variables

Example: Self-esteem and life satisfaction PROS:

• Objective, can be tested 
• More complete understanding of more people 
• Great for everyday people like you and me

CONS:

• Boring 
• Difficult, need to understand stats 

"Mission Impossible" Requires a basic paradigm

• Understanding everything about a person/people at once is impossible

❍ Think of  an important behavior that you performed recently and ALL of the reasons for the behavior 

• The basic paradigm (approach) involved limiting the focus at any one time so the task is do-able
• Focus on one things at a time

Basic Approaches: Not mutually exclusive

• Difference approaches address different questions

❍ Each ignores many key concerns

• Not one big theory that works because every theory has something wrong with them

Interested in "Why" people do something - psychoanalyst

"who" should you hire - Trait approach 

Characteristics of Personality Psychology