Chapter 8 - Personality

Resilience

- Ability to recover from stress. - High levels are found in people who are characteristically able to cope with challenging life events.

Traits Perspective of Personality

- Assumes that personal traits guides individual behaviour. - Traits are viewed as genetically inherited, at least partially. - Most accepted Trait Theory: Costa and McCrae's: OCEAN, or five major dimensions of personality.

Type A and Hostility related to heart disease

- Cardiologist Meyer Friedman identified Type A behaviour pattern as a major risk factor for heart disease, particularly when combined with high levels of Hostility. - Another risk factor: high levels of anxiety

Identity Accommodation

- Changing views of the self in the face negative self-evaluation and feedback from experience. - Altering the view of the self based on life experiences. - Should be kept to a minimum. - Correlates with higher levels of depression and low self-esteem.

Vaillant Theory of Defence Mechanisms

- Defence mechanisms are strategies devised to protect the conscious mind from morally unacceptable urges and desires coming from the unconscious; used automatically. - Vaillant: defence mechanisms become increasingly adaptive and mature, and help people cope with life stressors. - Other studies found the same correlation between aging and maturing of defence mechanisms. - Older adults tend to cope with stress through less self-destructive ways than they did when they were younger. - Gender differences: regardless of age, WOMEN are more likely to avoid unpleasant situations, blame themselves when things go wrong, and seek support from others. MEN are more likely to externalize feelings, and to act in a way opposite to their unconscious feelings ("reaction formation").

Loevinger's Theory of Ego Development

- Defined ego as the structure within personality that attempts to synthesize, master and interpret experiences. - Ego is involved in regulating impulses, relating to others, achieving self-understanding and reflecting on experiences. - Development of the ego proceeds in a series of stages, from lower to higher level. - Stages: 1. Conformist: basic understanding of themselves, others and society; simple views of right and wrong. 2. Conscientious-Conformist: most adults; able to understand self and others' motives; internalized sense of right and wrong. 3. Conscientious: true conscience, internalized views of right and wrong and society; aware of self and other's motives; have insight into own and other's emotions. 4. Individualistic: all of the previous + appreciation of individuality. 5. Autonomous: all of the previous + clearly articulated inner standards + better able to deal with uncertainty. 6. Integrated: all of the previous + clear sense of self, recognizes inner conflicts, individual values. Achieved by few; related to Maslow's final need: self-actualization.

Identity Status Interview

- Developed by James Marcia (1966) - Examines the degree of the individual's commitment to identity issues and the degree of exploration they used to arrive at this commitment. - Expands on Erikson's stage of Adolescence (identity) by showing that some people may have strong identities without having given it much thought. - Those people could have simply adopted their family's or religion's views, for example. - Most useful in adolescence and early adulthood; not usually applied to middle and late adulthood. - Four profiles: 1. Identity Achievement: strong commitment + strong exploration 2. Foreclosed: strong commitment + no exploration 3. Moratorium: actively exploring different commitments 4. Identity Diffuse: no strong commitments, with or without exploration.

Mills College longitudinal study with college women - Findings

- Done by Raveena Helson in the 1950s. - Participants increased in qualities of assurance, independence, and self-control. - Decreased in measures of perceived femininity. - Women higher in identity showed higher generativity and well-being in later assessments. - Social roles influenced measurements of dominance, masculinity/femininity, flexibility and achievement.

Adult Attachment Theory

- Early bond between infant and caregiver sets the stage for all later significant relationships. - Attachment styles: mental representations of what to expect in a relationship; also inform models of the self. - Anxious attachment: imagine their adult partners will abandon them. - Avoidant attachment: fear of abandonment leads them to stay away from close relationships. - Secure attachment: feel confident about self and others. - Usually more influential in early adulthood: older people show lower levels of insecure attachment. - Evidence that attachment styles can change over time.

Psychodynamic perspective

- Freud's approach originally. - Also used by Jung, Adler, Horney - Freud: father of personality psychology. - Unconscious motives and impulses express themselves in people's personality and behaviour.

