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Chapter 1
The Study of Personality
Introduction
1
S ubdisciplines of psychology such as social psychology, cognitive psychology, and indus-
trial psychology endeavor to find common principles that will explain everyone’s behavior. These subfields have achieved considerable success in doing so, since we are all similar in many ways. Despite our similarities, however, there is little doubt that each human being is unique—different from every other individual on the planet. Seeking to understand human commonalities and seeking to account for individual differences are complementary, insofar as we cannot fully apprehend differences if we cannot identify our common characteristics. Personality psychology looks for answers to numerous questions. In what ways do human beings differ? In what situations and along what dimensions do they differ? Why do they differ? How much do they differ? How consistent are human differences? Can they be measured? These are the issues that this text will explore. An important aspect of this exploration will be a critical examination of the numerous theories that have been proposed to explain personality. Some of these are competing and contradictory while others are supportive and complementary.
Chapter Goals
- Provide an overview of the controversies in the field of personality
- Explain the purpose and utility of studying personality to mental health professionals
- Review the various definitions of human personality
- Offer insights into the history of personality theories
- Introduce some of the methods used to measure or evaluate personality
- Present some of the major personality theorists who have developed the concepts we will be studying
Personality psychology was a latecomer among the various disciplines within psychology. Before it was adopted as a subject for study, however, it was already well established as a topic of discussion in the public domain. People have always been practicing personality psychology whether they have recognized it or not. When we seek the right person for a mate, our judgment of his or her personality is indispensable in evaluating our hoped-for compatibility. And are personnel directors really doing anything other than analyzing the applicant’s personality during a job interview? Similarly, when we describe a physician as a “good doctor,” have we really assessed the caliber of his or her medical knowledge? Or are we saying that we are satisfied with the doctor’s professional persona? When we listen to political speeches, how do we rate the orators? Are we looking at their command of the issues or their political acumen? Or is it essentially their personality that we appraise? In most cases, it would seem the latter. These examples illustrate the omnipresence of informal personality assessment. It is a subject of universal interest and continual relevance in all human interactions. On the other hand, although the study of personality is compelling and important, personality as such is also very hard to pin down. Personality falls under the heading of things that most people believe they understand. In fact, there is probably no domain within any field of knowledge in which more people think they have achieved some expertise. Simply put, most people believe they can know or understand other people. We all try to predict behavior, interpret conversations, and make inferences about others’ actions. If someone offends us, acts strangely, or seems excessively kind, we will quickly try to understand their motives. In addition, we often draw inferences about what kind of people they are; that is, what personality traits they may possess. Most of us regard ourselves as competent judges of personality. We make use of our skills in personality assessment on a daily basis; however, most of us would have a difficult time explaining exactly how we draw our conclusions about others. Besides evaluating and rating each other’s personalities, we also tend to be confident that we are very good in so doing. It is rare to find someone who admits that he or she is not a good judge of people and does not understand the behavior of others. As this text will show, most of us are not only often incorrect in our assessments of others but also overconfident of our abilities. Most people have an innate trust in their ability to impute underlying motives to the actions of others. We are personality experts, or at least think we are. Moreover, once we evaluate someone else’s personal qualities, we tend to interpret their subsequent actions through the lens of our initial assessment, making it difficult to see that we might have been inaccurate in the first place. We tend to go through our lives categorizing the people we encounter under various labels. Our language is replete with words that describe types or groups of people, many of them quite pejorative. Words like macho , wimp , nerd , milquetoast , playboy , redneck , square , and hippie are used to categorize a type of person, most often one we find undesirable. This tendency to categorize people makes a great deal of sense in some contexts because it is a universal human characteristic to impose order on complex situations. As complex as human behavior can be, repeating patterns can be discerned. Almost all human encounters involve classifying and categorizing personalities. For example, business people typically judge their associates on their general demeanor, physical bearing, verbal style, and presumed ability to fit into the milieu of a specific organization. University professors presenting technical papers to their colleagues will be judged to some
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Descartes
René Descartes (1596–1650), a French philosopher, viewed human personality as the product of the interaction of divine and primal forces. He saw the essential force behind human personality as the immortal soul—pure, perfect, and intangible. Descartes set out to explain how this spiritual entity interacted with the physical body. His observation of an anatomical dissection led him to think he had resolved this mind-body problem. He noticed a small body in the apparent center of the brain known as the pineal gland or pineal body , so named by the Greco-Roman physician Claudius Galen (c. 130–c. 200 CE) because its shape reminded him of a pine cone. Descartes (1649) came to the conclusion that that this cone-shaped endocrine gland must be the point of contact between the soul and the body. Cartesian dualism, which is the philosophical position that two substances—matter and spirit, or brain and mind—exist independently of each other although they interact—became the most common view in the Christian West after the seventeenth century because it “explained” the existence of human free will and consciousness in an otherwise mechanistic universe. Indeed, before the advent of the computer, it seemed impossible to allow for consciousness without appealing to nonphysical concepts. Cartesian dualism is still the dominant view on the mind-body issue among the general public, although it is not held by cognitive psychologists or neurologists.
