Trait and psychodynamic theories provide different perspectives on personality. Trait theories view personality as enduring attributes that influence behavior across situations. Allport categorized traits into cardinal, central, and secondary levels. Psychodynamic theories emphasize unconscious motivations and internal conflicts. Freud believed personalities develop through psychosexual stages and are composed of the id, ego, and superego. He emphasized unconscious drives and defenses against anxiety. Later theorists like Jung, Horney, and Adler extended psychoanalytic concepts to be more empirically testable and incorporate social and cultural influences.

1. TRAIT AND
PSYCHODYNAMIC
THEORIES
Princewill Lingbwin, Jigem
Chinedu Michael, Okoye
Chidiebere John, Uma

2. Trait Theories

3. THEORIES OF
TRAIT
Traits are enduring qualities or attributes
that predispose individuals to behave
consistently across situations

4. ALLPORT’S TRAIT APPROACH
• Gordon Allport, a psychologist, viewed trait has the
building block of personality and the source of
individuality.
• According to him traits produce a coherence in
behavior because they unify a person’s reaction to a
variety of stimuli.
• He categorized traits into three levels

5. CARDINAL TRAITS
• Cardinal traits are traits around which a person
organizes his or her life.

6. CENTRAL TRAITS
• Central traits are traits that represent major
characteristics of a person

7. SECONDARY TRAITS
• Secondary traits are specific personal features that help
predict an individual’s behavior but are less useful for
understanding an individual’s personality

9. Summary of Allport’s approach
• Allport saw personality structures, rather than environ-
mental conditions, as the critical determiners of
individual behavior. “The same fire that melts the
butter hardens the egg” was a phrase he used to
show that the same stimuli can have different effects
on different individuals.

10. Identifying universal
trait dimensions by
various psychologists

11. RAYMOND CATTELL
• His research led him to propose that 16factors called source
traits underlie human personality.
• Cattell’s 16 factors included important behavioral oppositions
such as reserved versus outgoing, trusting versus suspicious, and
relaxed versus tense.
• contemporary trait theorists argue that even fewer dimensions
than 16 capture the most important distinctions among people’s
personalities.

12. HANS EYSENCK
• He developed a model of personality based upon
three universal trails;
1. Extraversion/intraversion
2. Neuroticism/emotional stability
3. Psychoticism(kindness and considerate/ Antisocial).

15. Evolutionary perspectives on trait
dimensions
• Supporters of the five-factor model have tried to
explain why exactly these five dimensions emerge by
looking to evolution
• relating the five dimensions to consistent types of
interactions that people had with each other and with
the external world over the course of human
evolution by seeing them as answers to these
questions:

16. 1. Who is good company? – Extraversion
2. Who is kind and supportive? – Agreeableness
3. Who puts in sustained effort? – Conscientiousness
4. Who is emotionally undependable? – Neuroticism
5. Who has ideas that pan out? – Openness to experience

17. • The diversity of environments over human evolution
explains why people embody both low and high values
on each of the five dimensions. If this explanation is
correct, we might also expect that, like other aspects
of human experience that have been shaped by
evolution, traits can be passed from one generation to
the next.

18. Traits and Heritability
• evidence that supports the heritability of personality traits:
Recall that behavioral genetics is the study of the degree to
which personality traits and behavior patterns are inherited.
• Heritability studies show that almost all personality traits
are influenced by genetic factors
• The findings are the same with many different
measurement techniques, whether they measure broad
traits, such as extraversion and neuroticism, or specific
traits, such as self-control or sociability

19. DO TRAITS
PREDICT
BEHAVIOR

20. Two important terminologies to
consider:
• Cross-situational consistency
• knowing that a person can be characterized by a particular
trait would enable you to predict his or her behavior across
different situations
• Consistency paradox
• The observation that personality ratings across time and
among different observers are consistent while behavior
ratings across situations are not consistent.

22. Evaluation of Trait Theories
• Trait theories allow researchers to give concise
descriptions of different people’s personalities. But, they
do not generally explain how behavior is generated or
how personality develops; they identify and describe only
characteristics that are correlated with behavior.
• Trait theories typically portray a static, or at least
stabilized, view of personality structure as it currently
exists. By contrast, psychodynamic theories of personality,
to which we next turn, emphasize conflicting forces
within the individual that lead to change and development.

