01 - 13 Personality

13 Personality

CHAPTER 13 PERSONALITY © ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/DEMONOID For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk

462 CHAPTER 13 PERSONALITY applied to understand personality only in the past couple of decades. In reviewing these theories, we raise a question that has never been satisfactorily answered: To what degree are our beliefs, emotions, and actions free and in what ways are they determined by causes beyond our control? Are we basically good, neutral, or evil? Fixed or modifiable? Active or passive in controlling our destinies? These are not empirical questions, and theories of personality do not attempt to answer them explicitly. But each theoretical approach contains implicit answers – a set of distinctive underlying assumptions about human nature. Historically, these more philosophical factors have been as important as the empirical data in provoking controversies and in winning converts for the competing accounts of personality. ASSESSMENT OF PERSONALITY Personality can be defined as the distinctive and characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior that make up an individual’s personal style of interacting with the physical and social environment. When we are asked to describe an individual’s personality, we are likely to use terms referring to personality traits – adjectives such as extroverted and conscientious. Personality psychologists have attempted to devise formal methods for describing and measuring personality, which go beyond our everyday use of trait terms in three ways. First, they seek to reduce the potential set of trait terms to a manageable set that will still encompass the diversity of human personality. Second, they attempt to ensure that their instruments for measuring personality traits are reliable and valid. Finally, they do empirical research to discover the relationships among traits and between traits and specific behaviors. One way to begin the task of deriving a comprehensive but manageable number of traits is to consult a dictionary. It is assumed that through the process of linguistic evolution a language will encode most, if not all, of the important distinctions among individuals that make a difference in everyday life. Language embodies the accumulated experience of the culture, and the dictionary is the written record of that experience. The idea of examining a language to cull the characteristics that distinguish people dates back to Galton and Rumelin in the late nineteenth century, and to Klages and Baumgarten in the early twentieth century. In the 1930s Allport and Odbert (1936) recorded approximately 18,000 words in the English dictionary that refer to characteristics of behavior – nearly 5 percent of all the words in the dictionary! Next, they reduced the list to about 4,500 terms that represented the most typical traits. For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk We also return to a major theme that we introduced in Chapter 3: the interaction between nature and nurture. In Chapter 3 we discussed how innate biological factors interact with events in an individual’s environment to determine the course of development, focusing particularly on factors that make us all alike. We considered, for example, how innately determined sequences of maturation cause all children to go through the same stages of development in the same sequence, regardless of differences in their environments. In this chapter we focus on the biological and environmental factors that make us different from one another – in other words, the factors that create individuality. First, however, we discuss how we measure personality. Subsequent researchers have used such trait terms to obtain personality ratings of individuals. Peers who know an individual well are asked to rate him or her on a scale for each trait. For example, a rater might be asked to rate the person on the trait of friendliness, using a seven-point scale ranging from ‘not at all friendly’ to ‘very friendly’. Individuals can also be asked to rate themselves on the scales. In the mid 1940s, Raymond Cattell (1943, 1945) condensed the Allport-Odbert list to 171 traits and obtained ratings for each trait (de Raad, 1998). He then used statistics to determine how many underlying personality factors could account for the pattern of correlations among the trait ratings. His analysis yielded 12 factors, to which he added 4 more factors to represent traits to cover traits not revealed by his analysis of the lexical record. British psychologist Hans Eysenck used psychiatrists’ ratings of patients’ characteristics to arrive at two personality factors: introversion–extroversion and emotional instability–stability, which he calls neuroticism (Eysenck, 1953); he has since added a third. Introversion–extroversion refers to the degree to which a person’s basic orientation is turned inward toward the self or outward toward the external world. At the introversion end of the scale are individuals who are shy and prefer to work alone. They tend to withdraw into themselves, particularly in times of emotional stress or conflict. At the extroversion end are individuals who are sociable and prefer occupations that permit them to work directly with other people. In times of stress, they seek company. Neuroticism (instability–stability) is a dimension of emotionality, with moody, anxious, temperamental, and maladjusted individuals at the neurotic or unstable end, and calm, well-adjusted individuals at the other. Figure 13.1 shows how these two dimensions combine to organize a number of subtraits that are correlated with the factors.

Unstable moody anxious rigid sober pessimistic reserved unsociable quiet touchy restless aggressive excitable changeable impulsive optimistic active Extraverted Introverted passive careful thoughtful peaceful controlled reliable even-tempered calm sociable outgoing talkative responsive easygoing lively carefree leadership Stable Figure 13.1 Eysenck’s Personality Factors. This figure shows the two major factors that emerge from factor-analytic studies of the intercorrelations between traits by Eysenck and others. The Stable-Unstable axis defines the neuroticism factor; the Introverted-Extraverted axis defines the extraversion factor. The other terms around the circle indicate where other traits are placed with respect to these two factors. (From H.J. Eysenck & S. Rachman (1965), The Causes and Cures of Neurosis, by H. J. Eysenck. Copyright © 1965 by H. J. Eysenck and S. Rachman. Reprinted by permission of EdiTS.) How many basic personality factors are there? Even with a rigorous analytic procedure, there is no definitive answer. Cattell arrived at 16 factors, but Eysenck arrived at only 3. Other investigators have come up with different numbers. In our discussion of intelligence in Chapter 12, ª CORA REED j DREAMSTIME.COM Extraverted people are not afraid to be the center of attention. For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk ASSESSMENT OF PERSONALITY we encountered a similar situation when we noted that the number of factors defining the concept of intelligence could be 1 (Spearman’s general intelligence factor, g), 7 (Thurstone’s primary mental abilities), or as many as 150 (Guilford, 1982). Some of the discrepancy occurs because different traits are initially put into the analysis, some occurs because different types of data are being analyzed (for example, peer ratings versus self-ratings), and some occurs because different analytic methods are employed. But some of the disagreement is a matter of taste. A researcher who prefers a more differentiated or fine-grained description of personality will set a lower criterion for a factor and thus accept more factors, arguing that important distinctions would be lost if the factors were further merged. Another researcher, like Eysenck, will prefer to merge several lower-level factors into more general ones, arguing that the resulting factors will be more stable (that is, more likely to reemerge in other analyses). For example, when Cattell’s 16 factors are factor analyzed, Eysenck’s 2 factors emerge as superfactors. We can therefore think of a hierarchy of traits in which each broad general trait is composed of several subordinate, narrower traits. Despite these disagreements, a consensus is emerging among many trait researchers that five trait dimensions capture most of what we mean by personality – referred to as the ‘Big Five’ (Goldberg, 1981). Although the five factors were originally identified through a factor analysis of the Allport-Odbert trait list, the same five have emerged from a wide variety of personality tests (McCrae & Costa, 1999). There is still disagreement about how best to name and interpret the factors, but frequently used names include Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Table 13.1 displays some representative examples of the trait scales that characterize each of the five factors. Many personality psychologists consider the discovery and validation of the Big Five to be one of the major breakthroughs of contemporary personality psychology. Proponents of the Big Five argue that these core personality traits organize the myriad of more narrowly focused personality characteristics that have been discussed by other researchers (McCrae & Costa, 2006). In other words, they argue that all aspects of personality are subsumed under the Big Five. Personality inventories Some personality tests ask individuals to rate themselves on personality trait dimensions. On others, individuals are asked a set of questions about how they react in certain situations. For example, they might be asked to indicate how much they agree or disagree with the statement ‘I often try new and foreign foods’ or ‘I really like most people I meet’. Questionnaires that assess personality – called personality inventories – ask the same questions of

464 CHAPTER 13 PERSONALITY Table 13.1 Five trait factors This table presents five trait factors that reliably emerge when a wide variety of assessment instruments are factor- analyzed. The adjective pairs are examples of trait scales that characterize each of the factors. (After McCrae & Costa, 1987) Trait factor Representative trait scales Openness Conventional–Original Unadventurous–Daring Conservative–Liberal Conscientiousness Careless–Careful Undependable–Reliable Negligent–Conscientious Extroversion Retiring–Sociable Quiet–Talkative Inhibited–Spontaneous Agreeableness Irritable–Good natured Ruthless–Soft hearted Selfish–Selfless Neuroticism Calm–Worrying Hardy–Vulnerable Secure–Insecure each person, and the answers are usually given in a form that can be easily scored, often by computer. Each item on a personality inventory is composed to exemplify a particular personality trait, and subsets of similar items are summed to give the individual a score on each trait scale. For example, the item ‘I often try new and foreign foods’ is on the Openness to Experience scale of one inventory designed to measure the Big Five; the item ‘I really like most people I meet’ is on the Extroversion scale. Items on most personality inventories are initially composed according to the developer’s theory of each trait and then retained or discarded from the final inventory, depending on whether they correlate or fail to correlate with other items on the same scale. Often a large number of trial items are placed on a preliminary form of the inventory, which is administered to a large number of people. Their responses are then analyzed to determine which subsets of items intercorrelate and whether these subsets actually belong to the trait scale for which they were originally devised. Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) A very different method of test construction, called the criterion-keyed method or empirical construction, was used to develop one of the most popular of all personality inventories, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). The original MMPI was developed to provide a pencil-and-paper version of a psychiatric interview For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk (Hathaway & McKinley, 1943). It has more than 550 statements concerning attitudes, emotional reactions, physical and psychological symptoms, and experiences. The test taker responds to each statement by answering ‘true’, ‘false’, or ‘cannot say’. Here are four representative items: l I have never done anything dangerous for the thrill of it. l I daydream very little. l My mother or father often made me obey, even when I thought it was unreasonable. l At times my thoughts have raced ahead faster than I could speak them. Instead of formulating items on the basis of a theory, designers of the MMPI gave hundreds of test items like these to groups of individuals. Each group was known to differ from the norm on a particular criterion. For example, to develop a scale of items that distinguish between paranoid and normal individuals, the same questions were given to two groups. The criterion group consisted of individuals who had been hospitalized with the diagnosis of paranoid disorder; the control group consisted of people who were similar to the criterion group in age, sex, socioeconomic status, and other important variables but had never been diagnosed as having psychiatric problems. Only the questions that discriminated between the psychiatric group and the control group were retained on the inventory. Questions that at face value might seem to distinguish normal from paranoid individuals (for instance, ‘I think that most people would lie to get ahead’) may or may not do so when put to an empirical test. In fact, patients diagnosed as paranoid were significantly less likely to respond ‘true’ to this statement than were normal individuals. On the final test, the responses to each item are scored according to the extent to which they correspond to answers given by the different criterion groups. The MMPI was the first major inventory to incorporate a number of validity scales within it. These scales attempt to determine whether the person has answered the test items carefully and honestly. If an individual’s score on any of these scales is too high, his or her scores on the content scales must be interpreted with particular caution or disregarded altogether. These scales have been helpful but not completely successful at detecting invalid scores. Table 13.2 lists the 3 validity and 10 content scales usually scored on the MMPI. Because the MMPI is derived from differences between criterion and control groups, it does not really matter whether what the person says is true. What is important is the fact that he or she says it. If people with schizophrenia answer ‘true’ and control participants answer ‘false’ to the statement ‘My mother never loved me’, their answers distinguish the two groups regardless of how their mothers actually behaved. This is an advantage of a test

based on the criterion-keyed method over one based on a test constructor’s assumption that certain answers indicate specific personality traits. The disadvantage is that one does not really have a theoretical understanding of the connection between the test responses and the personality characteristics they identify. There are now more than 10,000 published studies on the MMPI, and it has been translated into at least 150 languages. There are even several private companies that provide computer-based scoring and interpretation of the inventory. Over the years, the MMPI has been criticized for the weak reliability and validity of some of its scales. It also became evident that the original inventory was getting out of date and should be revised. But the enormous amount of existing data on the original version discouraged most researchers from undertaking such a daunting task. Nevertheless, it was done. The MMPI-2, published in 1989, incorporates a number of significant revisions while maintaining the basic features of the original, including most of the original items. The MMPI has been most valuable in distinguishing in a general way between abnormal and normal populations and can be used to evaluate the overall severity of a particular individual’s disturbance. It is less successful, however, in making finer distinctions among various forms of psychopathology. Many criticisms have been raised about the use of the MMPI in culturally diverse samples, however (see Butcher et al., 2007). The norms for the original MMPI – the scores that were considered ‘healthy’ scores – were based on samples of people in the United States that were not representative of people from a wide range of national, ethnic and racial backgrounds, age groups, and social classes. In response to this problem, the publishers of the MMPI established new norms based on more representative samples of communities across the United States and throughout the world. Still, there are concerns that the MMPI norms do not reflect variations across cultures in what is considered normal or abnormal. In addition, the linguistic accuracy of the translated versions of the MMPI and the comparability of these versions to the English version have been questioned. The Q-sort A special method for measuring personality traits is called the Q-sort (The Q was chosen arbitrarily and has no particular meaning). In this method, a rater or sorter describes an individual’s personality by sorting a set of approximately 100 cards into piles. Each card contains a personality statement (for example, ‘Has a wide range of interests’ and ‘Is self-defeating’). The rater sorts the cards into nine piles, placing the cards that are least descriptive of the individual in pile 1 on the left and those that are most descriptive in pile 9 on the right. The other cards are distributed in the intermediate piles, with those that seem neither characteristic nor uncharacteristic of the Table 13.2 MMPI scales The first three scales are ‘validity’ scales, which help determine whether the person has answered the test items carefully and honestly. For example, the F (Frequency) scale measures the degree to which infrequent or atypical answers are given. A high score on this scale usually indicates that the individual was careless or confused in responding. (However, high F scores often accompany high scores on the Schizophrenia scale, which measures bizarre thinking.) The remaining ‘clinical’ scales were originally named for categories of psychiatric disorders, but interpretation now emphasizes personality attributes rather than diagnostic categories. Scale name Scale abbreviation Interpretation of high scores Lie L Denial of common frailties Frequency F Invalidity of profile Correction K Defensive, evasive Hypochondriasis complaints Hs Emphasis on physical sensations Depression D Unhappy, depressed Hysteria problems Hy Reacts to stress by denying Psychopathic deviancy Pd Lack of social conformity; often in trouble with the law Masculinity–Femininity Mf Feminine orientation; masculine orientation Paranoia Pa Suspicious Psychoasthenia Pt Worried, anxious Schizophrenia Sc Withdrawn, bizarre thinking Hypomania Ma Impulsive, excitable Social Introversion–Extroversion Si Introverted, shy ASSESSMENT OF PERSONALITY For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk

466 CHAPTER 13 PERSONALITY individual going into the middle pile (pile 5). Each Q item receives a score ranging from 1 to 9, with higher numbers indicating that the item is more characteristic of the person. (Some Q-sorts use fewer or more than nine piles, but the technique is the same.) At first glance, this would seem no different from asking raters to rate an individual on a set of traits, using a 9-point rating scale. And in fact, the item scores can be used in this way if the researcher wishes. But there is an important difference. When filling out rating scales, the rater is implicitly comparing the individual with others (for example, a rating of ‘very friendly’ implies that the individual is very friendly compared with other individuals). When performing a Q-sort, however, the rater is explicitly comparing each trait with other traits within the same individual (for example, placing the item ‘friendly’ in pile 9 implies that, compared with other traits, friendliness stands out as particularly descriptive of the individual). Researchers can compare two Q-sorts by computing the correlation between them, thereby assessing the degree to which two individuals are similar in their overall personality configurations. If the two Q-sorts are descriptions of the same individual at two different times, the correlation assesses the test-retest reliability of the Q-sort, or the continuity of the individual’s overall personality profile over time. If two Q-sorts are descriptions of a single individual made by two raters, the correlation assesses the interjudge reliability of the Q-sort, or the degree to which two people perceive the individual in the same way. (For example, in marital counseling, it could be helpful to assess the degree to which two spouses agree or disagree in their perceptions of each other.) Finally, if one of the Q-sorts is a description of a hypothetical personality type, the correlation between an individual’s Q-sort and the hypothetical sort assesses the degree to which the person is similar to that personality type. For example, one researcher asked clinical psychologists to construct Qsorts of the hypothetical ‘optimally adjusted personality’. The correlation between a person’s Q-sort and this hypothetical sort can be directly interpreted as an adjustment score (Block 1961/1978). By itself, the trait approach is not a theory of personality but a general orientation and set of methods for assessing stable characteristics of individuals. By themselves, personality traits do not tell us anything about the dynamic processes of personality functioning, and trait psychologists who have sought to develop theories of personality have had to look to other approaches to address the second major task of personality psychology: synthesizing the many processes that influence an individual’s interactions with the physical and social environments – biology, development, learning, thinking, emotion, motivation, and social interaction – into an integrated account of the total person. For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk INTERIM SUMMARY l To arrive at a comprehensive but manageable number of personality traits on which individuals can be assessed, investigators first collected all the trait terms found in an English dictionary (about 18,000) and then reduced them to a smaller number. Ratings of individuals on these terms were factor-analyzed to determine how many underlying dimensions were needed to account for the correlations among the scales. l Although different investigators arrive at different numbers of factors, most now believe that five factors provide the best compromise. These have been labeled the ‘Big Five’ and are labeled: Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. l Personality inventories are questionnaires on which individuals report their reactions or feelings in certain situations. Responses to subsets of items are summed to yield scores on separate scales or factors within the inventory. l Although items on most inventories are composed or selected on the basis of a theory, they can also be selected on the basis of their correlation with an external criterion – the criterion-keyed method of test construction. The best-known example is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), which is designed to identify individuals with psychological disorders. l The Q-sort is a method of assessing personality in which raters sort cards with personality adjectives into nine piles, placing the cards that are least descriptive of the individual in pile 1 on the left and those that are most descriptive in pile 9 on the right. CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS 1 There are consistent differences between women and men in scores on some of the ‘Big Five’ personality traits. On which traits would you expect to find gender differences, and in what direction? 2 How would you rate yourself on the ‘Big Five’ personality traits? Do you think your personality can be accurately described in this way? What important aspect of your personality seems to be left out of such a description? If you and a close friend (or a family member) were to describe your personality, on which characteristics would you be likely to disagree? Why? Are there traits on which you think this other person might actually be more accurate than you in describing your personality? If so, why?