Machiavelli
In contrast to Descartes, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), a Florentine diplomat and political thinker, believed that personality is best understood in a social context. According to Machiavelli’s worldview, people are essentially selfish, greedy, ungrateful, and vengeful.
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Image 1.1 Descartes believed that the pineal gland is the seat of the soul within the human brain
Pineal gland
Cerebellum
Spinal cord
Medulla oblongata
Pons
Pituitary gland
Furthermore, he saw two primary forces as defining human character. The first one is an almost untranslatable Italian term— virtù —which is best described as a combination of assertiveness, fearlessness, and self-confidence. Machiavelli called the second force fortuna, which is the Latin word for luck. A person could become a powerful leader with the help of a good dose of virtù and fortuna. Machiavelli (1546/1935) warned that leaders who act out of kindness and a belief in the essential goodness of humanity will always fail. This belief is sometimes expressed by contemporary people as “nice guys finish last.” Almost every major philosopher from ancient Greece and Rome through the Enlightenment proposed some form of personality theory, and many of their ideas served as the groundwork of theories set forth by modern psychologists. This text will concentrate on the theories that arose after the development of psychology as a distinct discipline. Because psychology is one of the social sciences, its practitioners seek not only to construct theories of personality or human behavior but also to find ways to test and validate them. As we will see, most of the more recent theorists in personality psychology claim to have discovered empirically verified principles as opposed to untested philosophical conjectures. Some have succeeded; some have not. The authors of this text, however, have little doubt that theories of personality should be held to the same standards used to judge theories in any other science.
2 THE MAKING OF A THEORY
In attempting to explain natural phenomena, researchers systematically observe events or conduct experiments on the subject of interest. They then review their findings, looking for any patterns or consistent outcomes that they may have uncovered. Their final step is to assess their findings in light of prior studies in the field and then propose a comprehensive explana- tion that links these findings with earlier and current ones. This comprehensive explanation is called a theory. We can consider an example from the history of medicine that illustrates the steps in the scientific method. In 1847, Ignaz Semmelweis (1818–1865), a young Austrian medical graduate who had just been appointed an assistant physician in midwifery at a large hospital in Vienna, noticed a puzzling phenomenon. There were two maternity wards in the hospital; patients in the first ward, attended by fully licensed physicians and medical students, had a rate of post-childbirth infection (called “puerperal fever” or “childbed fever”) three times as high as that of patients in the second ward, who were attended only by nurses and midwives. Puerperal fever was a common cause of death following childbirth at the time that Semmelweis began his investigation.
Quantifications, observations, and measurements (sometimes called characterizations). Semmelweis began by keeping careful records of deaths from puerperal fever in the two wards under his care. In the 1840s, puerperal fever was commonly attributed to weather con- ditions, overcrowding in the hospital, or even the position in which the woman lay while giv- ing birth. Semmelweis could find no correlation between climatic conditions or the number of patients in each ward and the number of cases of infection.
