Personality
Personality is the relatively stable pattern of thoughts, feelings and behaviour that distinguishes a person; the exam tests approaches, defence mechanisms and assessment.
Psychodynamic
Freud: id (pleasure principle), ego (reality principle), superego (conscience). Psychosexual stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital. Defence mechanisms protect the ego: repression, denial, projection, displacement, rationalisation, reaction formation and sublimation.
Trait approaches
Allport: cardinal, central and secondary traits. Cattell: 16PF, surface versus source traits. Eysenck: extraversion, neuroticism, psychoticism. Big Five (OCEAN): openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism.
Other approaches
Behavioural: learned responses. Social-cognitive: Bandura's reciprocal determinism and self-efficacy; Rotter's locus of control. Humanistic: Rogers's self-concept, congruence and unconditional positive regard; Maslow's self-actualisation.
Assessment
Interviews, self-report inventories (MMPI, 16PF, NEO-PI), projective tests (TAT, Rorschach) and observation. Projective tests are qualitative and scoring is subjective, so reliability is a concern.
Worked example
A student who fails an exam says the teacher was unfair; blaming himself would be internal. Reasoning: attributing outcomes to external forces indicates an external locus of control.
Traps
- Mixing id, ego and superego functions.
- Naming the wrong defence mechanism (projection attributes one's own impulse to others; displacement redirects it to a safer target).
- Confusing cardinal and central traits.
- Treating projective tests as highly reliable.