THE PSYCHOANALYTIC APPROACH Sigmund Freud, the creator of psychoanalytic theory, is a central figure in theories of personality. The basic premise of psychoanalytic theory is that much of what we think and do is driven by unconscious processes. Despite its shortcomings as a scientific theory, the psychoanalytic account of personality remains the most comprehensive and influential theory of personality ever created. Its impact extends well beyond psychology, influencing the social sciences, the humanities, the arts, and society generally. Even though psychoanalytic theory plays a less central role in psychology today than it did 60 or 70 years ago, many of its ideas have been absorbed into the mainstream of psychological thinking. Freud began his scientific career as a neurologist, using conventional medical procedures to treat patients suffering from various ‘nervous’ disorders. Because those procedures often failed, he turned to the technique of hypnosis but soon abandoned it. Eventually he discovered the method of free association, in which a patient is instructed to say everything that comes to mind, regardless of how trivial or embarrassing it may seem. By listening carefully to these verbal associations, Freud detected consistent themes that he believed were manifestations of unconscious wishes and fears. He found similar themes in the recall of dreams and early childhood memories. Freud compared the human mind to an iceberg (see Figure 13.2). The small part that shows above the surface of the water consists of the conscious – our current awareness – and the preconscious, all the information that is not currently ‘on our mind’ but that we could bring into consciousness if called upon to do so (for example, the name of the president of France). The much larger mass of the iceberg below the water represents the unconscious, a storehouse of impulses, wishes, and inaccessible memories that affect our thoughts and behavior. Freud was not the first to discover unconscious mental influences – even Shakespeare includes them in his plays – but he gave them primary importance in the everyday functioning of the normal personality. Closely allied with Freud’s focus on unconscious processes was his belief in the determinism of human behavior. Psychological determinism is the doctrine that all thoughts, emotions, and actions have causes. Freud maintained not only that all psychological events are caused but also that most of them are caused by unsatisfied drives and unconscious wishes. In one of his earliest publications, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), he argued that dreams, humor, forgetting, and slips of the tongue (‘Freudian slips’) all serve to relieve For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk THE PSYCHOANALYTIC APPROACH Conscious Ego Preconscious Superego Unconscious Id Figure 13.2 Freud’s Structural Model of the Mind. In Freud’s ‘iceberg’ model of the mind, all of the id and most of the ego and superego are submerged in the unconscious. Small parts of the ego and superego are either in the conscious or in the preconscious. psychological tension by gratifying forbidden impulses or unfulfilled wishes. Freud’s writings fill 24 volumes. The Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1900, and his final treatise, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, was published in 1940, a year after his death. We can present only the barest outline of Freud’s theory of personality here. Personality structure Freud discovered that his iceberg model was too simple to describe the human personality, so he went on to develop a structural model, which divided personality into three major systems that interact to govern human behavior: the id, the ego, and the superego. The id According to Freud, the id is the most primitive part of the personality and the part from which the ego and the superego later develop. It is present in the newborn infant and consists of the most basic biological impulses or drives: the need to eat, to drink, to eliminate wastes, to avoid pain, and to gain sexual (sensual) pleasure. Freud believed that aggression is also a basic biological drive. In fact, he believed that the sexual and aggressive drives were the most important instinctual determinants of

468 CHAPTER 13 PERSONALITY personality throughout life. The id seeks immediate gratification of these impulses. Like a young child, it operates on the pleasure principle: It continually strives to obtain pleasure and to avoid pain, regardless of the external circumstances. The ego Children soon learn that their impulses cannot always be gratified immediately. Hunger will not be alleviated until someone provides food. Relief of bladder or bowel pressure must be delayed until the bathroom is reached. Certain impulses – playing with one’s genitals or hitting someone – may be punished. A new part of the personality, the ego, develops as the young child learns to consider the demands of reality. The ego obeys the reality principle: The gratification of impulses must be delayed until the situation is appropriate. The ego thus is essentially the executive of the personality: It decides which id impulses will be satisfied and in what manner. The ego mediates among the demands of the id, the realities of the world, and the demands of the superego. The superego The third part of the personality is the superego, which judges whether actions are right or wrong. More generally, the superego is the internalized representation of the values and morals of society. It is the individual’s conscience, as well as his or her image of the morally ideal person (called the ego ideal). The superego develops in response to parental rewards and punishments. Initially, parents control children’s behavior directly through reward and punishment. By incorporating parental standards into the superego, children bring behavior under their own control. Children no longer need anyone to tell them it is wrong to steal; their superego tells them. Violating the superego’s standards, or even the impulse to do so, produces anxiety – beginning with anxiety over loss of parental love. According to Freud, this anxiety is largely unconscious but may be experienced as guilt. If parental standards are overly rigid, the individual may be guilt-ridden and inhibit all aggressive or sexual impulses. In contrast, an individual who fails to incorporate any standards for acceptable social behavior will feel few behavioral constraints and may engage in excessively self-indulgent or criminal behavior. Such a person is said to have a weak superego. The three components of personality are often in conflict: The ego postpones the gratification that the id wants immediately, and the superego battles with both the id and the ego because behavior often falls short of the moral code it represents. In the well-integrated personality, the ego remains in firm but flexible control; the reality principle governs. In terms of his earlier iceberg model, Freud proposed that all of the id and most of the ego and superego are submerged in the unconscious and that small For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk ª SIDNEY HARRIS, COURTESY SCIENCECARTOONPLUS.COM parts of the ego and superego are in either the conscious or the preconscious (see Figure 13.2). Personality dynamics Conservation of energy Freud was greatly influenced by the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, who argued that physiological events could be explained by the same principles that had been so successful in physics. Freud was particularly impressed by the principle of conservation of energy, which states that energy may be changed into different forms but is neither created nor destroyed. He proposed that humans are also closed energy systems. There is a constant amount of psychic energy for any given individual, which Freud called libido (Latin for ‘lust’), reflecting his view that the sexual drive was primary. One corollary of the principle of conservation of energy is that if a forbidden act or impulse is suppressed, its energy will seek an outlet somewhere else in the system, possibly appearing in a disguised form. The desires of the id contain psychic energy that must be expressed in some way, and preventing the expression of those desires does not eliminate them. Aggressive impulses, for example, may be expressed in disguised form by racing sports cars, playing chess, or making sarcastic remarks. Dreams and neurotic symptoms are also manifestations of psychic energy that cannot be expressed directly. Anxiety and defense Individuals with an urge to do something forbidden experience anxiety. One way of reducing this anxiety is to express the impulse in a disguised form that will avoid punishment either by society or by its internal representative, the superego. Freud and his daughter Anna Freud described several additional defense mechanisms, or strategies for preventing or reducing anxiety, and several are listed in the Concept Review Table.

CONCEPT REVIEW TABLE Major defense mechanisms Repression Excluding from conscious awareness impulses or memories that are too frightening or painful. Rationalization Assigning logical or socially desirable motives to what we do so that we seem to have acted rationally. Reaction formation Concealing a motive from ourselves by giving strong expression to the opposite motive. Projection Assigning our own undesirable qualities to others in exaggerated amounts. Intellectualization Attempting to gain detachment from a stressful situation by dealing with it in abstract, intellectual terms. Denial Denying that an unpleasant reality exists. Displacement Directing a motive that cannot be gratified in one form into another channel. We all use defense mechanisms at times. They help us over the rough spots until we can deal with stressful situations more directly. Defense mechanisms are maladaptive only when they become the dominant mode of responding to problems. We will discuss a few of the most common defense mechanisms here. Repression Freud considered repression to be the basic, and most important, defense mechanism. In repression, impulses or memories that are too frightening or painful are excluded from conscious awareness. Memories that evoke shame, guilt, or self-deprecation are often repressed. Freud believed that repression of certain childhood impulses is universal. In later life, individuals may repress feelings and memories that could cause anxiety because they are inconsistent with their self-concepts. Feelings of hostility toward a loved one and experiences of failure may be banished from conscious memory. Repression is different from suppression. Suppression is the process of deliberate self-control, keeping impulses and desires in check (perhaps holding them in private while denying them publicly) or temporarily pushing aside painful memories. Individuals are aware of suppressed thoughts but are largely unaware of repressed impulses or memories. Freud believed that repression is seldom completely successful. The repressed impulses threaten to break For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk THE PSYCHOANALYTIC APPROACH through into consciousness; the individual becomes anxious (though unaware of the reason) and employs other defense mechanisms to keep the partially repressed impulses from awareness. Rationalization When the fox in Aesop’s fable rejected the grapes that he could not reach because they were sour, he illustrated a defense mechanism known as rationalization. Rationalization does not mean ‘to act rationally’, as we might assume; it refers to the assignment of logical or socially desirable motives to what we do so that we seem to have acted rationally. Rationalization serves two purposes: It eases our disappointment when we fail to reach a goal (‘I didn’t want it anyway’), and it gives us acceptable motives for our behavior. If we act impulsively or on the basis of motives that we do not wish to acknowledge even to ourselves, we rationalize what we have done in order to place our behavior in a more favorable light. In searching for the good reason rather than the true reason, individuals make a number of excuses. These excuses are usually plausible; they simply do not tell the whole story. For example, ‘My roommate failed to wake me’ or ‘I had too many other things to do’ may be true, but they may not be the real reasons for the individual’s failure to perform the behavior in question. Individuals who are really concerned set an alarm clock or find the time to do what they are expected to do. A classic experiment involving posthypnotic suggestion (see Chapter 6) demonstrates the process of rationalization. A hypnotist instructs a participant under hypnosis that when he wakes from the trance he will watch the hypnotist. Then, when the hypnotist takes off her glasses, the participant will raise the window but will not remember that the hypnotist told him to do this. Aroused from the trance, the participant feels a little drowsy but soon circulates among the people in the room and carries on a normal conversation, furtively watching the hypnotist. When the hypnotist casually removes her glasses, the participant feels an impulse to open the window. He takes a step in that direction but hesitates. Unconsciously, he mobilizes his desire to be a reasonable person. Seeking a reason for his impulse to open the window, he says, ‘Isn’t it a little stuffy in here?’ Having found the needed excuse, he opens the window and feels more comfortable (Hilgard, 1965). Reaction formation Sometimes individuals can conceal a motive from themselves by giving strong expression to the opposite motive. This tendency is called reaction formation. A mother who feels guilty about not wanting her child may become overindulgent and overprotective in order to assure the child of her love and assure herself that she is a good mother. In one case, a mother who wished to do everything for her daughter could not understand why the child

470 CHAPTER 13 PERSONALITY was so unappreciative. At great sacrifice, she arranged for the daughter to take expensive piano lessons and assisted her in the daily practice sessions. Although the mother thought she was being extremely kind, she was actually being very demanding – in fact, hostile. She was unaware of her own hostility, but when confronted with it, she admitted that she had hated piano lessons as a child. Under the conscious guise of being kind, she was unconsciously being cruel to her daughter. The daughter sensed what was going on and developed symptoms that required psychological treatment. Projection All of us have undesirable traits that we do not acknowledge, even to ourselves. A defense mechanism known as projection protects us from recognizing our own undesirable qualities by assigning them to other people in exaggerated amounts. Suppose that you have a tendency to be critical of or unkind to other people, but you would dislike yourself if you admitted this tendency. If you are convinced that the people around you are cruel or unkind, your harsh treatment of them is not based on your bad qualities – you are simply ‘giving them what they deserve’. If you can assure yourself that everybody else cheats on college examinations, your unacknowledged tendency to take some academic shortcuts seems not so bad. Projection is really a form of rationalization, but it is so pervasive that it merits discussion in its own right. Intellectualization Intellectualization is an attempt to gain detachment from a stressful situation by dealing with it in abstract, intellectual terms. This kind of defense may be a necessity for people who must deal with life-and-death matters in their jobs. A doctor who is continually confronted with human suffering cannot afford to become emotionally involved with each patient. In fact, a certain amount of detachment may be essential for the doctor to function competently. This kind of intellectualization is a problem only when it becomes so pervasive that individuals cut themselves off from all emotional experiences. Denial When an external reality is too unpleasant to face, an individual may engage in denial, refusing to acknowledge that the undesired reality exists. The parents of a terminally ill child may refuse to admit that anything is seriously wrong, even though they are fully informed of the diagnosis and the expected outcome. Because they cannot tolerate the pain that acknowledging reality would produce, they resort to denial. Less extreme forms of denial may be seen in individuals who consistently ignore criticism, fail to perceive that others are angry with them, or For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk ªISTOCKPHOTO.COM/JEFFREY SMITH Emergency room physicians may need to develop many defenses to handle their high stress jobs. disregard all kinds of clues suggesting that their spouse is having an affair. Sometimes, denying facts may be better than facing them. In a severe crisis, denial may give the person time to face the grim facts at a more gradual pace. For example, victims of a stroke or a spinal cord injury might give up altogether if they were fully aware of the seriousness of their condition. Hope gives them an incentive to keep trying. Soldiers who have faced combat or imprisonment report that denying the possibility of death helped them function. In such situations, denial clearly has an adaptive value. On the other hand, the negative aspects of denial are evident when people postpone seeking medical help. For example, a woman may deny that a lump in her breast may be cancerous and delay going to a physician until the condition has become life-threatening. Displacement Through the mechanism of displacement, a motive that cannot be gratified in one form is directed into a new

ªISTOCKPHOTO.COM/GREMLIN Some people may displace their aggressive impulses by engaging in aggressive sports. channel. An example of displacement was provided in our discussion of anger that could not be expressed toward the source of frustration and was redirected toward a less threatening object. Freud felt that displacement was the most satisfactory way of handling aggressive and sexual impulses. The basic drives cannot be changed, but we can change the object toward which a drive is directed. Erotic impulses that cannot be expressed directly may be expressed indirectly in creative activities such as art, poetry, and music. Hostile impulses may find socially acceptable expression through participation in contact sports. It seems unlikely that displacement actually eliminates the frustrated impulses, but substitute activities do help reduce tension when a basic drive is thwarted. For example, the activities of taking care of others or seeking companionship may help reduce the tension associated with unsatisfied sexual needs. Personality development Freud believed that during the first five years of life, the individual progresses through several developmental stages that affect his or her personality. Applying a broad definition of sexuality, he called these periods psychosexual stages. During each stage, the pleasure-seeking impulses of the id focus on a particular area of the body and on activities connected with that area. Freud called the first year of life the oral stage of psychosexual development. During this period, infants derive pleasure from nursing and sucking and begin to put anything they can reach into their mouths. Freud called the second year of life the beginning of the anal stage and believed that during this period children find pleasure both in withholding and in expelling feces. These pleasures come into conflict with parents who are attempting toilet training, the child’s first experience with imposed control. In the phallic stage, from about age 3 to age 6, For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk THE PSYCHOANALYTIC APPROACH children begin to derive pleasure from fondling their genitals. They observe the differences between males and females and begin to direct their awakening sexual impulses toward the parent of the opposite sex. Around the age of 5 or 6, according to Freud, a boy’s sexual impulses are directed toward his mother. This leads him to perceive his father as a rival for his mother’s affection. Freud called this situation the Oedipal conflict, after the ancient Greek myth in which Oedipus unwittingly kills his father and marries his mother. Freud also believed that the boy fears that his father will retaliate against these sexual impulses by castrating him. He labeled this fear castration anxiety and considered it to be the prototype for later anxieties provoked by forbidden internal desires. In a normal case of development, the boy simultaneously reduces this anxiety and vicariously gratifies his feelings toward his mother by identifying with his father – that is, by internalizing an idealized perception of his father’s attitudes and values. The same process in a girl – resulting in her identifying with her mother – is analogous but more complicated. Resolution of the Oedipal conflict ends the phallic stage, which is followed by the latency period. During this sexually quiescent time, which lasts from about age 7 to ª TONY FREEMAN/PHOTOEDIT According to psychoanalytic theory, a child resolves the Oedipal conflict by identifying with the same-sex parent.