Hypotheses (theoretical or hypothetical explanations of the observations and measurements). Semmelweis tested the hypothesis, then widely taught in medical schools, that the position of
Chapter 1 The Study of Personality — 5
Chapter 1 The Study of Personality — 7
in the Second Division [ward]. In 1848 the mortality fell to 1.27 per cent versus 1.3 per- cent in the Second Division. In 1848 there were two months, March and August, in which not one single death occurred among the patients of the First Division. (Sinclair, 1909)
Figure 1.2 is a visual review of the steps that psychologists and other scientists use to for- mulate a theory. In any science, researchers construct a theory in such a way as to lead to hypotheses , or predictions based on that theory, that are subject to verification and falsifiability. That is, it must be stated in such a way that scientific experiments can be designed to test the applicability of the theory to real-world situations. Thus, a genuinely scientific theory must be precise, specific, and at least in some ways quantifiable. To see the importance of these qualifications, let us suppose a theory that states that all manifestations of personality are a result of the soul’s actions. How would we test this theory? First, we would have to define soul precisely. Then, we would have to devise a way to measure the soul and its effect on behavior. These measurements would be difficult at best. Although attempts were made by a Massachusetts physician named Duncan MacDougall to prove that the human soul has mass and weight (he weighed dying patients lying on a specially constructed bed in his office shortly before and shortly after death), his experiment—reported in the New York Times on March 11, 1907—would not have defined the soul to the satisfaction of all scientists, nor would he have proved that the soul affects human behavior even if he had succeeded in showing that it has a measurable weight. Alternatively, suppose we have a theory that states that a person’s response to fear and anger is mediated by the amygdala (an almond-shaped region of the brain associated with the emotions of aggression and fear). Here we have a proposition that is quite testable; it can be verified or falsified. This is exactly what Paul Whalen and his colleagues (2001) set out to do.
Figure 1.1 The Scientific Method
Observation
Define Problem
Propose Hypothesis
Gather evidence test hypothesis
Reject hypothesis Retain hypothesis
Develop theory
They showed participants photographs of faces expressing either fear or anger. The researchers then employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which is a technique that graphically depicts ongoing activity within the brain. In effect, fMRI can show the locations where thought is taking place within the brain while the subject is thinking. Whalen’s team found that brain activity is significantly elevated in the amygdala when people viewed faces showing fear and is elevated to a lesser extent when they viewed angry faces. It is important to understand that the word theory is used in formal science in quite a different way from its uses in ordinary speech. People often use theory informally to mean a guess or a hunch. In scientific usage, however, a theory is an organized set of principles that explains and makes verifiable predictions about some aspect or segment of reality. Theories are not opposed to facts; rather, facts are the building blocks of theories. The ability to formulate specific and testable theories in personality psychology is vital if this field of study is to be a science in the full sense of the word. Yet personality psychology still lacks a full consensus as to what exactly is being studied. We can agree that the term personality describes enduring and reasonably consistent patterns of behavior, perception , attitudes, and cognition. But psychologists cannot as yet agree as to how these enduring patterns develop and come to be established in human beings. As we move from descriptive accounts of personality to specific theories and models, we see progressive divergence among researchers in the field. When a descriptive account is founded on a theory of origin or structure, it gives way to an array of theoretical models or schools. In this context, school refers to a loose grouping of psychologists whose work and interpretation of data reflect a common conceptual foundation or the personal influence of a teacher. Each school attempts to provide a comprehensive and reasonably consistent understanding of patterns of human behavior. Personality psychology, more than any other area within psychology, is now defined and divided by these schools.
