Introduction to personality and individual differences: history, paradigms, and levels of personalit

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Introduction to personality and individual
differences history, paradigms, and levels of
personality

• Dr. Christine Simmonds

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Lecturers teaching on this course

• Dr. Christine Simmonds
• Cathal OSiouchru
• Minna Lyons

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(No Transcript)
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Schedule of lectures
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Personality is not a new concept

• Indian Ayurvedic body types
• Pisa
• Vata
• kapha
• Ancient Greece
• 4 humors
• Choleric
• Melancholic
• Sanguine
• phelgmatic
• Gideons army
• 1796 Galls phrenology

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Think about personality

• Describe your best friend to the person sitting
  next to you
• Think about yourself and whether you are always
  the same person
• With each of your friends?
• With your family?
• In different situations
• At a party
• At a job interview

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What is personality psychology?

• Every man is in certain respects
• a. like all other men
• b. like some other men
• c. like no other man
• - Kluckhohn and Murray (1953, p.53)

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What is personality psychology?

• It is not that there are good and bad ones!
• Personality psychology aims to
• Understand aspects of human nature
• Understand uniqueness - individual differences
• Predict behaviours
• Consistency across time
• Consistency across different situations
• How well will a particular individual perform at
  a task?
• E.g., Time of day issues, and interactions with
  personality
• Understand when and how things go wrong
• Clinical psychology
• Therapeutic context application

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Some definitions

• Cattell (1965) defines personality as that which
  permits a prediction of what a person will do in
  a given situation
• Stagner (1961) there are stimulus, response and
  intervening definitions of personality
• Guthrie (1944) personality is those habits and
  habit systems of social importance that are
  stable and resistant to change
• Gordon Allport (1961). personality is a dynamic
  organization, inside the person, of
  psychophysical systems that create the persons
  characteristic patterns of behaviour, thoughts,
  and feelings
• Pervin, 1996 personality is the complex
  organization of cognitions, affects, and
  behaviors that gives direction and pattern
  (coherence) to the persons life. Like the body,
  personality consists of both structures and
  processes and reflects both nature (genes) and
  nurture (experience). In addition, personality
  includes the effects of the past, including
  memories of the past, as well as constructions of
  the present and future

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Aspects of personality

• Unconscious
• Ego forces the self
• Biological aspects
• Learning/environmental aspects
• Cognitive aspects
• Traits, skills predispositions
• Spirituality
• Interaction between person and environment

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Cognitive abilities and personality

• To what extent is intelligence part of
  personality?
• To what extent is creativity part of
  personality?

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Research approaches in personality psychology 1

• Three reasons for studying personality
• To gain scientific understanding
• To assess people
• To change people

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Research approaches 2

• Observation is the start of all personality
  theory formation
• Self and others behavioural patterns
• Inductive versus deductive approaches
• Idiographic versus nomothetic approaches
• Clinical/case study approach
• Experimental approach
• Biological/genetic approach

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Determinants of personality

• Genetic and constitutional determinants
• e.g., William Sheldon
• Cultural determinants
• Social class determinants
• Familial determinants
• Other determinants

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Sheldons somatypes
Endomorphy
mesomorphy
Ectomorphy
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Controversies/issues in personality psychology

• To what extent is there a core personality that
  is consistent across situations and time?
• Are we chameleons driven by situations (external)
• Or do our internal drives and biases create
  dispositions that are consistent?
• What is the self?
• E.g., One self or many different selves?
• To what extent am I created by my environment
  versus my biology/genetics/evolution
• The nature-nurture debate
• The role of culture in the determination of
  personality/behavioural traits
• Is personality conscious or unconscious?
• What is the unconscious?

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Considerations about each theory of personality

• Nature versus nurture
• Free will versus determinism
• Rationality versus irrationality
• Homeostasis versus heterostasis
• Subjectivity versus objectivity
• Holism versus elementalism
• Politics and personality/intelligence testing

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What is a paradigm?

• Thomas Kuhns observations about science
• Paradigms are a term that relates closely to
  normal science. By choosing it, I mean to
  suggest that some accepted examples of actual
  scientific practice examples which include law,
  theory, application and instrumentation together
  provide models from which spring particular
  coherent traditions of scientific research
• Revolutions
• Out of date theories are not unscientific
  because they have been discarded
• New paradigms develop
• Dominant paradigm

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Timeline of events and theories relevant to
personality psychology

• 1859 Darwin publishes Origin of Species
• 1880s Galton begins measuring individual
  differences
• 1900 Freud publishes Interpretation of Dreams
• 1905 Binet and Simon being first valid
  intelligence testing
• 1906 Pavlov works on conditioning of nervous
  system
• 1910-1930 Jung, Adler, Horney, etc. refine
  psychoanalysis
• 1917 Personality testing for the army
• 1919 JB Watson founds behaviourism
• 1920s Kurt Lewin studies Gestalt psychology in
  Berlin
• 1930s Henry Murray develops motivational
  psychology
• 1930s BF Skinner studies reinforcement studies
• 1930s Margaret Mead studies personality cross
  culturally
• 1937 Gordon Allport proposes trait theory
• 1940s Guilford, Cattell and others refine testing
  and factor analysis
• 1940s Psychologists study fascism
• Existential philosophy in USA

• 1950s cognitive psychology
• 1950s Rogers, Maslow and Allport found humanistic
  psychology
• 1960s interactionist perspectives develop
• 1970s multiple selves, self monitoring, social
  self studied, classic theory fades
• 1970s gender studied seriously
• 1980s cultural influences studied
• 1980s personality and health studied
• 1980s modern interactionist approaches
• 1980s cognitive-social self
• 1990s 5 factor theory as a central topic
• 1990s revival of evolutionary and genetic
  influences on personality
• 1990s personal goals and life paths studied as
  theories
• 2000s application of personality to a variety of
  areas
• 2000s personality psychology increasingly rejoins
  with neuroscience, evolutionary biology,
  cognitive psychology

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Cooks levels of personality
Surface traits and factors
Phenomenal
Learning habit
Motives
self
psychoanalysis
Temperament
PHENOMENAL LINE
MOTIVATIONAL LINE
BIOLOGICAL LINE
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Modern approaches to personality

• Biological
• Cultural
• Critical
• Application to situations
• Education
• Health
• Relationships
• Performance at tasks
• E.g., ESP!

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Important to read around the course

• You have access to
• psychiinfo
• Web of science
• The library holds several personality related
  journals

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The coursework for P ID

• This is an applied assignment
• How does recent research in the field of
  intelligence apply to one of three of the applied
  fields of psychology?
• Assignment should be 2500 words in length
• Hand in date 24th November, 2005
• Example from parapsychology
• Dr. Simmonds is interested in looking at how
  intelligence has been applied to the field of
  parapsychology..
• Two parts to the question
• 1. Recent research on intelligence testing
• 2. Applications to parapsychology

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Dissertations 2005

• Find a supervisor in line with an area you are
  interested in
• Make an appointment with this tutor
• Discuss ideas for some research which interests
  you
• Send the tutor name and provisional title of
  dissertation project to Dr. Gill Ferrier by
  Friday 7th October, 2005
• N.B. If you do not find a tutor yourself, you
  will be allocated to a tutor by Dr. Ferrier after
  7th Oct.

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Do you want to take part in the ganzfeld?