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Hans Eysenck (1916–1997) was born in Berlin, Germany, and emigrated to England in 1934, after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. Eysenck planned to study physics at the University of London but was told that he lacked the requisite academic background.
Discouraged, he asked university officials if there was any other science in which he could major. Eysenck recalled, “I was told there was always psychology. ‘What on earth is that?’ I inquired in my ignorance. ‘You’ll like it,’ they said. And so I enrolled in a subject whose scientific status was perhaps a little more questionable than my advisers realised”. More than 40 years later, the highly successful and productive Eysenck was asked if he had ever regretted his career choice. Often, he noted, but admitted that he was resigned to it.
Over the course of a long, productive career, Eysenck published 79 books, including some for the general public, and 1,097 journal articles. At the time of his death, he was the world’s most frequently cited psychologist. He developed several personality assessment devices including the Eysenck Personality Inventory, the Maudsley Medical Questionnaire, and the Maudsley Personality Inventory. His work has been pivotal in supporting the role of inheritance in the description of personality.
THE DIMENSIONS OF PERSONALITY
Eysenck and his wife, Sybil (Ph.D., University of London), together developed many of the questionnaires used in their research. The Eysenck Personality Inventory required 12 years of joint research and 20 factor analyses. The result of their efforts is a personality theory based on three dimensions, defined as combinations of traits or factors. The three personality dimensions are as follows.
E—Extraversion versus introversion
N—Neuroticism versus emotional stability
P—Psychoticism versus impulse control (or
superego functioning)
Eysenck noted that the dimensions of extraversion and neuroticism have been recognised as basic elements of personality since the time of the ancient Greek philosophers. He also suggested that formulations of the same dimensions could be found on nearly every personality assessment device ever developed. Consider the list of personality traits associated with Eysenck’s three personality dimensions.
You can see clearly, for example, that people who score high on the traits of the E dimension would be classified as extraverts whereas people who score low would be classified as introverts.
Research has shown that the traits and dimensions Eysenck proposed remain stable throughout the life span from childhood through adulthood, despite the different social and environmental experiences each of us has. Our situations may change but the dimensions remain consistent. For instance, the introverted child tends to remain introverted as an adult.
Eysenck also conducted considerable research on intelligence. Although he did not list intelligence as a personality dimension, he considered it an important influence on personality. He noted that a person with an IQ of 120 is likely to have a more complex and multidimensional personality than is a person with an IQ of 80. He presented evidence to suggest that some 80 percent of our intelligence is inherited, leaving only 20 percent as the product of social and environmental forces.
Extraversion/ introversion
Extraverts are oriented toward the outside world, prefer the company of other people, and tend to be sociable, impulsive, adventurous, assertive, and dominant. In addition, people who score high on extraversion on the Eysenck Personality Inventory have been found to experience more pleasant emotions than those who score low on extraversion. Introverts are reported to be the opposite on these characteristics.
Eysenck was interested in how extraverts and introverts might differ biologically and genetically. He found that extraverts have a lower base level of cortical arousal than introverts do. Because the cortical arousal levels for extraverts are low, they need, and actively seek, excitement and stimulation. In contrast, introverts shy away from excitement and stimulation because their cortical arousal levels are already high. As a result, introverts react more strongly than extraverts to sensory stimulation.
Studies have shown that introverts exhibit greater sensitivity to low-level stimuli and have lower pain thresholds than extraverts. Other research supports differential responses to sensory stimulation but reports less convincing evidence that such differences can be attributed to variations in cortical arousal levels. Nevertheless, as Eysenck predicted, these differences are genetically based.
Neuroticism
As you can see from Table 10.4, neurotics are characterised as anxious, depressed, tense, irrational, and moody. They may have low self-esteem and be prone to guilt feelings. Eysenck suggested that neuroticism is largely inherited, a product of genetics rather than learning or experience. It is manifested in biological as well as behavioural characteristics that differ from those of people at the emotional stability end of the neuroticism dimension.
People high in neuroticism show greater activity in those brain areas that control the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system. This is the body’s alarm system, which responds to stressful or dangerous events by increasing breathing rate, heart rate, blood flow to the muscles, and release of adrenaline. Eysenck argued that in neurotics, the sympathetic nervous system overreacts even to mild stressors, resulting in chronic hypersensitivity.
This condition leads to heightened emotionality in response to almost any difficult situation. Indeed, neurotics react emotionally to events other people consider insignificant. According to Eysenck, these differences in biological reactivity on the neuroticism dimension are innate. People are genetically predisposed either toward neuroticism or toward emotional stability.
Psychoticism
People who score high in psychoticism are aggressive, antisocial, tough-minded, cold, and egocentric. Also, they have been found to be cruel, hostile, and insensitive to the needs and feelings of others. In addition, they are reported to have greater problems with alcohol and drug abuse than people who score low in psychoticism.
Paradoxically, people who score high in psychoticism can also be highly creative. The research evidence tends to suggest a large genetic component. Men as a group generally score higher than women do on the psychoticism dimension. This finding led Eysenck to suggest that psychoticism may be related to male hormones. He also speculated that people who score high on all three dimensions may be apt to display criminal behaviour but cited only modest empirical support for this idea.
