Kinds of Self

●There are several kinds of self. They get formed as a result of our interactions with our
physical and socio-cultural environments.
●There are two kinds of ‘self’:
All the three gunas are present in each and every person in different degrees.

●The dominance of one or the other guna may lead to a particular type of behaviour.

4. Typology by grouping people into Introverts and Extraverts by Jung

●Friedman and Rosenman classified individuals into Type A and Type B.

●This typology was further extended by Morris who suggested Type C personality.
 ●More recently, a Type D personality has been suggested.

2) Allport’s Trait Theory

●Allport categorised traits into:

3) Eysenck’s Theory

●H.J. Eysenck proposed that personality could be reduced into two broad dimensions that are
biologically and genetically based.
 ●Each dimension subsumes a number of specific traits. These dimensions are:

●Eysenck Personality Questionnaire is the test which is used for studying these dimensions of
personality.

Five-Factor Model of Personality

●Paul Costa and Robert McCrae formulated a Big Five Factor Model of Personality indicating
a set of five personality traits. They are often called Big Five Factors, also abbreviated as
‘OCEAN’. These factors include:
 ●Significance of Five-Factor Model of Personality
a. an important theoretical development in the field of personality.
b. useful in understanding the personality profile of people across cultures.
c. considered to be the most promising empirical approach to the study of personality.

Ego Defence Mechanisms

●According to Freud, much of human behaviour reflects an attempt to deal with or escape
from anxiety.
●Freud believed that people avoid anxiety mainly by developing defence mechanisms that try
to defend the ego against the awareness of the instinctual needs.
●Thus, defence mechanism is a way of reducing anxiety by distorting reality.
●People who use these mechanisms to such an extent that reality is truly distorted develop
various forms of maladjustment.
●People who use defence mechanisms are often unaware of doing so.
●Various kinds of defence mechanisms are:
A major developmental achievement of this stage is the resolution of the Oedipus complex which

takes place by:

i. accepting his father’s relationship with his mother

ii. modelling his own behaviour after his father
iii. give up sexual feelings for their mothers
iv. begin to see their fathers as role models rather than as rivals
●In this stage, the female child experiences Electra Complex, which involves:
i. attaching her love to the father
ii. trying to symbolically marry him and raise a family
When she realises that this is unlikely, she begins to:

i. identify with her mother

ii. copy her behaviour as a means of getting her father’s affection
Resolution of the Electra complex takes place by:

i. giving up their sexual feelings or desires for their fathers

ii. identifying with their mother
●The critical component in resolving the Oedipus complex is the development of identification
with the same sex parents.

Fixation

●Failure of a child to pass successfully through a stage leads to fixation to that stage.
Regression

●It takes a person back to an earlier stage.

●It occurs when a person’s resolution of problems at any stage of development is less than
adequate..

Criticisms of Psychodynamic theories:

a. The theories are largely based on case studies; they lack a rigorous scientific basis.
b. They use small and atypical individuals as samples for advancing generalisations.
c. The concepts are not properly defined, and it is difficult to submit them to scientific testing.
d. Freud has used males as the prototype of all human personality development. He
overlooked female experiences and perspectives.

Cultural Approach

●Attempts to understand personality in relation to the features of the ecological and cultural
environment.
●Proposes that a group’s ‘economic maintenance system’ plays a vital role in the origin of
cultural and behavioural variations.
●People’s skills, abilities, behavioural styles, and value priorities are viewed as strongly linked
to the features such as settlement patterns, social structures, division of labour, child
rearing practices, etc.
●Rituals, ceremonies, religious practices, arts, recreational activities, games and play are the
means through which people’s personality gets projected in a culture.
●The cultural approach considers personality as an adaptation of individuals or groups to the
demands of their ecology and culture.

Abraham Maslow’s Contribution to the Development of Humanistic Perspective on Personality:

●Maslow has given a detailed account of psychologically healthy people in terms of their
attainment of self-actualisation, a state in which people have reached their own fullest
potential.
●He had an optimistic and positive view of man who has the potentialities for love, joy and to
do creative work.
●Human beings are considered free to shape their lives and to self-actualise.
●Self-actualisation becomes possible by analysing the motivations that govern our life.
●An individual’s sole concern with the satisfaction of survival needs (biological, security, and
belongingness needs) reduces her/ him to the level of animals.
●The real journey of human life begins with the pursuit of self-esteem and selfactualisation
needs.
●The humanistic approach emphasises the significance of positive aspects of life.

