hello everyone we're gonna talk about personality psychology okay when we talk about personality before we really get started it's important to make a distinction between personality and behavior okay personality is the or are the underlying motivations the underlying drives the underlying forces for lack of a better term that push you to act that influenced your behavior and the behavior or the behaviors are the actions that you take and they're different we're gonna talk about theories of personality today and we're gonna talk about different ideas behind personality different understandings of where personality comes from but one thing to remember is is that at least in adulthood all of the theories say that your personality stays pretty stable some of the theories argue that your personality develops through child and adolescence some of them say that you're born with your personality and it doesn't really change but regardless of which Theory you subscribe to and regardless of which one you you like the most when when this lecture is done all of them do say at least implicitly if not explicitly that your personality stays the same once you're an adult which means that it's stable that doesn't necessarily mean that your behavior stays the same and this is an important distinction to make so as an example let's take shyness somebody could be shy and they could demonstrate that shyness in different ways right so the shyness stays the same but the behavior manifests itself differently let's take an example of somebody who's 5 years old and who's shy well the five-year-old child is brought to a party by you know their parent might walk into the party and hide behind their parents like they don't want to face anybody they were in the guy contact they're shy and they're how they're gonna hide behind their parents like an adult who's shy might go to a party and just stand kind of off to the side and pull their cell phone out a lot and try to keep busy you know reading the news feed or you know posting or tweeting or whatever in order to avoid eye contact in order to avoid interacting with other people the shyness is still the same in the five-year-old and the adult the difference between the two is going to be the behaviors that they manifest in order as a function of this shyness okay so it's important to make that distinction early on and we're talking about this because our personalities again when we're developing some theories argue that they evolved or developed but once we're adults most theories if not all of them say that our personalities are pretty robust they stay pretty consistent okay alright so personality theories attempt to describe and explain how people are similar and how they're different and the underlying motivations behind what we do okay the first theory we're going to talk about is Freud's theory of personality through Freud's theory there are consistencies right his theory is always going to talk about the unconscious processes that are happening and as theories gonna talk about what he called developmental stages or psychosexual stages of development okay so according to Freud the personality develops and it starts to develop in early childhood through mother child interactions or parent-child interactions okay and the three components of personality according to Freud are the in ego and super-ego okay we're born with an it and an ego and the it'd is basically functioning on the pleasure principle the it wants what it wants when it wants it immediately the ego looks at the reality of your circumstances or your situation and we'll go through a little thought exercise to explain this a little bit more in a few seconds but the ego looks at your surroundings and your environment and it tries to look at or tries to look at identify what the reality is of satisfying the in right now and or delaying it gratification okay the super-ego is your conscience okay this is your morality principle what should you do and this is in buyed than you by your parents according to Freud okay so the it'd you're born with the ego you're born with and the super-ego is your conscience that develops in the morality and principle and these three things are interacting all the time mostly below your level of consciousness moment mostly in your unconscious some of this is a conscious process but most of the time these things these forces are acting and competing with each other on the unconscious level okay so let me give you a little bit of a thought exercise just to go through this quickly so so you're going to school and your college student and you go to school every day and every day you stop at a bodega to get a cinnamon Danish and every day you hand the person at the cash register a dollar and then you take your cinnamon Danish you walk out and you do this every day now it's graduation week you're about one week before graduation and you go to this bodega and there's somebody online in front of you and they buy the same cinnamon Danish that you normally buy and they hand the person behind the counter a dollar and the person behind the counter hands them a quarter you look and and you're a little bit confused and you start to talk to the person behind the counter and you say how much is a cinnamon Danish in without batting an eye they say seventy-five cents and you say has it always been 75 cents and they say yes and you walk out and now you start to do math so the average college student is in college let's say for five years okay and they go to school and say thirty weeks a year and they go to school four days a week so if you go to cinnamon Danish every day four days a week twenty-five cents a day is a dollar a week thirty weeks a year is thirty dollars a year times let's say five years it's a hundred and fifty dollars so now you're thinking there are a hundred and fifty dollars that I lost by not getting that quarter back every day so you go back into the padega the next day and when you walk in the cash register drawers open there is way more than one hundred and fifty dollars in that and the person who works there is in the back stocking the refrigerator what do you do now immediately thoughts are popping into your head okay some of the thoughts aren't let me take all the money some of the thoughts might be let me get the hundred and fifty dollars back some of the thoughts might be two wrongs don't make a right some of the thoughts might be are there cameras here are there cameras watching me while I get caught etc is there anybody else in this door each one of these thoughts represents either your in your ego or your super-ego the thought that says I'm gonna take all the money right now he owes that to me that's your in I want what I want when I want it the thought process that says are there cameras around will I get caught that's your ego examining the situation and trying to see the reality of getting away with it the thought process says that says it's wrong to steal I shouldn't take anything two wrongs don't make a right maybe I should have paid attention more maybe it's my fault because I never checked the price or I was rushing out that's your super-ego your morality principal and the three of these things are kind of fighting all the time and in every person you might favor the it more you might favor the ego more you might favor the super-ego more but every person's balance of influence within each one of these or of each one of these is different and that difference is partly what makes you who you are according to Freudian theory okay but this is how this process works and as we grow and develop these forces are constantly at work and some people are more sensitive to they're in some people more sensitive to super-ego some people more sensitive to the ego okay all right now another big component in Freud's theory of development is his stage theory he said we go through five developmental stages what he called psychosexual stages and in these stages we go through basically a sort of a conflict or we go through basically a set of needs right the stages are oral anal phallic latency in genital and you can see the ages in the slide here so in the oral stage you're talking about babies newborns the baby gets