PERSONALITY:

THEORY AND
MEASUREMENT

CHAPTER 9
 OBJECTIVES:
● At the end of this lesson, the student must able to:
● Describe the psychoanalytic perspective and how it contributed to the
study of personality
● Explain the trait perspective and the “Big Five” trait model
● Identify the contributions of learning theory to understanding personality
● Describe the humanistic-existential perspective on personality
● Describe the different kind of test psychologists use to measure
personality
 Describe the psychoanalytic perspective
and how it contributed to the study of
personality

Focus of Research
● Unconscious conflict
● Drives such as sex, aggression, and the need for
superiority come into conflict with law, social
rules, and moral codes.
●View of Personality
● Levels of Mental life – unconscious,
preconscious, conscious
● Three structures of personality – id, ego, superego
● Five stages of psychosexual development oral,
anal, phallic, latency, genital
Personality
The term “personality” comes
from the Latin persona, or the mask
that people present to the outside
world.
Personality
The reasonably stable patterns of
emotions, motives, behavior that
distinguish one person from another.
Personality
No two people, not even
identical twins, have exactly the
same personalities
Psychodynamic Theory
Sigmund Freud’s perspective, which
emphasizes the importance of
unconscious motives and conflicts as
forces that determine behavior.
● UNCONSCIOUS
● Drives, urges, or instincts that are beyond our
awareness but that nevertheless motivate most of our
words, feelings, and actions.
● Meaning behind dreams, slips of the tongue, and certain
kinds of forgetting, called repression (forcing of unwanted,
anxiety-ridden experiences into the unconscious as a
defense against the pain of that anxiety).
● PRECONSCIOUS
● Contains all those elements that are not conscious but can become
conscious either quite readily or with some difficulty.
● Two sources: conscious perception and unconscious
● Conscious perception: what a person perceives is conscious for only a
transitory period, it quickly passes into the preconscious when the
focus of attention shifts to another idea; largely free from anxiety.
● Unconscious: in a disguised form—dreams, slips of the tongue, or
defense mechanisms
CONSCIOUS
● Can be defined as those mental elements in
awareness at any given point in time;
directly available to us
 STRUCTURE
OF
PERSONALITY
 ID
The psychic structure, present at
birth, that represents physiological
drives and is fully unconscious.
 ID
● No contact with reality
● Sole function is to seek pleasure
(pleasure principle) without regard
for what is proper or just.
 EGO
● The only region of the mind in
contact with reality
● Governed by the reality principle
● Decision-making or executive branch
of personality
 SUPEREGO
The third psychic structure, which
functional as a moral and sets forth-
high standards for behavior.
 SUPEREGO
● Moral and ideal aspects of personality
● Guided by the moralistic and idealistic
principles
● Has no contact with the outside world,
therefore is unrealistic in its demands for
perfection.
PSYCHOSEXUAL
DEVELOPMENT
Oral stage

The first stage of psychosexual

development, during which gratification is
hypothesized to be attained primarily
through oral activities.
Oral stage

AGE: 0 – 12 months
EROGENEOUS ZONE: Mouth; sucking,
biting, chewing
ACTIVITIES: Gained by oral stimulation;
breastfeeding and thumb sucking
Oral stage
ORAL RECEPTIVE/DEPENDENT: Gullible,
passive, and need lots of attention, affection and
attachment.
ORAL AGGRESSIVE: Argumentative and
exploitative
ORAL FIXATION: smoking, nail biting and
drinking.
Anal stage

The second stage of psychosexual

development, when gratification is attained
through anal activities.
Anal stage

AGE: 1 – 3 years
EROGENEOUS ZONE: Anus; bowel and
bladder control
ACTIVITIES: Toilet training
Anal stage

ANAL EXPULSIVE: Disorderly, messy,

destructive or cruel
ANAL RETENTIVE: Stubborn, stingy,
orderly, and compulsively clean; difficulty in
expressing.
Anal stage

