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, or phenomenological, theories of personality present a positive and optimistic view of human behaviour. In complete contrast to theories from the psychodynamic tradition, people are viewed as experiencing beings rather than victims of their unconscious motivations and conflicts. So the emphasis here is on individual experiences, relationships and ways of understanding the world. Fundamental to these theories are the beliefs that everyone’s experience is unique, and the individual’s perception of the world is critical to their understanding and behaviour. Humanistic theories have formed the basis of many therapeutic procedures on which modern counselling techniques are based.

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.

Here are the 16 trait dimensions used in the 16PF:

• Reserved – Outgoing
• Less intelligent – More intelligent
• Stable, ego strength – Emotionality/neuroticism
• Humble – Assertive
• Sober – Happy-go-lucky
• Expedient – Conscientious
• Shy – Venturesome
• Tough-minded – Tender-minded
• Trusting – Suspicious
• Practical – Imaginative
• Forthright – Shrewd
• Placid – Apprehensive
• Conservative – Experimenting
• Group-dependent – Self-sufficient
• Undisciplined – Controlled

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.

Differences in attributional style lead us to explain events in a characteristic way. Distinctions are made between particular dimensions of attribution:

• internal–external – the extent to which events are seen as caused by the self, rather than factors external to the self;
• stable–unstable – the extent to which causes are seen to persist across time; and
• global–specific – the extent to which the cause is something that affects many things in our life, rather than just specific situations.

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.

All of the answers given above refer to the individual motivations assumed in Higgins’ self-discrepancy theory.

Carver and Scheier’s (1981, 1990) control theory of human functioning states that there are stable individual differences in the extent to which we attend to aspects of the self. Control theory uses a metaphorical thermostat system to model the ways in which people set standards for their own behaviour and how they monitor their behaviour in order to meet these standards.
If we perceive ourselves to have reached too high a standard, the personality system will reduce the discrepancy between the standard and the perceived level. If we are not meeting the standard we have set for ourselves, motivation and effort will be set in motion to reduce the discrepancy.
People differ in the levels and kinds of controls included in their self-regulatory system.
The extent to which we attend to aspects of the self has been defined as a personality variable called self-consciousness. Fenigstein, Scheier and Buss (1975) developed a self-consciousness scale to measure what they considered to be stable individual difference in private and public self-consciousness. Private self-consciousness is attention to our own inner feelings, desires and standards, whereas public self-consciousness is attention to what others think and observe about us.