472 CHAPTER 13 PERSONALITY age 12, children become less concerned with their bodies and turn their attention to the skills needed for coping with their environment. Finally, adolescence and puberty usher in the genital stage, the mature phase of adult sexuality and functioning. Freud believed that special problems at any stage could arrest, or fixate, development and have a lasting effect on personality. The individual’s libido would remain attached to the activities appropriate for that stage. A person who was weaned very early and did not have enough sucking pleasure might become fixated at the oral stage. As an adult, he or she might be excessively dependent on others and overly fond of oral pleasures such as eating, drinking, and smoking. Such a person is said to have an oral personality. A person fixated at the anal stage of psychosexual development may be abnormally concerned with cleanliness, orderliness, and saving and may tend to resist external pressure. Such a person is said to have an anal personality. Inadequate resolution of the Oedipal conflict can lead to a weak sense of morality, difficulties with authority figures, and many other problems. Modifications of Freud’s theories Freud modified his theories throughout his life. Like a good scientist, he remained open to new data, revising his earlier positions as new observations accumulated that could not be accommodated by the original theory. For example, quite late in his career he completely revised his theory of anxiety. Freud’s theory has been further extended by his daughter Anna, who played a particularly important role in clarifying the defense mechanisms (1946/1967) and applying psychoanalytic theory to the practice of child psychiatry (1958). Although Freud was open to new data, he was not open to dissenting opinions. He was particularly adamant that his colleagues and followers not question the libido theory and the centrality of sexual motivation in the functioning of personality. This dogmatism forced a ª MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY / ALAMY Sigmund Freud with his daughter Anna. For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk break between Freud and many of his most brilliant associates, some of whom went on to develop rival theories that placed more emphasis on motivational processes other than sexuality. These former associates included Carl Jung and Alfred Adler, as well as later theorists such as Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Erich Fromm. Of those who broke with Freud, perhaps the most famous was Carl Jung. Originally one of Freud’s most dedicated followers, Jung eventually came to disagree profoundly with some aspects of Freud’s theory and founded his own school of psychology, which he called analytic psychology. Jung believed that in addition to the personal unconscious described by Freud, there is a collective unconscious, a part of the mind that is common to all humans. The collective unconscious consists of primordial images or archetypes inherited from our ancestors. Among those archetypes are the mother, the father, the sun, the hero, God, and death. To gather evidence for the presence of these archetypes, Jung examined dreams, myths, and other cultural products, noting that certain images, such as that of a vulture, often appear in dreams and also in religious writings and ancient mythologies with which the dreamer is not familiar. Although Jung agreed with Freud on the existence of the unconscious, he believed that Freud’s theory failed to explain the presence of common images or archetypes in the unconscious minds of all humans. Another well-known ‘neo-Freudian’ was the American psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan. Sullivan developed his own theory of personality on the basis of his experience with psychoanalysis. He placed primary emphasis on interpersonal relations, arguing that a personality ‘can never be isolated from the complex of interpersonal relations in which the person lives and has his being’ (Sullivan, 1953, p. 10). In his view, people’s responses to interpersonal experiences cause them to develop personifications – mental images of themselves and others. Images of the self fall into three categories: the good-me personification, the bad-me personification, and the notme. The last category contains aspects of the self that are so threatening that the individual dissociates them from the self-system and maintains them in the unconscious. This concept is similar to Freud’s concept of repression in that it requires a constant effort to keep these aspects of the self in the unconscious. Like Freud, Sullivan believed that early childhood experiences play an important role in the development of personality. He believed, however, that the personality continues to develop after childhood. He identified seven stages of personality development – infancy, childhood, the juvenile era, preadolescence, early adolescence, late adolescence, and adulthood – and maintained that each stage is largely socially determined. Although a person may go through a stage in a particular way because of certain biological factors, the primary influence is the

typical situations he or she experiences at that age. Sullivan’s view of development therefore differs considerably from Freud’s biologically based theory. These theorists and more recent psychoanalytic theorists all place greater emphasis on the role of the ego. They believe that the ego is present at birth, develops independently of the id, and performs functions other than finding realistic ways of satisfying id impulses, including learning how to cope with the environment and making sense of experience. Ego satisfactions include exploration, manipulation, and competence in performing tasks. This approach ties the concept of the ego more closely to cognitive processes. An important part of this new direction is object relations theory, which deals with a person’s attachments and relationships to other people throughout life. Object relations theorists have not rejected the concept of the id or the importance of biological drives in motivating behavior, but they have an equal interest in such questions as degree of psychological separateness from parents, degree of attachment to and involvement with other people versus preoccupation with self, and the strength of the individual’s feelings of self-esteem and competence. Although we did not identify it as such, Erik Erikson’s stage theory of development (discussed in Chapter 3) is an example of a revised psychoanalytic theory. Erikson himself was trained as a psychoanalyst by Anna Freud, and he perceived his own views as expanding rather than altering Freudian theory. Instead of viewing developmental stages in terms of their psychosexual functions, Erikson saw them as psychosocial stages involving primarily ego processes. For Erikson, the important feature of the first year of life is not that it focuses on oral gratification but that the child is learning to trust (or mistrust) the environment as a satisfier of needs. The important feature of the second year of life is not that it focuses on anal concerns such as toilet training but that the child is learning autonomy. Toilet training just happens to be a frequent arena of conflict in which the child’s striving for autonomy clashes with new demands by parents. Erikson’s theory also adds more stages in order to encompass the entire life span. Projective tests Personality psychologists who follow in Freud’s psychoanalytic tradition are particularly interested in assessing unconscious wishes, motivations, and conflicts. Accordingly, they prefer tests that resemble Freud’s technique of free association, in which the individual is free to say whatever comes to mind. For this reason, they developed For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk THE PSYCHOANALYTIC APPROACH ª PAVEL LOSEVSKY j DREAMSTIME.COM Children must develop ways of handling their sometimes mixed feelings about their parents. projective tests. A projective test presents an ambiguous stimulus to which the person may respond as he or she wishes. Because the stimulus is ambiguous and does not demand a specific response, it is assumed that the individual projects his or her personality onto the stimulus and thus reveals something about himself or herself. Two of the most widely used projective techniques are the Rorschach Test and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). The Rorschach Test The Rorschach Test, developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach in the 1920s, is a series of 10 cards, each of which displays a rather complex inkblot like the one shown in Figure 13.3. Some of the blots are in color; some are black and white. The person is instructed to © SPENCER GRANT/STOCK BOSTON Figure 13.3 A Rorschach Inkblot. The person is asked to tell what he or she sees in the blot. It may be viewed from any angle.

474 CHAPTER 13 PERSONALITY look at one card at a time and report everything the inkblot resembles. After the person has finished the 10 cards, the examiner usually goes over each response, asking the person to clarify some responses and indicate which features of the blot gave a particular impression. The individual’s responses may be scored in various ways. Three main categories are location (whether the response involves the entire inkblot or a part of it), determinants (whether the individual responds to the shape of the blot, its color, or differences in texture and shading), and content (what the response represents). Most testers also score responses according to frequency of occurrence; for example, a response is ‘popular’ if many people assign it to the same inkblot. Several elaborate scoring systems have been devised on the basis of these categories, but most of them have proved to be of limited predictive value. Consequently, many psychologists base their interpretations on an impressionistic evaluation of the response record, as well as on the individual’s general reaction to the test situation (for example, whether the person is defensive, open, competitive, cooperative, and so on). In 1974, a system was introduced that attempted to extract and combine the validated portions of all the scoring systems into one complete system. It has undergone extensive revision and is now supplemented by a computer scoring service and software for microcomputers (Exner & Weiner, 1995). This system is now widely used in clinical and forensic settings (Lillienfield, Wood, & Garb, 2000). The Thematic Apperception Test Another popular projective test, the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), was developed at Harvard University by Henry Murray in the 1930s. The participant is shown as many as 20 ambiguous pictures of persons and scenes, similar to the one in Figure 13.4, and asked to make up a story about each picture. The individual is encouraged to give free rein to his or her imagination and to tell whatever story comes to mind. The test is intended to reveal basic themes that recur in a person’s imaginings. (Apperception is a readiness to perceive in certain ways, based on prior experiences.) People interpret ambiguous pictures according to their apperceptions and elaborate stories in terms of preferred plots or themes that reflect personal fantasies. If particular problems are bothering them, those problems may become evident in a number of the stories or in striking deviations from the usual theme in one or two stories. For example, when shown a picture similar to the one in Figure 13.4, a 21-year-old male told the following story: For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk Figure 13.4 The Thematic Apperception Test. This picture is similar to the pictures used on the Thematic Apperception Test. The pictures usually have elements of ambiguity so that the individual can ‘read into’ them something from personal experience or fantasy. She has prepared this room for someone’s arrival and is opening the door for a last general look over the room. She is probably expecting her son home. She tries to place everything as it was when he left. She seems like a very tyrannical character. She led her son’s life for him and is going to take over again as soon as he gets back. This is merely the beginning of her rule, and the son is definitely cowed by this overbearing attitude of hers and will slip back into her well-ordered way of life. He will go through life plodding down the tracks she has laid down for him. All this represents her complete domination of his life until she dies. (Arnold, 1949, p. 100) Although the original picture shows only a woman standing in an open doorway looking into a room, the young man’s readiness to talk about his relationship with his mother led to this story of a woman’s domination of her son. Facts obtained later confirmed the clinician’s interpretation that the story reflected the man’s own problems. In analyzing responses to TAT cards, the psychologist looks for recurrent themes that may reveal the individual’s needs, motives, or characteristic way of handling interpersonal relationships. Problems with projective tests Since the widespread adoption of Exner’s scoring system for the Rorschach, hundreds of studies have been done to test the validity and reliability of results of the Rorschach based on this system (see Lillienfield et al., 2000). Unfortunately, the Exner system appears to have

done little to make the Rorschach a psychometrically sound test. The system too often misclassifies normal individuals as pathological, particularly individuals who are members of ethnic minority groups in the United States or from other cultures. The reliability of results from the Rorschach has generally been poor, in large part because the same responses may be evaluated quite differently by two trained examiners. And attempts to demonstrate the Rorschach’s ability to predict behavior or discriminate between groups have met with limited success. The TAT has fared somewhat better (Lillienfield et al., 2000). When specific scoring systems are used (for example, to measure achievement motives or aggressive themes), interscorer reliability is fairly good. TAT measures have also proven useful in predicting some specific behaviors. For example, the need for power, as assessed by TAT responses, significantly predicted important life outcomes, such as the choice of a career that gave one influence over others, in two long-term studies of female college students (Winter, Stewart, John, Klohnen, & Duncan, 1998). Many other projective tests have been devised. Some ask the individual to draw pictures of people, houses, trees, and so on. Others involve completing sentences that start with ‘I often wish . . . ’, ‘My mother . . . ’, or ‘I feel like quitting when they . . . ’, In fact, any stimulus to which a person can respond in an individualistic way could be considered the basis for a projective test. But many projective tests have not been subjected to enough research to establish their usefulness in assessing personality, and those that have been researched have not proven to have consistently strong reliability or validity (Lillienfield et al., 2000). A psychoanalytic portrait of human nature At the beginning of the chapter, we noted that each approach to personality carries with it a distinctive philosophy of human nature. To what extent are our actions free or determined? Good, neutral, or evil? Fixed or modifiable? Active or passive? Our description of Freud’s theory has hinted at many of his views on these matters. Freud is often compared with Copernicus and Darwin. Like them, he was accused of undermining the stature and dignity of humanity. The astronomer Copernicus demoted the earth from its position as the center of the universe to one of several planets moving around a minor star; Darwin demoted the human species to one of numerous animal species. Freud took the next step by emphasizing that human behavior is determined by forces beyond our control, thereby depriving us of free will and psychological freedom. By emphasizing the unconscious status of our motivations, he deprived us of rationality; by stressing the sexual and aggressive nature of those motivations, he dealt the final blow to our dignity. Psychoanalytic theory also paints a portrait of human nature as basically evil. Without the restraining forces of For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk THE PSYCHOANALYTIC APPROACH society and its internalized representative, the superego, humans would destroy themselves. Freud was a deeply pessimistic man. He was forced to flee from Vienna when the Nazis invaded in 1938, and he died in September 1939 just as World War II began. He saw these events as natural consequences of the human aggressive drive when it is not held in check. According to psychoanalytic theory, our personalities are basically determined by inborn drives and by events in our environment during the first five years of life. Only extensive psychoanalysis can undo some of the negative consequences of early experiences, and it can do so only in limited ways. We also emerge from psychoanalytic theory as relatively passive creatures. Although the ego is engaged in an active struggle with the id and superego, we are passive pawns of this drama being played out in our unconscious. Finally, for Freud, psychological health consisted of firm but flexible ego control over the impulses of the id. As he noted, the goal of psychoanalysis was to ensure that ‘Where id is, there ego shall be’ (1933). An evaluation of the psychoanalytic approach Psychoanalytic theory is so broad in scope that it cannot simply be pronounced true or false. However, there can be no doubt of its impact on our culture, or of the value of some of its scientific contributions. For example, Freud’s method of free association opened up an entirely new database of observations that had never before been explored systematically. In addition, the recognition that our behavior often reflects a compromise between our wishes and our fears accounts for many of the apparent contradictions in human behavior better than any other theory of personality. And Freud’s recognition that unconscious processes play an important role in much of our behavior is almost universally accepted – although these processes are often reinterpreted in learning-theory or information-processing terms (Funder, 2001). Nevertheless, as a scientific theory, the psychoanalytic account has been persistently criticized. One of the main criticisms is that many of its concepts are ambiguous and difficult to define or measure objectively. Also, psychoanalytic theory assumes that very different behaviors may reflect the same underlying motive. For example, a man who had a hostile and uncaring father may become a hostile parent to his own children or overly protective of them. When opposite behaviors are claimed to result from the same underlying motive, it is difficult to confirm the presence or absence of the motive or to make predictions that can be empirically verified. A more serious criticism concerns the validity of the observations that Freud obtained through his psychoanalytic procedure. Critics have pointed out that it often is not clear what Freud’s patients told him spontaneously about past events in their lives, what he may have ‘planted’ in their minds, and what he simply inferred. For

