Personality: Biological and Socio-Cultural Determinants; the Psychoanalytic, Neo-Freudian, Social-Learning, Trait and Type, Cognitive, Humanistic, Existential and Transpersonal Approaches; Rotter's Locus of Control, Seligman's Explanatory Styles and Kohlberg's Moral Development
2. Psychoanalytic and neo-Freudian approaches
Freud: the mind has conscious, preconscious and unconscious levels, and a structure of id (instinctual, the pleasure principle, primary-process thinking), ego (the reality principle, secondary process, mediating) and superego (internalised morality — conscience and ego ideal). Personality develops through the psychosexual stages — oral, anal, phallic (the Oedipus complex), latency and genital — and fixation at a stage leaves lasting traits. Anxiety is warded off by defence mechanisms, systematised by Anna Freud (1936): repression, denial, projection, reaction formation, displacement, sublimation, rationalisation, regression and intellectualisation.
| Neo-Freudian | Central ideas |
|---|---|
| Carl Jung — analytical psychology | A personal and a collective unconscious, the latter containing archetypes (persona, shadow, anima and animus, the self); the attitudes of introversion and extraversion and four functions (thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition); individuation as the goal. |
| Alfred Adler — individual psychology | Feelings of inferiority and compensation, striving for superiority (later perfection), style of life, social interest, fictional finalism and birth order. |
| Karen Horney | Basic anxiety from a hostile childhood world, met by three neurotic trends — moving toward, against or away from people; ten neurotic needs; a critique of Freud's view of women. |
| Erich Fromm; Harry Stack Sullivan; Erik Erikson | Fromm: escape from freedom and character orientations; Sullivan: personality as interpersonal; Erikson: eight psychosocial stages across the life span. |
3. Social-learning, trait and type, and cognitive approaches
| Approach | Theorists and constructs |
|---|---|
| Social learning | Bandura: reciprocal determinism among person, behaviour and environment; observational learning; self-efficacy. Rotter: expectancy and reinforcement value. Mischel: the person–situation debate (1968), the cognitive–affective personality system and delay of gratification. Dollard and Miller: drive, cue, response and reward, and approach–avoidance conflict. |
| Trait | Allport: cardinal, central and secondary traits, the proprium, functional autonomy of motives, the idiographic approach. Cattell: 16 source traits (versus surface traits) from L-, Q- and T-data. Eysenck: three superfactors — extraversion, neuroticism, psychoticism (PEN). The Big Five (Costa and McCrae; Goldberg): openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism. |
| Type | Discrete categories rather than dimensions: Hippocrates' humours, Sheldon's somatotypes, Jung's introvert and extravert, and Type A and Type B behaviour (Friedman and Rosenman). |
| Cognitive | George Kelly's personal construct theory (1955): each person is a scientist who construes events through bipolar personal constructs; constructive alternativism; the Role Construct Repertory (Rep) Test. Also Witkin's cognitive styles. |
4. Humanistic, existential and transpersonal approaches
- Carl Rogers: the self-concept; congruence or incongruence between the real and the ideal self; conditions of worth imposed by conditional regard produce incongruence, while unconditional positive regard allows growth toward the fully functioning person; the actualising tendency.
- Abraham Maslow: the hierarchy of needs (physiological, safety, belongingness and love, esteem, self-actualisation), deficiency (D-) versus being (B-) needs, and the characteristics of self-actualisers, including peak experiences.
- Existential: Rollo May (anxiety as the price of freedom; courage; the daimonic); Viktor Frankl (the will to meaning, the existential vacuum, logotherapy, drawn from his concentration-camp experience); Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss (Daseinsanalysis; being-in-the-world in its three modes — Umwelt, the physical world; Mitwelt, the social world; Eigenwelt, the self-world).
- Transpersonal: personality includes levels beyond the individual ego — Maslow's later "Theory Z" and self-transcendence, Roberto Assagioli's psychosynthesis (the higher self), Stanislav Grof's holotropic states and Ken Wilber's spectrum of consciousness, with Jung's collective unconscious as a forerunner.
5. Rotter's locus of control, Seligman's explanatory styles and Kohlberg's moral development
Julian Rotter's social learning theory predicts behaviour from expectancy and reinforcement value: behaviour potential BP = f(E and RV) in a given psychological situation. Locus of control is a generalised expectancy about whether reinforcements depend on one's own behaviour (internal) or on luck, chance, fate or powerful others (external). Rotter's I–E Scale (1966) uses forced-choice item pairs and is scored in the external direction. Internals tend to seek information, resist influence and achieve more; externals are more prone to helplessness and depression.
