theories of personality 3

• Originated person-centered therapy (non-directive).
• Humanistic psychology.
• Emphasis on the conscious & present.
• Inborn tendency to actualize.
• Goal: actualize

• Strict, religious parents forced their views, not his.
• Swung to liberal views--stressful.
• Brought emotional and intellectual independence.
• Psy professor at Ohio State University.
• Clinical psy (mainstream).
• Counseling emotionally disturbed persons.
• College students.

• People are motivated by an innate tendency to actualize, maintain, and enhance the self.
• Process involves difficult growth.

• Reality of our environment depends on our perception of it.
• Perception may not always coincide with reality.

• Only reliable reality is subjective experience and inner perception of reality.
• The most important point about our world of experience is that it is private and thus can only be known completely to each of us.
• Our experiences become the only basis for our judgments and behaviors.

• Infants: more complex experiential field.
• Self-concept: experience becomes differentiated from the rest.
• Distinguishes what is directly a part of the self from those things that are external to the self.
• Image of what we are, what we should be, and what we would like to be.

• Acceptance, love and approval from others.
• Universal and persistent need.
• Encourages or hinders actualization and development.

Approval regardless of one's behavior.

Condition under which we grant ourselves acceptance and approval.

• Conditional positive regard: approval, acceptance only when person exhibits desirable behaviors.
• Infants learn that parental affection has a price; it depends on behaving appropriately.
• External standards of judgment become internal and personal.
• No longer function freely; prevented from fully developing the self.

• Discrepancy between self-concept and experience.
• Becomes threatening--manifested as anxiety.

Comes from the compatibility between self-concept and experiences.

• Aware of all experience: open to positive as well as negative feelings.
• Live richly and fully in every moment: freshness of appreciation for all experiences.
• Trust in their own organism: trust in own behavior and feelings.
• Feel free to make choices: without inhibitions.
• Creative and live constructively: creativity and spontaneity.
• Face difficulties: continual need to grow, to strive to maximize one's potential.

• Person-centered therapy: approach to therapy in which the client is assumed to be responsible for changing.
• Client is given unconditional positive regard.

• Q-sort technique: self-report technique for assessing self-concept.
• Sort a large number of statements about the self-concept into categories that range from most descriptive to least descriptive.
• Discrepancy between perceived self and ideal self decreases with therapy.

• Criticisms
• Lack of clarification of mechanisms.
• Ignored factors outside of person's awareness.

• Contributions
• Person-centered therapy became popular; highly accessible.
• Core concepts accepted by other orientations.
• Personality theory much less influential than his psychotherapy.

• No personality theory; accounts for all behaviors.
• Humans="empty organism"--nothing inside us can explain behavior in scientific terms.
• Elemental processes: studied with rats and pigeons.
• Applications: therapeutic techniques, behavioral modification still in use.

• Behavior can be controlled by its consequences.
• Two kinds of behavior: respondent and operant.

• Responses made to or elicited by specific environmental stimuli.
• Becomes learned through conditioning---substitution of one stimulus for another.
• Pavlov.

• Act of strengthening a response by adding reward.
• A conditioned response cannot be established in the absence of reinforcement.

Process of eliminating a behavior by withholding reinforcement.

• Behavior emitted spontaneously or voluntarily that operates on the environment to change it.
• Change in consequences of a response will affect rate of response.

• Food-deprived rat placed in box; behavior is spontaneous.
• Rat presses bar --- gets food; food = reinfocer for pressing bar.
• More pressing --> more food.
• Next day --- can predict rat will press bar.
• Withholding food would extinguish operant behavior.

• Believed that most human and animal behavior is learned through operant conditioning.
• Skinner's concept of personality: a pattern or collection of operant behaviors.
• Neurotic/abnormal behaviors --- continued performance of undersirable behaviors that somehow have been reinforced.

Reinforcement of every response.

In real life, we are only reinforced part of the time.

Patterns or rates of providing or withholding reinforcers.

• A reinforcer is delivered after a fixed number of responses are made.
• A rat must press a lever 10 times before receiving the reinforcer of food.

• The number of responses it takes to obtain a reinforcer varies on each trial, based on an average number of responses.
• Slot machines.

• A reinforcer is delivered after the first response is given once a set interval of time has elapsed.
• Periodic exams in a class.

• A reinforcer is delivered after a different time interval on each trial.
• Pop quizzes.

Lead to higher rates of responding than interval schedules (steeper slopes on the cumulative record).