In Eysenck’s view, society needs the diversity provided by people characterised by all aspects of these three personality dimensions. An ideal society affords each person the opportunity to make the best use of his or her traits and abilities. However, some people will adapt to the social environment better than others will. The person high in psychoticism, for example, typified by hostile and aggressive behaviours, may become emotionally disturbed, or exhibit criminal tendencies, or channel the aggressive traits into a socially acceptable enterprise such as coaching college football.
THE PRIMARY ROLE OF HEREDITY
To Eysenck, traits
and dimensions are determined primarily by heredity, although the research
evidence shows a stronger genetic component for extraversion and neuroticism
than for psychoticism. Eysenck did not rule out environmental and situational
influences on personality, such as family interactions in childhood, but he
believed their effects on personality were limited.
His research
design involved comparisons of identical (monozygotic) and fraternal
(dizygotic) twins. The studies showed that identical twins are more alike in
their personalities than are fraternal twins, even when the identical twins
were reared by different parents in different environments during childhood.
Studies of adopted children demonstrate that their personalities bear a greater
similarity to the personalities of their biological parents than of their
adoptive parents, even when the children had no contact with their biological
parents. This is additional support for Eysenck’s idea that personality owes
more to our genetic inheritance than to our environment.
Cross-cultural
research demonstrates that Eysenck’s three personality dimensions have been
found consistently in more than 35 nations in America, Europe, Australia, azia
and Africa. The confirmation of the same three personality dimensions in
diverse cultures is further evidence for the primacy of inherited factors in
the shaping of personality.
FACTORS INFLUENCING PERSONALITY
The factors affecting personality we will
consider in this section, emerge from the considerations of various theorist of
personality. Let us consider the following agents governing our personality.
The Genetic Factor
There is strong evidence that many
personality traits or dimensions are inherited. These include the Eysenck’s
dimensions of psychoticism, neuroticism, and extraversion.
This is one reason why the trait approach,
with its emphasis on the impact of heredity, remains vital today and may be the
fastest growing area of personality research. What remains to be determined is
precisely how many inherited factors, traits, or temperaments there are.
No matter what number of traits there may be,
however, not even the most ardent proponent of the genetics approach argues
that personality can be explained fully and totally by heredity. What we
inherit are dispositions, not destinies; tendencies, not certainties. Whether
our genetic predispositions are ever realised depends on social and
environmental conditions, particularly those of childhood.
The Environmental Factor
Every personality theorist acknowledges
the importance of the social environment. According to Adler that personality
is influenced by our birth order i.e. position in the family relative to our
siblings. We are exposed to varying parental and social situations as a
function of the extent of the age difference between siblings or whether we
have siblings at all. In Adler’s view, these different home environments can
result in different personalities.
The culture and time period in which we
are reared as well as the vastly different social environments to which boys
and girls are exposed as children show their effects on personality. Usually,
the female inferiority develops from the way girls are treated in a
male-dominated culture. She suggested that women raised in a matriarchal
culture might have higher self-esteem and different personality
characteristics.
Allport noted that although genetics
supplies the basic raw material of personality, it is the social environment
that shapes the material into the finished product. Cattell argued that
heredity is more important for some personality factors than for others but
that environmental factors ultimately influence every factor to some extent.
Erikson’s eight stages of psychosocial
development are innate, but the environment determines the ways in which those
genetically based stages are realised. He believed that social and historical
forces influence the formation of ego identity.
Maslow and Rogers contended that
self-actualisation was innate but recognized that environmental factors could
inhibit or promote the self-actualization need. Large-scale societal events
such as wars and economic recessions can restrict life choices and influence
the formation of self-identity. More ordinary life changes (becoming parents,
getting divorced, and changing jobs) can also affect personality.
Our jobs can also influence our
personality. High-status jobs are likely to increase our positive emotionality
(well-being, social closeness, and feelings of achievement) and decreased in
negative emotionality (aggressiveness, alienation, and stress). The researchers
concluded that “work experiences have the potential to modify basic personality
dispositions” (Roberts, Caspi, & Moffitt, 2003, p. 13).
Finally, ethnic background and whether we
are part of a minority or majority culture, helps determine personality.
members of minority groups develop an ethnic identity as well as an ego
identity and have to adapt to both cultures. The success of this adaptation
affects personality and psychological health. For all these reasons, then, it
is impossible to deny the impact of diverse environmental and social forces on personality.
The most significant way in which that impact is exerted is through learning.
The Learning Factor
Evidence is overwhelming that learning
plays a major role in influencing virtually every aspect of behaviour. All of
the social and environmental forces that shape personality do so by the
techniques of learning. Even inherited facets of personality can be modified,
disrupted, prevented, or allowed to flourish by the process of learning.
Skinner (based on earlier work by Watson
and Pavlov) taught us the value of positive reinforcement, successive
approximation, superstitious behaviour, and other learning variables in shaping
what others call personality, but which he described as simply an accumulation
of learned responses.
