Lecture 1: Page 1 of 6

Personality & Psychopathology, Lecture 1:

Introduction

Today we begin looking at two topics that interest most people more than any others in
psychology: Personality and psychopathology, or abnormal psychology. We all have a tremendous
- sometimes insatiable - interest in these topics. Every bookstore is full of books about
understanding and improving our personality. Look at the number of popular magazines and
television shows that deal with People, and personality - normal or abnormal.
Personality and abnormal psychology are important topics in any introduction to
psychology, because in discussing them we have to try to answer some very important and difficult
questions.
One such question is what is personality? Defining personality is not the same as describing
personality. We can all describe personality without any trouble at all - we do it all the time. The
personality of a friend, your own. But what is it that you are describing? This is not as simple (or
silly) a question as it might sound. For example, you could easily describe a friend's dog as well as
her personality, but could you define what a dog is. What is the essence of dogness? How would
you define dogness so that it is easily discriminated from, catness, or ratness, or cowness?
I don't want to belabor the point, but you should understand that there is no agreement what
personality is. There are several definitions available, and it is not clear which one of them - if any
- is the most useful or 'correct'. The problem is that personality is not 'real' - unlike the brain, or a
dog, it has no physical existence. It is a hypothetical construct - an idea or concept that we use
because it seems to express or to capture something important about our experience. Scientific
theories are full of hypothetical constructs. Energy, the force of gravity, electromagnetic waves -
all of these are hypothetical constructs designed to help us organize and understand our experiences
- to makes sense of what we see around us.
But if we can't define personality, just what is it about us that personality is supposed to help
us understand? That we can say. The concept of personality is designed to help us explain two
things about people. The first is that the way we think and feel and behave is not random - it has
consistency across time, and across situations. If we know someone well, we can often predict
how they will react, what they will feel, and perhaps even what they will say in a particular
situation. Personality is designed to explain how this consistency comes about; it is whatever it is
about us that leads to consistency.
The second thing about ourselves that we want to explain with the concept of personality is
that we are different from each other. Not only are we consistent, but we are consistent in different
ways. So consistency and individual differences in consistency - this is what we are trying to
capture and understand with the concept of personality.
We are going to describe several theories of personality. Each of these theories is a 'map' of
personality, just as this is a map of Canada. Each theory paints a picture of personality using a
different set of hypothetical constructs. No matter what these constructs are (traits, cognitive
processes, psychic structures, aspects of the self), their purpose is to organize our view of
personality to make it both meaningful and useful. In the same way, there are many different ways
to create a map of Canada. There are topographic maps, political maps, economic maps,
demographic maps, temperature maps, and so on. No one of these maps is the 'right' map of
Canada; each one emphasizes some particular aspect of Canada - or 'Canadian-ness', and each map
is more useful for some purposes than for others. The same is true of different personality theories:
Each is a different (but perhaps equally useful) way to representation this set of phenomena we call
'personality'.
Lecture 1: Page 2 of 6
Although there are many different personality theories, there are only a few general
approaches to understanding personality. Each approach (or perspective) is a set of assumptions
about what personality is, how it develops, and how it should be studied. Each perspective answers
large-scale questions like "What is personality?", "What kinds of constructs best capture what we
mean by personality?", "How important is genetics compared with experience in the development
of personality?", and so on. Each individual personality theory adopts one of these perspectives,
that is, it starts by accepting the general assumptions about personality made by some particular
perspective. Each perspective sees personality in a different way, and when we talk about
personality, we often mix ideas and assumptionsfrom several different perspectives, usually without
realizing it. So let's take a brief look at a few of the most important perspectives, or approaches to
personality.
The oldest approach is the TYPE APPROACH, which assumes that there is only a
relatively small number of distinct and different personality types. The type approach began in
classical Greek philosophy, and dominated Western thinking about personality for some 2,000
years, certainly into the 16th and 17th centuries. We often use the language of the type approach
when we talk about the personality of others. When we say that "Bill is the macho type', or "J oan is
one of those people who's always trying to ingratiate herself with others - you know the type", we
are using the language and ideas of the type approach.