23. Psychodynamic
Theories

24. Freudian Theory
Theory of personality that shares the
assumption that personality is shaped by
and behavior is motivated by inner forces.

25. • According to Sigmund Freud, at the core of
personality are events within a person’s mind
(intrapsychic events) that motivate behavior.
• Freud believed that there are inner wellsprings of
behavior, as well as clashes between internal forces.
• All acts are determined by motives

26. Drives and Psychosexual
Development
• He ascribed the source of motivation for human
actions to psychic energy found within each
individual.
• He believed these tension systems were created by
organs of the body, which when activated, could be
expressed in many ways.

27. Two Basic Drives
• Self-preservation
• Eros

28. Libido
• The source of energy for sexual urges—a psychic
energy that drives us toward sensual pleasures of all
types. Sexual urges demand immediate satisfaction,
whether through direct actions or through indirect
means such as fantasies and dreams.

29. Eros
• According to Freund, Eros does not suddenly appear
at puberty but operates from birth. Eros is evident,
he argued, in the pleasure infants derive from
physical stimulation of the genitals and other
sensitive areas, or erogenous zones.

31. The Oedipus Complex
• Freud believed that every young boy has an innate
impulse to view his father as a sexual rival for his
mother’s attentions. Because the young boy cannot
displace his father, the Oedipus complex is generally
resolved when the boy comes to identify with his
father’s power.

32. Fixation
• A state in which a person remains attached to objects
or activities more appropriate for an earlier stage of
psychosexual development
• He believed that experiences in the early stages of
psychosexual development had a profound impact on
personality formation and adult behavior patterns.

34. Psychic determinism
• Psychic determinism is the assumption that all
mental and behavioral reactions (symptoms) are
determined by earlier experiences.

36. Unconscious
• The domain of the psyche that stores repressed
urges and primitive impulses

37. • According to Freud, behavior can be motivated by
drives of which a person is not aware
Behavior
Manifest
Latent

38. The Freudian Slip
• A Freudian slip occurs when an unconscious desire is
betrayed by your speech or behavior.

39. The Structure of Personality
• The Structure of Personality In Freud’s theory,
personality differences arise from the different ways
in which people deal with their fundamental drives
i. Id
ii. Ego
iii. Superego

41. Id
• The id is the storehouse of the fundamental drives.
It operates irrationally, acting on impulse and
pushing for expression and immediate gratification
without considering whether what is desired is
realistically possible, socially desirable, or morally
acceptable.
• The pleasure principle

42. Superego
• The superego is the storehouse of an individual’s
values, including moral attitudes learned from society.
The superego corresponds roughly to the common
notion of conscience.
• The superego also includes the ego ideal, an
individual’s view of the kind of person he or she
should strive to become.

43. Ego
• The ego is the reality-based aspect of the self that
arbitrates the conflict between id impulses and superego
demands.
• The ego represents an individual’s personal view of
physical and social reality—his or her conscious beliefs
about the causes and consequences of behavior.
• Part of the ego’s job is to choose actions that will gratify
id impulses without undesirable consequences. The ego is
governed by the reality principle, which puts reasonable
choices before pleasurable demands.

44. Repression and Ego Defense
• Repression is the psychological process that
protects an individual from experiencing extreme
anxiety or guilt about impulses, ideas, or memories
that are unacceptable and/or dangerous to express.
• Ego defense mechanism is the mental strategy
(conscious or unconscious) used by the ego to
defend itself against conflicts experienced in the
normal course of life.