476 CHAPTER 13 PERSONALITY ªISTOCKPHOTO.COM/SHERYL GRIFFIN A man who had an uncaring father may, according to Freud, become a doting father . . . example, Freud reported that many of his patients recalled being seduced or sexually molested as children. At first he believed them, but then he decided that these reports were not literally true but, rather, reflected the patients’ own early sexual fantasies. He regarded this realization as one of his major theoretical insights. But one writer argued that Freud’s original assumption about the reality of the seductions was probably more accurate, an argument that seems more reasonable in light of our increased awareness of child sexual abuse (Masson, 1984). Other critics have gone further and suggested that Freud may have questioned his patients so persistently with leading questions and suggestions that they were led to reconstruct memories of seductions that never occurred – a hypothesis that Freud considered but rejected (Powell & Boer, 1994). Others charge that in many cases Freud simply inferred that seduction had occurred, even though the patient never reported such an incident; he actually substituted his theoretical expectations for data (Esterson, 1993; Scharnberg, 1993). When Freud’s theories have been empirically tested, the results have been mixed (Westen, Weinberger, & Bradley, 2007). Efforts to link adult personality characteristics to psychosexually relevant events in childhood have generally met with negative outcomes (Sears, Maccoby, & Levin, 1957; Sewell & Mussen, 1952). When relevant character traits are identified, they appear to be related to similar character traits in the parents (Beloff, 1957; Hetherington & Brackbill, 1963). Thus, even if a relationship were to be found between toilet-training practices and adult personality traits, it could have arisen because both are linked to parental emphasis on cleanliness and order. In such a case, a simple learning-theory explanation – parental reinforcement and the child’s imitation of the parents’ behavior – would be a more economical explanation of the adult traits than the psychoanalytic hypothesis. This outcome should also remind us that Freud based his theory on observations of a very narrow range of For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk SHUTTERSTOCK / MONICA GNIOT . . . or he may become a hostile and uncaring father to his own children. people – primarily upper-middle-class men and women in Victorian Vienna who suffered from neurotic symptoms. In hindsight, many of Freud’s cultural biases are obvious, particularly in his theories about women. For example, his theory that female psychosexual development is shaped largely by ‘penis envy’ – a girl’s feelings of inadequacy because she doesn’t have a penis – is almost universally rejected as reflecting the sex bias of Freud and the historical period in which he lived. A little girl’s personality development during the Victorian era was surely shaped more decisively by her awareness that she lacked the greater independence, power, and social status of her brother than by her envy of his penis. Despite these criticisms, the remarkable feature of Freud’s theory is how well it managed to transcend its narrow observational base. For example, many experimental studies of the defense mechanisms and reactions to conflict have supported the theory in contexts quite different from those in which Freud developed the theory (Westen et al., 2007). The structural theory (ego, id, and superego), the psychosexual theory, and the energy concept have not fared well over the years. Even some psychoanalytic writers are prepared to abandon them or to modify them substantially (Kline, 1972; Schafer, 1976). On the other hand, Freud’s dynamic theory – his theory of anxiety and the mechanisms of defense – has withstood the test of time, research, and observation. A survey of psychoanalytically oriented psychologists and psychiatrists found widespread agreement with a number of ideas that were controversial when Freud first introduced them, including the importance of early childhood experiences in shaping adult personality and

the centrality of both conflict and the unconscious in human mental life (Westen, 1998). INTERIM SUMMARY l Freud’s psychoanalytic theory holds that many behaviors are caused by unconscious motivations. Personality is determined primarily by the biological drives of sex and aggression and by experiences that occur during the first five years of life. l Freud’s theory of personality structure views personality as composed of the id, the ego, and the superego. The id operates on the pleasure principle, seeking immediate gratification of biological impulses. The ego obeys the reality principle, postponing gratification until it can be achieved in socially acceptable ways. The superego (conscience) imposes moral standards on the individual. In a well-integrated personality, the ego remains in firm but flexible control over the id and superego, and the reality principle governs. l Freud’s theory of personality dynamics proposes that there is a constant amount of psychic energy (libido) for each individual. If a forbidden act or impulse is suppressed, its energy will seek an outlet in some other form, such as dreams or neurotic symptoms. The theory assumes that unacceptable id impulses cause anxiety, which can be reduced by defense mechanisms. l Freud’s theory of personality development proposes that individuals pass through psychosexual stages and must resolve the Oedipal conflict, in which the young child sees the same-sex parent as a rival for the affection of the opposite-sex parent. Over the years, Freud’s theory of anxiety and defense mechanisms has fared better than his structural and developmental theories have. l Psychoanalytic theory has been modified by later psychologists, notably Carl Jung and Harry Stack Sullivan. Jung proposed that, in addition to the personal unconscious described by Freud, there is a collective unconscious, a part of the mind that is common to all humans. Sullivan suggested that people’s responses to interpersonal experiences cause them to develop personifications – mental images of themselves and others. l Psychologists who take the psychoanalytic approach sometimes use projective tests, such as the Rorschach Test and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). Because the test stimuli are ambiguous, it is assumed that the individual projects his or her personality onto the stimulus, thereby revealing unconscious wishes and motives. For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk THE BEHAVIORIST APPROACH CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS 1 As this section makes clear, the value of Sigmund Freud’s impact on psychology is hotly debated. What is your opinion on the value of Freud’s legacy? 2 Can you identify some of your own assumptions about other people that are rooted in Freudian theory, whether you previously realized they were or not? THE BEHAVIORIST APPROACH In contrast to the psychodynamic approach to personality, the behaviorist approach emphasizes the importance of environmental, or situational, determinants of behavior. In this view, behavior is the result of a continuous interaction between personal and environmental variables. Environmental conditions shape behavior through learning; a person’s behavior, in turn, shapes the environment. Persons and situations influence each other. To predict behavior, we need to know how the characteristics of the individual interact with those of the situation (Bandura, 2006). Social learning and conditioning Operant conditioning The effects of other people’s actions – the rewards and punishments they provide – are an important influence on an individual’s behavior. Accordingly, one of the most basic principles of behavioral theory is operant conditioning – the type of learning that occurs when we learn the association between our behaviors and certain outcomes. The basic tenet of behaviorist theory is that people behave in ways that are likely to produce reinforcement and that individual differences in behavior result primarily from differences in the kinds of learning experiences a person encounters in the course of growing up. Although individuals learn many behavior patterns through direct experience – that is, by being rewarded or punished for behaving in a certain manner – they also acquire many responses through observational learning. People can learn by observing the actions of others and noting the consequences of those actions. It would be a slow and inefficient process, indeed, if all of our behavior had to be learned through direct reinforcement of our responses. Similarly, the reinforcement that controls the expression of learned behaviors may be direct (tangible rewards, social approval or disapproval, or alleviation of aversive conditions), vicarious (observation of someone receiving reward or punishment for behavior similar to one’s own), or self-administered (evaluation of one’s own performance with self-praise or self-reproach).

478 CHAPTER 13 PERSONALITY Because most social behaviors are not uniformly rewarded in all settings, the individual learns to identify the contexts in which certain behavior is appropriate and those in which it is not. To the extent that a person is rewarded for the same response in many different situations, generalization takes place, ensuring that the same behavior will occur in a variety of settings. A boy who is reinforced for physical aggression at home, as well as at school and at play, is likely to develop an aggressive personality. More often, aggressive responses are differentially rewarded, and the individual learns to distinguish between situations in which aggression is appropriate and situations in which it is not (for example, aggression is acceptable on the football field but not in the classroom). For this reason, behaviorists challenge the usefulness of characterizing individuals with trait terms like aggressive, arguing that such terms obscure the cross-situational variability of behavior. Classical conditioning To account for emotion or affect, behaviorists add classical conditioning – the type of learning that occurs when specific situations become associated with specific outcomes – to ª CINDY ROESINGER/PHOTO RESEARCHERS ‘Time-outs’ are based on behaviorist principles. For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk their account of personality (see Chapter 7). For example, when a child is punished by a parent for engaging in some forbidden activity, the punishment elicits the physiological responses that we associate with guilt or anxiety. Subsequently, the child’s behavior may itself elicit those responses, and the child will feel guilty when engaging in the forbidden behavior. In the terminology of classical conditioning, we would say that the behavior becomes a conditioned stimulus by being paired with the unconditioned stimulus of punishment; the anxiety becomes the conditioned response. For the behaviorist, it is classical conditioning that produces the internalized source of anxiety that Freud labeled the superego. Individual differences We noted earlier that personality psychology seeks to specify both the variables on which individuals differ from one another and the general processes of personality functioning. Trait approaches have focused on the first task, describing personality differences in detail while saying virtually nothing about personality functioning. Psychoanalytic theory has attempted to do both. In contrast, the behaviorist approach has focused primarily on process, devoting little attention to individual differences. Because this approach sees personality as the product of the individual’s unique reinforcement history and emphasizes the degree to which behavior varies across situations, it has not attempted to classify individuals into types or to rate them on traits. A behaviorist portrait of human behavior Like the psychoanalytic approach, the behaviorist approach to personality is deterministic. In contrast to the psychoanalytic approach, however, it pays little attention to biological determinants of behavior and focuses on environmental determinants. People are not inherently good or evil but are readily modified by events and situations in their environment. As we noted in Chapter 3, John Watson, the founder of the behaviorist movement in the United States, claimed that he could raise an infant to be anything, regardless of the infant’s ‘talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his [or her] ancestors’. Few behaviorists would take such an extreme view today. Nevertheless, behaviorists hold a strong optimism about our ability to change human behavior by changing the environment. The human personality as described by behavioral theorists may be highly modifiable, but it still has a passive quality. We still seem to be shaped primarily by forces beyond our control. This view changed, however, as social-learning approaches (described later in this chapter) replaced traditional behaviorist theories, increasingly emphasize the individual’s active role in selecting and modifying the environment, thereby permitting the person to become a causal force in his or her own life. As we will see, however, this role is not active

enough for humanistic theorists. In particular, they do not believe that it is sufficient to define psychological health as merely optimal adaptation to the environment. An evaluation of the behaviorist approach Through its emphasis on specifying the environmental variables that evoke particular behaviors, behavioral theory has made a major contribution to both clinical psychology and personality theory. It has led us to see human actions as reactions to specific environments, and it has helped us focus on how environments control our behavior and how they can be changed to modify behavior. As we will see in Chapter 16, the systematic application of learning principles has proved successful in changing many maladaptive behaviors. Behavioral theorists have been criticized for overemphasizing situational influences on behavior. But the learning theorists’ findings on the cross-situational consistency of personality have forced other personality psychologists to reexamine their assumptions. The result has been a clearer understanding of the interactions between people and situations and an enhanced appreciation of each person’s individuality. As we see in the next section, the cognitive theorists built on the work of behavioral theorists to introduce quite a different way of viewing personality. INTERIM SUMMARY l According to behaviorist theory, individual differences in behavior result primarily from differences in the kinds of learning experiences a person encounters in the course of growing up. l Through operant conditioning, people learn to associate specific behaviors with punishment or reward. They can also learn these associations through observational learning. l Through classical conditioning, people learn to associate specific situations with certain outcomes, such as anxiety. CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS 1 Think about your own tendency to be friendly or unfriendly. To what extent is the situation important in determining your level of friendliness? What are some of the reinforcements and punishments you’ve had in your life that might have contributed to your tendency to be friendly or unfriendly? 2 Behavioral theorists view all types of human behavior as modifiable. Do you think there are any types of behavior that are not modifiable? Why or why not? For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk THE COGNITIVE APPROACH THE COGNITIVE APPROACH Today most personality psychologists would not identify themselves as ‘pure’ adherents to any one of the three approaches described so far, and the differences among the approaches are no longer as sharp as they once were. This is because most contemporary personality theorists have joined psychologists in other subfields in becoming more ‘cognitive’. In fact, much contemporary experimental work in personality psychology begins from a cognitive base. The cognitive approach is not actually a ‘philosophy’ of human nature in the way that the other approaches are. Rather, it is a general empirical approach and a set of topics related to how people process information about themselves and the world. For the cognitive theorist, differences in personality stem from differences in the way individuals mentally represent information. Social learning theory Social-learning theory has its roots in early behavioral theory but was considered a radical departure from behaviorism when it was first introduced. The sociallearning perspective is aptly summarized in the following comment by Albert Bandura: ‘The prospects for survival would be slim indeed if one could learn only from the consequences of trial and error. One does not teach children to swim, adolescents to drive automobiles, and novice medical students to perform surgery by having them discover the requisite behavior from the consequences of their successes and failures’ (1986, p. 20). According to social-learning theorists, internal cognitive processes influence behavior, as well as observation of the behaviors of others and the environment in which behavior occurs. As early as 1954, Julian Rotter was introducing cognitive variables into the behaviorist approach (1954, 1982). Rotter proposed the concept of behavior potential, meaning the likelihood of a particular behavior occurring in a particular situation – for example, staying up all night to study for an exam. The strength of the behavior potential is determined by two variables: expectancy and reinforcement value. In the case of pulling an all-nighter, the likelihood of engaging in that behavior is greater if the student expects to receive a higher grade as a result. This expectation will depend on what happened the last time the student was in a similar situation. If studying all night resulted in a higher grade the last time, the student will expect the same result this time. In other words, the more often the student is reinforced for studying all night, the stronger his or her expectancy that the behavior will be reinforced in the future. As for reinforcement value, it depends on the degree to which we prefer one reinforcer over another. If a student prefers sleeping over receiving a

480 CHAPTER 13 PERSONALITY COURTESY OF ALBERT BANDURA Albert Bandura developed social cognitive theory. higher grade, the likelihood of pulling an all-nighter decreases. Bandura, one of the leading contemporary theorists in this area, has taken this approach even further, developing what he calls social-cognitive theory (1986, 2006). His theory emphasizes reciprocal determinism, in which external determinants of behavior (such as rewards and punishments) and internal determinants (such as beliefs, thoughts, and expectations) are part of a system of interacting influences that affect both behavior and other parts of the system (Bandura, 1986). In Bandura’s model, not only can the environment affect behavior but also behavior can affect the environment. In fact, the relationship between environment and behavior is a reciprocal one: The environment influences our behavior, which then affects the kind of environment we find ourselves in, which may in turn influence our behavior, and so on. Bandura notes that people use symbols and forethought in deciding how to act. When they encounter a new problem, they imagine possible outcomes and consider the probability of each. Then they set goals and develop strategies for achieving them. This is quite different from the notion of conditioning through rewards For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk and punishments. Of course, the individual’s past experiences with rewards and punishments will influence his or her decisions about future behavior. Bandura also points out that most behavior occurs in the absence of external rewards or punishments. Most behavior stems from internal processes of self-regulation. As he expresses it, ‘Anyone who attempted to change a pacifist into an aggressor or a devout religionist into an atheist would quickly come to appreciate the existence of personal sources of behavioral control’ (1977, pp. 128–129). How do these internal, personal sources of control develop? According to Bandura and other social-learning theorists, we learn how to behave by observing the behavior of others or by reading or hearing about it. We do not have to actually perform the behaviors we observe; instead, we can note whether those behaviors were rewarded or punished and store that information in memory. When new situations arise, we can behave according to the expectations we have accumulated on the basis of our observation of models. Bandura’s social-cognitive theory thus goes beyond classical behaviorism. Rather than focusing only on how environment affects behavior, it examines the interactions among environment, behavior, and the individual’s cognitions. In addition to considering external influences such as rewards and punishments, it considers internal factors such as expectations. And instead of explaining behavior simply in terms of conditioning, it emphasizes the role of observational learning. Another prominent social-learning theorist, Walter Mischel, has attempted to incorporate individual differences into social learning theory by introducing the following set of cognitive variables:

1. Competencies: What can you do? Competencies include intellectual abilities, social and physical skills, and other special abilities.

2. Encoding strategies: How do you see it? People differ in the way they selectively attend to information, encode (represent) events, and group the information into meaningful categories. An event that is perceived by one person as threatening may be seen by another as challenging.

3. Expectancies: What will happen? Expectations about the consequences of different behaviors will guide the individual’s choice of behavior. If you cheat on an examination and are caught, what do you expect the consequences to be? If you tell your friend what you really think of him or her, what will happen to your relationship? Expectations about our own abilities will also influence behavior: We may anticipate the consequences of a certain behavior but fail to act because we are uncertain of our ability to execute the behavior.

4. Subjective values: What is it worth? Individuals who have similar expectancies may choose to behave differently because they assign different values to the outcomes. Two students may expect a certain behavior to please their professor. However, this outcome is important to one student but not to the other.