When we describe someone as 'melancholy', we are using a term that comes from the most
influential of all the early type theories - that of the Greek physician Hippocrates and his Roman
follower Galen. Hippocrates (who gave his name to a famous oath which he undoubtedly had no
connection with) believed that the human body was made up of four elements, or humours - blood,
phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. A person was healthy when all four humours were balanced -
such a person was in good humour. If there was too much of one humour, it would lead to certain
kinds of illness. (That's why bleeding was such a popular form of treatment until just the last
century - because many disorders were thought to result from an excess of blood. A person might
be born with a constitutional tendency to have one of the four fluids in excess, and this would lead
to one of four types of personality.
For example, a person with two much black bile was said to have a MELANCHOLIC
personality type - melan for black, and choler for bile, in the Greek. Hamlet, the melancholy Dane.
The type approach generally assumes, as Hippocrates did, that we are born with the particular
personality type that we have. Genes, rather than the environment and experience are responsible
for personality, and so type theories tend to say little or nothing about the development of
personality. That means that the type approach downplays the possibility of meaningful personality
change during one's life. Because it sees little opportunity for personality change, the type
approach has not been the basis for models of counseling or psychotherapy. Today, very few
influential theories adopt the type approach, though some modern trait theories strongly resemble
type theories.
Which brings us to the TRAIT APPROACH. The trait approach sees personality as a set
of traits, that is, internal characteristics, or tendencies. This is the second oldest approach to
personality, and dates from nearly as far back as the type approach. It is the language of the trait
approach that most often appears in our own discussions of personality. When you describe the
personality of someone you know, or when you answer questions about your own personality in a
job interview, or application letter, you will most probably adopt the language of the trait approach.
Like the type approach, the trait approach assumes that most (if not all) personality traits are
genetically determined and present at birth. That means that there is little room for personality
Lecture 1: Page 3 of 6
change, and (again like type theories) trait theories do not talk much about personality
development, and have not been the basis for counseling or psychotherapy. Trait theories tend to
focus on two things.
The first is constructing tests to measure traits. Many personality tests are designed to
describe a person in terms of a collection of underlying traits. Because the words used to name or
describe traits - openness, aggressiveness, generosity, warmth, etc. - are taken from everyday
language, it is fairly easy to identify and to measure behaviors that might serve as indicators of an
underlying trait. Partly because it is relatively easy to devise ways to identify and measure traits,
this approach has been very popular in the more scientific approaches to studying personality.
The second focus of trait theories is to identify which traits are really important in
determining overall personality. Like most languages, English has thousands of words that identify
traits. Surely they can't all be equally important in our personality. Most trait theories identify
some small set of core traits that are really central to personality. Depending on the particular
theory, there might be four, five, eight or 32 such traits.
The next approach I want to describe is the PSYCHODYNAMIC APPROACH. I suspect
that this is the approach to personality that most people think of first when they think of personality
theory, because the theorist who pioneered this approach was Sigmund Freud. Following Freud, a
number of others, including Carl J ung, Erik Erikson, Alfred Adler, and Karen Horney developed
psychodynamic theories.
Though we don't usually describe ourselves using the language of the psychodynamic
approach, our conversation about the personality and behavior of others is often loaded with
psychodynamic concepts: libido, repression, rationalization, fixation, ego, denial, projection, etc.
J ust what is the psychodynamic approach? The psychodynamic approach sees personality as
generated by internal psychic structures or processes. The characteristics of these internal structures
and the way they interact with each other - their dynamics in other words - determine how we feel
and behave. Most psychodynamic theories argue that many of these structures, and their actions,
are unconscious. They suggest that we are not consciously aware of many important aspects of our
personality, often do not really know why we do the things we do, or feel the way we do.
Most psychodynamic theories see the way these internal structures work as based partly on
their genetically-determined characteristics, and partly on their interactions with the outside world.