Characteristics of a healthy person according to humanistic theorists:

●They become aware of themselves, their feelings, and their limits; accept themselves, and
what they make of their lives as their own responsibility; have ‘the courage to be’.
 ●They experience the “here-and-now”; are not trapped.
●They do not live in the past or dwell in the future through anxious expectations and distorted
defences.

Assessment of Personality

●It is a formal effort aimed at understanding personality of an individual.

●Assessment refers to the procedures used to evaluate or differentiate people on the basis of
certain characteristics.
●The goal of assessment is to understand and predict behaviour with minimum error and
maximum accuracy.
●Assessment is used to study what a person generally does, or how s/he behaves, in a given
situation.
●Assessment is also useful for diagnosis, training, placement, counselling, and other
purposes.
Self-report Measures (direct method)

●Suggested by Allport
●A method to assess a person by asking her/him about herself/himself.
●Fairly structured measures, often based on theory, that require subjects to give verbal
responses using some kind of rating scale.
●Requires the subject to objectively report her/his own feelings with respect to various items.
●The responses are accepted at their face value.
●They are scored in quantitative terms and interpreted on the basis of norms developed for
the test.
The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)

●Widely used as a test in personality assessment.

●Developed by Hathaway and McKinley as helping tool for psychiatric diagnosis.
●Very effective in identifying varieties of psychopathology.
●Its revised version is available as MMPI-2.
●Consists of 567 statements to be judged as ‘true’ or ‘false’ by the subject for her/ him.
●The test is divided into 10 subscales, which seek to diagnose:
a. Hypochondriasis
b. Depression
c. Hysteria
d. Psychopathic deviate
e. Masculinity-femininity
f. Paranoia
g. Psychasthenia
h. Schizophrenia
i. Mania
j. Social introversion
●In India, Mallick and Joshi have developed the Jodhpur Multiphasic Personality Inventory
(JMPI) along the lines of MMPI.
Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ)

●Developed by Eysenck.
●This test is also widely used.
●This test initially assessed two dimensions of personality, called introverted-extraverted and
emotionally stable-emotionally unstable.
●These dimensions are characterised by 32 personality traits.
●Later on, Eysenck added a third dimension, called psychoticism i.e. linked to
psychopathology that represents:
a. a lack of feeling for others
b. a tough manner of interacting with people
c. a tendency to defy social conventions.
A person scoring high on this dimension tends to be hostile, egocentric, and antisocial.

Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16 PF)

●Developed by Cattell.
●He identified a large set of personality descriptors, which were subjected to factor analysis to
identify the basic personality structure.
●Provides with declarative statements, and the subject responds to a specific situation by
choosing from a set of given alternatives.
●Can be used with high school level students as well as with adults.
●Extremely useful in career guidance, vocational exploration, and occupational testing.

Limitations of Self-Report Measures

a. Social Desirability is a tendency on the part of the respondent to endorse items in a socially
desirable manner.
b. Acquiescence is a tendency of the subject to agree with items/questions irrespective of
their contents. It often appears in the form of saying ‘yes’ to items.
These tendencies render the assessment of personality less reliable.

Projective Techniques (indirect method)

●Developed to assess unconscious motives and feelings.

●Based on the assumption that a less structured or unstructured stimulus or situation will
allow the individual to project her/his feelings, desires and needs on to that situation.
●These projections are interpreted by experts.
●Various kinds of stimulus materials and situations for assessing personality are used. Some
of them require reporting associations with stimuli (e.g., words, inkblots), some involve
story writing around pictures, some require sentence completions, some require
expression through drawings, and some require choice of stimuli from a large set of stimuli.
●The nature of stimuli and responses in these techniques share the following features:
a. The stimuli are relatively or fully unstructured and poorly defined.
 b. The person being assessed is usually not told about the purpose of assessment and the
method of scoring and interpretation.
c. The person is informed that there are no correct or incorrect responses.
d. Each response is considered to reveal a significant aspect of personality.
e. Scoring and interpretation are lengthy and sometimes subjective.
●Projective techniques cannot be scored in any objective manner.
●They generally require qualitative analyses for which a rigorous training is needed.

