Personality
This domain tests the major personality theories, their key terms, and the strengths and weaknesses of personality assessment.
What personality means
Personality is the relatively stable and distinctive pattern of behaviour, thought and emotion that distinguishes one person from another.
Psychodynamic approach (Freud)
The id follows the pleasure principle, the ego the reality principle, and the superego morality. Freud divided mental life into conscious, preconscious and unconscious levels, proposed psychosexual stages (oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital), and described defence mechanisms such as repression, projection, displacement, rationalisation and reaction formation.
Trait approaches
- Allport: cardinal, central and secondary dispositions.
- Cattell: surface traits versus sixteen source traits (16PF).
- Eysenck: extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism.
- Big Five (OCEAN): openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism.
Other approaches
Rogers's humanistic account centres on self-concept, congruence and unconditional positive regard. Bandura and Mischel's social-cognitive view stresses reciprocal determinism, self-efficacy and situational specificity.
Assessment
Self-report inventories such as the MMPI and 16PF; projective tests such as the Rorschach inkblots and the Thematic Apperception Test; interviews and behavioural observation. Projective tests generally have weaker reliability and validity than structured inventories.
Worked example
A man angry with his boss is rude to his wife at home. The impulse has been redirected to a safer target, which is displacement. If he instead denied any anger and described the boss as a fine person, that would be reaction formation.
Traps
Confusing id, ego and superego with the conscious and unconscious; treating trait names as explanations when they merely describe; assuming projective tests match psychometric inventories in accuracy.