hi everyone and welcome to uh psyched twists at meyer uh what we'll do in this little lecture presentation is we're going to look at the different personality theories of psychology and there are really eight major approaches and i'm just going to highlight a few of the big names and concepts within each one of them as they all take their own little viewpoint or perspective on how we can explain your personality what has made you the person that you are today so let's look at these and again we'll just go over some of the kind of uh key stuff in each one of them the first big theory is the psychodynamic perspective and a little quick analogy here humans are unconsciously motivated beings seeking to fulfill and balance our sexual and aggressive urges and the really big name that you would associate with the psychodynamic approach is sigmund freud but you can see uh holding a cigar right here uh if there's a psychologist who's holding a cigar it's probably freud very well known for that he's also well known for his ideas about the unconscious mind that all of our behavior is based on unconscious instincts and early childhood experiences things that we typically are not normally aware of and his theory he called it psychoanalysis the theory of personality and also his form of therapy that he invented again really focusing on early childhood influences and ideas related to the unconscious mind and the libido and a few of the other things that you see on this graphic so he talked a little bit about the three different structures of personality the id the ego and the super ego represented really really nicely in this picture here that the id being kind of the primal instinctive part of us and the ego being the kind of reality principle or the great mediator and then the superego being like our conscience or our ideals and then he also talked about his five psychosexual stages of development that as we age we go through these different phases of our libido or our psychic energy being focused on different parts of the body and freud's theories are a little bit controversial but he was the first right so he had to start somewhere and really everybody who came after him has built on what he proposed so coming after freud we had the neo-analytic theories or the the new analysis is what neoanalytic refers to where humans are unconscious and conscious actors and goal oriented strivers and everyone in this perspective really worked with freud and broke off with him at some point floyd didn't play very well with others he didn't do well with people not accepting his ideas and and the first person here is a man named carl jung and probably one of my favorite psychologists carl jung looked a lot at things like the personal unconscious our own unique repressed thought and thoughts and forgotten experiences and undeveloped ideas and also the collective unconscious that there were thoughts and feelings and expectations and archetypes that were common to all members of a species and so he kind of broke from freud looking a little bit more like spiritual and mystical rather than purely kind of sexual and aggressive there are lots of other big names in this approach but one other one that i'd like to mention is a developmental psychologist named eric erickson who spent a lot of time proposing that we develop our personality over the entire lifespan that we go through eight different stages or eight different uh kind of phases as we develop throughout life and i have those eight stages listed here for you that we first learn to trust or mistrust the world and then we develop autonomy versus shame and doubt and initiative or guilt industry versus inferiority entering the teen years we're focused on our identity or do we become kind of confused in who we are do we focus then on intimacy or become isolated in our young adult years and then generativity versus stagnation and toward the end of life integrity versus despair so a couple of different people here here are two of the really big ones other perspectives say that we are purely biological the biological theory views us as a bundle of genes and brains and hormones and focuses on things like dna or deoxyribonucleic acid that main ingredient of our chromosomes and genes that forms the code for all of our genetic information from a biological perspective we are not born a blank slate we're born with everything already in place at this idea of biological determinism that an individual's personality is completely determined by biological factors especially genetic ones from our genes our chromosomes our dna and the complete polar opposite of that the behaviorist approach says that we're intelligent rats learning life mazes and behaviorists reject ideas like the conscious mind and genetics and internal motivations and traits and so on and see us as just being in a product of our environment this is purely the nurture side of the nature and nurture debate our personality in other words is completely learned and a few big names here john locke very famous for his idea of tabula rasa or the blank slate that were born with everything blank and the environment will write in and fill in the pages for us we had people like ivan pavlov who we talked about back in the classical conditioning unit john watson he was very famous for his experiments with little little albert or baby albert and then of course b.f skinner who came up with his ideas of of opera conditioning so according to this perspective everything that we are is learned in the product of our environment and the product of nurture yet another perspective comes in the cognitive personality theories which say that humans are like little scientists and information processors and cognitive psychologists view the perception of the environment