Martin Seligman's explanatory style grew from the reformulated learned-helplessness theory (Abramson, Seligman and Teasdale, 1978): what matters is how people explain bad events, along three dimensions — internal versus external (me or circumstances), stable versus unstable (always or just this time) and global versus specific (everything or just this area). A pessimistic style explains bad events as internal, stable and global ("I failed because I am stupid") and predicts depression, poorer health and lower achievement; an optimistic style explains them as external, unstable and specific. It is measured by the Attributional Style Questionnaire and by content analysis of verbatim explanations (the CAVE technique), and is the basis of Seligman's "learned optimism".
| Level | Stage | Basis of moral judgement |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-conventional | 1. Punishment and obedience | Avoiding punishment; deference to power |
| Pre-conventional | 2. Instrumental exchange (individualism) | Serving one's own interests; fair deals |
| Conventional | 3. Interpersonal conformity ("good boy–nice girl") | Approval and being seen as good |
| Conventional | 4. Law and order (social system) | Duty, rules and maintaining social order |
| Post-conventional | 5. Social contract and individual rights | Laws as agreements that can be changed for the greater good |
| Post-conventional | 6. Universal ethical principles | Self-chosen principles of justice and human dignity |
Key takeaways
- Personality is shaped by heredity and temperament (Thomas and Chess; Kagan) and by family, culture and social roles; physique typologies (Kretschmer, Sheldon) are of historical interest.
- Freud's id, ego and superego, psychosexual stages and defences were revised by Jung (collective unconscious, archetypes), Adler (inferiority, social interest), Horney (basic anxiety) and others toward social forces.
- Social-learning (Bandura, Rotter, Mischel), trait (Allport, Cattell, Eysenck, Big Five), type, cognitive (Kelly's personal constructs), humanistic (Rogers, Maslow), existential (May, Frankl) and transpersonal (Assagioli, Wilber) approaches each define personality differently.
- Rotter: BP = f(E and RV); locus of control is a generalised expectancy, internal or external, measured by the I–E Scale. Seligman: explanatory style runs internal–external, stable–unstable and global–specific, and the pessimistic style (internal, stable, global for bad events) predicts depression.
- Kohlberg's three levels and six stages — pre-conventional, conventional, post-conventional — score moral reasoning; Gilligan's ethic of care is the major critique.
Practice questions (10)
Attempt each one before opening the answer. Every explanation names the tempting wrong option as well as the right one, because that is where marks are lost.
A student who fails an examination says, "I failed because I am stupid, and I will fail at everything I try." In Seligman's terms this explanation is:
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Answer: B — Internal, stable and global
"I am stupid" is internal (about me) and stable (a lasting trait), and "everything I try" is global. This is the pessimistic explanatory style that predicts helplessness and depression.In Rotter's social learning theory, locus of control is best described as:
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Answer: C — A generalised expectancy about whether reinforcement depends on one's own behaviour
Rotter defined locus of control as a generalised expectancy across situations, internal or external. A belief about capacity for a specific task is Bandura's self-efficacy, a different construct.According to Kohlberg, a person who reasons that laws are social agreements that can be changed when they conflict with individual rights and the greater good is at stage:
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Answer: D — 5 — social contract
Stage 5 treats laws as changeable contracts serving welfare and rights. Stage 4 upholds laws because they maintain social order, stage 3 seeks approval, and stage 2 serves self-interest.Which of the following are archetypes in Jung's analytical psychology? Select all that apply.
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Answer: B — Shadow; C — Persona
Persona and shadow (with anima/animus and the self) are Jungian archetypes of the collective unconscious. The superego is Freud's, and style of life is Adler's.Which theorist described people as "scientists" who construe events through bipolar personal constructs, assessed with the Rep Test?
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Answer: A — George Kelly
Kelly's personal construct theory (1955) is the classic cognitive theory of personality; the Role Construct Repertory Test elicits a person's constructs by comparing triads of significant people.In Rogers's theory, incongruence between the self-concept and experience arises mainly from:
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Answer: C — Conditions of worth imposed by conditional positive regard
When love and approval depend on meeting others' standards, people deny or distort experiences that conflict with those conditions, creating incongruence. Unconditional positive regard removes the conditions.Which of the following are dimensions of explanatory style in Seligman's reformulation? Select all that apply.
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Answer: A — Stable versus unstable; C — Global versus specific
Explanatory style has three dimensions — internal–external, stable–unstable and global–specific. Introversion–extraversion is a personality dimension, and controllability belongs to Weiner's attribution theory, not to Seligman's three.Which of the following is NOT one of the Big Five personality factors?
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Answer: D — Psychoticism
The Big Five are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Psychoticism is the third factor in Eysenck's PEN model.Assertion (A): Carol Gilligan criticised Kohlberg's theory of moral development. Reason (R): Kohlberg's stages were derived largely from male samples and centre on abstract justice, undervaluing reasoning based on care and relationships. Choose the correct option.
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Answer: A — Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
Both are true and R explains A: Gilligan's In a Different Voice (1982) argued exactly that a justice-centred scheme built on male participants mis-scored an ethic of care as less mature.Horney proposed that people cope with basic anxiety by three neurotic trends. Which set is correct?
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Answer: B — Moving toward, against and away from people
Horney's three trends are compliance (toward), aggression (against) and detachment (away). The other sets belong to Freud, to Binswanger's existential modes and to Allport respectively.