5. Self-regulatory systems and plans: How can you achieve it? People differ in the standards and rules they use to regulate their behavior (including self-imposed rewards for success or punishments for failure), as well as in their ability to make realistic plans for reaching a goal. (After Mischel, 1973, 1993) All of these person variables (sometimes referred to as cognitive social-learning person variables) interact with the conditions of a particular situation to determine what an individual will do in that situation. Kelly’s personal construct theory George Kelly (1905–1966) was another of the personality psychologists to first suggest that cognitive processes play a central role in an individual’s functioning. Kelly noted that personality psychologists typically characterized an individual on dimensions that they themselves had constructed. He proposed instead that the goal should be to discover personal constructs, the dimensions that individuals themselves use to interpret themselves and their social worlds. These dimensions constitute the basic units of analysis in Kelly’s personal construct theory (1955). More generally, Kelly believed that individuals should be viewed as intuitive scientists. Like formal scientists, they observe the world, formulate and test hypotheses about it, and make up theories about it. They also categorize, interpret, label, and judge themselves and their world. And, like scientists, individuals can entertain invalid theories, beliefs that hinder them in their daily lives and lead to biased interpretations of events and persons, including themselves. Like scientists trying to make predictions about events, people want to understand the world so that they can predict what will happen to them. Kelly argued that each individual uses a unique set of personal constructs in interpreting and predicting events. Those constructs tend to take an either–or form: A new acquaintance is either friendly or unfriendly, intelligent or unintelligent, fun or boring, and so on. But two people meeting the same individual may use different constructs in evaluating that individual – someone who seems friendly and intelligent to one person may seem unfriendly and unintelligent to another. These differences lead to differences in behavior – one person will respond positively to the new acquaintance while another may avoid him or her. These differences in behavior produce differences in personality. For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk THE COGNITIVE APPROACH Because typical trait tests of personality do not meet Kelly’s basic criterion that individuals must be assessed in terms of their personal constructs, he devised his own test for eliciting a person’s personal constructs, the Role Construct Repertory Test or ‘Rep Test’. On this test, clients fill in a matrix or grid like the one shown in Figure 13.5. Along the top of the grid is a list of people who are important to the individual. These might be supplied by the assessor or by the client, but they usually include ‘myself’ and sometimes include ‘my ideal self’. On each line of the grid, the assessor circles three of the cells. For example, in the first row of the figure the assessor has circled the cells in the columns labeled ‘myself’, ‘my mother’, and ‘my best friend’. The client is asked to consider these three people and to place an X in the cells of the two who are most similar to each other but different from the third. As shown in the first row, this (male) client considers himself and his mother to be the most similar pair. He is then asked, ‘In what way are you and your mother alike but different from your best friend?’ In this case the client has indicated that he and his mother are both witty. This description is his construct. Next he is asked, ‘In what way is your friend different from you and your mother?’ He has responded that his friend is humorless. This description is his contrast. For this client, then, the dimension witty–humorless is one of Most admired teacher Best friend Girl friend Neighbor Mother Myself Father Uncle Sister Construct Contrast Figure 13.5 The Role Construct Repertory Test. In each row, the individual compares three of the people listed at the top of the grid, placing an X under the two who are most alike. He or she then describes how they are alike by writing in the construct. Finally, the individual describes how the third person is different from the other two by writing in the contrast. This person indicates that he sees himself and his mother as being both witty and different from his best friend, who is seen as humorless. The procedure is repeated for each row in the matrix.

482 CHAPTER 13 PERSONALITY the personal constructs he uses to interpret his interpersonal world. Note that a construct–contrast pair need not constitute logical opposites. For example, this client might have labeled himself and his mother as witty but then labeled his best friend as serious or introverted or prefers-tolisten-to-humor-rather-than-initiate-it. If that is how he construes the two sides of the dimension, then that is what Kelly wanted to know. The Rep Test is designed to assess the individual’s constructs, not the psychologist’s. This procedure is repeated with several other triads in the set. By looking at the entire set, the investigator or therapist can explore a number of themes that seem to characterize the individual’s interpretation of the world. For example, some clients will reveal through this procedure that they see the entire world in authoritarian terms; dimensions like strong–weak, powerful–powerless, and so forth might appear repeatedly. Or an individual might reveal that she always pairs herself with males on the construct end of dimensions while placing other women on the contrast end. The Rep Test is a very general procedure and is not restricted to interpretations of other people. For example, an individual may be asked to consider triads of situations or events. (Which two are alike but different from the third? Taking an examination, going out on a blind date, encountering a spider.) The technique has proved valuable both for research on people’s constructs and for counseling. Self-schemas A schema is a cognitive structure that helps us perceive, organize, process, and utilize information. Through the use of schemas, each individual develops a system for identifying what is important in his or her environment while ignoring everything else. Schemas also provide a structure within which to organize and process information. For example, most people have developed a mother schema. When asked to describe their mother, it is easy for them because the information is organized into a welldefined cognitive structure. It is easier to describe one’s mother than to describe a woman one has heard about but has never met. Schemas are relatively stable over time and therefore result in stable ways of perceiving and utilizing information. They differ from one individual to another, causing people to process information differently and to behave in different ways. They thus can be used to explain differences in personality. Perhaps the most important schema is the self-schema, which consists of ‘cognitive generalizations about the self, derived from past experience, that organize and guide the processing of self-related information’ (Markus, 1977, p. 64). From an early age, we all develop a cognitive For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk representation of who we are. The resulting self-schema is made up of the aspects of our behavior that are most important to us, and it plays a central role in the way we process information and interact with the world around us. For example, two people may both enjoy jogging and literature, but for one person exercise may be an important part of the self-schema, yet the other person’s selfschema may place greater emphasis on being well-read. The first person is likely to spend more time jogging than reading, and the reverse is likely to be true of the second person. The core of the self-schema is basic information, such as the person’s name, physical appearance, and relationships with significant people. But more important from the standpoint of individual differences are particularistic features of the self-schema (Markus & Sentis, 1982; Markus & Smith, 1981). For the person whose selfschema includes an emphasis on exercise, for example, exercise is part of ‘who he or she is’ and a part of the daily or weekly routine. For the person who enjoys jogging but does not view it as central, an occasional jog around the park will be sufficient. So, differences in self-schemas produce differences in behavior. Self-schemas not only guide the perception and processing of information but also provide a framework for organizing and storing it. As with the mother schema mentioned earlier, we would expect people to retrieve information from memory more easily when they have a strong schema for it. This hypothesis was tested in an experiment in which college students were presented with a series of 40 questions on a video screen (Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977). The participants were asked to respond to each question by pressing a yes or no button as quickly as possible. Thirty of the questions could be answered easily without being processed through the self-schema. They asked whether a word was printed in big letters, rhymed with another word, or had the same meaning as another word. The other ten questions required participants to decide whether a word described them, and the researchers proposed that in these cases the information had to be processed through the self-schema. The participants were later asked to recall as many of the 40 words as they could. The results showed that when participants answered questions about themselves they were more likely to remember the information later. The researchers concluded that the participants processed this information through their self-schemas. Because information in the self-schema is easy to access, words referring to the self were easier to remember than words processed in other ways. In subsequent studies, when participants were asked whether a word described the experimenter (Kuiper & Rogers, 1979) or a celebrity (Lord, 1980), they did not recall those words as easily as words describing themselves. In sum, it appears that the

ªISTOCKPHOTO.COM/ANJA HILD People’s style of dress and appearance may reflect their selfschema. superior organization and accessibility of information about ourselves makes information that is processed through the self-schema more accessible than information that is processed in other ways (Karylowski, 1990; Klein & Loftus, 1988; Klein, Loftus, & Burton, 1989). Self-schemas differ considerably across cultures to the extent that some theorists argue that personality is a product of culture (Cross & Markus, 1999). For example, North Americans assume that the self is autonomous and separate from others and from situations and that people have individual choice over their actions and beliefs. In the North American conception of the self, a person’s wishes, desires, interests, and abilities make up the self. People have the power and the responsibility to create the self they want to have, rather than allow external influences to shape their selfconcepts. In contrast, in some Asian cultures, the self is not an entity separate from others but is thoroughly intertwined with one’s obligations and relationships to others. The core issue in the development of the self is For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk THE COGNITIVE APPROACH not to discover and express one’s own wishes, desires, interests, and abilities, but to determine how one is meant to fit in with the social group and to shape oneself to best serve the social group. A cognitive portrait of human nature While the psychoanalytic and behaviorist perspectives are essentially deterministic, the cognitive perspective views humans as actively constructing their world and their place in it. The concept of personal agency is central to the cognitive approach to personality and behavior (Bandura, 2006). People’s sense of agency, or belief that they can influence important situations in their lives, drives their choices of what situations to approach and what to avoid, their level of motivation and persistence, and their well-being. A sense of agency can be elevated or dampened by the conditions individuals encounter: a boy who grows up in abject poverty, with parents who constantly tell him he will never amount to anything, is less likely to have a strong sense of personal agency than a boy who grows up in a comfortable home with parents who encourage him to achieve his goals. But agency trumps environment in social-cognitive theory: even the boy who grows up in poverty with unsupportive parents can rise above his environment and accomplish great things if he has personal agency. Although the cognitive perspective gives hope and encouragement to some, it can lead to ‘blaming the victim’. It suggests that individuals who do not triumph over adversity are lacking the right attitude – if they would just believe in themselves, they could overcome their circumstances. This may not be true for everyone. An evaluation of the cognitive approach The cognitive approach has some strengths as well as some weaknesses. One positive aspect of the approach is that it is based on empirical research. Many cognitive structures have been subjected to extensive study in controlled laboratory experiments. Another strength of cognitive theory is that it goes beyond the trait approach in explaining personality characteristics. Rather than simply identifying traits, cognitive theorists use cognitive structures to explain individual differences in behavior. On the other hand, a frequent criticism of the cognitive approach is that it employs vague concepts. It is difficult to state specifically what a personal construct is or to be sure when a schema is being used, and it is not entirely clear how a personal construct differs from a schema or how any of these cognitive structures relate to memory and other aspects of information processing. Moreover, behaviorists might ask whether it is really necessary to use these concepts. Perhaps personality can be explained just as well without referring to cognitions.

484 CHAPTER 13 PERSONALITY INTERIM SUMMARY l The cognitive approach to personality is based on the idea that differences in personality stem from differences in the way individuals mentally represent information. l Albert Bandura developed social cognitive theory, which holds that internal cognitive processes combine with environmental pressures to influence behavior, and that cognitive processes and environment have reciprocal effects on each other. l Walter Mischel has identified a number of cognitive person variables that affect people’s reactions to the environment and behaviors in the environment. l George Kelly’s personal construct theory focuses on the concepts that individuals use to interpret themselves and their social world. l Much research has focused on the self-schema, which consists of the aspects of a person’s behavior that are most important to that person. Experiments have shown that people perceive information more readily and recall it better when it is relevant to their self-schemas. CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS 1 Some theorists argue that our most important schemas for ourselves and others are often nonconscious – we don’t even realize we hold them and might deny we hold them if asked explicitly. Can you think of some methods by which you might be able to tap into a person’s nonconscious schemas? 2 What do you think are some of the most important developmental processes or events that contribute to the type of self-schema an individual develops? THE HUMANISTIC APPROACH During the first half of the twentieth century, the psychoanalytic and behaviorist approaches were dominant in psychology. In 1962, however, a group of psychologists founded the Association of Humanistic Psychology. They saw humanistic psychology as a ‘third force’, an alternative to the other two approaches. To define its mission, the association adopted four principles:

1. The experiencing person is of primary interest. Humans are not simply objects of study. They must be For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk described and understood in terms of their own subjective views of the world, their perceptions of self, and their feelings of self-worth. The central question each person must face is ‘Who am I?’ In order to learn how the individual attempts to answer this question, the psychologist must become a partner with that person.
2. Human choice, creativity, and self-actualization are the preferred topics of investigation. People are not motivated only by basic drives like sex or aggression or physiological needs like hunger and thirst. They feel a need to develop their potentials and capabilities. Growth and self-actualization should be the criteria of psychological health, not merely ego control or adjustment to the environment.
3. Meaningfulness must precede objectivity in the selection of research problems. Humanistic psychologists argue that we should study important human and social problems, even if that sometimes means adopting less rigorous methods. And while psychologists should strive to be objective in collecting and interpreting observations, their choice of research topics can and should be guided by values. In this sense, research is not value-free.
4. Ultimate value is placed on the dignity of the person. People are basically good. The objective of psychology is to understand, not to predict or control people. Psychologists who share these values come from diverse theoretical backgrounds. For example, the trait theorist Gordon Allport was also a humanistic psychologist, and we have already pointed out that several psychoanalysts, such as Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and Erik Erikson, held humanistic views of motivation that diverged from Freud’s views. But it is Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow whose theoretical views lie at the center of the humanistic movement. Carl Rogers Like Freud, Carl Rogers (1902–1987) based his theory on work with patients or clients in a clinic (Rogers, 1951, 1959, 1963, 1970). Rogers was impressed with what he saw as the individual’s innate tendency to move toward growth, maturity, and positive change. He came to believe that the basic force motivating the human organism is the actualizing tendency– a tendency toward fulfillment or actualization of all the capacities of the organization. A growing organism seeks to fulfill its potential within the limits of its heredity. A person may not always clearly perceive which actions lead to growth and which do not. But once the course is clear, the individual chooses to grow. Rogers did not deny that there are other needs, some of them biological, but he saw them as subservient to the organism’s motivation to enhance itself.

CARL ROGERS MEMORIAL LIBRARY Carl Rogers believed that individuals have an innate tendency to move toward growth, maturity, and positive change. He referred to this as the actualizing tendency. Rogers’s belief in the primacy of actualization forms the basis of his nondirective or client-centered therapy. This method of psychotherapy assumes that every individual has the motivation and ability to change and that the individual is best qualified to decide the direction such change should take. The therapist’s role is to act as a sounding board while the client explores and analyzes his or her problems. This approach differs from psychoanalytic therapy, during which the therapist analyzes the patient’s history to determine the problem and devise a course of remedial action. (See Chapter 16 for a discussion of various approaches to psychotherapy.) The self The central concept in Rogers’s theory of personality is the self, or self-concept (Rogers uses the terms interchangeably). The self (or real self) consists of all the ideas, perceptions, and values that characterize ‘I’ or ‘me’; it includes the awareness of ‘what I am’ and ‘what I can do’. This perceived self, in turn, influences both the person’s perception of the world and his or her behavior. For example, a woman who perceives herself as strong and competent perceives and acts upon the world quite differently from a woman who considers herself weak and ineffectual. The self-concept does not necessarily reflect reality: A person may be highly successful and respected but still view himself or herself as a failure. According to Rogers, the individual evaluates every experience in relation to his or her self-concept. People For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk THE HUMANISTIC APPROACH want to behave in ways that are consistent with their self-image, and experiences and feelings that are not consistent are threatening and may be denied entry into consciousness. This is essentially Freud’s concept of repression, although Rogers felt that such repression is neither necessary nor permanent. (Freud would say that repression is inevitable and that some aspects of the individual’s experiences always remain unconscious.) The more areas of experience a person denies because they are inconsistent with his or her self-concept, the wider the gap between the self and reality and the greater the potential for maladjustment. Individuals whose selfconcepts do not match their feelings and experiences must defend themselves against the truth because the truth will result in anxiety. If the gap becomes too wide, the person’s defenses may break down, resulting in severe anxiety or other forms of emotional disturbance. A well-adjusted person, in contrast, has a self-concept that is consistent with his or her thoughts, experiences, and behaviors; the self is not rigid but flexible, and it can change as it assimilates new experiences and ideas. Rogers also proposed that each of us has an ideal self, our conception of the kind of person we would like to be. The closer the ideal self is to the real self, the more fulfilled and happy the individual becomes. A large discrepancy between the ideal self and the real self results in an unhappy, dissatisfied person. Thus, two kinds of inconsistency can develop: between the self and the experiences of reality and between the real self and the ideal self. Rogers proposed some hypotheses about how these inconsistencies may develop. In particular, Rogers believed that people are likely to function more effectively if they are brought up with unconditional positive regard – being given the sense that they are valued by parents and others even when their feelings, attitudes, and behaviors are less than ideal. If parents offer only conditional positive regard – valuing the child only when he or she behaves, thinks, or feels correctly – the child’s self-concept is likely to be distorted. For example, feelings of competition and hostility toward a younger sibling are natural, but parents disapprove of hitting a baby brother or sister and usually punish such actions. Children must somehow integrate this experience into their self-concept. They may decide that they are bad and feel ashamed. They may decide that their parents do not like them and feel rejected. Or they may deny their feelings and decide they do not want to hit the baby. Each of these attitudes distorts the truth. The third alternative is the easiest for children to accept, but in so doing they deny their real feelings, which then become unconscious. The more people are forced to deny their own feelings and accept the values of others, the more uncomfortable they will feel about themselves. Rogers suggested that the best approach is for the parents to recognize the child’s feelings as valid while explaining the reasons why hitting is not acceptable.