pleasure through his or her or their mouth okay so they seek what they call oral gratification now one thing to remember with the stage theory is that according to Freud the goal is to get satisfied in that stage and then move on to the next stage if you're satisfied in that stage you move on to the next if you're not satisfied you get stuck in that stage something that he called fixation and you're stuck in that stage for the rest of your life basically and and basically for the rest of your life you are seeking gratification of that stage satiation of that stage and you're stopped that's it and you can see how these behaviors manifest themselves as an adult okay so the stages the oral stage okay you're seeking gratification through the mouth this would be through you know breast feeding this would be through sucking on things pacifiers sucking thumbs etc and if you're satisfied if you provided enough overall stimulation in the oral stage you'll move on to the anal stage if you're not given enough stimulus in the oral stage and you can be over stimulated as well by the way but if you're not stimulated enough in the oral stage you'll spend the rest of your life fixated in the oral stage seeking oral gratification so as an adult you might be somebody who smokes you might be somebody who bites their nails or chews on pens I've even seen adults with pacifiers or drinking from baby bottles right you might be somebody who talks too much you might be an alcoholic right Freud would argue that all of these things are examples of being fixated in the oral stage the anal stage is next in one two three and in this 1 2 3 stage it really is about control okay so the child is learning and demonstrating a certain level of control they're learning to control their own body they're learning to control their their own you know bowel movements and urinary and urinary functions and so they're demonstrating their first level of control okay and they get satisfied and feel proud if they're able to exert that control according to Freud if not they're stuck trying to seek that control for the rest of their life they get fixated in the anal stage and if they get stuck trying to demonstrate that control for the rest of their life they might try to control their environment in ways that are somewhat extreme so they might be overly orderly overly clean overly neat right this is how we control our environment things are naturally messy right we call this entropy that the natural state right it's unnatural to have things all lined up and fold it and in order and clean and things like that right so people who are overly neat overly clean overly orderly according to Freud are stuck in the anal stage and we call those people anal and that's where it comes from Freud's theory if you move on to the anal stage you end up in the phallic stage and these this is certainly one of the things that makes people uncomfortable when you start talking about Freud because Freud said that you get pleasure through masturbation he didn't mean that you get pleasure through masturbation the same way that adults masturbate you know to to climax or for sexual self stimulation basically what he was saying is is that children in this age touch their genitals because it feels pleasurable and they're exploring their first opposite sex relationship right and the first opposite sex relationship that most people have is with their parent and so the child will touch themselves touch their genitals and have basic sexual urges and direct those sexual urges towards the first available object which typically is the parent and it's the parents job according to Freud to reject the child no no no you know Johnny you can't go to the bathroom with mommy or you know no Johnny you can't lift up mommy skirt or no Sally you can't go to the bathroom with Daddy you know you're too old for that now you have to go with mommy right and if they receive that rejection they move on to the latency stage if they don't receive that rejection they're stuck in the phallic stage and Freud argues that they spend the rest of their lives pining to marry the the their parents okay in the latency stage the sexual desires become hidden and kids focus on peers and relationships and they start to internalize the rules of society the rules that are imbibed in them by their parents this is where the super ego develops this is where the morali develops this is where they start to learn right and wrong okay and theoretically at a certain point they will these sexual urges will reintroduce themselves and then the child will end up in what Freud calls the genital stage the adolescent will end up in the general stage and in this stage this is where the child starts to express their sexual desires outwardly in a healthy way towards appropriate partners okay but again the potential is that they can come that they can become fixated in any one of these stages and if they do they'll be stuck in this stage and seeking some type of gratification of that stage for the rest of their lives another thing that Freud talked a lot about with something called defense mechanisms Freud argued that the ego is a very sort of fragile thing and that the the brain is always protecting itself from threats to the ego and usually the threat comes from anxiety or anything that's unpleasant or uncomfortable and so the brain basically protects itself from these uncomfortable thoughts uncomfortable ideas uncomfortable threats and the way that the brain does this is through defense mechanisms okay and these were some of the more common defense mechanisms that Freud identified repression sublimation denial rationalization regression displacement projection and reaction formation okay so repression is basically when you bury a thought or a feeling deep down outside of your conscious awareness so let's say that you're attracted to you know your best friends significant other and you might be treating them more nicely you might be favoring them thinking about them all the time and if anybody ever asks you no no no I'm not not attracted to not absolutely not and it's repression if it's outside of your awareness denial is similar to repression but with denial the individual is aware of their feelings and thoughts they're just denying them sublimation is where you channel these unwanted thoughts or feelings into appropriate ways so instead of calling up your significant others your best friend significant other and trying to get a date with them and trying to hook up with them instead of doing that maybe you sit there and say you know what I'm gonna take out these energies at the gym and I'm gonna go to the gym every day and I'm gonna try to train for a half marathon so you're channeling these unwanted thoughts or feelings the assumption is that you don't want to be attracted to your friends significant other so you're channeling these unwanted thoughts or feelings into healthy more appropriate ways okay rationalization would be justification so going to the saint going with the same example you know rationalization you find yourself attracted to your significant others your best friend significant other and you sense it well you know what she's always flirting with me or he's always flirting with me or they're always flirting with me or they're always engaging with me and oh you know my best friend doesn't treat them well anyway so maybe I shouldn't maybe it doesn't matter maybe they'd be better off with me and you know it's okay I could be attracted to anybody I want right so you're justifying this behavior regression is when you basically act as though you're in an earlier stage of development you regress you become more juvenile so you know maybe your best friend's significant others trying to throw them a surprise party and they call you up and you're like no no I don't talk to you they're not busy I'm busy nope not answering the phone right which is kind of a very sort of childish way of dealing with this right and this could be an example of regression displacement is when you displace these unwanted thoughts or feelings onto a safer target so let's go with a different example for this case so let's say that your boss yells at you at work and you can't yell back