The Balance of Personality The Balance of Personality CHRIS ALLEN PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY The Balance of Personality by Chris Allen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. The Balance of Personality Copyright © by Chris Allen is licensed under an Attribution NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International, except where otherwise noted. Contents Preface ix Acknowledgements x Front Cover Photo: x Special Thanks to: x Open Educational Resources xi Introduction 1 1. Personality Traits 3 Introduction 3 Facets of Traits (Subtraits) 7 Other Traits Beyond the Five-Factor Model 8 The Person-Situation Debate and Alternatives to the Trait Perspective 10 2. Personality Stability 17 Introduction 18 Defining Different Kinds of Personality Stability 19 The How and Why of Personality Stability and Change: Different Kinds of Interplay Between Individuals 22 and Their Environments Conclusion 25 3. Personality Assessment 30 Introduction 30 Objective Tests 31 Basic Types of Objective Tests 32 Other Ways of Classifying Objective Tests 35 Projective and Implicit Tests 36 Behavioral and Performance Measures 38 Conclusion 39 Vocabulary 39 4. Sigmund Freud, Karen Horney, Nancy Chodorow: Viewpoints on Psychodynamic Theory 43 Introduction 43 Core Assumptions of the Psychodynamic Perspective 45 The Evolution of Psychodynamic Theory 46 Nancy Chodorow’s Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Role of Mothering 55 Quiz 60 5. Carl Jung 63 Carl Jung: Analytic Psychology 63 6. Humanistic and Existential Theory: Frankl, Rogers, and Maslow 78 HUMANISTIC AND EXISTENTIAL THEORY: VIKTOR FRANKL, CARL ROGERS, AND ABRAHAM 78 MASLOW Carl Rogers, Humanistic Psychotherapy 85 Vocabulary and Concepts 94 7. The Nature-Nurture Question 96 Introduction 96 What Have We Learned About Nature–Nurture? 101 Epigenetic strategy to understanding gene-environment interactions 107 Vocabulary 110 8. Self-Regulation and Conscientiousness 112 Introduction 112 Early Work on Delay of Gratification 114 Benefits of Self-Control 114 Four Ingredients of Effective Self-Regulation 115 Conscientiousness 119 Video 1: Jennifer discussing 4 points of balance in an effort to stay differentiated and live with her family. 121 9. Personality Disorders 127 Introduction 127 128 DSM-5 Personality Disorders 128 Description 128 A Dimensional View 133 A Review of the Ten Personality Disorders 133 10. Yoga, Buddhism, Taoism, and Personality 140 References: 156 11. Happiness: The Empirical Science of Happiness and the Philosophy of Tibetan Buddhism 158 Introduction 158 Types of Happiness 160 Causes of Subjective Well-Being 160 Societal Influences on Happiness 161 Tibetan Buddhism, The Middle Way, and Conative Balance 163 The Country of Bhutan: A Case Study of Buddhism and Conative Balance 165 The Psychological Immune System (we are stronger than we think we are) 172 The SELF and Wanting to Be Happy? 173 The Comparing Mind 175 Outcomes of High Subjective Well-Being 178 Measuring Happiness 179 Some Ways to Be Happier 180 Outsides Resources 181 References for Chapters 5, 6 185 Preface This open access textbook was developed as an upper division undergraduate textbook for theories of personality. Its intended audience are students from Portland State University enrolled in Psychology 432 Personality course. The chapters are shorter than some personality textbooks and in this particular course Psy 432 the textbook is combined with other readings including scientific articles on personality. This open access textbook may be of interest to other courses interested in teaching about theory and research on personality. This book is best viewed online using the pressbooks format however, multiple formats (e.g., pdf, epub, mobi) are also made available. Preface | ix Acknowledgements This Open Educational Resource textbook has been adapted from: NobaProject // CC BY 4.0 ShareAlike • Chapter 1 Personality Traits • Chapter 2 Personality Stability • Chapter 3 Personality Assessment • Chapter 7 The Nature-Nurture Question • Chapter 8 Self-Regulation and Conscientiousness • Chapter 9 Personality Disorders • Chapter 11: Happiness: The Science of Subjective Well-Being open.umn.edu // CC BY 4.0 ShareAlike • Chapter 4: Sigmund Freud, Karen Horney, Nancy Chodorow: Alternative Views of Psychodynamic Theory • Chapter 5: Carl Jung • Chapter 6: Humanistic and Existential Theory: Frankl, Rogers, and Maslow • Chapter 10: Yoga, Buddhism, Personality and Non-Personality Please see individual chapters for further citation information. Chapters and sections were borrowed and adapted from the above existing OER textbooks on personality. Without these foundational texts, a lot more work would have been required to complete this project. Thank you to