One of the many areas of study in psychology is personality. Personality theorists attempt to find the patterns in which people behave, explain the differences between individuals, and explore how people conduct their daily lives. There are four types of personality theorists. The first are the psychoanalytic theorists who believe the unconcious plays a major roll in how we act and what we do. The second are the behaviorists who believe that all theories should only be based on the things that we do physically and study the effects of rewards and punishments. Another are the humanistic theorists who think people have the potential to do great things through their creativity and spontaneity. Last but not least are the trait theorists who think that personality characteristics are the most important thing to study.
Sigmund Freud is probably one of the best known psychoanalytic theorists. He was the first modern psychologist to suggest to the public openly that a large part of our personality is based in the unconcious. Freud came up with the theory of id, ego, and superego. In Freud's theory, id represents instinctual urges, superego represents socially accepted values, and the ego tries to satisfy them both. Sometimes the ego has trouble balancing between the superego and the id and must find a way to cope. There are five major defense mechanisms that the ego uses. These are displacement, repression, reaction formation, projection, and regression. Displacement redirects desires, feelings, or impulses from one object to a substitute. Repression is blocking painful, unpleasant, or undesirable feelings or memories from consciousness. Another of the five defenses is reaction formation which replaces unacceptable feelings with the opposite. The fourth defense is projection which is putting one's own undesirable attitudes, feelings, or thought on others. The final defense is regression where one returns to an earlier stage of development or pattern of behavior in a threatening or stressful situation.
Behaviorists discard everything Freud proposed. Behaviorism is the belief that the proper subject matter of psychology is only observable behavior. B. F. Skinner and Albert Bandura were both very important behaviorists. Skinner approached a problem by only observing it and drawing conclusions from what was seen. He would try to find the contingencies of reinforcement, or the conditions maintaining the behaviors. Skinner would then take the information he gathered and suggest ways to change the behavior by rewards and punishments. Albert Bandura believed that rewards and punishments weren't the only factors that shaped personality, but that observational learning (imitation) also played a major role. Bandura found that watching another perform a task or specific behavior influenced the observer's willingness to perform the task themselves. Thus, Bandura concluded that people direct their own behavior by their choice of models.
Humanistic psychologists attempt to discard the negative views of man kind by replacing them with the positive, of what man kind could do and be. Humanists stress the human ability to create and live by personal standards and morals, rather than on their destructive natures. Humanistic psychology is founded on the belief that all human beings strive for self-actualization or the realization of their potentials as human beings. Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers were both humanistic psychologists. Abraham Maslow based his studies on people who were stable and fully used their talents and abilities rather than on disturbed individuals. Maslow found that even though people sometimes had great emotional stress, they adjusted themselves so that they could still live and be productive. Carl Rogers was also a humanist, but approached it in a different light. His theories were similar to Freud's but were not based on instinctual urges. One of his theories was that every person has a self (view or value of themselves) that they gain over time by observing how others react to them. A fully functioning person, in Roger's view, would have an unconditional positive regard of themselves.
Trait theorists try to explain the consistency of a person's behavior in different situations. A trait is a predisposition to respond a certain way in a situation. Most trait theorists believe that basic traits apply to everyone, such as social aggression. Raymond B. Cattell found two types of traits, surface traits and source traits. Surface traits are behaviors that tend to go together, while source traits are the causes of the behaviors. Cattell researched by life records, questionnaires, and objective tests. Hans Eysenk found two dimensions of personality. The first dimension deals with the amount of control people have over their feelings. At the stable end is the person who is well adjusted and even-tempered while at the neurotic end is the person who is anxious and restless. The other dimension deals with extroverts and introverts. Extroverts are social, lively people, while introverts are quieter and more passive.