ANAL TRIAD: (1) Orderliness or Neatness,

(2) Stinginess or Miserliness, and (3)
Obstinacy or Stubbornness
Phallic stage

The third stage of psychosexual

development, characterized by a shift of
libido to the phallic region.
Phallic stage

AGE: 3 –6 years
EROGENEOUS ZONE: Genitals
ACTIVITIES: Awakening of sexuality;
Playing with genitals
Phallic stage
Oedipus Conflict/Oedipus Complex: A
conflict of the phallic stage in which the boy wishes
to possess his mother sexually and perceives his
father and as a rival in love. Male child wants to kill
his father so he can have sex with his mother.
Phallic stage

Electra Conflict/Electra Complex: A

conflict of the phallic stage in which the girl
longs for her father and resents her mother.
Girls loves her father and competes with her
mother.
Latency stage

A phase of psychosexual
development characterized by repression
of sexual impulses.
Latency stage

AGE: 6-12 years

EROGENEOUS ZONE: NONE
ACTIVITIES: Same-sex peer and play
interactions.
Also called: HIDDEN STAGE OR HIDDEN
SEXUALITY
Genital stage

The mature stage of psychosexual

development, characterized by preferred
expression of libido through intercourse
with an adult of the other gender.
Genital stage

AGE: 12 - puberty
EROGENEOUS ZONE: Masturbation
ACTIVITIES: Maturation; Sexual urges
reawaken; Pleasure through sexual intercourse
with non relatives
MATURITY

Activities: Hypothetically, maturity would

be characterized by a strong ego in control of the
id and the superego and by an ever-expanding
realm of consciousness.
The final psychosexual stage following
infancy, latency, and the genital period.
 DEFENSE
MECHANISMS
DEFENSE MECHANISMS
To avoid dealing directly with sexual and
aggressive implosives and to defend itself
against the anxiety that accompanies them.

- Tool of the ego to control

- Without this, people will suffer from neurosis
Repression
 It forces threatening feelings into the unconscious
 Blocking a wish or desire from conscious
expression.
 E.g., A young girl may permanently repress her
hostility for a younger sister because her hateful
feelings create too much anxiety.
Denial
 Refusal to accept unpleasant reality
 Reality is distorted to make it suit to the
individual’s wishes
 E.g., An alcoholic fails to acknowledge that he is
addicted to alcohol
 E.g., Heavy smokers individual may refuse to admit
that smoking is bad for their health.
Reaction Formation
 Doing things that is opposite with what you feel
 E.g., Beauty pageant contestants who got slipped,
but stood up and continue to walk, plastic friends.
 E.g., A young boy who bullies a young girl because,
on a subconscious level, he’s attracted to her.
Displacement
 People can redirect their unacceptable urges onto a
variety of people or objects so that the original impulse
is disguised or concealed.
 E.g., a woman who is angry at her roommate may
displace her anger onto her employees, her pet cat, or a
stuffed animal. She remains friendly to her roommate,
but does not exaggerate or overdo her friendliness.
Fixation
 The permanent attachment of the libido onto an
earlier, more primitive stage of development.
 People who continually derive pleasure from
eating, smoking, or talking may have an oral
fixation, whereas those who are obsessed with
neatness and orderliness may possess an anal
fixation.
Regression
 Once the libido has passed a developmental stage, it
may, during times of stress and anxiety, revert
back to that earlier stage.
 E.g., A person stuck in traffic may experience road
rage, the kind of tantrum they’d never have in their
everyday life but helps them cope with the stress of
driving.
Regression
 E.g., Due to the pressure of college, Betito starts
sucking his thumb.
 Viray begins to sleep with his favorite childhood
stuffed animal for comfort
 Nurse makes an error in giving medication and
starts crying.
Projection
 Attributing the unwanted impulse to an external
object, usually another person.
 E.g., instead of saying, “I love him,” the paranoid
person says, “I hate him.”
 E.g., Fiona blames the instructor for a bad grades
when she didn’t study.
 E.g., Princess cheats on his spouse and blames the
spouse for cheating.
Introjection
 Whereby people incorporate positive qualities of
another person into their own ego.
 E.g., an adolescent may introject or adopt the
mannerisms, values, or lifestyle of a movie star.
 E.g., A little boy tells his younger sister to let him
hold her hand as his mother used to hold her hand
while crossing the road.
Sublimation

 Helps both the individual and the social group.

