Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Week 9: Chapter 12: What is Personality, and How Do We Measure It?

The Psychoanalytic Approach

  • Emphasizes unconscious aspects of personality. Proposes that personality operates at the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. 
  • According to Freud, personality is comprised of the unconscious id that operates according to the pleasure principle, the conscious ego, and the moral directives of the superego. 
The Trait Approach
  • Attempts to describe personality by identifying the internal traits
  • Classified traits into three types: central, cardinal, and secondary
  • Five-factory theory proposed five core universal traits
    • Openness
    • Conscientiouness
    • Extraversion
    • Agreeableness
    • Neuroticism
Social Cognitive Approach
  • Evaluates environmental and cognitive factors that influence personality
  • Reciprocal determinism suggests that personality is due to the constant interaction between one's environment, one's behavior, and one's thoughts. 
The Humanistic Approach
  • Emphasizes one's drive toward uniqueness and self-actualization
  • The humanistic approach promotes self-awareness and positive interactions with others. 
Measuring Personality
  • Tools that assess personality should be reliable and valid. 
  • Personality inventories such as the MMPI-2 are objective forms that can reliably describe a person's traits if answered honestly. 
  • Projective tests are less structured. A person's responses are believed to reflect underlying unconscious concerns. 

That's all for this week! Personality, huh? Super interesting. Time to do some more homework; oh joy. Busy, busy, busy week! And happy birthday to my sister this week! :) Next Week is Chapters 13 & 14. Volleyball ended last night as well. :(

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