Cognitive Perspective - Identity Process

- Goal of development is optimal adaptation through establishing a balance between consistency and change. - Consistency = identity assimilation - Change = identity accommodation - Assimilation usually has the edge, as people always try to see themselves as consistent over time and experiences. - Women tend to use accommodation more than men. - Higher accommodation is linked to lower self-esteem. - Older adults who avoid adopting negative views of aging may be using assimilation; they also lived 7.5 years longer than those who accommodated to societal negative views of aging.

Lower mortality rates are correlated with which OCEAN traits?

- High conscientiousness - Low neuroticism - High extroversion (activity) - High openness (curiosity and emotional awareness)

Hostility and health

- High levels related to: higher risk of heart disease and depression; riskier health-related behaviours; negative changes in family life in middle adulthood; obesity, failure to exercise, high-fat diets; social isolation; poor health; lower income (women).

Self-efficacy and forms of coping.

- High self-efficacy people tend to use more problem-focused coping strategies. - High in social support and perceived stress people tend to use more emotion-focused strategies.

Type A Behaviour Pattern

- Highly competitive - Highly achievement-oriented - Impatient - Strong sense of time urgency

Freud - Role of Id, Ego and Superego

- Id: basic instincts - Superego: moral behaviour - Ego: rational thought

Identity Process Model

- Identity shaped throughout life through assimilation, accommodation and balance. - Each experience is seen as opportunities to confirm or reshape identity.

Identity Assimilation

- In a way, denial of negative self-evaluations or societal feedback. - Also, seeing the self as stable over time. - Incorporating views that confirm a positive sense of identity. - Correlates with better psychological health. - Older adults who denied negative views of aging (assimilation) were found to live longer.

Costa and McCrae's Five Factor Model of Personality

- Intends to capture essential characteristics of personality through the five broad traits. - Each trait has six sub-scales or "facets". - Tool: NEP-PI-R questionnaire, applied individually through an interview. - Studies show a high degree of consistency of traits over time in adulthood. - Increase until the age of 40: social dominance, conscientiousness, emotional stability, social vitality, and openness to experience. - Past 40: social vitality and openness decrease; agreeableness increases. - Four out of the 6 traits continued to change in middle and late adulthood.

Levinson's Mid-life Crisis Theory

- Largely discounted by academic psychology. - Study done with 40 men (small sample). - Proposed that development involves primarily changes in the LIFE STRUCTURE (the way life is patterned at a given point in time). - Life structure will evolve in a series of universal stages in adulthood. - Stages alternate periods of tranquility and of transition. - Transition periods are inevitable, since choices are always imperfect and outcomes not 100% predictable. - Mid-life transition received more attention, but also includes early and late adult transitions.

Drug use and OCEAN traits

- Low conscientiousness combined with high neuroticism = higher levels of smoking cigarettes. - High neuroticism alone also correlated with higher use of heroin and cocaine. - High use of marijuana correlated with high openness, and low agreeableness and conscientiousness.

Cognitive Perspective - Coping and Control

- Older adults maintain a sense of control over their outcomes, despite being aware of their increasing constraints. - Coping: actions people take to reduce stress. - Main forms of coping: 1. Problem-focused: changing something about the situation. 2. Emotion-focused: changing their perspective of the situation. - Other forms of coping are a mix of the two. - Best coping mechanism depends on the situation. - Good health and extensive and high quality social networks contribute to successful coping. - Social support also affects perceived stress, and perceived ability to cope with stress.

Levinson - Mid-life transition aspects

- Overcoming disillusionment from failure to achieve dreams of their youth; need to establish new more realistic aspirations. - Deciding how to pursue a new life structure for middle adulthood; questioning marriage; accepting children as mature; handling work changes; reflecting upon broader contextual changes such as politics. - May begin to establish mentoring relationships. - Resolve polarity: masc/fem, life/death, autonomy/dependence.

Erikson - Generativity

- Parenting: not only having children but being concerned about their development. - Grandparenting: also important, as long as grandparents spend time and effort in building strong relationships with their grandchildren. - Not completely selfless: "redemptive self"; generativity also has benefits for the person. - Bauer: "quiet ego" vs. "noisy ego"; people high in generativity have a "quieter" ego, allowing them to focus on the needs of others. - People high in generativity: more concerned with the environment, more attuned to politics, more likely to engage in volunteer work.