 Doing this that are socially acceptable, positive
and productive
 Highest form or most mature defense
mechanism
Sublimation
 E.g., Maria doesn’t like being alone; it makes
her feel unwanted and is deeply hurtful. To
compensate, she has joined so many social
groups at school nearly every moment outside of
class is filled with club activities. (Staying Busy
to Overcome Loneliness)
Rationalization
 Is the substitution of a safe & reasonable
explanation for the true cause of behavior.
 E.g., A student who cheats on test may say: “I
only cheated on a few questions, I know most of
the answers.”
Sour Grape
 Pretending to dislike what one really likes
 E.g., A girl is very excited to attend the debut party of
her friend but unfortunately she is not invited so she
may rationalize by saying that she is not really
interested to attend.
 E.g., A student who fails to get into medical school and
justifies herself by saying “I didn’t really want to be a
doctor anyway
Sweet-Lemon
 Pretending to like what one really dislikes
 E.g., A student who has shift to another course, say business,
because of failure to make the grade in medicine course, may
rationalize by saying that he is really interested in business
course.
 E.g., A student who has failed in an examination several
times may argue that only the examiners can pass such
examinations
Undoing
 “cancel out” or “make up” for bad act by doing good.
 E.g., After a fight, a man brings his wife out for a candle light
dinner
 E.g., Excessively praising someone after having insulted
 E.g., A husband who showers his wife roses and chocolates
on Valentine’s Day may be unconsciously seeking to undo a
year of neglect
Compensation
 People overachieve in one area to compensate for
failures in another
 It may positive or negative
 E.g., Individuals with poor family lives may direct their
energy into excelling above and beyond what is required
at work.
● E.g., “I may not know how to cook but I can sure do the
dishes.”
Withdrawal

● It someone faces failure or rejection they

try to withdraw from that situation
● E.g., Fear of rejection in making friends.
Intellectualization
 Focuses on the cognitive aspects wherein the
person tends to isolate the scene from his
emotions
 Helps us adapt to a painful event.
 E.g., A cancer patient focused on discovering
his cure instead of crying.
Indentification

 Modeling someone’s behavior after the

behavior of someone else
 E.g., Abused children tend to become
abusive parents.
 Analytical Psychology
Jung’s psychoanalytic theory,
which emphasizes the collective
unconscious and archetypes.
 Collective unconscious
Jung’s hypothesized store of vague
memories that represents the history of
humankind.
 Inferiority Complex
Feelings of inferiority
hypothesized by Adler to serve as a
central motivating force.
 Creative self
According to Adler, the self-aware
aspects of personality that strives
to achieve its full potential.
 Individual Psychology
Adler’s psychoanalytic theory,
which emphasizes feelings of
inferiority and the creative self.
 Psychosocial Development
Erikson’s theory of personality and
development, which emphasizes social
relationships and eight stages of
growth.
 Ego Identity
A firm sense of who one is and
what one stands for.
Trait perspective and the “Big Five” trait
model.

Focus of Research

Rely on the mathematical technique of factor

analysis to catalog and organize basic human
personality traits
View of Personality
Based on theory of Hippocrates and work of Gordon
Allport
Eysenck’s two-dimensional model: introversion-
extraversion and emotional stability-instability
Current emphasis on the five-factor model (the “Big Five”)
extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness,
neuroticism, openness to experience.
 Trait
A relatively stable aspect of personality
that is inferred from behavior and
assumed to give rise to consistent
behavior.
 Introversion
A trait characterized by intense
imagination and the tendency to
inhibit impulses.
 Extraversion
A trait characterized by tendencies to
be socially outgoing and to express
feelings and impulses freely.
The contributors of learning theory of understand
personality

