Personality: Theories and Assessment
Personality refers to relatively stable, distinctive patterns of behaviour, thought and emotion. The paper asks you to attribute concepts to the right theorist and to judge the quality of an assessment technique.
Psychodynamic
- Id (pleasure principle, unconscious), ego (reality principle, mediator), superego (conscience and ego-ideal).
- Psychosexual stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital; fixation is said to shape adult traits.
- Defence mechanisms: repression, projection, rationalisation, displacement, reaction formation, sublimation, regression, denial.
- Neo-Freudians: Jung (collective unconscious, archetypes, introversion–extraversion), Adler (inferiority complex, striving for superiority), Horney, Erikson.
Trait, humanistic, social-cognitive
- Allport: cardinal, central and secondary dispositions.
- Cattell: 16PF, surface versus source traits.
- Eysenck: extraversion, neuroticism, psychoticism (PEN).
- Big Five: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism.
- Rogers: self-concept versus ideal self, congruence, unconditional positive regard.
- Bandura: reciprocal determinism and self-efficacy; Rotter: locus of control.
Assessment
- Interviews, observation, rating scales, situational tests.
- Inventories: MMPI, 16PF, NEO-PI, EPQ.
- Projective: Rorschach, TAT, word association, sentence completion.
- Criteria: reliability, validity, standardisation and norms.
Worked example
A person with strong hostile impulses becomes a surgeon. The impulse is redirected into a socially valued activity - sublimation, a mature defence. Displacement would instead redirect the impulse toward a weaker target, and reaction formation would produce the opposite behaviour.
Traps
- Regression (returning to earlier behaviour) is not repression (pushing out of awareness).
- Projective tests generally show lower reliability and validity than standardised inventories.
- The Big Five is a trait model, not a psychodynamic one.