PS377- Personality - Dr. Nicky Newton PDF

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Dr. Nicky Newton...

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Personality February 28th, 2019

Personality ● Behaviours, traits, emotions and ideas about the self that make up each unique individual ● Controversy: whether personality changes over time and to what degree ● Levels of analysis: McAdams- Actor, Agent, Author -dispositional traits (actor); traits and roles -personal concerns (agent); goals and values -life narrative (author) Traits (actor level) ● Distinguishable, enduring ways in which one person differs from others ● Ways in which were like all people, some people, or unique ● ‘enduring’ points to stability -personality is stable after age 30 ● Traits can be studied at idiographic or nomothetic level -idiographic= levels within a person -nomothetic= average levels across people Big Five: OCEAN ● Openness to experience: openness to ideas and values, active imagination, aesthetics, trying new things ● Conscientiousness: hard working, organized, preserving, scrupulous ● Extraversion: warmth, assertiveness, excitement thinking, positive emotions ● Agreeableness: sympathetic, get along with others, generally nice ● Neuroticism: anxiety, self consciousness, depression, impulsiveness, vulnerability

Late childhood and adolescents are a key time in developing personality

The Berkeley Studies ● ● ● ●

Participants are followed for 30 years- ages 40-70 Women: young adulthood lifestyle= old age life satisfaction Men: young adulthood personality= old age life satisfaction Social clock -sociable times for when you should do things in your life

Social Clock and Personality Development ● A major source of personality change in adulthood may be associated with adherence to or departure from social clock projects ● Feminine social clock= family at age 28 ● Masculine occupational clock= career at 28

Personal Concerns (agent level) ● contextual, in contrast to dispositions traits ● One has personality traits ● Eriksons Stages of Psychosocial Development -first to develop a truly lifespan theory of personality development -eight stages represent the eight great struggles that he believed people must under go -each struggle has a certain time of ascendancy -the EP Generativity ● The establishment, the guidance, and the enrichment of the living generation and the world it inherits ● Expanded radius of care: family, community, global ● Expressed in family, work or more global contexts ● African Americans are higher in generativity ● Productive roles for adults 50+ in public elementary schools; foster grandparents

Ego Integrity ● Coming to terms with the life one has lived; realize you have a purpose if life, living in the present ● Opposite of ego integrity is despair

Ego integrity balances integrity with despair, creating an adaptive strength: wisdom Potentially the longest stage Link between life review and ego integrity vs despair midlife life review= acknowledge regrets= motivation for change= higher well being in later life ● Regrets of omission and commission; better to regret what you’ve done rather than what you haven’t done ● ● ● ●

Regret Study Theories based on life transitions ● Among the most popular theories of adult personality development ● Based on the idea that adults go through a series of life transitions, or passages ● Life transitions tend to overestimate the commonality of age linked transitions

Midlife crisis ● ● ● ●

Many adults face difficult issues and make behavioural changes Promoted by media But little data supports claim that all people experience a crisis in middle age MIDCOURSE CORRECTION: reevaluating ones roles and dreams and making the necessary corrections

Life Narrative (author level) ● McAdams life story model argues that people create a life story ● Internalized narrative with a beginning, middle, and end ● created/revised throughout adulthood with individual with individual and environmental changes ● Conscious and unconscious reformations ● The goal is to have a life story that is coherent, credible, open to new possibilities, richly differentiated, reconciles opposite aspects of oneself, integrated within ones sociocultural context

Take away ● Inter individual differences and intraindividual change ● 3 levels: actor, agent, author

● OCEAN ● Social clock ● Erickson adult stages...