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Personality Cheat Sheet (DRAFT) by

Personality Study Sheet Includes: Psychoanalysis Trait Theories Social Cognitive Theory

This is a draft cheat sheet. It is a work in progress and is not finished yet.

Psycho­ana­lysis

Individual Differ­ences
Focus how people differ in the workings of their minds or how they are influenced by the social enviro­nment.
Person­ality
People vary in important ways in how they typically think, feel and behave.
 
There is tendency for that person to think, feel and behave in consistent ways over time and across contexts.
 
Ongoing an active process/ a psycho­logical process/ something reasonably stable/ has an important influence on one's life
 
Person­ality theories attemt to look beyond proximal causes of behaviour and describe one fundam­ental basis of behaviour.
Behaviours that reflect indivi­dual's person­ality
Seen as a component of an indivi­dual's identity, and they serve to distin­guish that person from other people.
 
Caused by internal rather external
 
Have a structure and an organi­sation and are therefore predic­table.

Psycho­ana­lytic Theory

Freud's Psycho­ana­lytic Model of Person­ality
Conscious Mind=what we are aware of moment­-to­-mo­ment.
 
Precon­scious Mind=m­aterial not conscious but can be brought into consci­ousness
 
Uncons­cious Mind=M­aterial that is not available to concious thought and is kept hidden in the uncons­cious by repression due to it's unacce­ptable content.
Hydraulic Model of Mind
People were born with fixed amount of "­mental energy­"-the libido
 
First Law of Thermo­dyn­amics= energy can neither be created nor destroyed; energy can only be transf­erred or changed from one to another.
 
Repressed mental energy comes from another form-m­ental ilness
Freud claimed that person­ality developed through five distinct phases
Oral Stage (birth to 1 year)=­lib­idinal energy is focused on the mouth. Energy is focused on the pleasure provider (usually the mother)- attachment to relati­onship begins to form. Over/under stimul­ation of the mouth at this stage will lead to a person being orally­-fi­xated in later life (cigar­ettes, chewing gum, over-e­ating)
 
Anal Stage (18month - 3 years)­=li­bidinal energy is focused on anus. Freud claims that at this stage the child begins to gain pleasure from defeca­ting.
 
Phallic Stage (3-5 years)= libidinal energy is focused on the genitals. Freud claimed that at this stage the child begins to gain pleasure from their genitals and begins to mastur­bate.
 
Latency stage (5-12 years)­=re­sting stage (energy is being devoted to learning and social­isi­ng).Sa­tis­factory identi­fic­ation with same sex parent leads children to interacr predom­inantly with same sex peer groups. Defence mechanism develo­ps=cope with anxiety generated from conflicts between their id, ego, superego.
 
Genital Stage (13-18 years)= libidinal energy is again focused on genitals. Puberty reawakens the child's psycho­sexual energy. For normal develo­pment, Freud said the objects of this energy should be members of the opposite sex. If the child has failed to succes­sfully navigate the oral, anal, or phallic develo­pmental stages their person­ality is fixed in a proble­matic scale. Person­ality is largely determined by age 5.
 
The child must succes­sfully pass through each stage of develo­pment to achieve a healthy person­ality. Failure to succes­sfully pass through each stage can lead to disrupted person­ality.
Evaluation of Freuds theory
Two ways can be rejected: 1.It can be wrong=People suffer from psychotic illness because their mother didn't love them enough=plausable explan­ation but wrong. Many aspects of Freud's theory pf human person­ality have been shown to be wrong by modern psycho­logical science.
 
2.A theory is untest­abl­e=t­heory is so vague and all-en­com­passing that it can't be tested and therefore is unfals­ifi­able.
Freud argued that the mental division were not perfec­t-r­epr­ession often fails and uncons­cious material can "­sli­p" into consci­ous­ness.

Spielman 2017 on Psycho­ana­lysis

y. Freud believed most of our psycho­logical problems are the result of repressed impulses and trauma experi­enced in childhood, and he believed psycho­ana­lysis would help uncover long-b­uried feelings.
Psycho­ana­lysis is a therapy approach that typically takes years. Over the course of time, the patient reveals a great deal about himself to the therapist. Freud suggested that during this patien­t-t­her­apist relati­onship, the patient comes to develop strong feelings for the therap­ist­—maybe positive feelings, maybe negative feelings
 

Trait Theories

Wundt (1874)
Argued that there was no such thing as different person­ality types.
Humans fundam­entally varied along two dimens­ions:
Change of dimension/ emotional dimention
Galton (1884)
The Lexical Hypoth­esi­s=i­ndi­vidual differ­ences that are important become encoded in language as single term. The more important the trait, the more commonly used words that will exist-the more synonyms for that trait that will exist.

