Test: Self and Personality- 2 - Humanities/Arts MCQ

At the beginning of the oral stage (birth to 18 months), children are highly dependent on their mothers and derive pleasure from sucking and swallowing. Freud suggested that children who become fixated at this early oral stage derive pleasure in adulthood from activities such as overeating, smoking, drinking and kissing.
During the anal stage (18 months to 3 years), pleasure is gained from the expulsion and retention of faeces; this is also a stage at which children start to explore their environment but experience control and discipline from their parents. It is at the phallic stage (3 to 5 years) that children discover pleasure from touching their genitals. According to Freud, personality is formed by the end of the phallic stage, and sexual impulses are rechannelled during the latency period (6 to 12 years) into activities such as sport, learning and social activities. As young people approach the age of reproductive ability (the genital stage – 13 years to adult), they begin to focus their libido, or sexual energy, towards the opposite sex.

Humanistic theories of personality offer a positive and optimistic view of human behaviour. They contrast sharply with psychodynamic theories, which often portray individuals as victims of unconscious motivations. Key aspects of humanistic theories include:

• Focus on individual experiences: Humanistic theories emphasise personal experiences and relationships, highlighting how these shape our understanding of the world.
• Uniqueness of experience: They assert that every person's experience is unique, and that individual perceptions are crucial for understanding behaviour.
• Self-actualisation: The theories suggest that individuals have an inherent drive to realise their full potential and capabilities.
• Positive view of human nature: Humanistic theorists, such as Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, believe that people are innately good and strive for personal growth.

These theories have significantly influenced modern counselling techniques, focusing on the importance of self-awareness and personal development.

Raymond Cattell further developed Allport’s work to describe personality by traits and developed a model of 16 trait dimensions of personality. Rogers and Freud did not develop models of personality based on traits and Eysenck specified a model of personality that contained two super traits.

The nomothetic approach to study personality emphasizes that all people are similar and therefore can be compared to each other because all people are governed by the same basic behavioural principles. The idiographic approach to study personality emphasizes that all people are unique and therefore cannot be compared with one another.

The way we feel can be determined by stable individual differences in personality as well as by immediate responses to situations as they occur. Both types of emotional reaction can have an important impact on the way we behave. Mischel and Shoda (1995) describe this interplay in terms of ‘hot’ emotions having an impact on ‘cool’ cognitions.
Feeling angry, anxious or happy might impact on any of the other types of cognition, changing the way we respond. So while a person who is already feeling happy may react very positively to meeting a friend in the street, someone who is already feeling angry may lose their temper when their car is scraped in the car park. A dispositionally calm person may still become anxious when the elevator they are travelling in becomes stuck between floors.

Self-efficacy is the term that refers to the extent to which people believe that they can bring about an outcome. The alternative answers given do not refer to this type of belief.

Self-efficacy is defined as the belief in one’s ability to perform behaviors necessary to achieve specific outcomes, rooted in Bandura’s social learning theory. It influences how individuals approach challenges, with high self-efficacy linked to persistence and reduced fear. For example, people with strong self-efficacy can quit smoking once they decide to, as they believe in their control over outcomes.

The psychodynamic approach, primarily developed by Freud, focuses on unconscious conflicts and the interplay of id (pleasure-seeking), ego (reality-based), and superego (moral) in shaping personality. It includes psychosexual stages (oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital) where fixation can influence adult behavior. Unlike the behavioral approach, it does not emphasize observable behaviors learned through reinforcement.

In the Indian context, the Charak Samhita, a treatise on Ayurveda, classifies personality based on three humoral elements (tridosha: vata, pitta, kapha) and also references a typology based on trigunas: sattva (cleanliness, truthfulness), rajas (activity, materialism), and tamas (anger, laziness). These gunas vary in dominance, influencing behavior. Other theorists like Hippocrates (humoral types), Sheldon (body-based typology), and Jung (introvert–extravert) proposed different typologies.

Self-report measures, like the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) or Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, involve structured questions where respondents rate their feelings or behaviors. A key limitation is social desirability, where individuals may endorse responses to appear favorable. Other issues include acquiescence (agreeing regardless of content). Unlike projective techniques, self-reports do not use unstructured stimuli or uncover unconscious motives, and they require training for accurate interpretation.