at your boss but you're angry so you could displace this anger to a safer target right your boss is not safe because if you reflect the anger back you might get fired so you you put you you displace this anger onto onto let's say your significant other or your best friend or your child okay so your boss yells at you you come home you yell at your kids okay you're displacing these feelings projection is when you project unwanted thoughts or feelings onto somebody else so you could be attracted to your significant other you know your best friend significant other and then you're like no no they're attracted to me that's what it is right you're projecting you or unwanted feelings onto them and then reaction formation is when you demonstrate the opposite reaction that you should so let's say your boss is really really mean to you all the time and treats you badly and really is nearly abusive to you and your time at the job and you might sit there and then treat them really really nicely and say no no they really care about me and you know I'm gonna go the extra mile for them all the time instead of just saying this is not a job for me maybe I shouldn't be here anymore or have a conversation with your boss okay that's reaction formation okay there's a cute video it's bikie and peels link below if the video link still works and you can show kind of comedic or silly examples of most of the defense mechanisms and it's not a very long video it's like five minutes so it might be worth taking a look at I'm not going to show it right now but you can take a look at it on your own there's also sort of a quiz yourself section on the defense mechanisms here so you can take a look at the defense mechanisms and try to match them up with the with the scenarios that are that are listed here okay all right now I'm going to switch gears and I'm gonna move on to humanistic theory humanistic theory came as a backlash to Freudian theory and a little bit to behavioral theory and basically what the humanistic theory posits or ideas or argues is that human psychology humans are much more complicated than we give them credit for and it also argues that we need to view humans as inherently good and inherently benevolent individuals and we need to look at humans as trying to be the best person that they can be okay so when you're looking at human behavior just in general humanistic psychology argues that people have a choice which according to Freud you could argue that so much is happening unconsciously maybe we don't have a choice but humanists say people do have a choice they're good they're motivated to kind of be the best person that they can be reach their full potential and humanistic psychology focuses a lot more on the present and the future where analytic psychology focused on the past childhood experiences humanistic psychology focused on the future and the present what's happening today and how do we deal with what's happening today in terms of the future how does that help us how does that make things better okay when practicing humanistic psychology we need to maintain a level of unconditional positive regard meaning always finding the good in somebody always finding something good about them and so you know you have a criminal in your office who's sitting there trying to you know break free of their life of crime even if they've committed horrible crimes in the past and they're sitting in your office well the humanism the humanists will probably view this person as you know what I'm not gonna look at them as a criminal I'm gonna look at them as somebody who's actually trying to get better and this is good that they're here and they're actually seeking help instead of oh that's disgusting the things that you've done that's horrible and you're your terrible burden on society and you know why you're here and you belong in prison no no you're trying to make yourself better okay and so if actualization is basically getting to the point where you realize your full potential and you're starting to give back to the world or to society okay and humanism looked at people's behaviors or personalities a function of sort of achieving this or working through this hierarchy of needs and if you look at the hierarchy of needs it goes from more basic needs to more kind of existential needs right so in the beginning is hunger and thirst right you have to satisfy your basic biological needs before you could focus on anything else and I always sort of give the caveman scenario with this right so if you're a cave person living in cave times right and you know you see the carcass of a dead animal in front of you you know do you go and risk being attacked by another animal to get the carcass well if you haven't even in a few days and you do right hunger thirst you have to satisfy that the next level is safety and security so you're safe in your cave and you see the carcass and it's surrounded by lions do you go after the carcass you don't go after the carcass if you've eaten recently if you haven't eaten recently safety doesn't matter because you need to satisfy the biological needs the next is love and belonging right so you decide that you want a cave partner because you have a nice cave you have your safety you have plenty of food to eat and then you focus on love and belonging being part of a community being part of a group partnering up and the next thing is esteem right self-esteem recognition status right so this is where you become king of the cave village because you have all of your other needs met and then self-actualization is now when you become the benevolent king and you start to give back to society and people right now not everybody gets through all the levels here right depending on your life depending on your situation depending on a number of factors you might not make it to self-actualization Maslow and Rogers the the two humanists argued that everybody would like to get to self-actualization that's what they're striving for but that doesn't mean that everybody does get there okay everybody's kind of working their way up right one of the examples I use for this is something like you know Bill Gates and I'm not gonna say he self actualized per se but just as an example you Bill Gates was a kid like he always needed the basics right he needed food he needed security and then he went to college right anyway then he needed to be part of a social group make friends and then he kind of went to college I don't even think he finished college to be honest with you but his educational needs were met and then he needed esteem and recognition so he made what he thought was the most ubiquitous software program in the world where he developed Windows and then and then made a ton of money on this and now he just sits there you know opening up charities and donating money and research too you know and disease and help charitable causes and things like that so the argument would be that he's probably reached the level of self-actualization that's arguable obviously but for illustrations sake that's what we're looking at okay a third theory of personality is called trait theory of personality trait theory of personality basically looks at or or assumes that we're born with a set of traits traits are things that are consistent they're stable characteristics that remain the same in different situations and throughout our entire life the original trait theorists was somebody named Gordon outport Gordon outport had gone through the Oxford English Dictionary and looked at every word that described you know humans he then put this into 200 catting 200 clusters and to break that down and say these are all the traits that humans have gentlemen named him isync came back and boiled these clusters down into three different traits psychoticism extraversion neuroticism is it everybody has these three different traits some have more of one or less of another but we can look at your traits as like a profile you know on a scale of one to ten what's your psychoticism scale of one to ten what's your extraversion scale of one to ten with two neuroticism so somebody might be high on psychoticism a9 low on extraversion at two five on neuroticism which might be different from somebody