and our thoughts our cognitions as the core of what it means to be a person in other words the essence of our personality is really found in the way that we think and from this perspective we're looking at people like albert bandura and cognitive social learning theories where behavior is the product of the interaction of our thoughts and learning and past experiences in the environment we're looking a lot at your expectations and your beliefs about your success something that bandura called self-efficacy our expectation that your efforts will be successful so basically here your personality is dictated by your expectations and perceptions in the way that you are viewing the world kind of setting you up for what you're actually going to experience what's important to you the trait perspectives have a slightly different take on personality a little bit different than the ones we've covered so far here humans are clusters of temperaments and traits and skills and when we're talking about a trait we're just talking about a dimension or a characteristic in which people differ in a distinct way it's basically an adjective so if you were to describe yourself or describe a friend to someone else the words that you use would be adjectives or traits so here what we're trying to do is use a limited number of adjectives or dimensions to describe and scale individuals and there have been an incredible number of uh kind of perspectives within within this but the one that really has the biggest amount of strength statistically and empirically is something known as the big five five traits or basic dimensions that we can kind of boil somebody's personality down to and these dimensions are conscientiousness agreeableness neuroticism openness to experience and extroversion which make a wonderful little acronym of canoe right so these five different traits which break down into little endpoints or different facets or dimensions as well we can capture somebody's personality so the trait perspective is a little bit different and that rather than trying to figure out what has made you the person you are today we're trying to describe the person that you are today using things like the big five or the big three and several other different theories that are all statistically driven through things like factor analysis a few more humanistic and existentialist theories say that humans are free and responsible beings seeking fulfillment of our spirituality and our potentials a very kind of positive happy field of psychology where we're looking at the fundamental goodness of people and striving toward higher levels of functioning and a couple of big names here we have people like abraham maslow who talked about our hierarchy of needs and how we strive to become self-actualized and fulfill our potential moving up the pyramid from kind of basic needs like physiological and safety stuff to more love and belonging esteem and eventually reaching the top and kind of fulfilling our potential as a human being we also have people like carl rogers who talked a lot about the idea of becoming a fully functioning person and having unconditional positive regard from somebody and of ourselves right in order to reach that fully functioning person status really really big name in in therapy and counseling psychology but both of these people focusing quite a bit on our fundamental goodness and striving to realize our potential and our fulfill our kind of destinies and potentials as a human being the last one uh kind of a combination of everything the person situation uh per approach or perspective says that humans are an ongoing dialogue between ourselves and the environment so it looks directly at how different social situations might impact behavior and this is very much along the lines of social psychology maybe even a little bit of sociology because we look at the power of the situation so from this approach we say that personality might be kind of a poor predictor of our behavior because sometimes the situation can be so strong that it overrides our natural inclinations and we talked about this with survival instincts right but sometimes a situation can bring out parts of us that might not normally emerge again vary along the lines of social psychology you might be different with your friends than you are with your family and different with your family than you are with your partner different with your partner than you might be like in a classroom that different situations bring out different parts of your personality and this approach also focuses quite a bit on the lifespan because we don't stop growing and changing and responding to the environment we have to study an individual as they change over time so we're kind of looking at an interaction of a lot of different elements within this kind of final theory so those are the different perspectives when it comes to explaining our personality and there's obviously quite a bit more that we could have covered but just to give you kind of a little bit of a rundown of how each one of those branches or fields or theories kind of view our personality and most likely as it is with just about everything in psychology our personality is the product of a variety of things coming together so it's probably a little bit of our unconscious mind mixed with some genetics mixed with some behaviorism and all of our cognitions and expectations and it happens across our lifespan and there are all sorts of things that motivate us to reach our potential it's a combination of everything but looking at these different theories hopefully you can start to see how we might view your personality right through the lens of personality psychology so thanks for joining me and i will hope to have you join me again in the near future