Personality Theories

Almost everyday we describe and assess the personalities of the people around us.

Personality psychology looks at the patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behavior

that make a person unique. Some of the best known theories in psychology are

devoted to the subject of personality.

The founder of psychoanalytic theory was Sigmund Freud. Before we can understand

Freud's theory of personality, we must first understand his view of how the mind is

organized. According to Freud, the mind can be divided into two main parts:

1. The conscious mind includes everything that we are aware of. This is the aspect of our mental processing that we can think and talk about rationally. A part of this includes our memory, which is not always part of consciousness.

2. The unconscious mind is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that outside of our conscious awareness. Most of the contents of the unconscious are unacceptable or unpleasant, such as feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict.

According to Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory of personality, personality is composed of three elements. These three elements of personality--known as the id, the ego and the superego --work together to create complex human behaviors.

The Id: The id is the only component of personality that is present from birth, the id is the source of all psychic energy, making it the primary component of personality. The id is driven by the pleasure principle, which strives for immediate gratification of all desires, wants, and needs. If these needs are not satisfied immediately, the result is a state anxiety or tension. For example, an increase in hunger or thirst should produce an immediate attempt to eat or drink. The id is very important early in life, because it ensures that an infant's needs are met. If the infant is hungry or uncomfortable, he or she will cry until the demands of the id are met.

The Ego:The ego is the component of personality that is responsible for dealing with reality. According to Freud, the ego develops from the id and ensures that the impulses of the id can be expressed in a manner acceptable in the real world.

The Superego:The last component of personality. The superego is the aspect of personality that holds all of our internalized moral standards and ideals that we acquire from both parents and society--our sense of right and wrong. The superego provides guidelines for making judgments. According to Freud, the superego begins to emerge at around age five. According to Freud, the key to a healthy personality is a balance between the id, the ego, and the superego.

the Big Five Dimensions of Personality. Personality researchers (D. W. Fiske (1949), Norman (1967), Smith (1967), Goldberg (1981), and McCrae & Costa (1987) have proposed that there are five basic dimensions of personality.

1. Extraversion: This trait includes characteristics such as excitability, sociability, talkativeness, assertiveness, and high amounts of emotional expressiveness.

2. Agreeableness: This personality dimension includes attributes such as trust, altruism, kindness, affection, and other prosocial behaviors.

3. Conscientiousness: Common features of this dimension include high levels of thoughtfulness, with good impulse control and goal-directed behaviors. Those high in conscientiousness tend to be organized and mindful of details.

4. Neuroticism: Individuals high in this trait tend to experience emotional instability, anxiety, moodiness, irritability, and sadness.

5. Openness: This trait features characteristics such as imagination and insight, and those high in this trait also tend to have a broad range of interests.

These dimensions represent broad areas of personality. Research has demonstrated that these groupings of characteristics tend to occur together in many people, and these traits do not always occur together.

Social Psychology Theories. Social theories are generally centered on specific social phenomena, including group behavior, prosocial behavior, social influence, love and much more. Social psychology is focused on situations. Social psychologists are interested in the impact that social environment and interaction has on attitudes and behaviors.

It is important to distinguish between social psychology and sociology. Sociologists are interested in the institutions and culture that influence social psychology. Psychologists instead focus on situational variables that affect social behavior.

Interest in leadership increased during the early part of the twentieth century. While many different leadership theories have emerged, most can be classified as one of eight major types:

1. "Great Man" Theories: Great man theories assume that the capacity for leadership is inherent – that great leaders are born, not made.

2. Trait Theories: assume that people inherit certain qualities and traits that make them better suited to leadership.

3. Contingency Theories: focus on particular variables related to the environment that might determine which particular style of leadership is best suited for the situation. Success depends upon a number of variables, including the leadership style, qualities of the followers and aspects of the situation.

4. Situational Theories: Situational theories propose that leaders choose the best course of action based upon situational variables. Different styles of leadership may be more appropriate for certain types of decision-making.

5. Behavioral Theories: According to this theory, people can learn to become leaders through teaching and observation.

6. Participative Theories: These leaders encourage participation and contributions from group members and help group members feel more relevant and committed to the decision-making process.

7. Management Theories: focus on the role of supervision, organization and group performance. These theories base leadership on a system of rewards and punishments.

8. Relationship Theories: focus upon the connections formed between leaders and followers. Leaders with this style often have high ethical and moral standards.

According to The Behavioral Neuroscience Approach, the brain and nervous system are central to understanding behavior, thought, and emotion. Our remarkable capabilities as human beings would not be possible without our brains. The human brain and nervous system constitute the most complex, intricate, and elegant system imaginable. Neurobiogists believe that thoughts have a physical basis in the brain. The human brain is divided into left and right sides. Roger Sperry made one of the most exciting discoveries in neuroscience when he revealed that some aspects of our behavior are controlled more by one side of the brain than by the other. Our own human gift of speech, for example, primary involves the left side of our brain.

The Evolutionary Psychology Approach. It’s psychology’s newest approach which emphasizes the importance of adaptation, reproduction, and survival of the fittest” in explaining behavior. The evolutionary psychology approach focuses on conditions that allow individuals to survive or to fail. David Buss’ ideas on evolutionary psychology have ushered in a whole new wave of interest in how evolution is involved in explaining humanbehavior. He believes that just as evolution shapes our physical features, such as body shape and hight, it also influences how we make decisions, how aggressive we are, our fears. Steven Pinker argues that “how the mind works” can be summarized by three main points: (1) The minds computes, (2) the mind was designed to compute by evolution, and (3) these computations are performed by specialized brain systems that natural selection has designed to achieve specific goals, such as survival.

The sociocultural approach emphasizes that culture, ethnicity, and gender are essential to understanding behavior, thought, and emotion. Culture is the behavior patterns, beliefs, and other products of a particular group of people, such as values, work patterns, music, dress, diet, and ceremonies, that are passed on from generation to generation. Ethnicity (the word ethnic comes from the Greek word for “nation”) is based on cultural heritage, nationality characteristics, race, religion, and language. Ethnicity involves descent from common ancestors, usually in a specifiable part of the world. Given the descent of individuals from common anscestors, people often make inferences about someone’s ethnicity based on physical features believed to be typical of an ethnic group.

Apart from above-discussed two aspects of sociocultural influences – culture and ethnicity, a third important aspect is gender, the sociological dimension of being male or female. Sex is the biological dimension of being female or male.

The sociocultural approach is one of psychology’s newest lenses for examining behavior and mental processes. As the future brings increasing contact between people from quite different backgrounds, the sociocultural approach will help to expand psychology’s role as a relevant discipline in the twenty-first century.

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