[Crash Course] XXI& XXII Personality tests
Rorschach test: Klecksography Rorschach was intrigued with Carl Jung's use of word association in attempts to access patients' unconscious minds. To determine how people 'projected' their personal associations onto random shapes. He drew conclusions about a patient's personality.
Personality is one of the most complex and one of the most contested. What makes us who we are?
Personality: your distinctive and enduring characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving. 1.By trying to understand differences in specific characteristics, like 'introvertedness' vs 'extrovertedness'. 2.By looking at how all the various parts of each person mesh together as a whole. Basically, what are our characteristics and how do they combine to make me 'me' and you 'you'?
Psychoanalytic perspective (Sigmund Freud): unconscious represented a vast reservoir of often unacceptable and frequently hard-to-tolerate thoughts, feelings, desires and memories. Freud believed that our personalities are largely shaped by the 'enduring conflict between our impulses to do whatever we feel like, and our restaint to control these urges between our pleasure-seeking aggressive urges and our inner social control over them'. He theorised our minds as being divided into three interacting parts: -The ID (unconscious/preconscious, sex and aggression, Pleasure principle, infants were all ID), -The Ego (consious/preconscious, getting what ID wants in a reasonable timely and realistic way), -The Superego (conscious/preconsious, real and ideal), that provide the battleground for this internal conflict that shaped our personalities. He proposed that our egos use a series of indirect and unconscious defense mechanisms to protect themselves from this fear. And each person's particular configuration of defense mechanisms in turn makes up part of what we're referring to here as personality. [through repression, regression, reaction formation, projection, rationalisation, displacement, denial, etc.] Psychosexual stages: -oral (10-18 months): mouth-sucking, biting, chewing -anal (18-36 months): bowel and bladder elimination -phallic (3-6 years): gentials, incestuous sexual feelings, the Oedipus complex reared up. -latency (6 to puberty): dormant sexual feelings -gential (adult): mature sex interests Fixation: a lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, in which conflicts were unresolved.
Neo-Freudians: -Karen Horney: feminist psychology 'womb envy' -Carl Jung: driven by the need to achieve a full knowledge of self. Collective unconsious, a group of shared images or archetypes that are universal to all humans and this was why different cultures share similar myths and imagery. -Alfred Adler: ongoing social tensions not sexual ones, as most crucial to the formation of personality. Inferiority complex.
Humanistic Theories: view personality with a focus on the potential for healthy personal growth. -Abrahem Maslow: we are motivated by that pyramid-shaped hierarchy of needs, and that once basic needs are met, like food and shelter and whatnot, we're able to achieve higher goals. He believed the top two rungs of that pyramid are where the real growth and personality takes place. Self-acutalisation (the need to live up to our full, unique potential). Self-tanscendence (finding meaning and purpose and identity beyond ourselves). -Carl Rogers: person-centred perspective. He believed we're all basically good eggs so long as we're nurtured in a growth-promoting enviornment that he thought required three conditions (genuiness, acceptance, empathy).
Hippocrates: believed personality manifested itself in four different humours. Traditional Chinese medicine: our personalites depend on the balance of five elements, earth, wind, water, metal and fire. Traditional Hindu Ayurvedic medicine: we're each of the unique three different mind-body principles called Doshas. Freud: who we're in part depend on who was winning the battle of urges between ID, EGO and SUPEREGO. Maslow: the key to self-actualisation was first successfully climbing a hierarchy of more basic needs.
Trait theory: researchers look to define personality through stable and lasting behaviour patterns and conscious motivations. Gordon Allport: descirbe personality in terms of fundamental traits, or characteristic behaviours and conscious motives. Not explain, but describe. OCEAN. These traits are hypothesised to predict behaviour and attitude. Our personality traits are better at predicting our average behaviour than what we'd do in any specific situation.
Social cognitive perspectives: the interaction between our traits and their social context. Alfred Bandura: we learn a lot of our behaviour by watching and imitating others, that's the social part of the equation. Reciprocal determinism: we're both the creators, and the products, of the situations we surround ourselves with.
Thematic appreception test: you'd be presented with evocative but ambiguous pictures, and then asked to provide information about them. The idea is that your responses will reveal something about your concerns and motivations in real life, or how you see the world or about your unconsicous processes that drive you.
Personality trait inventories: The big five, MBTI, Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory (MMPI).
Possible self, feared self.