Traits - Gordon Allport

Focused research on extracting and counting words from dictio­naries that were believed to reflect individual differ­ences in person­ality.
Allport and Odbert (1936) produced a list of 4,500 words describing person­ality traits
Allport was the first to propose that person­ality traits should have a physical basis in the central nervous system.
Also was the first person to suggest that the unique combin­ation of person­ality trait within an individual explains variation among humans.

Traits - Raymond Cattel

Modern science of person­ality trait theory began with the develo­pment of a revolu­tionary advice in statis­tical modelling.
Factor Analysis
 
Statis­tical method that allows unobse­rvable variable to be measured by examining the associ­ations between observable variables.
 
All contem­porary trait theory stems from, and still based on, the applic­ation of factor analysis.
Cattel and his team took Allport's 4,500 person­ality trait descri­ptors and reduced list to 174 trait names.
Through 'expert assess­ment' refined it to 46 traits believed to represent individual differ­ences in person­ality.
 
Large amounts of data were been gathered on these 46 traits.
 
Cattell factors analysed these data to determine the smallest number of latent person­ality variables needed to describe the observed data.
 
Cattell's analyses identified 16 major person­ality traits and he developed Sixteen Person­ality Factor (16PF) questi­onare to measure these traits.
Cattel produced the first empiri­cal­-de­rived model of person­ality traits, described the importance of genetic and enviro­nmental contri­butions to the develo­pment of person­ality, stressed the importance that any worthwhile model of person­ality would have to be able to predict behaviour in the future he also stressed the immense limita­tions associated with a trait-­based model of human behaviour.

The Five-F­actor Theory of Person­ality

The Big Five Model
Paul Coat and Robert McCrae (1985,­1992)
 
Given the extent of evidence to support the existence of person­ality traits Costa and McCrea accepted these trait into their model. However, the evidence for Psycho­ticism trait was weak.
 
After years of factor analysing large datasets, their determined that the empirical evidence best supported the existing of five fundam­ental person­ality traits.
 
The five person­ality traits are indepe­ndent constr­ucts.
 
If you're high or low on one, it tells you nothing about how you will score on any other trait. These traits are dimens­ional or quanti­tative in nature, not catego­rical or qualit­ative: how much not present or absent.
Not all scientists accept the Five-F­actor Model as complete.

Spielan 2017 on Trait Theories

Trait theorists believe person­ality can be understood via the approach that all people have certain traits, or charac­ter­istic ways of behaving.
most of us tend to lie somewhere midway along the continuum of each factor, rather than at polar ends. It’s important to note that the Big Five traits are relatively stable over our lifespan, with some tendency for the traits to increase or decrease slightly. Resear­chers have found that consci­ent­iou­sness increases through young adulthood into middle age, as we become better able to manage our personal relati­onships and careers

Individual differ­ences

Sex and age differ­ences
Person­ality traits are relatively stable and enduring phenomena
 
There now exists popula­tio­n-l­evel, longit­udinal data tracking changes in person­ality traits throughout the lifespan.
 
There are important differ­ences between men and women on several of these person­ality traits.
 
Person­ality is not fixed-it is a dynamic process throughout life.
 
Humans appear to become more consci­ent­ious, agreeable, emotional stable and introv­erted as we age.
Important sex differ­ences on several person­ality traits:
in particular differ­ences on Agreea­bleness and Neurot­icism likely explain observed sex differ­ences for risk of Extern­alizing and Intern­alizing mental health disorders.
Effects of Life Events
Entering in one's intimate relati­onship is associated with decreases in Neurot­icism, and increases in Extrav­ersion.
 
Transition from school to college/ work is associated with increases in Openness, Agreea­ble­ness, Consci­ent­iou­sness, and Emotional Stability.
Politics
Consci­ent­iou­sness is associated with supporting conser­vat­ives, while Openness is associated with supporting liberal condid­ated.
 
Consci­ent­iou­sness reflects tendencies towards diligence, achiev­ement striving, and following social norms.= conser­vative mindset
 
Openness reflects tendencies towards new ideas and change = liberal mindset
Mental Health
Higher levels of Neurot­icism and lower levels of Consci­ent­iou­sness have been found to be consis­tently and robustly associated with increased risk of mental health problems.
 
As we age Neurot­icism decreases and Consci­ent­iou­sness increases, and also, the risk of develo­pin­g/h­aving mental health problems declines as we age.
 
Change in person­ality may be respon­sible for reduced risk of mental health problems as we age.
All person­ality traits are highly heritable. Person­ality traits fluctuate over the lifespan in predic­table ways, and differ in important ways between the two sexes. These person­ality traits predict a wide array of life outcomes including mental and physical health.