Personality Structure: A Comprehensive Overview of Personality Psychology, Summaries of Psychology

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R. Larsen, D. M. Buss, A. Wismeijer,

Personality psychology

Chapter 8 How The Parts of the Personality Fit Together What is Personality Structure? Personality Structure Described

• Personality structure refers to the relatively enduring, stable areas that are inside personality
• Structure: the relatively enduring long term qualities of the personality system
• personality dynamics: the relatively rapid, active processes and change within the personality system
• analogy of a personality to a city Why is Personality Structure Important?
• Structural divisions of personality provide organization and overview of parts so one can see the whole group instead of each one in detail o Ex instead of talking about every single emotion, talk about emotion system
• Trilogy of mind= motives, emotion, and cognition
• Viewing all pieces together gives you a much better picture of a person as a whole There Exist Multiple Personality Structures
• Just like different occupations would divide a city differently (ex. Geologist vs realtor), there are different theoretical perspectives on personality that call for different divisions of the personality system
• Psychodynamic theorists — interested in consciousness & self awareness
• Distinction between conscious and unconscious
• Divided by major functions: motivation, emotion, cognition
• Relation of personality & social behavior to outside world
• Systems-oriented psychologists — integrating structural divisions Personality Structure Provides Organization
• A good structural model should divide personality into 3 - 7 large areas
• Each division must possess an adequate scientific basis; should occur in every healthy personality
• Divisions of the mind must create distinct areas
• Must cover the most important parts of personality How are Personality Traits Structured? The Hierarchical Organization of Traits
• Traits can be represented in the form of hierarchical structures of traits o Lowest level are individual test items o Factor analysis is applied to lowest level to obtain mid-level traits o Second factor analysis is done on those traits to obtain big/super traits
• “Trait structure” refers to the hierarchy & statistical pattern of relationships

▪ Agreeableness: friendly, trusting, straightforward, modest, compliant ▪ Disagreeable: suspicious, oppositional, self-aggrandizing, hostile ▪ Warmth, compliance, trust o Conscientiousness-carelessness ▪ Conscientious: responsible, orderly, dutiful; performing with competence & value achievement ▪ Organization, persistence, control o Honesty/humility-dishonesty/arrogance ▪ Honest: straightforward ▪ Dishonest: pretending & calculating ▪ Humility vs pompous qualities

• Saucier, Ostendorf, and Peabody created more neutral dimensions by substituting terms like “bold vs cautious” with “courageous vs cowardly”
• 2 dimensions o tight-loose: contrasts orderly, organized, and economical with social, happy-go-lucky, and impulsive o assertive-unassertive: contrasts confident, forceful, and aggressive with uncompetitive, unaggressive, and naïve
• “big six” is sometimes preferred over “big five” and the traits are referred to together as HEXACO: humility/honesty, emotionality, eXtraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness o humility/honesty’s opposite pole is arrogance/dishonesty ▪ humility: honest, self-effacing, sincere ▪ other end: boastful, pompous, dishonest
• researchers examined adjective clusters that weren’t already in big 5 to come up with more potential big factors o religious-nonreligious, deceptive-honest, sexy-nonsexual, thrifty- spendthrift, conservative-radical, masculine-feminine, conceited- humble, humorous-serious
• controversy as to whether the structure of traits is the same thing as the structure of personality o some say traits can define personality structure o some believe structure of traits is less than the structure of the personality itself and leaves certain essential elements out Big Traits: Do They Cross Species?
• Some traits seem near-universal although they are expressed differently from species to species
• Close variants of extraversion, neuroticism, and agreeableness can be found in pigs, dogs, rhesus monkeys, donkeys, and other species
• Argued that extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, openness can be found in all forms of monkeys What Are Structural Models of Awareness and Why Do They Matter?

Rationale for Structural Models of Awareness

• There are multiple ways to divide a personality, and traits provide only one such division
• Structural models of awareness focus on distinction between consciousness and unconsciousness o Understanding the flow of information in the mind (into awareness)
• Western philosophy is based on the belief that people don’t have good self- knowledge so they are more likely to engage in foolish or reckless behavior
• People started realizing self-knowledge is limited in the 18 th^ and 19 th^ centuries
• Freud proposed the preconscious, the unconscious, and the subconscious Consciousness and How Things Become Conscious
• Consciousness: those things which are in our attentional spotlight and which we can describe
• Memories — closely related to consciousness; could be conscious or not o Declarative memory: information retrievable from memory that can be readily brought to mind o Declarative memory is referred to as the preconscious
• Activation: a level of mental energy associated with a concept at a given moment; concept is retrieved when activation rises over a threshold
• Unconscious areas consist of mental processes that have no communication with consciousness o Automatized unconscious o Unnoticed unconscious o Repressed-suppressed unconscious o No-access unconscious The “No - Access” Unconscious, or Unconscious Proper
• We have an unconscious so that we aren’t constantly distracted by every little thing that we know or every process going on in our bodies
• No access unconscious/unconscious proper: all mental activities that lack any communication channel to consciousness
• The mind compartmentalizes and those compartments have little communication with one another The Implicit or Automatic Unconscious
• Implicit/automatic unconscious: cognitive processes that operate independently of consciousness but direct a person’s thoughts, judgments, and behaviors according to non-conscious rules and tricks
• False fame effect: occurs when people misinterpret their familiarity with a name, suggesting that the name belongs to a famous person The Unnoticed Unconscious
• Consists of influences that go on in our mind that we could potentially know about if we paid attention to them, but that we don’t notice or understand