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Image 1.2 Functional MRI Image of a Human Brain
contrast, as someone adheres to an increasing number of beliefs in favor of social welfare pro- grams, the probability of being assigned to the liberal set increases. Thus, unlike a more clearly defined set like gender, a membership in a fuzzy set is probabilistic. Fuzzy set theory is often used in decision making with imprecise data. Some observers would define theories of personality as an example of a fuzzy set because the concept of personality seems so imprecise. Potter Stewart, a former associate justice of the Supreme Court, once made a telling statement about pornography. Stewart said, “I cannot define it, but I know it when I see it.” He could just as easily have been describing personality. Most of us think we have a personality; we recognize personalities in others; but most of us would have a difficult time pinning down exactly what the word means. Here are some recent attempts at defining personality:
The collective perceptions, emotions, cognitions, motivations, and actions of the individ- ual that interact with various environmental situations. (Patrick & Léon-Carrión, 2001) The psychological forces that make people uniquely themselves. (Friedman & Schustack,
The various styles of behavior that different organisms habitually reflect. (Rychlak, 1981) The visible aspect of one’s character as it impresses others. (Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, 1991) The characteristic manner in which one thinks, feels, behaves, and relates to others. (Widiger, Verheul, & van den Brink, 1999)
If we desired, we could fill an entire book with elegant but divergent definitions of personality. Most would bear a family resemblance to one another, but no two would be com- pletely concordant. How can this be? How can a term that is used by both professionals and lay people on a daily basis not have a standard definition? Perhaps the variations exist for that very reason—that is, when a clinical or technical term enters everyday speech, it loses its original precision. For this and related reasons, the editors of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) typically change the names of several psychological disorders in each new edition. An example of this transition is the term psychosomatic. This term originally referred to a physical symptom or disorder caused or notably influenced by psychological dysfunction. Over time, however, psychosomatic came to be used in popular magazines or newspapers to refer to imaginary or psychogenic symptoms. It was ultimately replaced in the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV; APA, 2000) by a diagnostic category titled Psychological Factors Affecting Medical Condition. The example given in the manual of a medical condi- tion affected by a psychological factor is that of a person with weight-related diabetes who continues to overeat from anxiety. The definition of personality that will be used in this text is: behaviors, styles of thought, speech, perception, and interpersonal interactions that are consistently characteristic of an individual. This definition includes both the overt and covert actions of an individual. Covert actions refer to all cognitive processes, both conscious and nonconscious. It is important to note that our use of the term nonconscious is not the same as the psychoanalytic use of unconscious. As will be further discussed in the chapter on cognitive
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models of personality, the human brain processes a great deal of information outside its field of conscious awareness. These are called nonconscious cognitions.
2 NORMAL AND PATHOLOGICAL PERSONALITIES
Although distinguishing between a normal personality and one that is dysfunctional, ill, or otherwise problematic may seem simple, it is not. The distinction between normal and abnor- mal remains one of the most vexing issues in personality psychology. When describing a normal personality, we can be certain of one thing—that our definition will be found lacking at least by some people. The Quaker saying, “All the world is queer save me and thee, and sometimes I think thee is a little queer,” definitely captures the subjective nature of defining normality. The distinction between normal and pathological is almost always arbitrary and, to some extent, an expression of the preferences of the individual making the distinction. Of course, in the case of such severe extremes as obsessive or compulsive personalities, or of individuals falling within the spectrum of schizophrenia , even a layperson can often determine that there is some pathology to be found in the afflicted person’s personality. It is not, for example, normal for people to hear voices commanding them to kill someone, as the assassin of President James Garfield claimed after shooting him in 1881 (Rosenberg, 1968). By definition, however, such extreme conditions are unusual. Another obvious means of determining pathology is by self-report. People who have personalities that cause them subjective misery can clearly be categorized as having pathological characteristics. Most personalities, however, cluster around the central tendencies of the more common personality configurations. Choosing the point at which a divergence from that mean becomes pathological is difficult. It involves making sharp divisions in what is basically a continuum—a problem that recurs in other contexts. Each of the various schools of psychology has its own means of distinguishing the normal from the pathological. For example, a Freudian psychoanalyst would posit defects in the person’s intrapsychic defense mechanisms, perhaps a breakdown of ego defenses against id impulses. Or the psychoanalyst might say that the overinvestment of mental energy in an intrapsychic object can result in a pathological personality. These terms will be explained in Chapter 4. A simpler model of pathology was proposed by the classical school of behaviorism. Behaviorists regard all personality pathology as resulting from aberrant conditioning and subsequent reinforcement. For example, a behaviorist would say that a perennially shy person was trained to be this way through parental reinforcement , and his/her personality remains shy due to reinforcers found in the person’s present environment.