The Rorschach Inkblot Test

●Developed by Hermann Rorschach.

●Consists of 10 inkblots:
a. 5 of them are in black and white
b. 2 with some red ink
c. 3 in some pastel colours
●The blots are symmetrical in design with a specific shape or form.
●Each blot is printed in the centre of a white cardboard of about 7”´10” size.
●The blots were originally made by dropping ink on a piece of paper and then folding the
paper in half (hence called inkblot test).
●The cards are administered individually in two phases:
a. In the first phase, called performance proper, the subjects are shown the cards and are
asked to tell what they see in each of them.
b. In the second phase, called inquiry, a detailed report of the response is prepared by asking
the subject to tell where, how, and on what basis was a particular response made.
●Fine judgment is necessary to place the subject’s responses in a meaningful context.
●The use and interpretation of this test requires extensive training.
●Computer techniques too have been developed for analysis of data.

The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

●Developed by Morgan and Murray.

●A little more structured than the Inkblot test.
●Consists of 30 black and white picture cards and one blank card.
●Each picture card depicts one or more people in a variety of situations.
●Each picture is printed on a card.
●Some cards are used with adult males or females. Others are used with boys or girls. Still
others are used in some combinations.
●20 cards are appropriate for a subject, although a lesser number of cards (even five) have
also been successfully used.
●The cards are presented one at a time.
●The subject is asked to tell a story describing the situation presented in the picture:
a. What led up to the situation?
b. What is happening at the moment?
c. What will happen in the future?
d. What the characters are feeling and thinking?
●A standard procedure is available for scoring TAT responses.
●The test has been modified for children and for the aged.
 ●Uma Chaudhury’s Indian adaptation of TAT is also available.

Rosenzweig’s Picture-Frustration Study (P-F Study)

●Developed by Rosenzweig
●To assess how people express aggression in the face of a frustrating situation.
●The test presents with the help of cartoon like pictures a series of situations in which one
person frustrates another, or calls attention to a frustrating condition.
●The subject is asked to tell what the other (frustrated) person will say or do.
●The analysis of responses is based on the type and direction of aggression.
●An attempt is made to examine whether the focus is on the frustrating object, or on
protection of the frustrated person, or on constructive solution of the problem.
●The direction of aggression may be towards the environment, towards oneself, or it may be
tuned off in an attempt to gloss over or evade the situation.
●Pareek has adapted this test for use with the Indian population.

Sentence Completion Test

●This test makes use of a number of incomplete sentences.

●The starting part of the sentence is first presented and the subject has to provide an ending
to the sentence.
●The type of endings used by the subjects reflect their attitudes, motivation and conflicts.
●The test provides subjects with several opportunities to reveal their underlying unconscious
motivations.

Draw-a-Person Test

●It is a simple test in which the subject is asked to draw a person on a sheet of paper. A pencil
and eraser is provided to facilitate drawing.
●After the completion of the drawing, the subject is generally asked to draw the figure of an
opposite sex person.
●Finally, the subject is asked to make a story about the person as if s/he was a character in a
novel or play.
●Some examples of interpretations are as follows:
a. Omission of facial features suggests that the person tries to evade a highly conflict-ridden
interpersonal relationship.
b. Graphic emphasis on the neck suggests lack of control over impulses.
c. Disproportionately large head suggests organic brain disease and pre-occupation with
headaches.

Advantages of Projective Techniques

a. Helps to understand unconscious motives, deep-rooted conflicts, and emotional complexes

of an individual.
b. The analysis of personality with the help of projective techniques appears fairly interesting.

Limitations of Projective Techniques

 a. The interpretation of the responses requires sophisticated skills and specialised training.
b. There are problems associated with the reliability of scoring and validity of interpretations.