486 CHAPTER 13 PERSONALITY Measuring real–ideal self-congruence Earlier, we described a method of assessment called the Q-sort, in which a rater or sorter is given a set of cards, each containing a personality statement (for example, ‘Is cheerful’), and asked to describe an individual’s personality by sorting the cards into piles. The rater places statements that are least descriptive of the individual in a pile on the left and those that are most descriptive in a pile on the right. The other statements are distributed in the intermediate piles, thereby assigning each Q item a score corresponding to the pile in which it is placed. Researchers can compare two Q-sorts by computing a correlation between their item scores, thereby assessing the degree to which the two sorts are similar. Rogers pioneered the use of the Q-sort as a way of examining the self-concept. His Q set contains statements like ‘I am satisfied with myself’, ‘I have a warm emotional relationship with others’, and ‘I don’t trust my emotions’. In Rogers’s procedure, individuals first sort themselves as they actually are – their real self – and then sort themselves as they would like to be – their ideal self. The correlation between the two sorts reveals the degree of incongruence between the real and ideal selves. A low or negative correlation corresponds to a large discrepancy, implying feelings of low self-esteem and lack of worth. By repeating this procedure several times during the course of therapy, Rogers could assess the effectiveness of therapy. In one study, correlations between self and ideal Q-sorts of individuals seeking therapy averaged .01 before therapy but increased to þ.34 after therapy. Correlations for a matched control group that did not receive therapy did not change (Butler & Haigh, 1954). In other words, the therapy had significantly reduced these individuals’ perception of the discrepancy between their real selves and their ideal selves. Note that this could occur in two ways: An individual could change his or her concept of the real self so that it was closer to the ideal self or change his or her concept of the ideal self so that it was more realistic. Therapy can produce both kinds of changes. More recently, psychologist Tory Higgins (Higgins & Spiegel, 2004) has shown that self-discrepancies such as those described by Rogers are associated with psychopathology. People who see themselves as falling far short of the person they would ideally like to be, or feel they ought to be, and who do not believe they can overcome these discrepancies, are prone to serious depression and anxiety. Abraham Maslow The psychology of Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) overlaps with that of Carl Rogers in many ways. Maslow was first attracted to behaviorism and carried out studies of primate sexuality and dominance. He was already For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk Self-actualization needs: to find self-fulfillment and realize one’s potential Aesthetic needs: symmetry, order, and beauty Cognitive needs: to know, understand, and explore Esteem needs: to achieve, be competent, and gain approval and recognition Belongingness and love needs: to affiliate with others, be accepted, and belong Safety needs: to feel secure and safe, out of danger Physiological needs: hunger, thirst, and so forth Figure 13.6 Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Needs that are low in the hierarchy must be at least partially satisfied before needs that are higher in the hierarchy become important sources of motivation. (After Abraham H. Maslow, ‘Hierarchy of Needs’, from Motivation and Personality. Copyright © 1954 by Harper and Row Publishers, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Pearson Education, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ.) moving away from behaviorism when his first child was born, after which he remarked that anyone who observes a baby cannot be a behaviorist. He was influenced by psychoanalysis but eventually became critical of its theory of motivation and developed his own theory. Specifically, he proposed that there is a hierarchy of needs, ascending from the basic biological needs to the more complex psychological motivations that become important only after the basic needs have been satisfied (see Figure 13.6). The needs at one level must be at least partially satisfied before those at the next level become important motivators of action. When food and safety are difficult to obtain, efforts to satisfy those needs will dominate a person’s actions, and higher motives will have little significance. Only when basic needs can be satisfied easily will the individual have the time and energy to devote to aesthetic and intellectual interests. Artistic and scientific endeavors do not flourish in societies in which people must struggle for food, shelter, and safety. The highest motive – self-actualization – can be fulfilled only after all other needs have been satisfied. Maslow decided to study self-actualizers – men and women who had made extraordinary use of their potential. He began by studying the lives of eminent historical figures such as Spinoza, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham

Table 13.3 Self-actualization Listed here are the personal qualities that Maslow found to be characteristic of self-actualizers and the behaviors he considered important to the development of self-actualization. (A. H. Maslow (1967), ‘Selfactualization and beyond’. In Challenges of Humanistic Psychology, J. F. T. Bugenthal (ed.). Copyright © 1967 by Abraham H. Maslow. Used with permission of McGraw-Hill Publishers.) Characteristics of self-actualizers Perceive reality efficiently and can tolerate uncertainty Accept themselves and others for what they are Spontaneous in thought and behavior Problem-centered rather than self-centered Have a good sense of humor Highly creative Resistant to enculturation, although not purposely unconventional Concerned for the welfare of humanity Capable of deep appreciation of the basic experiences of life Establish deep, satisfying interpersonal relationships with a few, rather than many, people Able to look at life from an objective viewpoint Behaviors leading to self-actualization Experience life as a child does, with full absorption and concentration Try something new rather than sticking to secure and safe ways Listen to their own feelings in evaluating experiences rather than to the voice of tradition or authority or the majority Be honest; avoid pretenses or ‘game playing’ Be prepared to be unpopular if their views do not coincide with those of most people Assume responsibility Work hard at whatever they decide to do Try to identify their defenses and have the courage to give them up Lincoln, Jane Addams, Albert Einstein, and Eleanor Roosevelt. In this way he was able to create a composite picture of a self-actualizer. The distinguishing characteristics of such individuals are listed in Table 13.3, along with some of the behaviors that Maslow believed could lead to self-actualization. Maslow then extended his study to a population of college students. Selecting students who fit his definition of self-actualizers, he found this group to be in the healthiest 1 percent of the population. These students showed no signs of maladjustment and were making effective use of their talents and capabilities (Maslow, 1970). For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk THE HUMANISTIC APPROACH ªISTOCKPHOTO.COM/YENWEN LU Musicians sometimes describe the experience of playing as a peak experience. Many people experience what Maslow called peak experiences: transient moments of self-actualization. A peak experience is characterized by happiness and fulfillment – a temporary, nonstriving, non-self-centered state of goal attainment. Peak experiences may occur in different intensities and in various contexts, such as creative activities, appreciation of nature, intimate relationships, aesthetic perceptions, or athletic participation. After asking a large number of college students to describe any experience that came close to being a peak experience, Maslow attempted to summarize their responses. They spoke of wholeness, perfection, aliveness, uniqueness, effortlessness, self-sufficiency, and the values of beauty, goodness, and truth. A humanistic portrait of human nature As a matter of principle, humanistic psychologists have been quite explicit about the principles underlying their approach to human personality. The four principles set forth by the Association of Humanistic Psychology, which we summarized earlier, draw sharp contrasts

488 CHAPTER 13 PERSONALITY between the humanistic portrait of human personality and the portraits drawn by the psychoanalytic and behaviorist approaches. In addition, while humanistic psychology shares with cognitive perspectives a concern with how the individual views the self, humanistic psychology has a much more expansive view of human experience than cognitive perspectives, which goes far beyond the particular thoughts that go through the individual’s mind. Most humanistic psychologists do not dispute the claim that biological and environmental variables can influence behavior, but they emphasize the individual’s own role in defining and creating his or her destiny, and they downplay the determinism that is characteristic of the other approaches. In their view, individuals are basically good, striving for growth and self-actualization. They are also modifiable and active. Humanistic psychologists set a particularly high criterion for psychological health. Mere ego control or adaptation to the environment is not enough. Only an individual who is growing toward self-actualization can be said to be psychologically healthy. In other words, psychological health is a process, not an end state. Such assumptions have political implications. From the perspective of humanistic psychology, anything that retards the fulfillment of individual potential – that prevents any human being from becoming all he or she can be – should be challenged. For example, if women in the 1950s were happy and well adjusted to traditional sex roles, the criterion of psychological health defined by behaviorism was satisfied. But from the humanistic perspective, consigning all women to the same role is undesirable – no matter how appropriate that role might be for some women – because it prevents many from reaching their maximum potential. It is no accident that the rhetoric of liberation movements – such as women’s liberation and gay liberation – echoes the language of humanistic psychology. © AP/ WIDE WORLD PHOTOS An evaluation of the humanistic approach By focusing on the individual’s unique perception and interpretation of events, the humanistic approach brings individual experience back into the study of personality. More than other theories we have discussed, the theories of Rogers and Maslow concentrate on the whole, healthy person and take a positive, optimistic view of human personality. Humanistic psychologists emphasize that they study important problems, even if they do For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk not always have rigorous methods for investigating them. They have a point – investigating trivial problems just because one has a convenient method for doing so does little to advance the science of psychology. Moreover, humanistic psychologists have succeeded in devising new methods for assessing self-concepts and conducting studies that treat the individual as an equal partner in the research enterprise. Nevertheless, critics question the quality of the evidence in support of the humanists’ claims. For example, to what extent are the characteristics of self-actualizers a consequence of a psychological process called self-actualization and to what extent are they merely reflections of the particular value systems held by Rogers and Maslow? Where, they ask, is the evidence for Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? Humanistic psychologists are also criticized for building their theories solely on observations of relatively healthy people. Their theories are best suited to wellfunctioning people whose basic needs have been met, freeing them to concern themselves with higher needs. The applicability of these theories to malfunctioning or disadvantaged individuals is less apparent. Finally, some have criticized the values espoused by the humanistic theorists. A psychology that raises individual self-fulfillment and actualization to the top of the value hierarchy may provide a ‘sanction for selfishness’ (Wallach & Wallach, 1983). Although Maslow lists concern for the welfare of humanity among the characteristics of self-actualizers (see Table 13.3) and some of the self-actualizers identified by Maslow – such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Albert Einstein – clearly possessed this characteristic, it is not included in the hierarchy of needs. ª BETTMANN/CORBIS Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt were among the individuals Maslow identified as self-actualizers.

INTERIM SUMMARY l The humanistic approach is concerned with the individual’s subjective experience. Humanistic psychology was founded as an alternative to psychoanalytic and behaviorist approaches. l Carl Rogers argued that the basic force motivating the human organism is the actualizing tendency – a tendency toward fulfillment or actualization of all the capacities of the self. When the needs of the self are denied, severe anxiety can result. Children come to develop an actualized self through the experience of unconditional positive regard from their caregivers. l Abraham Maslow proposed that there is a hierarchy of needs, ascending from the basic biological needs to the more complex psychological motivations that become important only after the basic needs have been satisfied. The needs at one level must be at least partially satisfied before those at the next level become important motivators of action. CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS 1 Several studies suggest that people in Asian cultures are not as concerned with individualism as Americans are and instead are more concerned with the collective welfare of their family and community. To what extent do you think this refutes humanistic perspectives on personality? 2 Do you think it’s always a good idea to give a child unconditional positive regard? Why or why not? THE EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH One of the most controversial theories in personality is really an application of a very old theory. Evolutionary theory, as proposed by Darwin (1859), has played an important role in biology for well over a century. Darwin ventured some ideas about the evolutionary roots of human behavior, but the modern field of evolutionary psychology began with the work of Wilson (1975) on ‘sociobiology’. The basic premise of sociobiology and, later, evolutionary psychology is that behaviors that increased the organism’s chances of surviving and leaving descendants would be selected for over the course of evolutionary history and thus would become aspects of humans’ personalities. Not surprisingly, a good deal of the research on the application of evolutionary psychology to personality has focused on mate selection. Mating involves competition – For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk THE EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH among heterosexuals, males compete with males and females compete with females. What’s being competed for differs between the sexes, however, because males and females have different roles in reproduction. Because females carry their offspring for nine months and then nurse and care for them after birth, they have a greater investment in each offspring and can produce fewer offspring in their lifetimes than men can. This puts a premium for the female on the quality of the genetic contribution of the males with whom she reproduces, as well as on signs of his ability and willingness to help care for his offspring. In contrast, the optimal reproductive strategy for males is to reproduce as often as possible, and they will primarily be looking for females who are available and fertile. David Buss, Douglas Kenrick, and other evolutionary psychologists have investigated personality differences between males and females that they hypothesize are the result of these differences in reproductive strategies (Buss, 2007; Kenrick, 2006). They reasoned that women who are interested in mating should emphasize their youth and beauty, because these are signs of their fertility, but should be choosier than men about what partners they mate with. In contrast, men who are interested in mating should emphasize their ability to support their offspring and should be less choosy than women about their mating partners. A variety of findings have supported these hypotheses. When asked what they do to make themselves attractive to the opposite sex, women report enhancing their beauty through makeup, jewelry, clothing, and hairstyles. Women also report playing hard to get. Men report bragging about their accomplishments and earning potential, displaying expensive possessions, and flexing their muscles (Buss, 2007). Other studies have found that men are more interested in casual sex than women are (Buss & Schmitt, 1993) and are less selective in their criteria for one-night stands (Kenrick, Broth, Trost, & Sadalla, 1993). ª MATT CARDY / ALAMY Evolutionary theory provides an explanation for why older men often seek women who are much younger than they are.

490 CHAPTER 13 PERSONALITY One proxy for fertility is youth, and one proxy for economic resources is older age. Evolutionary theory suggests that men will be interested in mating with younger women, whereas women will be interested in mating with older men. These sex differences in mating preferences have been found across 37 cultures (Buss, 1989). Kenrick and Keefe (1992) even found evidence for these mating preferences in singles ads placed in newspapers. In the ads, the older a man was, the more he expressed a preference for a younger woman. Women tended to express a preference for older men, regardless of the women’s age. Some theorists have extended evolutionary predictions far beyond mating preferences, arguing that men are more individualistic, domineering, and oriented toward problem solving than women because these personality characteristics increased males’ ability to reproduce often over history and thus were selected for (Gray, 1992; Tannen, 1990). In contrast, women are more inclusive, sharing, and communal because these personality characteristics increased the chances of survival of their offspring and thus were selected for. In some of their more controversial work, evolutionary theorists have argued that because of sex differences in mating strategies there should be sex differences in both sexual infidelity and the sources of jealousy. Whereas men’s desire to mate frequently makes them more prone to sexual infidelity than women, their concern that they are not investing their resources in offspring who are not their own makes them more concerned about sexual infidelity of their female partners. This suggests that men will be more likely than women to cheat on their female partners and more jealous than women if their spouse or partner cheats on them. Several studies have found support for these hypotheses (Buss, 2007). When competition among males for available females becomes fierce, it can lead to violence, particularly among males who have fewer resources to compete with, such as unemployed males. Wilson and Daly (1985; Daly & Wilson, 1990) found that homicides between nonrelatives are most likely to be among young males, whom they argued were fighting over ‘face’ and status. They further found that homicides within families are most often husbands killing wives and argued that these killings represent the male’s attempt at controlling the fidelity of the female partner. An evolutionary portrait of human nature The evolutionary portrait of human nature would appear to be a rather grim one. We are this way because it has been adaptive for the species to develop in this manner, and everything about our personalities and social behavior is coded in our genes. This would seem to leave little room for positive change. Evolutionary theorists are the first to emphasize, however, that evolution is all about change – when the For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk environment changes, only organisms that can adapt to that change will survive and reproduce. This change just happens more slowly than we might like it to. An evaluation of the evolutionary approach You should not be surprised that the evolutionary approach has taken a great deal of heat. There are important social and political implications of the arguments and findings of these theorists. Some critics argue that evolutionary psychology simply provides a thinly veiled justification for the unfair social conditions and prejudices in today’s world. If women are subordinate to men in economic and political power, it’s because this was evolutionarily adaptive for the species. If men beat their wives and have extramarital affairs, they can’t help it; it’s in their genes. If some ethnic groups have more power and wealth in society, it’s because their behaviors have been selected for over evolutionary history, and their genes are superior. Evolutionary theorists have also taken heat from the scientific community. The early arguments of sociobiologists were highly speculative and not based on hard data. Some critics argued that their hypotheses were unfalsifiable or untestable. In the past decade, there has been an upsurge of empirical research attempting to rigorously test evolutionary theories of human behavior. Some theorists have steered away from controversial topics such as sex differences in personality or abilities to investigate the role of evolution in shaping the cognitive structures of the brain (Tooby & Cosmides, 2002). Still, the question remains of whether an evolutionary explanation for a given finding – whether a human sex difference or some behavior or structure that all humans share – is necessary. It is easy to develop alternative explanations for most of the findings that evolutionary theorists tend to attribute to reproductive strategies (Wood & Eagly 2007). For example, sex differences in personality characteristics could be due to sex differences in body size and strength (for instance, men are more dominant than women because their size allows them to be, whereas women are friendlier than men because they are trying not to get beaten up by men). The causes of behavior focused on by most alternative explanations are more proximal than evolutionary causes – the explanations don’t rely on claims about what has been true for millions of years and make claims only about what has been true in the relatively recent past. For many findings touted by evolutionary theorists as being consistent with evolutionary history, it is difficult to conceive of experiments that could help us decide between an evolutionary explanation and an alternative explanation that focuses on more proximal causes. Evolutionary theory is attractive in its power to explain a wide range of behaviors, however. Not since the introduction of behaviorism has psychology had a new explanatory framework that might account for most aspects of human behavior. Many evolutionary theorists

