Dr.

Mahendrenath Motah
September 2016

Dr. Mahendrenath Motah

PERSONALITY
 Personality is the collection of
characteristic thoughts, feelings, and
behaviors that are associated with a
person.
 Personality traits are characteristic
behaviours and feelings that are consistent
and long lasting.

Dr. Mahendrenath Motah

 The ancient Greeks believed that people’s personalities depended on the
kind of humour, or fluid, most prevalent in their bodies.
 The ancient Greeks identified four humours—blood, phlegm, black bile,
and yellow bile—and categorized people’s personalities to correspond as
follows:
 Sanguine: Blood. Cheerful and passionate.
 Phlegmatic: Phlegm. Dull and unemotional.
 Melancholic: Black bile. Unhappy and depressed.
 Choleric: Yellow bile. Angry and hot-tempered.
 The Greek theory of personality remained influential well into the
eighteenth century.

Dr. Mahendrenath Motah

Freud’s Theory of Psychoanalysis
 According to psychoanalytic theory,
personalities arise because of attempts to
resolve conflicts between unconscious
sexual and aggressive impulses and
societal demands to restrain these
impulses.

Dr. Mahendrenath Motah

 Freud believed that most mental processes
are unconscious. He proposed that people
have three levels of awareness:
 The Conscious,
 The Preconscious, and
 The Unconscious

Dr. Mahendrenath Motah

 Freud proposed that personalities have
three components:

 The id,
 The ego, and
 The superego.

Dr. Mahendrenath Motah

Psychosexual Stages of Development
Freud proposed five stages of psychosexual development:
 The oral stage,
 The anal stage,
 The phallic stage,
 The latency stage, and
 The genital stage.
He believed that at each stage of development, children gain sexual
gratification, or sensual pleasure, from a particular part of their bodies.
Eachstage has special conflicts, and children’s ways of managing these conflicts influence
their personalities.

Dr. Mahendrenath Motah

 Carl Jung was a follower and close friend of
Freud’s. Like Freud, Jung believed that
unconscious conflicts are important in shaping
personality
 He believed the unconscious has two layers: the
personal unconscious, which resembled Freud’s
idea, and the collective unconscious, which
contains universal memories of the common
human past.

Dr. Mahendrenath Motah

 Alfred Adler, another follower of Freud and a
member of his inner circle, eventually broke away
from Freud and developed his own school of
thought, which he called individual psychology.
 Adler believed that the main motivations for
human behavior are not sexual or aggressive
urges but strivings for superiority.

Dr. Mahendrenath Motah

 The object-relations school of psychoanalysis emerged in the 1950s,
led by a group of psychoanalysts that included D. W. Winnicott and
Melanie Klein.
 The term object relations refers to the relationships that people have
with others, who are represented mentally as objects with certain
attributes.
 Object-relations theorists believe that people are motivated most by
attachments to others rather than by sexual and aggressive impulses.
 According to these theorists, the conflict between autonomy and the
need for other people plays a key role in shaping personality.

Dr. Mahendrenath Motah

 The school of behaviourism emerged in the
1910s, led by John B. Watson.
 Unlike psychodynamic theorists, behaviourists
study only observable behaviour.
 Their explanations of personality focus on
learning.
 Skinner, Bandura, and Walter Mischel all
proposed important behaviourist theories.

Dr. Mahendrenath Motah

 Skinner didn’t think that childhood played
an especially important role in shaping
personality.
 Instead, he thought that personality
develops over the whole life span.
 People’s responses change as they
encounter new situations.

Dr. Mahendrenath Motah

 Although Bandura agrees that personality arises
through learning, he believes that conditioning is
not an automatic, mechanical process.
 He and other theorists believe that cognitive
processes like thinking and reasoning are
important in learning.
 The kind of behaviourism they advocate is called
social-cognitive learning.

Dr. Mahendrenath Motah

 Walter Mischel, like Bandura, is a social-
cognitive theorist.
 Mischel’s research showed that situations
have a strong effect on people’s behaviour
and that people’s responses to situations
depend on their thoughts about the likely
consequences of their behaviour

Dr. Mahendrenath Motah

 Humanistic psychologists try to see people’s lives as those
people would see them.
 They tend to have an optimistic perspective on human
nature.
 They focus on the ability of human beings to think
consciously and rationally, to control their biological
urges, and to achieve their full potential.
 In the humanistic view, people are responsible for their
lives and actions and have the freedom and will to change
their attitudes and behavior.

Dr. Mahendrenath Motah

 Maslow described several characteristics that self-
actualizing people share:
 Awareness and acceptance of themselves
 Openness and spontaneity
 The ability to enjoy work and see work as a mission to
fulfill
 The ability to develop close friendships without being
overly dependent on other people
 A good sense of humor
 The tendency to have peak experiences that are spiritually
or emotionally satisfying

Dr. Mahendrenath Motah

 Carl Rogers, another humanistic psychologist,
proposed a theory called the person-centered
theory.
 In Rogers’s view, the self-concept is the most
important feature of personality, and it includes
all the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs people have
about themselves. Rogers believed that people
are aware of their self-concepts.

Dr. Mahendrenath Motah

 Some psychologists have proposed theories that
emphasize the genetic influences on personality.
 Empirical evidence for genetic contributions to
personality comes mainly from two kinds of
studies: studies of children’s temperaments and
heritability studies.

Dr. Mahendrenath Motah

 Temperament refers to innate personality
features or dispositions.
 Babies show particular temperaments soon after
birth.
 Temperaments that researchers have studied
include reactivity, which refers to a baby’s
excitability or responsiveness, and soothability,
which refers to the ease or difficulty of calming an
upset baby

Dr. Mahendrenath Motah

 Heritability studies also provide evidence for genetic
contributions to personality.
 Heritability is a mathematical estimate that indicates how
much of a trait’s variation in a population can be
attributed to genes.
 Researchers have shown that identical twins raised
together are more similar than fraternal twins raised
together in traits such as positive emotionality, negative
emotionality, and constraint.

Dr. Mahendrenath Motah

 The environment also has important influences
on personality. These include peer relationships
and the kinds of situations a child encounters.
 Children’s temperaments are likely to influence
their peer relationships and the situations they
encounter.
 Similarly, peers and situations can modify
children’s personality characteristics.

Dr. Mahendrenath Motah

 Evolutionary theorists explain personality in
terms of its adaptive value.

Dr. Mahendrenath Motah

 Cultural psychologists have noted that some aspects of personality
differ across cultural groups.
 Researchers believe that culture influences aggressiveness in males.
 Culture also influences altruism.
 Cultural psychologists face the difficult challenge of studying and
describing differences among cultures without stereotyping any
particular culture.
 Ideally, cultural psychologists acknowledge that all members of a
culture don’t behave similarly.
 Variation exists within every culture, in terms of both individuals and
subcultures.
 Cultural psychologists also try not to exaggerate differences among
cultures.

Dr. Mahendrenath Motah