Chapter 1 The Study of Personality — 11
Exercise 1 Prepare a brief outline of what you see as the elements of a normal personality and the elements of an abnormal personality. Then describe your difficulty in making the determination.
personalities, suggesting that no two are exactly alike. A follower of this approach would study each person as a complete and unique entity and would not compare his or her person- ality to others. The Greek philosopher Theophrastus (372–287 BCE) took this approach more than 23 centuries ago, in his book Characters. In it, he described several prototypical per- sonalities, most of which could easily describe a present-day person. His description of the flatterer is as follows:
The Flatterer is a person who will say as he walks with another, “Do you observe how people are looking at you? This happens to no man in Athens but you. A compliment was paid to you yesterday in the Porch. More than thirty persons were sitting there; the question was started, who is our foremost man? Everyone mentioned you first, and ended by coming back to your name.” With these and the like words, he will remove a morsel of wool from his patron’s coat; or if a speck of chaff has been laid on the other’s hair by the wind, he will pick it off; adding with a laugh, “Do you see? Because I have not met you for two days, you have had your beard full of white hairs; although no one has darker hair for his years than you.” Then he will request the company to be silent while the great man is speaking, and will praise him, too, in his hearing, and mark his approbation at a pause with “True”; or he will laugh at a frigid joke, and stuff his cloak into his mouth as if he could not repress his amusement. He will request those whom he meets to stand still until “his Honour” has passed. He will buy apples and pears and bring them in and give them to the children in the father’s presence; adding with kisses, “Chicks of a good father.” Also when he assists at the purchase of slippers, he will declare that the foot is more shapely than the shoe. If his patron is approaching a friend, he will run forward and say, “He is coming to you,” and then turning back, “I have announced you.” He is just the person, too, who can run errands to the Women’s Market without drawing breath. He is the first of the guests to praise the wine; and to say, as he reclines next the host, “How delicate is your fare!” and (taking up something from the table) “Now this—how excellent it is!” He will ask his friend if he is cold, and if he would like to put on something more; and before the words are spoken, will wrap him up. Moreover he will lean towards his ear and whisper with him; or will glance at him as he talks to the rest of the company. He will take the cushions from the slave in the theatre, and spread them on the seat with his own hands. (cited in Roback, 1928, p. 9)
Theophrastus depicts an ingratiating person whose primary goal is to gain standing with another person through psychological manipulation. Most of us have encountered or at least witnessed sycophants playing on another person’s vanity to obtain some advantage. The ques- tion raised by such people is whether they differ in kind from the majority or merely in degree of some particular trait. Those who take a nomothetic approach to personality psychology would strongly affirm the latter proposition. The nomothetic approach stresses that unique- ness exists only as a combination of quantifiable traits. According to this model, we all have a number of traits in common, and we differ only in the amount of each trait we possess. The first nomothetic personality psychologist may very well have been Claudius Galen, a Greco-Roman physician of the second century CE. We have encountered Galen earlier as the writer who gave the pineal body the name by which it is still known. He proposed that various combinations of the four humors or bodily fluids regulated human personality. The four humors he identified were blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. According to the
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relative predominance of each humor in the individual, these fluids were supposed to produce temperaments designated respectively as sanguine (warm, pleasant), phlegmatic (slow-moving, apa- thetic), melancholic (depressed, sad), and choleric (quick to react, hot-tempered). From a historical perspective, Galen’s four humors could be considered the equivalent of a modern four-factor (Lester, 1990) model of personality.^1 Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), arguably the most influential personality theorist even in the twenty- first century, could be classified as nomothetic in his approach. He created a fascinating complex model of developmental stages, drives, and psychic structures. Indeed, he was an exceptional observer of human behavior. Freud is justly entitled to praise for developing his complicated explanations of personality: In so doing, he made the study of personality interesting and helped to start the process of research into personality in earnest. Freud’s first attempt at understanding personality is found in his Project for a Scientific Psychology , written in 1895 as part of his correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess. In this early model, Freud attempted to explain consciousness and human drives as outgrowths of the structure and interrelationships of neurons or nerve cells. Failing in this project, Freud moved on to his later topological and structural models of the psyche. His system resembled the celestial model of Ptolemy (c. 90–c. 168 CE), an Egyptian astronomer who became a Roman citizen. Ptolemy explained the observed motions of the planets while holding that the Earth was at the center of the universe. Specifically, Ptolemy’s geocentric system appeared somewhat accurate in predicting planetary movements, but its faulty underlying assumptions necessitated increasingly complex modifications to explain apparent exceptions. We see the same process occurring with Freud’s model of the psyche. His theory of human personality was superficially accurate in its descriptions of many human attributes. As his successors examined it more closely over time, however, they found a growing number of gaps and flaws. We can only hope that had Freud lived longer, he would have adjusted his model to accommodate the evidence of current research in personality. Freud was followed by figures like Alfred Adler (1870–1937), who added the concepts of inferiority feelings and personal striving to the Freudian system. Then there was Carl Jung (1875–1961), who added numerous mystical elements, such as the collective unconscious shared by people across generations, archetypes of unconscious symbols, and a personality typology based on four functions of the mind—thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. Karen Horney (1885–1952), variously classified as a neo-Freudian or social psychologist, produced her own brand of psychoanalysis focused on the striving child. The vast majority of contemporary textbooks in the field of personality psychology follow a common outline, classifying personality theories into three large groups: psychoanalytic, behavioral, and humanistic. And most of these texts continue to emphasize psychoanalytic theory as a viable explanation of human personality and behavior. This text will explore this fascinating starting point, but it will also show it as just that: a starting point. This text will examine it under the bright light of contemporary research in experimental psychology.