CUTTING EDGE RESEARCH Finding the Self in the Brain The ‘self’ is a key aspect of personality according to several theories discussed in this chapter. People have schemas for the self and personal constructs that describe and organize their perceptions of themselves. They can have a strong or weak sense of self-agency or self-efficacy. They can be more or less self-actualized. Modern neuroscientists have been interested in whether information about the self, and the processing of self-relevant information, are centralized in certain areas of the brain. They have used several different kinds of tasks to investigate brain regions associated with self-referential processing. For example, some researchers have people evaluate the selfdescriptiveness of adjectives or sentences describing personality traits (e.g., Heatherton et al., 2006) or simply think freely about their own personality (D’Argembau et al., 2005), and have compared brain activity during these tasks with brain activity when individuals are reflecting on the personality traits of another person or making judgments of factual knowledge. The most consistent finding in this literature is that self-referential thought is associated with increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (see Figure A). Interest in the role of the prefrontal cortex in self-relevant thought and self-regulation dates back to the famous case of Phineas Gage (Damasio et al., 1994). Gage was a 25-yearold construction foreman for a railroad line in the northeast United States in the mid-1800s. Controlled blasting was used to level uneven terrain so that railroad ties could be laid, and Gage was in charge of detonations. On 13 September 1848, an accident sent a fine-pointed, 3-cm-thick, 109-cmlong tamping iron hurling at high speed through Gage’s face, Figure A The medial prefrontal cortex. Self-referential thought is associated with activity in the medial prefrontal cortex. For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk THE EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH Figure B Phineas Gage’s Brain Injury. Modern neuroimaging techniques have helped identify the precise location of damage to Phineas Gage’s brain. Source: Damasio, H., Grabowski, T., Frank, R., Galaburda, A. M., and Damasio, A. R.: The return of Phineas Gage: clues about the brain from the skull of a famous patient. Science, 264, 1102–1105. skull, and brain, and then into the sky. Unbelievably, Gage was only momentarily stunned, but regained full consciousness and walked away with the help of his men. Following the accident, Gage’s intellectual capacities seemed intact, but he underwent a remarkable change in personality. Gage had been a highly responsible, well-liked individual prior to the accident. After the accident, however, he became irresponsible, irreverent and profane. His control over his emotions and social behavior seemed to be lost. Almost 150 years later, researchers using modern neuroimaging techniques on Gage’s preserved skull and a computer simulation of the tamping-iron accident showed that the main damage to Gage’s brain was in the prefrontal cortex (see Figure B). The prefrontal cortex is an area of the brain that is involved in many of our most advanced thinking processes. It takes information from all sensory modalities, from other areas of the brain, and from the outside environment, integrating this information and coordinating our responses to it. As such, it has been considered the ‘chief executive’ of the brain. Thus, it is not surprising that aspects of the self – the characteristics we associate with our self, the emotions that these characteristics arouse, and our ability to regulate the self, involve processing in the prefrontal cortex. It is too simple to say, however, that the self is in the prefrontal cortex. Researchers are finding that fine distinctions in self-relevant processing, for example, thinking about one’s hopes and aspirations, versus thinking about one’s duties

492 CHAPTER 13 PERSONALITY and obligations, activates different areas of the prefrontal cortex, and other areas of the brain (Johnson et al., 2006). Further, the ability to regulate one’s behaviors and emotions probably has to do with the coordination of activity of different areas of the brain, not just whether one area of the brain is active (Ochsner & Gross, 2007). Finally, although activity in different areas of the brain can affect our sense of self, those are vigorously pursuing more sophisticated and persuasive empirical tests of their hypotheses. Evolutionary psychology will clearly have an important influence on personality theories in years to come. INTERIM SUMMARY l Evolutionary psychology attempts to explain human behavior and personality in terms of the adaptiveness of certain characteristics for survival and reproductive success over human history. l Evolutionary theory is consistent with some observed sex differences in mate preferences. l It is a controversial theory, however, both for its social implications and for the difficulty of refuting arguments derived from this theory. CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS 1 To what extent do you think the political implications of a psychological theory should be of concern to its proponents? 2 Do you think evolutionary theory can predict anything about how human behavior will change in the next few centuries? THE GENETICS OF PERSONALITY We end with another controversial and relatively recent approach to understanding the origins of personality – the argument that personality traits are largely determined by the genes an individual was born with. Some of the best evidence that genes play a role in personality comes from the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart, which we described in Chapter 12 and highlighted at the beginning of this chapter. Recall from Chapter 12 that the participants in this study were assessed on a number of ability and personality measures. In addition, they participated For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk patterns of activity can be changed by training people to think differently about themselves (e.g., Ray et al., 2005) or through medications (Kennedy et al., 2001). Thus, modern neuroscience is helping us understand what areas of the brain are active when we think about ourselves. We are still left with the age-old philosophical question, however, What is the self? in lengthy interviews during which they were asked questions about such topics as childhood experiences, fears, hobbies, musical tastes, social attitudes, and sexual interests. A number of startling similarities were found. The twins with the most dramatically different backgrounds are Oskar Stohr and Jack Yufe, described at the beginning of the chapter. Another pair of twins with fairly different backgrounds are both British homemakers. They were separated during World War II and raised by families that differed in socioeconomic status. Both twins, who had never met before, arrived for their interviews wearing seven rings on their fingers. These studies reveal that twins reared apart are just as similar to each other across a wide range of personality characteristics as twins reared together, permitting us to conclude with greater confidence that identical twins are more similar to each other on personality characteristics than fraternal twins because they are more similar genetically (Bouchard, 2004; Tellegen et al., 1988). For the most part, the correlations found in the Minnesota studies are in accord with results from many other twin studies. In general, the highest levels of heritability are found in measures of abilities and intelligence (60%–70%), the next highest levels are typically found in measures of personality (about 50%); and the lowest levels are found for religious and political beliefs and vocational interests (30%–40%). For example, one study found that traits such as shyness and the tendency to become easily upset have heritabilities of between 30% and 50% (Bouchard et al., 1990; Newman, Tellegen, & Bouchard, 1998). Interactions between personality and environment Genotype–environment correlation In shaping an individual’s personality, genetic and environmental influences are intertwined from the moment of birth. First, it may take certain environments to trigger the effects of specific genes (Gottlieb, 2000). For example, a child born with a genetic tendency toward alcoholism may never become alcoholic if never exposed to alcohol. Second, parents give their biological offspring both their genes and a home environment, and both are functions of the parents’ own genes. As a result, there is a built-in correlation between the child’s

ªISTOCKPHOTO.COM/ARTISTS MEMBER NAME Intelligent parents will both pass their genes to their children and provide environments that foster intelligence. inherited characteristics (genotype) and the environment in which he or she is raised. For example, because general intelligence is partially heritable, parents with high intelligence are likely to have children with high intelligence. But parents with high intelligence are also likely to provide an intellectually stimulating environment for their children – both through their interactions with them and through books, music lessons, trips to museums, and other intellectual experiences. Because the child’s genotype and environment are positively correlated in this way, he or she will get a double dose of intellectual advantage. Similarly, children born to parents with low intelligence are likely to encounter a home environment that exacerbates whatever intellectual disadvantage they may have inherited directly. Third, some parents may deliberately construct an environment that is negatively correlated with the child’s genotype. For example, introverted parents may encourage participation in social activities to counteract the child’s likely introversion: ‘We make an effort to have people over because we don’t want Chris to grow up to be as shy as we are.’ Parents of a very active child may try to provide interesting quiet activities. But whether the correlation is positive or negative, the point is that the child’s genotype and environment are not simply independent sources of influence that add together to shape the child’s personality. Finally, in addition to being correlated with the environment, a child’s genotype shapes the environment in certain ways (Bouchard, 2004). In particular, the environment becomes a function of the child’s personality through three forms of interaction: reactive, evocative, and proactive. Reactive interaction Different individuals who are exposed to the same environment interpret it, experience it, and react to it differently – a process known as reactive interaction. An anxious, sensitive child will experience and react to harsh For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk THE GENETICS OF PERSONALITY parents differently than will a calm, resilient child, and the sharp tone of voice that provokes the sensitive child to tears might pass unnoticed by his sister. An extroverted child will attend to people and events around her, but her introverted brother will ignore them. A brighter child will get more out of being read to than a less bright child. In other words, each child’s personality extracts a subjective psychological environment from the objective surroundings, and it is that subjective environment that shapes personality development. Even if parents provided exactly the same environment for all their children – which they usually do not – it will not be psychologically equivalent for all of them. Reactive interaction occurs throughout life. One person will interpret a hurtful act as the product of deliberate hostility and react to it quite differently from a person who interprets the same act as the result of unintended insensitivity. Evocative interaction Every individual’s personality evokes distinctive responses from others, which has been referred to as evocative interaction. An infant who squirms and fusses when picked up will evoke less nurturance from a parent than one who likes to be cuddled. Docile children will evoke a less controlling style of child rearing from parents than will aggressive children. For this reason, we cannot simply assume that an observed correlation between the child-rearing practices of a child’s parents and his or her personality reflects a simple cause-and-effect sequence. Instead, the child’s personality can shape the parents’ child-rearing style, which, in turn, further shapes the child’s personality. Evocative interaction also occurs throughout life: Gracious people evoke gracious environments; hostile people evoke hostile environments. Proactive interaction As children grow older, they can move beyond the environments provided by their parents and begin to select and construct environments of their own. These ª SALLY AND RICHARD GREENHILL / ALAMY As children grow older, they begin to construct their own environments, independent from their parents.

494 CHAPTER 13 PERSONALITY environments, in turn, further shape their personalities. This process is referred to as proactive interaction. A sociable child will choose to go to the movies with friends rather than stay home alone and watch television because her sociable personality prompts her to select an environment that reinforces her sociability. And what she cannot select she will construct: If nobody invites her to the movies, she will organize the event herself. As the term implies, proactive interaction is a process through which individuals become active agents in the development of their own personalities. The relative importance of these three kinds of personality-environment interactions shifts over the course of development (Scarr, 1996; Scarr & McCartney, 1983). The built-in correlation between a child’s genotype and his or her environment is strongest when the child is young and confined almost exclusively to the home environment. As the child grows older and begins to select and construct his or her own environment, this initial correlation decreases and the influence of proactive interaction increases. As we have noted, reactive and evocative interactions remain important throughout life. Some unsolved puzzles Studies of twins have produced a number of puzzling patterns that still are not completely understood. For example, the estimate of heritability for personality is higher when it is based on identical twin pairs reared apart than it is when based on a comparison of identical and fraternal twins pairs reared together. Moreover, the striking similarities of identical twins do not seem to diminish across time or separate rearing environments. In contrast, the similarities of fraternal twins (and nontwin siblings) diminish from childhood through adolescence, even when they are reared together. Instead, the longer they live together in the same home, the less similar they become (Scarr, 1996; Scarr & McCartney, 1983). Some of these patterns would emerge if the genes themselves interact so that inheriting all one’s genes in common (as identical twins do) is more than twice as effective as inheriting only half one’s genes in common (as fraternal twins and non-twin siblings do). This could come about if a trait depends on a particular combination of genes. Consider, for example, the trait of having blue eyes (which we will oversimplify a bit to make the point). Suppose that two parents each have a blue-eye gene and a brown-eye gene. For one of their children to get blue eyes, the child must inherit a blue gene from the father and a blue gene from the mother; the three other combinations (brown–brown, brown–blue, blue– brown) will give the child brown eyes. In other words, any child of theirs has a one-in-four chance of getting blue eyes. But because identical twins inherit identical For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk genes from their parents, they will also inherit the same combination of genes. If one gets blue eyes, so will the other. In contrast, if a fraternal twin inherits a blue gene from both parents, the chances that the other twin will also do so is still only one out of four and not one out of two. So, in this example, inheriting all one’s genes in common is more than twice as effective as inheriting only half one’s genes in common. There is evidence for this kind of gene–gene interaction for some personality traits, especially extroversion (Lykken, McGue, Tellegen, & Bouchard, 1992; Pedersen, Plomin, McClearn, & Friberg, 1988). But personality–environment interactions could also be partially responsible for these patterns. Consider identical twins. Because they have identical genotypes, they also react to situations in similar ways (reactive interaction), they evoke similar responses from others (evocative interaction), and their similar, genetically guided talents, interests, and motivations lead them to seek out and construct similar environments (proactive interaction). The important point is that these processes all operate whether the twins are reared together or apart. For example, two identical twins who were separated at birth will still be treated in similar ways by other people because they evoke similar responses from others. Proactive interaction operates in the same way. Each twin’s personality prompts him or her to select friends and environments that happen to be similar to the friends and environments chosen by the other twin. But friends and environments that are similar will treat each twin in similar ways. And so it goes. Because the twins begin with identical genotypic personalities, all the processes of personality–environment interaction act together to promote and sustain their similarity across time – even if they have not met since birth. In contrast, the environments of fraternal twins and non-twin siblings increasingly diverge as they grow older – even within the same home. They are most alike in early childhood, when parents provide the same environment for both (although even here siblings will react somewhat differently and evoke different responses from the parents). But as soon as they begin to select and construct environments outside the home, their moderately different talents, interests, and motivations will take them down increasingly divergent paths, thereby producing increasingly divergent personalities. Shared versus nonshared environments Twin studies allow researchers to estimate not only how much of the variation among individuals is due to genetic variation but also how much of the environmentally related variation is due to aspects of the environment that family members share (for example, socioeconomic status) as compared with aspects of the environment that family members do not share (for

example, friends outside the family). Surprisingly, some studies suggest that differences due to shared aspects of the environment seem to account for almost none of the environmental variation: After their genetic similarities are subtracted out, two children from the same family seem to be no more alike than two children chosen randomly from the population (Scarr, 1992). This implies that the kinds of variables that psychologists typically study (such as child-rearing practices, socioeconomic status, and parents’ education) are contributing virtually nothing to individual differences in personality. How can this be so? One possible explanation might be that the reactive, evocative, and proactive processes act to diminish the differences between environments as long as those environments permit some flexibility of response. A bright child from a neglecting or impoverished home is more likely than a less bright sibling to absorb information from a television program (reactive interaction), to attract the attention of a sympathetic teacher (evocative interaction), and to go to the library (proactive interaction). This child’s genotype acts to counteract the potentially debilitating effects of the home environment, and therefore he or she develops differently from a less bright sibling. Only if the environment is severely restrictive will these personality-driven processes be thwarted (Scarr, 1996; Scarr & McCartney, 1983). This explanation is supported by the finding that the most dissimilar pairs of identical twins reared apart are those in which one twin was reared in a severely restricted environment. Although this explanation seems plausible, there is no direct evidence that it is correct. In recent years, several psychologists have pointed to methodological problems in research on the heritability of individual differences that may also account for the apparent lack of effects of the environment. For example, almost all the data for these studies come from self-report questionnaires, but the validity of these questionnaires, particularly as assessments of the environment of different children in the family, is questionable. In addition, the families who participate in these studies tend to be quite similar to each other in demographics – not representing the extremes of either good or bad environments. This would reduce the apparent contribution of the environment to children’s abilities and personalities. In any case, it appears that research will have to shift from the usual comparisons of children from different families to comparisons of children within the same families – with particular attention to the personality– environment interactions within those families. Similarly, more attention must be given to influences outside the family. One writer has suggested that the peer group is a far more important source of personality differences among children than the family (Harris, 1995; see Chapter 3). For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk THE GENETICS OF PERSONALITY INTERIM SUMMARY l Evidence from twin studies suggests that genetic factors substantially influence personality traits. l In shaping personality, genetic and environmental influences do not act independently but are intertwined from the moment of birth. Because a child’s personality and his or her home environment are both a function of the parents’ genes, there is a built-in correlation between the child’s genotype (inherited personality characteristics) and that environment. l Three dynamic processes of personality–environment interaction are (1) reactive interaction – different individuals exposed to the same environment experience it, interpret it, and react to it differently; (2) evocative interaction – an individual’s personality evokes distinctive responses from others; and (3) proactive interaction – individuals select or create environments of their own. As a child grows older, the influence of proactive interaction becomes increasingly important. l Studies of twins have produced a number of puzzling patterns: Heritabilities estimated from identical twins reared apart are higher than estimates based on comparisons between identical and fraternal twins; identical twins reared apart are as similar to each other as identical twins reared together, but fraternal twins and non-twin siblings become less similar over time, even when they are reared together. l These patterns are probably due in part to interactions among genes, so that having all one’s genes in common is more than twice as effective as having only half of one’s genes in common. Such patterns might also be due in part to the three processes of personality–environment interaction (reactive, evocative, and proactive). l After their genetic similarities are subtracted out, children from the same family seem to be no more alike than children chosen randomly from the population. This implies that the kinds of variables that psychologists typically study (such as child-rearing practices and the family’s socioeconomic status) contribute virtually nothing to individual differences in personality. CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS 1 What are some ways that reactive, evocative, and proactive interaction might have influenced the development of your personality and abilities? 2 If you have siblings, what do you think are the best explanations for the similarities and differences you see between yourself and your siblings?