else who's low on psychoticism a too high on extraversion and low on eroticism right they look like two different people this would explain why they do what they do because we could sort of see their traits and other traits influenced them a more recent trait theory is something called the Big Five or ocean ocean is an acronym that starts with that that's made up of the first letter of each of the five traits openness conscientiousness extraversion agreeableness and neuroticism okay so they took two from I six model got rid of psychoticism and added three others in right they added openness conscientiousness they added extraversion and they added agreeableness okay sorry they added agreeableness on extraversion extraversion was already there and neuroticism is already there so openness is how you like to try new things conscientiousness is motivating being motivated to work hard extraversion is outgoing agreeableness is how well you get along with others and neuroticism is is emotional stability okay higher neuroticism less emotionally stable lower neuroticism more emotionally stable so with that the most amount of research on personality theory is own trait theory and what we've learned about trait theory is a few things number one the most predictive trait for job success is conscientiousness people that load high in conscientiousness tend to do well at work and their jobs number two these traits tend to be with us from birth these traits tend to be stable throughout an entire lives and don't really change very much the one that does change is agreeableness we tend to get a little bit more agreeable as we get older but otherwise they stay pretty stable people like trait theory for the fact that it's you know consistent it's reliable the research indicates that it's likely the most accurate but the reason why people dislike trait theory is because number one traits are so stable that it basically says we don't really have the ability to change them which makes it hard you know as a therapist to sit there and say well you've got this trait for the rest of your life and I'm going to do about it I mean you can engage in coping techniques you can engage in compensatory behaviors to override a trade if it's causing you problems you can get an engage in behavior change but if the trade itself doesn't change you know it's a little bit of a daunting proposition to to really think about the idea of you know change overall the second thing is we don't know what traits come from you're just kind of born with them and if you don't know where they come from that doesn't mean the theory's bad per se but it just means that the theory is somewhat limited because it means our understanding of traits is somewhat limited are they genetic there's something happen in the uterus are they biologically hardwired you know where do they come from we don't know so those are some of the limits of trait theories but it is one of the more trait theory itself and personality is one of the more robust one of the more well researched theories of personality okay you can kind of go through this sort of test yourself on the theories and when you're talking about trait theories don't worry it's it's it's talking about eine six model the the additional one a nine six model as well as the big five that's why there is six choices here so using psychoticism as well as the Big Five ocean you can answer these questions here okay just as a way of testing yourself and each one is only used once okay another theory on personality is interpersonal theory of psychology and basically interpersonal theory looks at our personality as a function of our interactions with others says no human being lives in a vacuum so we look at our personalities of function of interactions with others and if that's the case we always have to identify components of our personality as functions of other people so self-concept is how you think about yourself how you evaluate yourself and self-esteem is how you feel about yourself now this is important in the sense of interpersonal psychology because this really basically explains or this is this is really big on it's always a function of myself in the other people how do I think about myself so I think about myself is educated well if I'm standing in a room of people that have doctoral degrees or advanced doctoral degrees or you know whatever I might not think of myself as highly educated if I standing if I'm standing in a room of people that you know haven't graduated high school I might think of myself as highly educated right how I think about myself as a function of others it's always influenced by others it's always relative according to interpersonal psychologists self esteem is how I feel about myself so am i proud of what I've done you know do I think it's a you know a good thing or not okay so I have a doctoral degree am i proud of this you know well I could look at myself on one hands then yeah I'm one of the first doctorates in my family so that's something I'm proud of and it's something I could feel good about where I could sit there and say well you know what maybe my doctoral degree wasn't as competitive as a physics doctorate which is not actually true mine was quite competitive but maybe it wasn't as competitive as a physics doctorate maybe you know I just kind of have like this easy doctoral degree to achieve right maybe that's it so I really shouldn't feel happy or proud of that right and that's kind of your self esteem okay and you can take a look at the definitions of self enhance install verify they're just things for kind of your own information but I'm not sort of requiring that you know this for the course but you could take a look at it and if you have questions feel free to email I'm gonna move on to something called the Johari Window and then I'm gonna talk a little bit about assessment and personality testing okay so the Johari Window is a personality assessment that was built off of interpersonal psychology and basically what the Johari Window does is it it it's an exercise to help you and others learn more about your personality so what you do with this exercise and you can find one online you're welcome to do it on your own I highly recommend you be careful but this because you could find out things that are disturbing or upsetting but basically what you do is you download this Johari window and they'll give you a two by two box a two by two matrix and then they'll give you a list of like forty or fifty adjectives at the bottom and you work on this with somebody that you know so let's say your name is Adam and you have a friend named Steve and Adam wants to know more about himself and Adam wants Steve to know more about Adam so Adam is going to take his lists of adjectives which is and give a copy of the same list to Steve they both of the same list Adams gonna go through and circle everything that Adam believes applies to add Steve is gonna go through the same list without looking at what Adam circled and Steve is going to circle everything that he thinks applies to Adam Adams I'm gonna take this list and compare everything that they both circled in common goes to what's called the known self these are the things that I know about myself and these are the things that I project in the world and I let other people see about me okay the hidden self are the things that Adam circled about himself that Steve didn't circle these are the things that I know about myself but I keep secret for one reason or another either on purpose or by accident but I don't share these things with the world don't worry about the unconscious self at all that's all about you know analytic therapy and deep introspection etc so we won't get to that and it's not worth knowing for the case of this but the third one is something called the blind self the blind self are all of the things that Steve circles about Adam that Adam did not circle about himself and these are the things that Steve sees in Adam why is this important it's important because we never know how we come across to other people and we are not as insightful as we would like to think that we are so having somebody circle these things about us can be very very insight building