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Photo 1.2 Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
rate their analysis as to how well it applied to them on a scale ranging from 0 = very poorly to 5 = excellent. The students gave their analyses an average rating of 4.27. Forer then revealed that he had given all the students the identical personality analysis and that he had compiled it from a series of newspaper horoscopes. Here is the analysis that Forer (1949) gave his students:
You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be crit- ical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a cer- tain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself as an independent thinker; and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic_._ (p. 120)
The principle that Forer studied was later designated the Barnum effect, after the famous showman Phineas T. Barnum, by the psychologist Paul Meehl (Dickson & Kelly, 1985). Formal personality assessments, performed either with projective instruments like the Rorschach inkblot series, objective tests like the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), or an interview by a credentialed professional, must exceed a standard set by the Barnum effect (Andersen & Nordvik, 2002; Dickson & Kelly, 1985; Furnham & Schofield, 1987; Snyder, Shenkel, & Lowery, 1977). In other words, scientific assessment methods must be falsifiable and partly validated in ways other than by subjective agreement among examiners. Assessment tools must predict behavior better than chance, and they must be based on psychologically valid methods. More than a modicum of research into personality has been confounded by the Barnum effect. The history of psychological research includes techniques like phrenology , which captivated both scientists and the lay population. For a nearly a generation the most widely known method for personality analysis, phrenology was based on the shape of persons’ heads. Phrenological guidebooks sounded very much like horoscopes. Both participants and researchers endorsed personality profiles that sounded appropriate, even though the profiles did not have a meaningful association with the behavior of the individuals they sought to measure. The legacy we can derive from such techniques is caution. As we will show, all techniques used to assess personality must be at a minimum superior to methods that appear meaningful largely as a result of the Barnum effect. The Rorschach, the Thematic Apperception Test, and the Draw-A-Person Test are all examples of personality tests predicated on the notion that dynamic unconscious forces lie at the foundation of human personality. These and similar assessment tools have a long and controversial history in the study of personality and will be examined in detail. Such objective tests as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory, the California Personality Inventory, and the Edwards Personal Preference Schedule have a slightly shorter history of use. These tests are generally based on empirical research
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Projective Tests
Objective Tests
Rorschach Inkblots presented with the goal having the client project his personality
Thematic Apperception Test Numerous images of people and settings are presented with the goal of have the client project her personality
Draw a Person Test/House Tree Person Test Client is asked to draw several images with the goal of have the client project her personality
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory 567 questions which yield numerous personality scales
Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory 175 questions which yield several personality scales
California Personality Inventory 464 questions which produce numerous scales
and are continually evaluated and updated on the basis of more recent evidence. They have the marked advantage of avoiding the taint of administrative bias. The specific meaning of the items or questions in these assessment instruments is not as important as the casual observer might think. The way a person responds to clusters of these items actually constitutes characteristic behavioral responses associated with personality types or traits. This approach to personality assessment has proven to have a high level of validity. On the horizon are new techniques utilizing fMRI, positron emission tomography (PET) scans, and others that directly associate personality with activity in specific areas of the brain. These techniques are in their infancy; but it is likely that the next generation of personality psychologists will have powerful tools to assist them in understanding human nature.
