Lesson 02 Summary

Lesson 02: Summary

I. The Place of Personality Psychology Among All of the Subfields of Psychology

Unlike most subfields of psychology, which study specific topics such as perception, memory, emotions, or relationships, personality psychology strives to study the whole person.
Personality psychology addresses both consistencies and inconsistencies in what is called the psychological triad: how people think, feel, and behave.
Personality psychology is most closely aligned with clinical psychology, which studies abnormalities within the whole person, but also integrates material from social, cognitive, developmental, and biological psychology.

II. The Goals of Personality Psychology

The textbook defines personality as "an individual's characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior, together with the psychological mechanisms—hidden or not—behind those patterns."
Trying to understand everything about the whole person at once is a virtually impossible mission, so personality psychologists have specialized into basic areas that ask limited questions.

The trait approach asks how people differ and how we can measure these differences.
The biological approach asks how genes, neurotransmitters, hormones, and brain structure evolved and how they affect personality.
The psychoanalytic approach asks how the unconscious—the part of our mind of which we are unaware—influences our thoughts, feelings, and behavior.
The phenomenological approach asks how our conscious choices and interpretations of reality lead to creativity, freedom, happiness, and a meaningful life.
The learning and cognitive processes approach asks how experiences change us and how we adapt to new situations.

Because the founders and followers of each approach argue that their approach is the best, the five approaches seem competitive. But in reality they ask different questions and are complementary.
To date no psychologist has come up with the One Big Theory (OBT) that integrates all of the approaches.
Just as a person's greatest strength can also be his or her greatest weakness, the advantages of personality psychology as a whole over other subfields and the advantages of each approach are also disadvantages.

III. The Plan of the Textbook and This Course

A. After this introductory chapter, the book is divided into six parts. Part I (chapters 2 and 3) cover research methods. Parts II through VI cover the five basic approaches to personality psychology. Chapters 8 (anatomy and physiology) and 16 (personality processes) will not be assigned in the course, although you are certainly welcome to read these chapters.

B. Following the sections on the five basic approaches, two final chapters are presented as a way of summing up what we have learned in the course. Chapter 18 considers a topic that can be viewed from all five approaches: the extreme and problematic personality disorders. Chapter 19 revisits the need for different approaches to personality and reviews the major contributions each has made.

C. In addition to highlighting each chapter's main points, the commentary for each chapter will also provide insights and examples from the instructor's experience as a professional personality psychologist. These insights will include:

The difficulty in being objective about personality and the way in which the cultural background, personal experiences, and needs of psychologists can affect their thinking.
The "root ideas" (motivation, personality development, self-knowledge, unconscious processes, psychological health, and the relationship between the individual and society) are issues that every major personality theory has something to say about, although theories from the different approaches tend to emphasize some root ideas and ignore others.
Personality theories shape our perceptions of facts about personality.
Taking personality tests favored by the different approaches and engaging in other activities will help you better understand personality psychology. Therefore some of the assignments will include taking tests and engaging in activities as well as writing out answers to questions.

IV. Pigeonholing versus Appreciation of Individual Differences

Some feel uncomfortable with the idea of measuring personality and describing people with trait or type labels because it seems to pigeonhole and dehumanize people.
Yet the potential weakness of categorizing and labeling people can be seen as a strength in its sensitivity to the fact that people differ from one another. Other subfields of psychology assume that people are basically the same and regard differences as measurement error.