it can be very very informative about us because maybe Adam is a boss and maybe Adam thinks he's a very benevolent boss and he thinks he takes time for everybody but Adam is also very conscientious and he works hard constantly taking on projects and things like that and Steve might not get as much time as he wants to that so Steve might write something like aloof and Adams gonna write something like conscientious and they talk to each other now and this is going to fall into aloof is gonna fall into the blind self from Adam and as what are you talking about you know why why do you put aloof and you know Steve is gonna think what every time I try to talk to you you don't have time for me you're distracted you're not paying attention you're thinking about other things and it's interesting because maybe Adam can be aloof but he didn't realize about he didn't realize that about himself and so this can be used in a business setting this can be used in a relationship setting but it's important to understand that you know the interpersonal psychological the interpersonal psychology basically assumes or posits that you will never fully know yourself unless you look at yourself through other people's eyes and this is sort of one way to do it okay all right next personality tests okay so I'm gonna talk about personality tests you know in in the context of psychometric testing and I'm gonna talk about personality test specific to personality testing as a whole okay so when you're talking about personality test these are assessments that have been developed and normed on the population so they always have to be taken you know they always have yours I think of a personality test that that's you know been built off of the population with which the person of which the person you're testing so if I built this test and I practice this Destin I developed this test on you know people in northeastern United States and that's all I tested well that's all this tests would be good to measure right and we talked about testing we talked about two different concepts reliability and validity reliability means consistently it's not good or bad it just means that you're getting similar results again and again and if I'm giving you a personality test and your personality doesn't change over time if I give you this test at two different times you should get similar results that's reliability if your personality changes every time we give you this test well there are two things to think about number one either our theories of personality don't make sense which at this point they've been researched enough where they probably do or two it's it's not a reliable test and if the test is not a reliable test it's probably not a very good or useful test because we want to make sure that it's consistent compare this to a blood test let's say I give you you know I'd give you a test for cholesterol and I do a blood draw and I see that your cholesterol is 205 and then five minutes later I give you a blood draw and it says your cholesterol is 50 it's not a reliable test we know that your cholesterol doesn't go up and down that fast and we know that if we're testing your cholesterol the numbers need to be accurate if your numbers don't go up and down that fast but I'm getting these two very different readings I have to start to question the tests that I give and since we know personality is consistent if I give you this personality test and it's not giving me consistent result results then I know it's probably not a reliable test and it was Devin underlie with us and it's probably not a very good or useful test okay now validity is another thing that's important in general validity means accuracy right so a valid test is a test that tests that measures what it's supposed to measure okay in the abstract I don't want to get too much into test construction or research methods or things like that right now because it's a complicated concept but just know that validity basically means accuracy is this thing accurately measuring the thing that it's supposed to be measuring okay now again without getting into the whole thing something that's worth knowing is if a test is reliable it can't be if it tests is not reliable excuse me it cannot be a valid test okay going back to the personality example if we know personality stable and we test your personality with this test and we give you the same test twice and I get very very different results it's not a reliable test if it's not reliable if it's not reliably testing for personnel it can't possibly be testing for personality because personality stable it can't work that way okay now there are tests that can be reliable but not necessarily valid okay and I'll give you a very weird and obscure example but let's say I put you on a scale for your weight and you get on the scale and you weigh a hundred pounds you get off the scale get back on your weight hundred pounds you get off the scale you get back on a hundred pounds that's a reliable scale and let's say I'm some really kooky psychologist and I sit there and I say I'm gonna test your personality get on the scale you were you a hundred pounds okay your personality is the of the person that's 100 pounds you come off you get back on again come off get my gun it's 100 every time well guess what it's reliable scale is it a valid scale is it really measuring personality no so in that case it's reliable but not valid I know this is a silly example but it's an extreme example to just sort of demonstrate the point so test can be reliable but not necessarily valid what we need with personality tests is ideally for them to be both reliable and valid and we need predictive validity with personality tests meaning that with let's say I'm doing an assessment or a test of psychological disorders I just need to know what your symptoms are right now do you meet criteria for depression do you meet criteria for an anxiety disorder do you meet criteria for psychosis if you have enough symptoms today you meet criteria that's all I need I don't need to know what's gonna happen in your future right in order for you to test positive for this predictive validity means does it predict something in the future and if a personality test is designed to measure your personality and your personality is designed your personality is expected to influence your behavior for the long term then a personality test should have some predictive validity it should be able to predict outcomes one of the things that we talked about is the biggest predictor of workplace success are high levels of conscientiousness okay if I give you a personality test that's measuring for conscientiousness and you take that today and you're loading high unconscious well you better do well at your job right and if you do do well at your job and that correlates meaning is associated with coal relates has a relationship with conscientiousness well then this test has a high level of predictive validity which is what we're looking for in personality tests okay it needs to predict something in the future and needs to predict kind of what we wanted to predict okay there are a number of different personality tests the two different types of personality tests in general are what we call objective tests and projective tests objective tests are tests that are theoretically based in objective or observable or verifiable measures or verifiable behaviors or verifiable indicators right it's objective it's verifiable it's it's you know you can see it you can measure it all that kind of stuff a projective test is different projective tests are based in unconscious process they really come from Freud and they're really a function of looking at what looking at how the individual projects their unconscious processes outward okay we'll get to that in a few seconds let me finish objective tests an objective test is a psychological test in which an individual answers standardized questions about their behavior and feelings we then compare this to established answers about behaviors and feelings they can demonstrate differences between people and can sometimes demonstrate neither personality or psychological disorders one of the most common objective tests is