• Some studies have suggested changing trilogy of mind to quaternity-of-mind o Adding consciousness makes trilogy appear more complete in covering the mental functions A Brain to Match?
• Triune brain: the brain underwent three evolutionary bursts of development that resulted in three different sets of neurological structures The Reptilian Brain
• Helped reptiles with basic motivations such as defending territory on land, securing food, and reproducing
• Sense organs, pons, amygdala, cerebellum
• Some aspects of thalamus & hypothalamus associated with feeding and sexual behavior; other reward and punishment experiences The Paleo-Mammalian Brain
• Mammals raise their young and form social groups, which requires a new layer of brain structures to support the increased emotional and social complexities and requirements of mammalian life
• Located around reptilian brain and consists of other structures o hippocampus, corpus callosum, cingulate gyrus, and hippocampal gyrus of the temporal lobe
• forms limbic system (responsible for socio-emotional learning and responding)
• includes corpus callosum (permits communication between left and right hemispheres) The Neo-Mammalian Brain
• origin: most likely the growing capacity for pre-language communication & language itself; those who possessed it had an evolutionary advantage and were better at thinking
• surrounds paleo-mammalian brain
• cerebral cortex is the outer layer which assists in planning, thinking, judging, communicating, and performing other information-processing tasks
• left & right hemisphere; frontal, parietal, occipital, and temporal lobe
• primary motor cortex & somatosensory cortex make up the body homunculus, where Freud placed the ego Summary of Maclean’s Tri-Partite Division of the Brain
• trilogy of mind (motivation, emotion, cognition) corresponds to the triune brain (reptilian, paleo-mammalian, neo-mammalian) respectively
• each part however ha its own means of operation & design, so they’re not fully integrated Integration in the Systems Set
• inner-related systems (motivated urges) to the left, externally related systems to the right
• molecular systems (short term memory) toward bottom, molar systems (self- concept) toward the top

• systems set: structural division that marks out 4 general areas of personality functions o executive management — self-awareness & self control o knowledge guidance — knowledge & intelligence o action implementation — action planning, social skills, social styles o energy development — motives and emotions
• includes distinction between conscious and unconscious processes
• processes may be blocked out of consciousness by various mechanisms of defense What are the Boundaries Between Structural Areas Like
• Ernest Hartmann examined whether “boundaries” between areas have different size barriers from person to person o Someone with thick boundaries can keep matters in focus and block out distractions ▪ Few in-between states ▪ Clear states of boundaries, identity, group identity o Someone with thin boundaries has a blend of sensory experiences CALLED SYNESTHESIA!!!!! (I have synesthesia!!!!!) ▪ Seeing images in response to sound or hearing notes in response to taste ▪ Can be easily overwhelmed and confused by too much input; aware of feeling and thinking at the same time; thinking in shades of gray o Boundary questionnaire assesses people’s boundaries and is related to Tellegen’s Absorption Scale (predicting hypnotic susceptibility) and Big Five Scale of Openness ▪ High scorers: art students, music students, models, adults with nightmares, frequent dream recallers, etc ▪ Low scorers: naval officers, salespersons, lawyers, etc o People with thick boundaries have more clear-cut states of waking, NREM, and REM sleep, whereas thin boundaries have blurred sleep physiology What Are the Structural Connections from Personality to the Environment?
• Connective structural models: framework for examining how personality is connected to the outside world Structures of Social Interaction
• Social-cognitive psychologists want to know how personality operates in the real world and how it makes sense of different social situations
• Cognitive-affective personality system structurally divides the personality into 5 parts (Mischel & Shoda’s C-A units in personality) o Encodings: mental models people use to understand outside situations; categories into which people, situations, and events are sorted

• Research being done is surveying people about their individual life space: biological, situational setting, interactions, group memberships
• Interesting dimensions emerge: healthy social interactions, affiliation with sports, drug culture, involved in the arts, involved in solitary intellectual pursuits
• Next researchers will see what traits go with what life spaces Structure and the Description of the Person
• When dividing personality, psychologists must make sure there’s a complete overview of an individual’s mental functioning
• Loooong Nixon example From Structures to Dynamics
• Structures: trait, awareness, function-based, external-connective
• Personality dynamics: the way one part of personality influences another o Ex chain of dynamics begins motivationally, is amplified emotionally, thought about cognitively, and is finally expressed in the outer world