Cognitive Perspective of Personality

- People are driven by the desire to predict and control their experiences. - Emphasize coping: mechanisms used to deal with stress. - Emphasize how people interpret their experiences and understand themselves over time. - Important principle: people do not always see themselves realistically. - People also tend to see their abilities and personal qualities in a more positive light. - Three theories within this perspective: Possible Selves, Coping and Control, and Identity Process.

Cognitive Perspective - Possible Selves

- People are motivated to achieve a hoped-for self, and avoid a feared self. - Self-schema guides choices and pursuits: goal is to attain the hoped-for self. - Self-conceptions change over time: people maintain hoped-for selves way into late adulthood. - Hoped-for selves usually relate to health goals as people get older. - Life satisfaction relates to the degree to which people realized their hoped-for self or at least avoided the feared self. - People may revise the possible self in light of outcomes, if this hoped-for self seems to not be achievable. - Lowering expectations shows improvement in overall satisfaction.

Correspondence Principle

- People experience and deal with particular life events according to their personality. - In turn, once the events occur, they affect the person's personality. - Since people will chase experiences that fit their personality, this principle explains that personality stability is enhanced by active choices made by the individual, rather than by intrinsic likelihood of traits being stable over time.

Conscientiousness and death rates

- People who showed low scores in conscientiousness in childhood had higher death rates in adulthood. - One explanation: low conscientiousness leads to more careless behaviour, such as lack of control over diet and exercise patterns, leading them to become overweight adults with higher risk of weight-related disease. - Low conscientiousness also correlates with higher levels of drug use. - High self-discipline (a sub-score of conscientiousness) also predicts lower mortality in late adulthood (65+). - Low conscientiousness also showed correlation with worse lipid and immune profiles. - High conscientiousness = higher levels of protective health behaviours.

Freud's unfounded claim

- Personality doesn't change after early childhood. - Therapy is not useful for people over 50, because their personalities are too rigid.

Levinson's Mid-life Crisis - Criticisms

- Relies too much on chronological age, but did not reach a consensus as to what is the age for the crisis. - Some say is 40-45, others 38-47, etc. - Idea of universality extrapolates the available evidence from a small sample. - Lack of clarity: term ends up being used in any situation of stress, unhappiness and feelings of failure. - Levinson himself was said to lack objectivity: his goal was to write a book. - Study never stated the research procedures.

Rochester Adult Longitudinal Study (RALS)

- Sampled university students in different decades, in a sequential design. - Looked at how much individuals changed over time, relative to themselves and others. - Showed that individuals could get "caught up" with their peers in measures such as intimacy and industriousness later in life--past 30. - Demonstrated that continued personality development is not only possible but predictable: even stages from childhood (e.g. Trust vs. Mistrust) showed continued gains in adulthood.

How did Loevinger measure ego development?

- Sentence completion Tests: 36 sentence openings that the participants must finish or complete. - Measured independently from each other, then added up in a composite score. - Uses a strong cognitive component to measuring ego development. - Strong correlations between ego development and intellectual abilities, according to this theory. - Higher levels of ego development found to have higher levels on assertiveness, conformity and fearfulness.

Religion and coping

- Serves as an important coping resource for many older adults. - Culture variability in terms of norms and expectations for emotions influence coping capacity.

Social connections and coping

- Social support is an important resource for people of any age when faced with stressful experiences. - Married older adults with high levels of marital closeness were more protected against psychological stress.

Erikson - Epigenetic Principle

- Stages of life unfold in a determined order, and all individuals go through the same stages in the same order.

Conscientiousness and Alzheimer's disease

- Study showed high levels of conscientiousness as a protective factor agains Alzheimer's disease. - Those high on this trait were less likely to show symptoms, even if their brains showed physical markers of the disease.

Ego Psychology

- Three structures of the mind: id, ego, superego - Ego psychology: ego plays essential role in actively directing behaviour. - Erikson: the ego is the part of the mind maturing over time.