something called the MMPI - the Minnesota multiphasic inventory 2nd edition the MMPI is used frequently in law enforcement fire department I believe it's used in the military and basically what the MMPI - does is it's based on a series of scales ok there are different scales on the MMPI - without going into them but these scales are supposed to be components of our personality and the scales are a little bit antiquated with their names one of them is masculinity femininity one of them is psychopathic deviant right these things do need to be updated but what we found is is that people that answer in certain ways across these questions tend to show particular tendencies going forward this is the predictive validity part and so based on previous results of previous people who've taken this test we're going to compare your results to them and get a relative result on your level of masculinity femininity psychopathic deviant etc and we're gonna get your your relative rating and so based on the population based on everybody who took this test are you in the top percentage are you average are you in the low percentage and we've used this test to see how people fare in you know certain situations particularly law enforcement so people that test high or low on certain scales in this test tended to do either better or worse and law enforcement dependent or better or worse in other areas professionally depending and so what will happen is is that we'll use this test to weed people out for the job so let's say people that tested very high on the psychopathic deviant scale and this is just an example tended to have more complaints lodged against them so police officers or people that took the test that became police officers the test at high in the psychopathic deviant scale tended to have a lot of you know complaints complaints about you know possible violence on the job complaints about you know assaults things like that and appropriate conduct whatever we're talking about right so people had those complaints lodged against them that tested high in psychopathic deviant in the past well now what we're gonna do is every person we give this test to if they're loading high in the factor of the trade of psychopathic deviance is measured by the MMPI to we're gonna sit there and say this is not a good fit this is not a good person for this job I don't know if they'll necessarily have the same problems as somebody else but what I know is people that measured this way in the past had problems you're measuring this way it's not worth taking the chain it's okay if that makes sense the mpi-2 is a weird test it's 456 multiply no it's a zone 500 here is actually 456 multiple-choice questions and it's true/false questions and what this does is having this large number of questions creates reliability because if you answer a similar question 27 times that's gonna give us a more consistent response pattern from you and I'll give you a silly example of reliability right so let's say you're a student in biology and I want a reliable measure of your knowledge of biology if I ask you one bio question there's a 50% chance you're gonna get that right right if you get it right do I know that you're good at biology it might be you might not be but I don't know for sure if I ask you ten questions in biology and you get them all right do I know that you're good at biology maybe probably but not for sure if I ask you a thousand questions in biology and you get all 1,000 questions right do I know that you're good at biology probably and that thousand question measure is a more reliable measure because I'm getting a more consistent result okay the more time the more questions you ask the more consistent the results are okay and the more consistent the results the more reliable they are now that doesn't have to do it with validity we talked about validity before yeah look I could be giving you math questions and saying that that's a measure of your biology ability like I say anybody who's good at math is probably good at bio that's not a valid measure of your biology knowledge it could be a reliable measure because I could give you a thousand math questions and you could get all thousand right and I could know reliably you're performing high on these tests but they might not be they might not be a valid measure because it might not be accurately measuring your ability to do well in biology okay all right now the MMPI is considered a self-report because you're talking about feature or ideas or concepts or traits or things in you and there are other self-report measures the API is just one of the more common ones self-report measures tend to have some strengths and they didn't have some weaknesses the strengths of self-report measures are that everybody is getting the same stimulus numbers getting the same questions so it standardizes everything you know once you start to give inconsistent questions the answers become inconsistent and the measure becomes more difficult to you to be kind of to get clear results on so they're standardized we base it on population norms we've tested other people tens of thousands of times in the past we know how the population is going to answer and I don't want to get into all bell curves and everything like that in normal distributions but basically we know how people are likely to answer some people are going to answer in the extreme but most people can answer sort of in the middle and so we can compare you based on how you're answering these questions to the population and know where you fit okay the tests tend to be consistent when they're reliable and they tend to predict behavior so these tests tend to be good at giving us an indication of what may or may not happen so people that score very high in you know certain areas of the MMPI you know consistently in the past tend to have performed poorly as an officer of the law and so it's been a lot it's been a valid measure if this test is not to predict that then it's been a valid measure and again there's no telling why right we don't know why you know somebody ends up doing what they're doing but we know that you know it's been predictive it's been able to tell us what happens in the future okay weaknesses of self-report people can fake responses you know you don't have to tell the truth now on a test that has so many questions like the MMPI - and not all of them have this many questions but a test with so many questions it tends to be harder to fake responses and we also have sort of certain what we call lie scales built-in which means that we can tell if you're faking responses we don't know why you're faking responses we don't know what you're lying about but we can tell if you're following patterns similar to other people who fake responses because in testing this we've said you know we brought in people and said fake you know look this way or look that way your fake your responses you know as we're developing the test and guess what other people when they take it tend to other people's responses tend to match other people who fake them so we say likely that you're faking the response okay we know that based on the test so it's hard to fake these things especially a long test but you can you can and you can try to look more socially desirable all right long tests people can like just kind of bottom out at the end they just kind of give up they lose all Drive and motivation so it's very hard for them to to kind of really pay attention so the last you know hundred questions or fifty questions few must be answering anything and so it might be hard to get sort of a reliable result cuz people just give up I mean think about it now online somebody gives you a five question survey and by question three like I'm done when it hits whatever every you know ten ten ten or one one one or five five I don't care and the damn survey right so you know reliable met so people might kind of peter out at the end of these okay the other thing is is that people might not be insightful you know we talked about this before people might not be good judges of their own thoughts or feelings or behaviors and if you're not a good judge of your thought feeling or behavior you might not val you might not accurately