Lead to fewer breaks after reinforcement than fixed schedules.

Extintion will take longer with partial-reinforcement schedule than with a continuous reinforcement schedule.

Appetitive stimulus is presented (ex. praise for good work)

An aversive stimulus is presented (ex. scolding for doing poor work).

Aversive stimulus is removed (ex. using a painkillers to remove a headache).

Appetitive stimulus is removed (ex. parents taking away dessert from a child).

• Punishment
• Skinner said that punishment was ineffective in changing behavior from undesirable to desirable.
• Positive Reinforcement much more effective than punishment.

• Negative Reinforcement
• Skinner opposed to using aversive stimuly to modify behavior.
• Negative reinforcement does not always work; positive reinforcement more consistently effective.

• Explanation for the acquisistion of complex behavior.
• Behavior will be reinforced only when it approximates or approaches the desired behavior.

• Results from accidental reinfrocement.
• Persistent behavior that has a coincidental relationship to the reinforcement it received.

• Acting to alter the impact of external events.
• To some extent, we can control the exteranal variables that determinate our behavior.

• Stimulus avoidance: removing stimulus from your environment.
• Self-administered satiation: overdoing undesired behavior.
• Aversive stimulation: making negative consequences for self.
• Self-reinforcement: rewarding self.

Therapy that applies principles of reinforcement to bring about behavioral changes.

• Behavior modification technique in which tokens (awared for desirable behaviors) can be exchanged for valued objects or privileges.
• Behavior change does not carry to other settings.

Functional analysis: Study of behavior.

• 3 aspects of behavior: frequency of behavior, situation in which behavior occurs, reinforcement associated with behavior.
• 3 approaches to assessing behavior: direct observation of behavior, self-reports (interviews and questionnaires), physiological measurements.
• Focus for all assessment techniques: behavior not motivation.
• Goal: modify behavior not change personality.

• Intensive study of single subjects.
• Reversal experimental design.
• Results of other experiments support Skinner's ideas.

• Establish baseline.
• Conditioning stage: introduce independent variable (IV).
• Reversal: determine whether other variable affects behavior (no IV).
• Reconditioning: re-introduce IV.

• Criticisms
• Focus on overt behavior ignores uniquely human qualities.
• Hard to extrapolate from pigeon to society.

• Contributions
• Skinner was potent force in psychology.
• Dominance later challenged by cognitive movement.
• Remains influential in many areas: Broad application of behavior modification techniques.

• Agrees with Skinner that behavior is learned. Criticized Skinner's emphaiss on individual animal subjects.
• Recognizes that much learning takes place as a result of reinforcement.
• Believes that cognitive processes can influence observational learning.
• We make deliberate, conscious decisions to imitate certain behaviors.

Learning new responses by observing the behavior of other people (without directly experiencing any reinforcement).

Observing the behavior of others and the consequences of that behavior.

• Most human behavior is learned through example.
• Observing the behavior of a model and repeating the behavior ourselves, it is possible to acquire responses that we have never performed previously.

• Adults acted violently toward the doll.
• Children modeled the violent behavior.

• Children's behavior reflect their parents' behavior.
• Verbal modeling can induce behaviors.

• Weakening of inhibitions by observing the behavior of a model.
• Effects of society's models.

• Three factors.
• Characteristics of the models.
• Characteristics of the observers.
• Reward consequences associated with the behaviors.

• Similarity.
• Age.
• Sex.
• Status and Prestige.

• Self-confidence.
• Self-esteem.
• History of reinforcement for imitating behaviors.

• Meaningful rewards.
• Observation of a model being rewarded or punished.

• Governed by four related mechanisms:
• * Attentional processes.
• * Retention processes.
• * Production processes.
• * Incentive and motivational processes.

• The subject must pay attention to the model.
• Staying awake during driver's education class.

• The subject must remember the model's behavior.
• Taking notes on the lecture material or the video of a person driving a car.

• The subject must be able to perform the model's behavior correctly.
• Getting in a car with an instructor to practice shifting gears and dodging the traffic cones in the parking lot.

• The incentive to learn is influenced by reward or punishment.
• Expecting that when we have mastered driving skills, we will pass the state test and receive a driver's license.

• Administering rewards or punishments to oneself for meeting, exceeding or falling short of one's own expectations or standards.
• Set personal standards.
• Reward ourselves for succeding; punish ourselves for failing.