2 TRAITS, TYPOLOGIES, AND CHARACTER
Most of us are inclined to categorize people; psychologists are no exception. Freud proposed several character types based on his theory of childhood development. The so-called oral, anal, urethral, phallic, and genital personalities refer to persons whose sexual energies became diverted or stalled during certain phases of development. The English language is
Chapter 1 The Study of Personality — 17
Figure 1.2 Major Personality Assessment Tools
Chapter 1 The Study of Personality — 19
Figure 1.3 Personality Traits: Two and 16 Dimensions
Moody Anxious Rigid Sober Pessimistic Reserved Unsociable Quiet
Unstable
Stable
I n t r o v e r t e d E x t r a v e r t e d
Sociable Outgoing Talkative Responsive Easygoing Lively Carefree Leadership
Passive Careful Thoughtful Peaceful Controlled Reliable Even Tempered Calm
Left Meaning Reserved, Impersonal Concrete Thinking Emotionally Changeable Deferential, Cooperative Serious, Restrained Non-Conforming Shy, Timid Unsentimental Accepting, Trusting Practical, Grounded Forthright, Genuine Self-Assured, Unworried Traditional Affiliative Tolerant of Disorder Composed Relaxed
Warm, Attentive Conceptual Thinking Emotionally Stable Dominant, Assertive Lively, Spontaneous Rule-Conscious, Dutiful Socially Bold Sensitive, Sentimental Vigilant, Suspicious Abstracted, Imaginative Private, Discreet Apprehensive, Worried Open to Change Self-Reliant, Individualistic Perfectionistic Tense, Driven
Right Meaning
Average
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Touchy Restless Aggressive Excitable Changeable Impulsive Optimistic Active
Mel
a^ nc
holy
S^ a
ng
u^ in
e
P hlegmatic
Chole ric
(“I must have what I want now ”) to longer-term benefits (“It’s better to build a good credit rating by paying my bills on time than a poor one caused by overspending”). Ellis said in 1987,
I am still haunted by the reality, however, that humans—and I mean practically all humans— have a strong biological tendency to needlessly and severely disturb themselves and that, to make matters much worse, they also are pow- erfully predisposed to unconsciously and habit- ually prolong their mental dysfunctioning and to fight like hell against giving it up. No, I do not think they are masochistic—I think... that they are obsessed with the pleasures of the moment rather than of the future. (p. 365)
The treatment of irrational thinking became one of the primary predicates of his clinical method and theory of personality. This text will be the first work to comprehensively examine and integrate the vast body of thought and research on this sub- ject by Ellis, his students, and his associates. REBT uses a multifactorial and biological view of personality. Ellis’s assertion that people are innately irrational has been validated by numerous studies (Ellis, 1976; Kendler, Myers, & Prescott, 2002; Kendler, Jacobson, Myers, & Prescott, 2002; Kendler, Myers, Prescott, & Neale, 2001; Knowles, Mannuzza, & Fyer, 1995; Ruth, 1992). This idea is not new, and in fact, it was a premise of the early psychoanalysts. For example, Morton Prince (1854–1929), the founder of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology , stated the following in an early text on personality theory:
There is every reason to believe that intrinsically there is no essential difference between those physiological dispositions and activities of the lower nervous centers (subcortical ganglia and spinal cord), which condition and determine unconscious behavior, and those dispositions and activities of the higher centers—the cortex—which condition and deter- mine both conscious and unconscious behavior. The former are undoubtedly innate in that they are primarily conditioned by inherited anatomical and physiological prearrangements of neurons and the latter are preeminently acquired through experience although probably not wholly so. (Our knowledge of the localization of function in the nervous system is not sufficiently definite to enable us to delimit the localization of either innate or acquired dis- positions.) (Prince, 1921, p. 230)
Prince’s proposition that personality can best be understood through the understanding of the brain is not new, but models of personality must integrate current neurological research to the greatest extent possible. REBT views the brain as the seat of personality and genetics as the blueprint of the brain’s development. It also regards these same factors as the basis of the irrationality that distorts much of our personality. Many behavioral dispositions are genetic in origin and, like most
20— P E R S O N A L I T Y T H E O R I E S
Photo 1.3 Dr. Albert Ellis (1913–2007)