report this stuff you might think that you're somebody that you're actually not right we talked about this in the Johari Window right you might think that you're being very benevolent and somebody else might think that you're being aloof so even though you think you're one way you might not be who you think you are I'm not talking about multiple personalities or dissociative identity disorder I'm not talking about you know anytime anything like that I'm just saying you might value yourself or look at yourself in one way and other people might see you very very differently and so if the general consensus of the population is to see you one way but everybody else sees you differently you have to start to think really a lot about how you're evaluating yourself and are you evaluating yourself accurately or not okay so we're gonna move on to projective tests okay I mentioned before that projective test is a test that is rooted in psychoanalytic theory and analytic theory basically talks about your unconscious a projective test or projective test in general are designed to give you ambiguous stimuli and encourage you to respond to the stimulus or stimuli and when you respond to the stimulus or stimuli the thought is is that if it's ambiguous enough and we allow you to respond freely what will happen is is that you will start to disengage your defense mechanisms and unconscious thoughts or feelings are gonna start to come out okay I don't want to go into all of the details of projective testing and things like that and and how they're scored because the scoring can be extremely complicated and it can also be a little bit arbitrary people can kind of interpret these things sort of any way they want you know hopefully there's a lot of training involved I did have a lot of training in in scoring and interpreting projective tests and that's supposed to create a certain level of reliability but doesn't always you know people can still look at these things in various objective ways and you know because it's not the questions are because the interpretations aren't formalized per se there's you know with the Rorschach test which we'll talk about first there is a scoring system in place but with a lot of these other projective tests there's no scoring system in place without consistent scoring it's hard to you know interpret reliably once you have poor reliability validity is kind of all over the place there are benefits to projective tests though okay so the big projective is that we'll talk about now or the Rorschach t-80 or Thematic Apperception tests and then sentence completion tests okay all right so this is an example of an altered version of one of the Rorschach cards and the Rorschach cards are just a series of ink blots on paper you know these basically cardboard pieces that you show the individual there are ten of them this is an example that looks similar to one it's not exactly but it's an example that looks similar to one and you'll show this to the person and you basically kind of ask them what they see and then they'll tell you what they see and then you'll kind of ask them you know what makes it look like that and it's a very you know you'll write down all of their answers and then analyze every word they say and how they answer it later on not in front of them obviously and then there's a whole scoring system that goes along with it and within the scoring system as you're scoring this there are different scales right there is a Depression Inventory there is a suicide inventory there's a psychotic inventory there are a few different inventories based on you know certain personality features or components and then you can write a you know an interpretive report based on this one thing to remember about psychological testing in general and specifically for projective tests and personality test but in general you never give one test because the results from one test are never going to be reliable even if the test itself is reliable you always get more tests because you want between test reliability you want two different tests to say the same thing so if I give the Rorschach and you're loading very high on depression I'm gonna want to give you another test just to make sure and if the other test says yes depression the same way Rorschach did well then I know something you know it's probably indicating something accurately but if I get two different tests and they say two widely disparate things one says depression the other one says mania well either you're rapid cycling bipolar or schizoaffective disorder and you went through a cycle between the time I gave you the two tests or there's something wrong with the results on the tests okay so it's just something to be mindful of another type of projective test is the t-80 Thematic Apperception tests and there are different versions of the t-80 this is an example of one card from one version of the t-80 and basically what I would do is I would give this to a client and I would say you know tell me a story about what's happening in this picture tell me what happened right before tell me what's happening in the picture and tell me what happens after and I would be looking for themes okay this is vague right if you look at this carefully it's hard to tell a lot of things what's the relationship between the two people are they related are they friends what are the intentions of the person with their hand in the air you know what's going on with the person laying down with their eyes closed is that a male or a female or other are they awake have they passed away you know and people can interpret this anyway right and people have kind of strong reactions to it but they can interpret it any way and the thought is is that again once I've given you enough of these cards that are ambiguous and they all look very different the styles the same the black and white is the same with the sort of pencil shading drawing is the same but the themes and the cards are different but if I'm getting similar thematic responses from you I can identify these themes and interpret these themes to mean certain things I'll give an example I was giving somebody this test and every story at the end of their story tell me what happens after it's ended up in people dying and people killing each other every story no matter what and if you met this person in person there was no violence you know that you could see in this person there was nothing that indicated that there was any violence or or anything like that but these themes kept coming out again and again and then these themes actually kept coming out with their answers in the Rorschach - and so once you start to get that sort of consistent style of response if you believe in and support projective testing you can interpret that those responses as meaning something right person definitely you know voiced aggressive themes violent themes consistently again and again this is congruent with their past and of whatever it is okay so they can be kind of useful that way this is an example of the sentence completion test this is one that seems to be used in a correctional population there's certainly others because this one asks a lot about jail and prison and things like that but you can look at some of the more vague questions and some of the more you know Universal questions so take a look at number ten my mind so you present this for somebody and say this is going to start a sentence for you I want you to complete the sentence and you don't give him any other prompt than that and so they'll look at this and say my mind and now because it's so broad and open whatever they write is a very subjective thing and based on principles of Freud that Freud called free association where you basically let somebody just talk uninterrupted and eventually they're unconscious influences will come out this kind of does the same thing so somebody might say my mind wanders my mind races all the time my mind is useless right and if you look at all of these answers they all mean something different and again one answer of saying something like my mind is useless is not very telling of anything but if there are ten answers my childhood was awful skipped in number three I think as little as