Behavioural Analysis

●A person’s behaviour in a variety of situations can provide us with meaningful information

about her/his personality.
●Observation of behaviour serves as the basis of behavioural analysis.

Interview

●Commonly used method for assessing personality.

●Involves talking to the person being assessed and asking specific questions.
●Diagnostic interviewing generally involves in-depth interviewing which seeks to go beyond
the replies given by the person.
●Interviews may be structured or unstructured depending on the purpose or goals of
assessment:
a. In unstructured interviews, the interviewer seeks to develop an impression about a person
by asking a number of questions. The way a person presents her/ himself and answers the
questions carries enough potential to reveal her/his personality.
b. The structured interviews address very specific questions and follow a set procedure. This
is often done to make objective comparison of persons being interviewed.

Observation

●Commonly used for the assessment of personality.

●Sophisticated procedure that cannot be carried out by untrained people.
●Requires careful training of the observer.
●Requires a fairly detailed guideline about analysis of behaviours in order to assess the
personality of a given person.

Limitations of Observation and Interview methods:

a. Professional training required for collection of useful data through these methods is quite
demanding and timeconsuming.
b. Maturity of the psychologist is a precondition for obtaining valid data through these
techniques.
c. Mere presence of the observer may contaminate the results. As a stranger, the observer
may influence the behaviour of the person being observed and thus not obtain good data.
Behavioural Ratings

●Used for assessment of personality in educational and industrial settings.

●Taken from people who know the assessee intimately and have interacted with her/him over
a period of time or have had a chance to observe her/him.
●Attempts to put individuals into certain categories in terms of their behavioural qualities.
●The categories may involve different numbers or descriptive terms.
●Use of numbers or general descriptive adjectives in rating scales always creates confusion
for the rater.
●In order to use ratings effectively, the traits should be clearly defined in terms of carefully
stated behavioural anchors.

Limitations of Behavioural Ratings:

Halo Effect

a. Raters often display certain biases that colour their judgments of different traits. For eg,
most of us are greatly influenced by a single favourable or unfavourable trait. This often
forms the basis of a rater’s overall judgment of a person.
b. Raters have a tendency to place individuals either in the middle of the scale (called middle
category bias) by avoiding extreme positions, or in the extreme positions (called extreme
response bias) by avoiding middle categories on the scale.

Nomination

●Used in obtaining peer assessment.

●Can be used with persons who have been in long-term interaction and who know each other
very well.
●In nomination, each person is asked to choose one or more persons of the group with whom
s/he would like to work, study, play/participate in any other activity.
●The person may also be asked to specify the reason for her/his choices.
●Analysed to understand the personality and behavioural qualities of the person.
●Found to be highly dependable, although it may also be affected by personal biases.

Situational Tests
 ●Provides us with information about how a person behaves under stressful situations.
●The test requires a person to perform a given task with other persons who are instructed to
be non-cooperative and interfering.
●The test involves a kind of role playing.
●The person is instructed to play a role for which s/he is observed.
●A verbal report is also obtained on what s/he was asked to do.
●The situation may be realistic one, or it may be created through a video play.
General Adaption Syndrome
●Selye studied what happens to the body when stress is prolonged, by subjecting animals to a
variety of stressors (high temperature, X-rays and insulin injections) in the laboratory over
a long period of time.
●He also observed patients with various injuries and illnesses in hospitals.
●He noticed a similar pattern of bodily response in all of them
●According to him, GAS involves:
Alarm reaction stage

●The presence of a stressor or stimulus leads to activation of the adrenal-pituitary-cortex

system.
●This triggers the release of hormones producing the stress response.
●Now the individual is ready for fight or flight.

Resistance stage

●If stress is prolonged, the resistance stage begins.

●The parasympathetic nervous system calls for more cautious use of the body’s resources.
●The organism makes efforts to cope with the threat, as through confrontation.

Exhaustion stage

●Continued exposure to the same stressor or additional stressors drains the body of its
resources.
●The physiological systems involved in alarm reaction and resistance become ineffective and
susceptibility to stress-related diseases such as high blood pressure becomes more likely.
Selye’s model has been criticized for assigning a very limited role to psychological factors in
stress. Psychological appraisal of events is important for the determination of stress.