Socio-emotional Selectivity Theory

- Two functions served by interpersonal relationships: informational and emotional. - Older adults or anyone who feels pressure due to time constraints, will focus more on the emotional, less on the informational. - Happens more often later in life when people feel they are "running out of time". - BUT NOT so much related to age, as it relates to the sense of time constraint. - This is the main motivation for shifting focus. - Feelings of time constraints and of "running out of time" make people switch their focus from looking for informational to emotional relationships. - Makes them want to maximize their time with those with whom they have an emotional relationship. - Further studies showed older adults will also tend to focus on positive facial expressions and generally display a positive selectivity. - Research is not conclusive as to whether this positive selectivity actually leads to experiencing more positive emotions.

McCrae and Costa on the Mid-life Crisis

- Used data from their database on personality traits to test the idea of a crisis along the years reported by Levinson: found nothing. - Then, created a Midlife Crisis Scale and administered it to 350 men from 30-60 years old. - Scale asked participants to rate themselves in terms of the emotions said to be experienced in the crisis. - Found nothing the both times they used the scale on two different samples of 300+ men. - Also tested the Scale on participants of the Veterans Normative Aging Study: those high in neuroticism 10 years earlier were the ones getting high scores on the midlife crisis scale - previous psychological issues predicted crisis.

Life Story

- Using identity assimilation to think back on their own experiences and on how they have changed over time.

Other evidence of the non-existence of the Midlife Crisis.

- Whitbourne (1986): interviewed 100 men, none of which fit the criteria for a midlife crisis. - National Survey Of Midlife Development (2004): 26 reported experiencing a midlife crisis, but there was no age pattern. - McFadden and Rawson Swan (2012): reviewed studies on mid-life crisis versus midlife transition, didn't find any patterns along the age range.

RALS - 5 Life Pathways

1. Authentic Road: identity commitments through exploration and change. 2. Triumphant Trail: overcomes challenges through resilience. 3. Straight and Narrow Way: consistent patterns, resistant to change. 4. Meandering Way: fails to settle, constant search for identity. 5. Downward Slope: self-defeating behaviour, poor decisions.

Three branches of Freudian psychodynamic theory

1. Ego Psychology 2. Theory of defence mechanisms 3. Adult attachment theory

Identity Status - Profiles

1. Identity Achievement: tend to be mature in their relationships, thoughtful about life options and balanced in their thinking. 2. Moratorium: tend to be open and curious, positive, but also anxious or depressed, with low self-esteem. 3. Foreclosed: tend to be higher in self-esteem, but close-minded and rigid. 4. Identity Diffuse: more likely to engage in delinquent and drug-related behaviours, have low self-esteem. Can be subdivided into "carefree" diffuse (don't care about committing to identity) and undifferentiated (try unsuccessfully to find identity).

Two main forms of coping.

1. Problem-focused: changing something about the situation. 2. Emotion-focused: changing their perspective of the situation.

Which Identity Pathway relates to the process of Identity Balance?

Authentic Road

Capacity to experience strong emotions decreases over time. True or False?

False. - Capacity for strong emotion doesn't change. - What may change is reaction time to the situation which leads to better emotional control. - Could be that older adults are better at regulating their emotions. - Slower emotional reactions cold also serve the function of maintaining cognitive function; protective factor agains accidents or mistakes.

Young adults high in openness were less likely to report early life stressful childhood events. True or False?

False. They were more likely to report early childhood stressful life events. But also, more likely to respond well to lab tests on stress response.

Neuroticism and Alzheimer's disease

High neuroticism for women predicts early onset of the disease.

Which Identity Pathway relates to the process of Identity Accommodation?

Meandering Way

OCEAN

Openness Conscientiousness Extraversion Agreeableness Neuroticism

Affect Regulation

Seeking out experiences, people, knowledge that will increase your feelings of well-being and happiness.

Traits

Stable, enduring dispositions that persist over time and capture the essence of a person's psychological make up.

Which Identity Pathway relates to the process of Identity Assimilation?

Straight and Narrow Pathway