• Our feeling of adequacy, efficiency, and competence in coping with life.
• The power of believing you can.
• Meeting performance standards enhances self-efficacy; failure to meet them reduces self-efficacy.
• Low self-efficacy: helpless, unable to control life events.
• High self-efficacy: ability to deal effectively with events and situations, perseverance, confidence, little self-doubt.

• Performance attainment: Prior achievements or failures.
• Vicarious experiences: Seeing other perform successfully.
• Verbal persuasion: Reminding people of their abilities.
• Physiological and emotional arousal: Fear, tension and anxiety.

• 1. Exposing people to success experiences by arranging reachable goals to increase performance attainment.
• 2. Exposing people to appropriate models who perform successfully to enhance vicarious success experiences.
• 3. Providing verbal persuasion to encourage people to believe they have the ability to perform successfully.
• 4. Strengthening physiological arousal through proper diet, stress reduction, and exercise programs to increase strength, stamina, and the ability to cope.

Goal: Modify or change learned behaviors that society considers undesirable or abnormal.

Applied modeling techniques to eliminate fears and other intense emotional reactions.

• Fear of medical treatment.
• Test anxiety.

• Both cognitive variables and behavior can be assessed.
• Assessment techniques:
• Direct observation.
• Self-report inventories.
• Physiological measurements.

• Criticisms
• Focus on overt behavior ignores human aspect of personality.
• Treats just the symptom no the cause.

• Contributions
• It is objective and amenable to study.
• Great deal of empirical support.
• Observational learning and behavior modification are pragmatic.
• Bandura's ideas can be applied to the resolution of individual and national problems.

• Internal locus of control: belief that reinforcement is brought about by our own behavior.
• External locus of control: belief that reinforcement is under the control of other people, fate, or luck.
• Source can have a considerable influence on our behavior.

• Self report inventories:
• Internal-External scale (I-E).
• Children's Nowicki-Strickland Internal-External scale.

• Daydream about success rather than failure.
• Experience greater personal choice.
• Are more popular.
• Have higher self esteem.
• Attract people they can manipulate.
• Act in more socially skillful ways.
• Less likely to have emotional problems.
• Less likely to be alcoholics.
• Less anxiety, depression, and suicide.
• Earn higher grades and score higher on tests.

• Physically healthier.
• More cautious about their health.
• More likely to wear their seat belts, exercise, and quit smoking.
• More likely to believe they can overcome an illness.

and learned in childhood and relates to parental behavior.

• Strong relationship between concept of locus of control and Bandura's concept of self-efficacy.
• Difference is that locus of control can be generalized whereas self-efficacy is situation specific.
• Rotter's research is highly rigorous.

• Need for varied, novel and complex sensations and experiences.
• Largely hereditary.
• Sensation Seeking Scale (SSS).

• Thrill/adventure seeking.
• Experience seeking.
• Boredom susceptibility.
• Disinhibition.

• "good" type: thrill/adventure seeking.
• "bad" type: high scores on disinhibition, experience seeking, and boredom susceptibility and high scores on Eysenck's psychoticism scale.

• Young vs old.
• Men vs women.
• Racial and cultural differences.

• High SSS prefer a variety of activities, sometimes dangerous.
• Drug and alcohol use.
• Drug selling and shoplifting.
• Reckless driving.
• Risky exual and physical behavior.

• Relationship to extraversion and psychoticism.
• Egocentrism.
• Autonomy.
• Self-fullfillment.
• Openness to experience and agreeableness.

• Occupational preferences
• High sensation seekers choose different jobs than low sensation seekers.

• Attitudes
• Differences in political and religious beliefs.

• Physiological differences
• Differences in tolerance for pain and increased arousal.

• Heredity vs Environment
• Research indicates over 50% accounted for by genetic factors.
• Parental influence.

• Reflections:
• Concept has stimulated research.
• Common sense appeal.

• Condition resulting from the perception that we have no control over our environment.
• Early research: Canine research replicated in humans, learned helplessness occurs in every day life.

• Optimistic: prevents helplessness.
• Pessimistic: spreads helplessness to all areas of life.

• Healthier, stronger immune systems.
• Greater longevity.
• Less depressed and anxious, less stress.

Link between learned helplessness and depression in pessimistic people.

• We attribute our lack of control or failure to some cause.
• Pessimists: failure attributed to internal, stable and global causes.
• Optimists: fialure attributed to external, unstable, and specific causes.

• Conceps have generated hundreds of research studies.
• Very similar to Rotter's concept of locus of control.
• Leaves several unanswered questions.
• Supported by a large body of data.