Focus of Research

Behaviorists focus on situational factors that determine

behavior
Social cognitive emphasis on observational learning and
person variables competencies subjective values and self-
efficacy expectations
View of Personality
- Watson saw personality as plastic and determined by
external, situational variables
- Skinner believed that society conditions individuals
into wanting certain things
- Bandura develop social cognitive theory, which focuses
on learning by observation and on the cognitive
processes that underlie personal differences
 Social Cognitive Theory
A cognitively oriented learning theory in
which observational learning and person
variables such as values and expectancies play
major roles in individual differences.
 Gender-typing
The process by which males and females
come to display behavior patterns consistent
with stereotypical masculine and feminine
gender roles.
 Gender-schema theory
A cognitive view of gender-typing that processes that
once girls and boys become aware of their anatomic
sex, they begin to blend their self-expectations and
self-esteem with the ways in which they fit the gender
roles prescribed in a given culture .
Humanistic-existential perspective on
personality

Focus of Research

The experience of being human and developing

one’s unique potential within an often hostile
environment.
View Personality

People have inborn drives to become what

they are capable of being
Carl Roger’s unconditional positive regard
leads to self-esteem, which facilitates
individual growth and development
 Humanism
The view that people are capable of free
choice, self-fulfillment, and ethical
behavior.
 Existentialism
The view that people are completely
free and responsible for their own
behavior.
 Self-actualization
In humanistic theory, the innate
tendency to strive to realize one’s
potential.
 Unconditional positive regard
A persistent expression of esteem for the value of a
person, but not necessarily an unqualified
acceptance of all the person’s behaviors.
 Conditional positive regard
Judgment of another person’s value on the
basis of the acceptability of that person’s
behaviors.
 Conditions of worth
Standards by which the value of a person is
judged
The sociocultural perspective on
personality .

Focus of Research
The roles of ethnicity, gender, culture, and
socioeconomic status in personality
formation and behavior.
View of Personality

- Development differs in individualistic and

collectivist societies
- Discrimination, poverty, and acculturation
affect self-concept and self-esteem
 Sociocultural perspective
The view that focuses on the roles of ethnicity,
gender, culture, and socioeconomic status in
personality formation, behavior, and mental
processes.
 Individualist
A person who defines herself or himself in
terms of personal traits and gives priority to
his or her own goals.
 Collectivist
A person who defines herself or himself
in terms of relationships to other people
and groups and gives priority to group
goals.
 Acculturation
The process of adaptation in which immigrants
and native groups identify with a new,
dominant culture by learning about that culture
and making behavioral and attitudinal changes.
The different kinds of tests psychologists use to
measure personality.

The two most widely used types of personality

tests are objective tests and projective tests.
 Objective tests present respondents with a
standardized group of test items in the form of
a questionnaire. Responses are limited to a
specific range of answers. The MMPI is the
most widely used objective test.
 In projective tests, people are shown
ambiguous stimuli such as inkblots or drawings and
asked to say what they look like. People project
their own personalities into their responses. The
Rorschach inkblot test and the Thematic
Apperception Test (TAT) are examples of projective
tests.
 Reliability
In psychological testing, the consistency or
stability of test scores from one testing to
another.
 Validity
In psychological testing, the degree to
which a test measures what it is supposed to
measure.
 Standardization
In psychological testing, the process by which one
obtains and organizes test scores from various
population groups, so that the results of a person’s
completing a test can be compared to those of others of
his or her sex, in his or her age group, and so on.
 Objective tests
Tests whose items must be answered in a
specified, limited manner; tests whose items
have concrete answers that are considered
correct.
 Projective tests
A psychological test that presents
ambiguous stimuli onto which the test taker
projects his or her own personality in
making a response.
It's good to be good at playing defence,
but the best defence is a strong offence.
-Chrystia Freeland
Thank you!
Do you have any
questions?