So most psychodynamic theories have a great deal to say about how personality develops through
this interaction of innate characteristics and personal experience.
Unlike trait and type theories, psychodynamic theories also have a lot to say about another
big issue in human behavior: motivation. Why we do the things we do; why we do anything at all?
Trait and type theories generally are weak in motivational concepts, while the psychodynamic
theories are rich in ideas about human motivation.
Another approach that is based very heavily on ideas about human motivation is the
HUMANISTIC APPROACH. Compared with the other perspectives we have described, this is a
relatively recent one, dating from about the 1940's and 1950's. Humanistic theories share a strong
belief that we are motivated by the desire for personal growth and the realization of our full
potential. We want to enhance ourselves; to become more competent, more fully developed, more
open to experience, and more self-aware. Indeed, the idea of the Self is a central construct of most
humanistic theories. Humanistic theories also believe that we strive to establish a sense of
purposefulness and meaningfulness in our lives. More than most other theories, humanistic theories
see each of us as unique in our desires and feelings. Compared with most other perspectives, the
humanistic perspective is much less interested in abnormality or pathology, and much more
interested in understanding the normal personality, and in what it means to be psychologically
Lecture 1: Page 4 of 6
healthy and well adjusted. Humanistic theories also tend to focus much more on individuals, trying
to understand each person in depth rather than trying to develop general principles of personality
development that apply to everyone.
The humanistic perspective is also more HOLISTIC than most others. That is, it places
more emphasis on looking at the individual as a whole and complex person, rather than trying to
analyze personality into smaller components - like traits or internal structures. Many of the books
available on self-development and self-improvement take a strongly humanistic approach to the
development and improvement of personality. A lot of techniques and concepts in counseling come
from humanistic theories of personality. Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow are two of the best-
known and most influential theorists to adopt the humanistic perspective on personality.
All of the perspective I have mentioned agree that whatever personality is, it is inside the
individual. It causes us to have particular desires and emotions, and causes us to behave in certain
ways. All of these perspectives, in other words, see personality as a cause, and behavior as an
effect; external behavior is a symptom of internal personality, just as a fever might be an external
symptom of an internal bacterial infection.
The BEHAVIORIST PERSPECTIVE sees the situation very differently. Behaviorism is
the approach to psychology popularized by J ohn B. Watson in book, Psychology as the Behaviorist
Views It, published in 1915. When Watson wrote, scientific psychology was 50 years old, and had
spent those 50 years investigating consciousness using the method of introspection. A psychologist
would present the subject with some stimulus or other, and then ask the subject to introspect - to
actively examine the contents of consciousness to report what elements were present, and what was
happening to them. The problem was that the results of similar studies often differed dramatically
from one laboratory to another, with subjects in Dr. Smith's lab reporting data that were consistent
with Dr. Smith's pet theory about consciousness, and subjects in Dr. J ones's lab reporting data that
(remarkably enough) supported the theory of Dr. J ones.
Reacting to what he saw as the failure of introspection as a method of investigation, Watson
argued that in order for psychology to be truly scientific, it would have to adopt the methods of the
older and more successful physical sciences - chemistry, physics - and collect only purely objective
data; data that could be readily and publicly verified by any researcher. The personally examined
contents of consciousness were not that kind of data. What was that kind of data was behavior -
overt external, easily observable behavior. Never mind what the subject said she was thinking or
feeling, let's study and record what she is actually doing.
This was a fairly radical proposal at the time, since psychology, and a child of philosophy,
had always concerned itself with conscious contents rather than overt behavior. Watson was
arguing that psychology should be the science of behavior, not of mind or consciousness, and that
psychologists should not and could not infer anything about events inside the mind. Psychology
could be a successful science only if it studied how observable behavior changes when stimuli -
external conditions - change.
