Personality – A state of being a person.

Sum total of all physical, mental, emotional, and social

characteristics of a person.
Ways of Looking at our Personality
1. Examine our intentions (“What do we want to happen?”)
2. Look at its source (“Is it internal or external? Do you react to an external phenomena? Or
are you trying to understand mental/internal processes?)
3. Enduring Characteristics
4. Unique Characteristics (“It can be your external characteristic, pwede indi man”)
5. Social Media
6. Race and Gender
How do we assess our Personality
1. Self-report or object inventories
- Asking people to report on themselves by answering questions about their behavior
and feelings in various situations.

A. MMPI (Minnesota Multiphastic Personality Inventory) – most widely used

psychological test, assess and diagnose mental illness and consists of true-
false statements
B. MBTI (Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator) – builds an understanding of strengths
and blind spots, helps people understand how they might differ from one
another, designed for individual growth and development

2. Projective Techniques
- Maggwa ang imo unconsciousness. You are given ambiguous questions
- Developed for work with the emotionally disturbed
- Attempts to prove the invisible portion of our personality
- Highly subjective

A. Rorshach and Inkblots - Responses would be interpreted in several

B. TAT Thematic Apperception Test – asked to tell a story about the people and
the objects in the pictures and describe what led up to the situation showing
what they are thinking and feeling and what the outcome will likely be.
Measures aspects of personality such as achievement, affiliation, and power
3. Clinical Interviews
4. Behavioral Assessment
- Observer evaluates the person’s behavior in a given situation
- The more the observer knows the person the more accurate their evaluations are
5. Thought and Experience Assessment
- Observer and observed are one person
- Write or record their thoughts, moods, and behaviors and it would be analyzed by a
psychologist later on

Place of Personality in Psychology – Personality is a broad category

 1. Study of Consciousness by William Wundt
- Studied external stimuli that could be manipulated and controlled by the
experimenter
- Only looked at how our environment would affect us
2. Study of Behavior by John Watson
- Personality was reduced to what would be seen and observed objectively
3. Study of the Unconscious by Sigmund Freud
- Personality is affected by our past experiences
4. Gordon Allport
- Personality is shaped by our childhood experiences, current environment and its
interaction
Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory
Central Points
- Personality is primarily unconscious
- Behavior is merely a surface characteristic
- The unconscious mind holds the key to understanding behavior
- Trivial Behaviors have significance when the unconscious are revealed
Iceberg:
On the surface: Contact with outside world
Preconscious: Material just beneath the surface of awareness
Unconscious: Difficult to retrieve material: well below the surface of awareness
Id – works in accordance to the pleasure principle. Intrusive thoughts. Seeks immediate
satisfaction and does not tolerate any delay or postponement. No awareness of reality
Ego (Mom-Friend) – works in accordance with the reality principle. Deals with the demands of
reality.
Superego (Mom) – Conscience, the moral branch of personality. Strives for moral perfection,
represents the ideal rather than reality. The id wants to be satisfied, the ego tries to delay it and
the superego urges morality over it.
Freud’s Psychosexual Stages
- Personality is formed on the basis of unique relationships we have as children

First Stage
- Principal source is the mouth
- Baby learns from the mother or caregiver if the world is good or bad
- Overly gratified – overly gullible, believe everything and blindly trust others
- Teeth grown in – argumentative and sarcastic, envious of others and try to exploit
and manipulate in an effort to dominate
- Basically Trust vs Mistrust
Anal Stage
 - Defacation now has erotic pleasure
- The child is put under pressure to learn to postpone or delay that pleasure
- Anal aggressive personality – defacate whenever and wherever they want which
would result in the formation of sadistic and hostile behavior
- Gusto niya mag-defacate kay manami, so ma-defacate siya anywhere tapos magin-
sadista ka sa unahan.
- Anal retentive personality – child is frustrated with toilet training so they hold back on
defacation which concerns the parents that they can’t poop. If parents give too much
attention and affection – result in being stingy and stubborn, hoard or train things
because their feelings of security depend on what is possessed.
Phallic Stage
- Interest in exploring and manipulating genitals
- Oedipus Complex – unconscious desire of the son for the mother, unconscious
desire to replace or destroy the father, accompanying fear of castration
- Electra Complex – father becomes the daughter’s love object. Formation of penis
envy which will never be resolved and will result in a poorly developed superego. A
woman’s love for a man will always be tinged with penis envy and will partially be
compensated by having a son.
Latency Stage
- Not a psychosexual stage
- Sexual instincts are dormant because the individual is busy with school, hobbies,
and developing friendships
- You are gullible, because your mother really cares for you.
Gordon Allport
- made the study of personality an academically respectable topic
- traits play a prominent role in his theory of personality
- “… the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems
that determine characteristics behavior and thought
Two district personalities
a) infant behavior – driven by biological urges and reflexes (“what I need, what I want”)
b) adult functioning – more psychological in nature (we become more thoughtful)
Characteristics of Traits
1. they are real and exist within each of us
2. determine or cause behavior – as a response (react) to a certain situation to produce a
behavior
3. demonstrated empirically – you know that it exists because that is how you react to
things constantly
4. interrelated
5. vary with the situation
Two types of traits
 a) Common traits – shared by a group of people like members of a culture
b) Individual traits – unique to a person and define the person’s character
Personal Dispositions
- traits that a person has
- not all in the same intensity or significance in comparison to the personality
- pure crammer but there are times when you organize your time
Cardinal traits – pervasive and influential, dominate our behavior
Central traits – 5 to 10 things that best describe your behavior
Secondary traits – appear less consistent, preferences or intensity
Robert Cattell’s Factor Analysis