possible skip to number six most of the time I really am just miserable okay now go back to my mind is just useless now do you start to see themes and the person's answers and when you start to see those themes and those answers and then you compare that with the t-80 where they might be saying things like oh you know well this old person is the child's father and then the young person is the child I'm not saying that that's the relationship but this is how the person's interpreting and the father is just so upset and and and drawn-out about the fact that the son fails at everything in their lives and and they can't do anything right and he's you know thinking about even hurting the son but he can't bring himself to because it's still his son but he's just so exasperated by his son's failures okay well guess what now you have a lot more themes okay inconsistent themes and that's what somebody might do when they're interpreting the t-80 okay and they end the Rorschach and and the sentence completion test etc okay all right benefits and drawbacks of projective tests theoretically they can access the unconscious process they can allow for an infinite number of responses right a true-false tests or multiple-choice test limits the number of responses that you can have but something is open-ended is this anybody could write anything or say anything when they're given an inkblot or say anything when they give him one of the t-80 cards which means we could get it stuff that we didn't even realize was there which is always interesting and can be beneficial they can break down defense mechanisms as somebody's putting their guard up it's hard for them to keep their guard up throughout an entire test battery meaning a number of different tests right it's hard for them to kind of keep that up you might be able to present as controlled and organized with one or two questions or one or two cards but eventually if the person is disorganized or psychotic or something else is going on you start to see this stuff come out it's hard for them to contain this over an entire series of tests it really is and it could be more engaging right giving them the freedom to just talk and to kind of discuss anything they like can be more engaging to the client in ways that a true/false test or you know a multiple-choice test might not the bad things you know that we talked about before right it's subject to the interpretation of the person giving the test the Assessors version gave me this is subject to interpretation right so I might interpret their answers differently I might interpret that t-80 response of you know the father you know being disappointed in the son and the patient may be identifying as the son and you know with the themes of the other answers that they gave in the sentence completion well somebody else might interpret it differently somebody else might interpret themselves as a father you know frustrated and angry and disappointed and let down by you know what the son did or didn't do right and if you interpret that differently it leads to different results and different conclusions so you know it's subjective it's subject to the interpretation it's not that I'm scoring it and then just reading the results and basing the results on a scale okay next reliability right it's not as reliable or these are not as reliable so the tests although some people who really really love these tests or really support these tests do argue that the reliability rates are relatively high if the training is correct again I don't have the data on that so I'm not going to speak to it one way or another but I do know that the reliability tests tend to be lower on the projective tests I don't know how much lower but they tend to be lower there difficult to score right you can't really assign numbers to you know sentence completion you can't really assign numbers to a ta t responds a gentleman named Exner did try to assign numbers to the Rorschach test but the scoring system for the Rorschach is so overly complicated I trained on it for just to give an example however the complicated it is I trained on it for two years and by the end of the second year actually no I joined for five years by the end of year five I felt comfortable giving it and scoring it and then I didn't do it for a year and I've forgotten so much of it right now because it's so complicated that I would not feel competent giving it again right now I just wouldn't I the scoring is so complicated that I felt like if I tried to score it now I would do such a bad job that the results that I would get would be inaccurate so scoring these things is difficult and then the predictive validity part is also debatable how much do they predict things accurately is debatable some people say that they're accurate predictors some people say that they're not you know one of the things that you have to remember is is that because I'm not giving them a scale with cut-offs like I do with the MMPI you know the NPI I'm gonna you know score hypothetically in a scale of you know plus 10 to negative 10 and you know zero being average right let's say I'm making this up but just to give you an example right and people that load +10 you know the cutoff is you know seven to join the police department if you're a 7 or above again I'm making all this up if you're 7 or above you know you can't join the police department so simple and I predict that sevens you know people who are 7 or above don't do well and so I don't hire the 7s and in the past sevens have done well and we're done that's you know kind of predictive you know it's easy to create a level of predictive validity with something like the Rorschach or the t-80 or the sentence completion test and there are others you're going to write a report and you want to be as specific as possible but you also want to be somewhat vague you want to be specific because you want to be clear and you want report to mean something but you also want to be vague because you don't want to say something so specific that a it's inaccurate because it's so specific or be it opens you up to a level of liability so without going into too much detail if you've ever read a Rorschach report because all of these tests are followed up by a written and report and interpretation of results if you've ever read one of these reports they're a little bit on the vague side and some for some psychologists they're too vague to be useful so they might say something like you know you tend to get overwhelmed frequently and you tend to find yourself you know having difficult time and interpersonal relationships this could be 100 percent accurate but it's also so vague that it could be a hundred percent accurate for almost anybody that I give it to if they interpret it a certain way right so again it's something that's debatable with regard to the level of predictive validity okay debatable not useless by any stretch of the imagination and some people live by these projective tests make their entire career these predictive tests and they can be very helpful very effective if used correctly but other people you know have strayed away from this and in contemporary psychology these projective tests are starting to lose a little bit of traction in favor of the objective test for a number of different reasons some of which are ease of use some of which are speed of administration some of which are based on insurance reimbursements you know some of which are based on standardizations you know in certain areas etc so there's a lot there are a lot of things that you know go into how these things evolve and we use them for later on but just know that they exist they're still being used but fewer places are tending to use them nowadays okay all right so that's it on the theories of personality again this is for an intro course so it really is basic and general I didn't go too deep into anything there are courses on personality psychology that go much much more in-depth on all of the theories I'm assuming they go more in depth on personality assessments and things like that but this is just a general overview so take a look at the video feel free to pause and rewind it take notes etc but that's about that I hope you enjoyed