45. Denial of
reality
Protecting self from unpleasant reality by refusing to perceive it
Displacement Discharging pent-up feelings, usually of hostility, on objects less dangerous than those that
initially aroused the emotion
Fantasy Gratifying frustrated desires in imaginary achievements (“daydreaming” is a common form)
Identification Increasing feelings of worth by identifying self with another person or institution, often of
illustrious standing
Isolation Cutting off emotional charge from hurtful situations or separating incompatible attitudes into
logic-tight compartments; also called compartmentalization
Projection Placing blame for one’s difficulties on others or attributing one’s own “forbidden” desires to
others
Rationalization Attempting to prove that one’s behavior is “rational” and justifiable and thus worthy of the
approval of self and others
Reaction
formation
Preventing dangerous desires from being expressed by endorsing opposing attitudes and types
of behavior and using them as “barriers”
Regression Retreating to earlier developmental levels involving more childish responses and usually a lower
level of aspiration
Repression Pushing painful or dangerous thoughts out of consciousness, keeping them unconscious; this is
considered to be the most basic of the defense mechanisms
Sublimation Gratifying or working off frustrated sexual desires in substitutive nonsexual activities socially
accepted by one’s culture
Major Ego Defense Mechanisms

47. Anxiety
• An intense emotional response caused by the
preconscious recognition that a repressed conflict is
about to emerge into consciousness

48. If defense mechanisms
defend you against anxiety,
why might they still have
negative consequences for
you?

49. Evaluation of
Freudian Theory

50. Criticism of Freudian Theory
• First, psychoanalytic concepts are vague and not
operationally defined; thus much of the theory is
difficult to evaluate scientifically
• A second, related criticism is that Freudian theory is
good history but bad science. It does not reliably
predict what will occur; it is applied retrospectively—
after events have occurred.

51. Other Major Criticisms
• First, it is a developmental theory, but it never
included observations or studies of children.
• Second, it minimizes traumatic experiences (such as
child abuse) by reinterpreting memories of them as
fantasies (based on a child’s desire for sexual contact
with a parent).
• Third, it has an androcentric (male-centered) bias
because it uses a male model as the norm without
trying to determine how females might be different.

52. Extending
Psychodynamic
Theories

53. Changes made to the Freudian
Theory
• They put greater emphasis on ego functions, including
ego defenses, development of the self, conscious thought
processes, and personal mastery.
• They view social variables (culture, family, and peers) as
playing a greater role in shaping personality.
• They put less emphasis on the importance of general
sexual urges, or libidinal energy.
• They extended personality development beyond
childhood to include the entire life span.

54. Alfred Adler
• Alfred Adler (1870–1937) rejected the significance of
Eros and the pleasure principle. Adler (1929) believed that
as helpless, dependent, small children, people all
experience feelings of inferiority.
• Personality is structured around this underlying striving;
people develop lifestyles based on particular ways of
overcoming their basic, pervasive feelings of inferiority.
• Personality conflict arises from incompatibility between
external environmental pressures and internal strivings for
adequacy, rather than from competing urges within the
person.

55. Karen Horney
• Karen Horney(1885–1952) challenged Freud’s
phallocentric emphasis on the importance of the penis,
hypothesizing that male envy of pregnancy, motherhood,
breasts, and suckling is a dynamic force in the
unconscious of boys and men.
• This “womb envy” leads men to devalue women and to
overcompensate by unconscious impulses toward creative
work.
• Horney also placed greater emphasis than did Freud on
cultural factors and focused on present character structure
rather than on infantile sexuality (Horney, 1937, 1939).

56. Carl Jung
• Collective unconscious is a part of an individual’s
unconscious that is inherited, evolutionarily
developed, and common to all members of the
species.
• The collective unconscious explains your intuitive
understanding of primitive myths, art forms, and
symbols, which are the universal archetypes of
existence.

57. Archetype
• An archetype is a universal, inherited, primitive, and
symbolic representation of a particular experience or
object
• Animus was the male archetype, anima was the female
archetype, and all men and women experienced both
archetypes in varying degrees.
• The archetype of the self is the mandala, or magic
circle; it symbolizes striving for unity and wholeness
(Jung, 1973)

58. Analytical Psychology
• Analytical Psychology is a branch of psychology that
views the person as a constellation of compensatory
internal forces (such as masculine aggressiveness and
feminine sensitivity) in a dynamic balance.
• In addition, Jung rejected the primary importance of
libido so central to Freud’s own theory. Jung added
two equally powerful unconscious instincts: the need
to create and the need to become a coherent, whole
individual.

59. Any Questions???