those who shared before us. All other content should include the following attribution statement: This work is licensed under an Attribution NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International, except where otherwise noted. Download this book for free at: https://pdx.pressbooks.pub/thebalanceofpersonality/ Front Cover Photo: Janith Chanaka at https://www.pexels.com/photo-license / / CC BY 4.0 Special Thanks to: Amy Stanforth and Karen Bjork at the Portland State University Library for their support in this project. x | Acknowledgements Open Educational Resources This text is provided to you as an Open Educational Resource (OER) which you access online. It is designed to give you a comprehensive introduction to personality psychology at no or very nominal cost. It contains both written and graphic text material, intra-text links to other internal material which may aid in understanding topics and concepts, intra-text links to the appendices and glossary for tables and definitions of words, and extra-text links to videos and web material that clarifies and augments topics and concepts. License: Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike | xi Dear Readers, Welcome to this textbook. The book focuses on the diversity and complexity of personality, and how personality is a carefully created balance of traits and behaviors and more, in each unique person. Thanks, Chris Allen PhD Portland State University Introduction | 1 1. Personality Traits This is an edited and adapted chapter by Diener, E. & Lucas, R. E. (2019) from the NOBA series on psychology. For full attribution see end of chapter. Personality traits reflect people’s characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Personality traits imply consistency and stability—someone who scores high on a specific trait like Extraversion is expected to be sociable in different situations and over time. Thus, trait psychology rests on the idea that people differ from one another in terms of where they stand on a set of basic trait dimensions that persist over time and across situations. The most widely used system of traits is called the Five-Factor Model. This system includes five broad traits that can be remembered with the acronym OCEAN: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Each of the major traits from the Big Five can be divided into facets to give a more fine-grained analysis of someone’s personality. In addition, some trait theorists argue that there are other traits that cannot be completely captured by the Five-Factor Model. Critics of the trait concept argue that people do not act consistently from one situation to the next and that people are very influenced by situational forces. Thus, one major debate in the field concerns the relative power of people’s traits versus the situations in which they find themselves as predictors of their behavior. • Big five • Five-Factor Model of personality • OCEAN system of traits • Person-situation debate • Personality • Personality traits • Social learning Learning Objectives • List and describe the “Big Five” (“OCEAN”) personality traits that comprise the Five-Factor Model of personality. • Describe how the facet approach extends broad personality traits. • Explain a critique of the personality-trait concept. • Describe in what ways personality traits may be manifested in everyday behavior. • Describe each of the Big Five personality traits, and the low and high end of the dimension. • Give examples of each of the Big Five personality traits, including both a low and high example. • Describe how traits and social learning combine to predict your social activities. • Describe your theory of how personality traits get refined by social learning. Introduction When we observe people around us, one of the first things that strikes us is how different people are from one another. Some people are very talkative while others are very quiet. Some are active whereas others are couch potatoes. Some worry a lot, others almost never seem anxious. Each time we use one of these words, words like “talkative,” “quiet,” “active,” or “anxious,” to describe those around us, we are talking about a person’s personality—the characteristic ways that people differ from one another. Personality psychologists try to describe and understand these differences. Personality Traits | 3 “Are you an introvert”? In popular culture it’s common to talk about people being introverts or extroverts as if these were precise descriptions that meant the same thing for everyone. But research shows that these traits and others are quite variable within individuals. [Image: Nguyen Hung Vu, https://goo.gl/qKJUAC, CC BY 2.0, https://goo.gl/BRvSA7] Although there are many ways to think about the personalities that