So what about the behaviorist approach to personality? A behaviorist argues that
personality is behavior. When we describe a person's personality - no matter what set of constructs
we use - we are actually describing or referring to consistent patterns of behavior. Think about it for
a minute. If we meet someone for the first time, or see a picture of her in the newspaper, what can
we say about her personality? Nothing at all, right? We have to see what that person does in order
to say something about her personality. Suppose we see Sue loan her textbooks to one friend, and
give some money to another friend who is short on funds. We might say 'Ah, Sue is a generous
person!' We go beyond what we have actually seen to infer some internal characteristic called
'generosity'. But the behaviorist would say 'Why do that?'. What do we actually gain in
Lecture 1: Page 5 of 6
understanding by saying that Sue possesses the characteristic of generosity? All we mean by
'generosity' it is that Sue shows a consistent pattern of giving and lending things to friends. So
'generosity' really is another name for a relatively consistent pattern of behaviors. So why go
beyond the behaviors themselves? For the behaviorist, personality just another name for a set of
consistent behavior patterns. The other perspectives I described see consistent behavior as an
external symptom of personality. For the behaviorist, external behavior is not a symptom of
anything - it is personality.
Behaviorists also believe that our behavior (therefore our personality) is heavily influenced
by experience, and by learning in particular. Personality is not something that we are born with; it
is instead the set of consistent behavior patterns we acquire through a history of rewards and
punishments for previous behaviors.
Given this view, it is not surprising that there is no purely behaviorist theory of personality,
and no principles of personality development. There can't be, because personality is not something
distinct from any other kinds of behavior. Instead, behaviorists focus on understanding how
patterns of behavior - good or bad, adaptive or maladaptive - are shaped by the responses of those
around us. Naturally, behaviorists do not see personality as something permanent and unchanging
about the person. Our behavior patterns shift and change in response to changing contingencies of
reward and punishment. Rewarded behaviors occur more often, and in more situations, and
unrewarded or punished behaviors occur less frequently, and in fewer situations. So all we have to
do to change personality is to change the contingencies - change the pattern of rewards and
punishments that follow our behaviors.
The last approach I want to talk about is the COGNITIVE APPROACH. This is the most
recent of all the approaches I have mentioned, and dates from about the 1950s. Like all the other
approaches (except the behavioral approach), the cognitive perspective sees personality as
something internal to the person that causes feelings and behavior. Specifically, it is the set of
internal processes we use to process information. Each of us selects pieces of information from the
world around us; we combine and process that information, we interpret that information, and
finally we act on that information. Behaviorists say that personality is patterns of behaving;
cognitivists say personality is patterns of information processing.
Some of the information we process is about events outside ourselves - about the things we
see and hear. Perhaps the most important of these external events are those that involve other
people - what they say to us, how they behave toward us. The very same external event may be
perceived and interpreted differently by different people. Some of the events we process and
interpret are internal - feelings, impulses, thoughts. These too can be interpreted in different ways.
So it is our consistent pattern of selecting and interpreting information that constitutes personality
for the cognitive theorist. Many of the ideas about personality change that are found in self-help
books are based on the idea that we can change who we are by changing the way we think about
ourselves.
Like behaviorists, cognitivists believe that experience and learning are important in shaping
the ways in which we select and process information. We are not born looking at and interpreting
the world in particular ways, these habits of thought are shaped by our experiences. In fact, the
cognitive and behavioral approaches complement each other well, and new approaches to
personality often combine the two, with a focus on how both our internal information processing
and out external behavior can be shaped and modified by experience.
So, those are the major ways in which we can construe what personality is. Each of the
personality theories we will look at in more detail views personality from a different perspective.
Keep in mind that it is probably not sensible to ask which of these theories is the 'right' theory, or
Lecture 1: Page 6 of 6
which is 'true'. Over the centuries, we have noticed a lot of things about ourselves and our
behavior. We have noticed, for one thing, that each of us has consistent ways of behaving and
feeling. Our task in personality is to try to makes some sense of this consistency. Each of the
theories we will talk about is a different way of trying to make sense out of these observations, and
each has something to tell us about personality.