496 CHAPTER 13 PERSONALITY SEEING BOTH SIDES IS FREUD’S INFLUENCE ON PSYCHOLOGY STILL ALIVE? Freud’s influence on psychology is alive and vibrant Joel Weinberger, Adelphi University Is Freud still alive? Of course Freud is dead. He died on September 23, 1939. No one asks whether Isaac Newton or William James is dead. For some odd reason this is reserved for Freud. If the question is whether psychoanalysis, the branch of psychology he founded, is dead, the answer is clearly no. Psychoanalysis survived Freud and thrives today. The American Psychological Association’s division of psychoanalysis is the second largest division in the association. There now exist several schools of psychoanalysis, some of which Freud would probably not recognize. That is just what you would expect from a discipline whose founder is now 70 years dead. Are Freud’s ideas dead? They certainly are not. They have entered our common vernacular. They have entered and forever changed our culture. Think of the terms of id, ego, superego, Freudian slip, and so on. There are psychoanalytic writers, historians, psychiatrists, and of course, psychologists. The real question, I suppose, is whether Freud’s ideas are still valid. The answer is that some are and some are not. A surprising number remain relevant, even central, to modern psychology. So I suppose the charge is to state which of his ideas remain valid. And that is what I will address. Let’s look at some of Freud’s central ideas and see how they stack up with today’s psychology. Freud said that all human motives could be traced back to biological sources, specifically to sex and aggression. There is a branch of psychology now termed evolutionary psychology (Buss, 1994a,b); there is also sociobiology (Wilson, 1975) and ethology (Hinde, 1982). All champion the importance of biological factors in our behavior. And all have data to back up their claims. This aspect of Freud’s thinking is certainly not dead. As for the importance of sex and aggression? Just look at the best-selling books, hit movies, and TV shows around you. What characterizes virtually all of them? Sex and violence. Hollywood and book publishers all seem to be Freudians, and so are the people who sample their wares. For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk Another idea of Freud’s that was very controversial in his time was his notion that children have sexual feelings. Now that is simply commonplace knowledge. Psychoanalysts have long held that one of the major factors accounting for the effectiveness of psychotherapy is the therapeutic relationship. For many years this was not accepted, particularly by the behaviorist school (Emmelkamp, 1994). We now know that this is a critical factor in therapeutic success (Weinberger, 1996). The related idea that we carry representations of early relationships around in our heads, an idea expanded upon by object relations theory (a school of psychoanalysis) and attachment theory (the creation of a psychoanalyst, John Bowlby), is also now commonly accepted in psychology. The most central idea usually attributed to Freud is the importance of unconscious processes. According to Freud, we are most often unaware of why we do what we do. For a long while, mainstream academic psychology rejected this notion. Now it seems to have finally caught up to Freud. Modern thinkers now believe that unconscious processes are central and account for most of our behavior. Discussion of unconscious processes permeates research in memory (Graf & Masson, 1993), social psychology (Bargh, 1997), cognitive psychology (Baars, 1988), and so on. In fact, it is now a mainstream belief in psychology. More specific notions of Freud’s such as his ideas about defense have also received empirical support (Shedler, Mayman, & Manis, 1993; D. Weinberger, 1990). So have some of his ideas about unconscious fantasies (Siegel & Weinberger, 1997). There is even some work afoot to examine Freud’s conceptions of transference (Andersen & Glassman, 1996; Crits-Christoph, Cooper, & Luborsky, 1990). Of course, many of the particulars of Freud’s thinking have been overtaken by events and have turned out to be incorrect. What thinker who died over 70 yeas ago has had all of his or her ideas survive intact, without change? In broad outline, however, Freud’s ideas are not only alive, they are vibrant. We should probably be testing more of them. Any notion that Freud should be ignored because some of his assertions have been shown to be false is just plain silly. It is throwing out the baby with the bath water. And, he is so much fun to read!

Freud is a dead weight on psychology John F. Kihlstrom, University of California, Berkeley The twentieth century was the century of Sigmund Freud, because Freud changed our image of ourselves (Roth, 1998). Copernicus showed us that the Earth did not lie at the center of the universe, and Darwin showed us that humans were set apart from other animals, but Freud claimed to show that human experience, thought, and action was determined not by our conscious rationality, but by irrational forces outside our awareness and control – forces which could only be understood and controlled by an extensive therapeutic process called psychoanalysis. Freud also changed the vocabulary with which we understand ourselves and others. Before you ever opened this textbook, you already knew something about the id and the superego, penis envy and phallic symbols, castration anxiety and the Oedipus complex. In popular culture, psychotherapy is virtually identified with psychoanalysis. Freudian theory, with its focus on the interpretation of ambiguous events, lies at the foundation of ‘postmodern’ approaches to literary criticism such as deconstruction. More than anyone else, Freud’s influence on modern culture has been profound and long-lasting. Freud’s cultural influence is based, at least implicitly, on the premise that his theory is scientifically valid. But from a scientific point of view, classical Freudian psychoanalysis is dead as both a theory of the mind and a mode of therapy (Macmillan, 1991/1997). No empirical evidence supports any specific proposition of psychoanalytic theory, such as the idea that development proceeds through oral, anal, phallic, and genital stages, or that little boys lust after their mothers and hate and fear their fathers. No empirical evidence indicates that psychoanalysis is more effective, or more efficient, than other forms of psychotherapy, such as systematic desensitization or assertiveness training. No empirical evidence indicates that the mechanisms by which psychoanalysis achieves its effects, such as they are, are those specifically predicated on the theory, such as transference and catharsis. Of course, Freud lived at a particular period of time, and it might be argued that his theories were valid when applied to European culture at that time, even if they are no longer apropos today. However, recent historical analyses show that Freud’s construal of his case material was systematically distorted by his theories of unconscious conflict and infantile sexuality, and that he misinterpreted and misrepresented the scientific evidence available to him. Freud’s theories were not just a product of his time: They were misleading and incorrect even as he published them. Of course, some psychologists argue that psychoanalysis has a continuing relevance to twenty-first-century psychology (Reppen, 2006). In an important paper, Drew Westen (Westen, 1998), a psychologist at Emory University, agreed that Freud’s For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk THE GENETICS OF PERSONALITY SEEING BOTH SIDES IS FREUD’S INFLUENCE ON PSYCHOLOGY STILL ALIVE? theories are archaic and obsolete, but argued that Freud’s legacy lives on in a number of theoretical propositions that are widely accepted by scientists: the existence of unconscious mental processes; the importance of conflict and ambivalence in behavior; the childhood origins of adult personality; mental representations as a mediator of social behavior; and stages of psychological development. However, some of these propositions are debatable. For example, there is little evidence that childrearing practices have any lasting impact on personality (Harris, 2006). More important, this argument skirts the question of whether Freud’s view of these matters was correct. It is one thing to say that unconscious motives play some role in experience, thought, and action. It is something else to say that our every thought and deed is driven by repressed sexual and aggressive urges; that children harbor erotic feelings toward the parent of the opposite sex; and that young boys are hostile toward their fathers, whom they regard as rivals for their mothers’ affections. This is what Freud believed, and so far as we can tell Freud was wrong in every respect. For example, the unconscious mind revealed in laboratory studies of automaticity and implicit memory bears no resemblance to the unconscious mind of psychoanalytic theory (Kihlstrom, 2008). Westen also argued that psychoanalytic theory itself had evolved since Freud’s time, and that it is therefore unfair to bind psychoanalysis so tightly to the Freudian vision of repressed, infantile, sexual and aggressive instincts. Again, this is true. In both Europe and America, a number of ‘neo-Freudian’ psychoanalysts such as W. R. D. Fairbairn and D. W. Winnocott in Great Britain, and even Freud’s own daughter, Anna, have de-emphasized the sex, aggression, and biology of classical Freudian theory, while retaining Freud’s focus on the role of unconscious conflict in personal relationships. But again, this avoids the issue of whether Freud’s theories are correct. Furthermore, it remains an open question whether these ‘neo-Freudian’ theories are any more valid than are the classically Freudian views that preceded them. For example, it is not at all clear that Erik Erikson’s stage theory of psychosocial development is any more valid than Freud’s was. Some psychoanalysts recognize these problems, and have argued that psychoanalysis must do more to re-connect itself to modern scientific psychology (Bornstein, 2001; Bornstein, 2005). Doubtless, such efforts will help clinical psychoanalysis come up to contemporary standards for scientifically based treatment. But it is not at all clear how this project will benefit scientific psychology. While Freud had an enormous impact on twentieth-century culture, he was a dead weight on twentieth-century psychology – especially with respect to personality and psychotherapy. John F. Kihlstrom

498 CHAPTER 13 PERSONALITY CHAPTER SUMMARY Although different investigators arrive at different numbers of factors, most now believe that five factors provide the best compromise. These have been labeled the ‘Big Five’: Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Although items on most inventories are composed or selected on the basis of a theory, they can also be selected on the basis of their correlation with an external criterion – the criterion-keyed method of test construction. The best-known example is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), which is designed to identify individuals with psychological disorders. The Q-sort is a method of assessing personality in which raters sort cards with personality adjectives into nine piles, placing the cards that are least descriptive of the individual in pile 1 on the left and those that are most descriptive in pile 9 on the right. Freud’s psychoanalytic theory holds that many behaviors are caused by unconscious motivations. Personality is determined primarily by the biological drives of sex and aggression and by experiences that occur during the first five years of life. Freud’s theory of personality structure views personality as composed of the id, the ego, and the superego. The id operates on the pleasure principle, seeking immediate gratification of biological impulses. The ego obeys the reality principle, postponing gratification until it can be achieved in socially acceptable ways. The superego (conscience) imposes moral standards on the individual. In a well-integrated personality, the ego remains in firm but flexible control over the id and superego, and the reality principle governs. Freud’s theory of personality development proposes that individuals pass through psychosexual stages and must resolve the Oedipal conflict, in For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk which the young child sees the same-sex parent as a rival for the affection of the opposite-sex parent. Over the years, Freud’s theory of anxiety and defense mechanisms has fared better than his structural and developmental theories have. Psychoanalytic theory has been modified by later psychologists, notably Carl Jung and Harry Stack Sullivan. Jung proposed that in addition to the personal unconscious described by Freud, there is a collective unconscious, a part of the mind that is common to all humans. Sullivan suggested that people’s responses to interpersonal experiences cause them to develop personifications – mental images of themselves and others. Psychologists who take the psychoanalytic approach sometimes use projective tests, such as the Rorschach Test and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). Because the test stimuli are ambiguous, it is assumed that the individual projects his or her personality onto the stimulus, thereby revealing unconscious wishes and motives. Behavioral approaches assume that personality differences result from variations in learning experiences. Through operant conditioning, people learn to associate specific behaviors with punishment or reward. They can also learn these associations through observational learning. Through classical conditioning, people learn to associate specific situations with certain outcomes, such as anxiety. The cognitive approach to personality is based on the idea that differences in personality stem from differences in the way individuals mentally represent information. Albert Bandura developed social cognitive theory, which holds that internal cognitive processes combine with environmental pressures to influence behavior and that cognitive processes and environment have reciprocal effects on each other. Walter Mischel has identified a

number of cognitive person variables that affect people’s reactions to the environment and behaviors in the environment. George Kelly’s personal construct theory focuses on the concepts that individuals use to interpret themselves and their social world. Much research has focused on the self-schema, the aspects of a person’s behavior that are most important to that person. Experiments have shown that people perceive information more readily and recall it better when it is relevant to their self-schemas. The humanistic approach is concerned with the individual’s subjective experience. Humanistic psychology was founded as an alternative to psychoanalytic and behaviorist approaches. Carl Rogers argued that the basic force motivating the human organism is the actualizing tendency – a tendency toward fulfillment or actualization of all the capacities of the self. When the needs of the self are denied, severe anxiety can result. Children come to develop an actualized self through the experience of unconditional positive regard from their caregivers. Abraham Maslow proposed that there is a hierarchy of needs, ascending from the basic biological needs to the more complex psychological motivations that become important only after the basic needs have been satisfied. The needs at one level must be at least partially satisfied before those at the next level become important motivators of action. Evolutionary psychology attempts to explain human behavior and personality in terms of the adaptiveness of certain characteristics for survival and reproductive success over human history. Evolutionary theory is consistent with some observed sex differences in mate preferences. It is a controversial theory, however, both for its social implications and for the difficulty of refuting arguments derived from this theory. Evidence from twin studies suggests that genetic factors substantially influence personality traits. In shaping personality, genetic and environmental For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk CHAPTER SUMMARY influences do not act independently but are intertwined from the moment of birth. Because a child’s personality and his or her home environment are both a function of the parents’ genes, there is a built-in correlation between the child’s genotype (inherited personality characteristics) and that environment. Three dynamic processes of personality–environment interaction are (1) reactive interaction – different individuals exposed to the same environment experience it, interpret it, and react to it differently; (2) evocative interaction – an individual’s personality evokes distinctive responses from others; and (3) proactive interaction – individuals select or create environments of their own. As a child grows older, the influence of proactive interaction becomes increasingly important. Studies of twins have produced a number of puzzling patterns: Heritabilities estimated from identical twins reared apart are higher than estimates based on comparisons between identical and fraternal twins. Identical twins reared apart are as similar to each other as identical twins reared together, but fraternal twins and non-twin siblings become less similar over time, even when they are reared together. These patterns are probably due in part to interactions among genes, so that having all one’s genes in common is more than twice as effective as having only half of one’s genes in common. Such patterns might also be due in part to the three processes of personality– environment interaction (reactive, evocative, and proactive). After their genetic similarities are subtracted out, children from the same family seem to be no more alike than children chosen randomly from the population. This implies that the kinds of variables that psychologists typically study (such as child-rearing practices and the family’s socioeconomic status) contribute virtually nothing to individual differences in personality.

CORE CONCEPTS personality introversion–extroversion neuroticism ‘Big Five’ personality inventory Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory Q-sort psychoanalytic theory free association conscious preconscious unconscious psychological determinism id ego superego libido defense mechanisms repression suppression rationalization reaction formation projection intellectualization denial displacement psychosexual stages oral stage anal stage phallic stage Oedipal conflict latency period genital stage collective unconscious object relations theory projective test Rorschach Test Thematic Apperception Test behaviorist approach operant conditioning observational learning classical conditioning cognitive approach social-learning theory social-cognitive theory personal constructs schema self-schema agency actualizing tendency self ideal self unconditional positive regard hierarchy of needs peak experiences evolutionary psychology reactive interaction evocative interaction proactive interaction WEB RESOURCES http://www.atkinsonhilgard.com/ Take a quiz, try the activities and exercises, and explore web links. http://www.freud.org.uk/ http://www.freud-museum.at/e/index.html Check out the chronology of Freud’s life on the Vienna site or photos from the London museum, including Freud’s famous couch. http://pmc.psych.northwestern.edu/personality.html Why do people differ? This detailed site provides further insight into personality research, as well as a variety of further links to academic and nonacademic web pages. CHAPTER 13 PERSONALITY For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk

CD-ROM LINKS Psyk.Trek 3.0 Check out CD Unit 10, Personality Theory 10a Freudian theory 10b Behaviorist theory 10c Humanistic theory 10d Biological theory For more Cengage Learning textbooks, visit www.cengagebrain.co.uk CD-ROM LINKS 501