Many aspects of personality that have
scientific evidence to show that they are learned, such as need for achievement.
In addition, considerable research has documented that learning will influence
self-efficacy (Bandura), locus of control (Rotter), learned helplessness, and
optimism versus pessimism (Seligman). These concepts appear to be related to a
broader notion: level of control. People who believe they have control over
their lives are high in self-efficacy, have an internal locus of control, and
are not characterized by learned helplessness (which involves lack of control).
By whatever name self-efficacy, internal
locus of control, or optimism, control is determined by social and
environmental factors. It is learned in infancy and childhood, though it can
change later in life. specific parental behaviours can foster a child’s feeling
of being in control. Thus, the notion of control is a learned dimension of
personality for which parental behaviour is paramount.
The Parental Factor
Although Freud was the first theorist to
emphasise parental influences on the formation of personality, virtually every
theorist echoed his views. Recall Adler’s focus on the consequences for a child
who feels unwanted or rejected by his or her parents.
Such parental rejection can lead to
insecurity, leaving the person angry and deficient in self-esteem. Horney wrote
from her own experience about how lack of parental warmth and affection can
undermine a child’s security and result in feelings of helplessness.
There is a great deal of evidence showing
that children of parents who are described as authoritative (that is, warm but
firm in their child-rearing practices) are more competent and mature than
children of parents described as permissive, harsh, or indifferent. Researchers
have noted that “authoritative parenting is associated with a wide range of
psychological and social advantages in adolescence, just as it is in early and
middle childhood … the combination of parental responsiveness and demandingness
is consistently related to adolescent adjustment, school performance, and
psychosocial maturity”.
Considerable research also suggests that
praise from parents can promote a child’s sense of autonomy, realistic
standards and expectations, competence, and self-efficacy, and can enhance
intrinsic motivation to achieve. And just
as positive parental behaviours have positive effects on children, negative
parental behaviours have detrimental effects.
What happens when parents are not the primary
caregivers, that is, when parents share child-rearing responsibilities with day
care workers, friends, or family members while they work outside the home? In a
national longitudinal survey of more than 15,000 children ages 3 to 12, no
significant problems with behaviour or self-esteem were found when the mothers
took a job outside the home. The researcher concluded that caregiving by
someone other than the child’s mother had no negative impact on the variables
studied.
The Developmental Factor
Freud believed that personality was shaped and fixed by the age of 5 and that it was difficult thereafter to alter any aspect of it. We accept that the childhood years are crucial to personality formation, but it is also clear that personality continues to develop well beyond childhood, perhaps throughout the entire life span.
Theorists such as
Cattell, Allport, Erikson, and Murray viewed childhood as important but agreed
that personality could be modified in later years. Some theorists suggested that
personality development is ongoing in adolescence. Jung, Maslow, Erikson, and
Cattell noted middle age as a time of major personality change. The questions
concerning how long does our personality continue to change and grow, has
become a highly complex issue.
A study of 392 U.S. college students over 30 months
showed that they became more open, agreeable, and conscientious during that
time. The researchers noted, “These results are consistent with the notion that
personality changes more in early adulthood than after the age of 30. A study of 32,515 people ages 21–60, conducted
over the Internet, showed that conscientiousness and agreeableness increased
through early and middle adulthood. Conscientiousness increased most strongly
in the 20s; agreeableness increased most strongly during the 30s. A study of 921 people in New Zealand (ages 18–26)
showed that personality changes during those years demonstrated an increasing
level of psychological maturity.
What these studies confirm is that personality changes
as we grow into adolescence and early adulthood (a finding you may already have
observed in your own case). All such cultural and personal challenges leave
their mark on personality. One personality theorist has suggested that
personality can be described on three levels to explain its continuing
development in adulthood. These levels are dispositional traits, personal
concerns, and life narrative.
Dispositional
traits are inherited personality characteristics
found to remain stable and relatively unchanging from about age 30 on.
Personal
concerns refer to conscious feelings, plans, and
goals; for example, what we want, how we try to achieve it, and how we feel
about the people in our life. These feelings, plans, and goals change often
over the life span as a result of the diverse influences to which we are
exposed, such as the examples noted above. All of these situations can mean
changes in our feelings and intentions, yet the underlying dispositional traits
(such as our basic level of neuroticism or extraversion) with which we confront
these life situations may remain relatively unchanged.
Life
narrative, implies shaping
the self, attaining an identity, and finding a unified purpose in life. We are
constantly writing our life story, creating who we are and how we fit into the
world. Like personal concerns, the life narrative changes in response to social
and environmental demands. As adults, we add to and rewrite our narrative with
each stage of life and its differing needs, challenges, and opportunities. In
sum, then, this view holds that the underlying dispositional traits portion of
personality remains largely constant, while our conscious judgments about who
we are and who we would like to be are subject to change. That idea leads to
another factor the theorists have considered, that of consciousness.
The Consciousness Factor
Almost every personality theory we have
described deals explicitly or implicitly with conscious (cognitive) processes.
Even Freud and Jung, who focused on the unconscious, wrote of an ego or
conscious mind that perceives, thinks, feels, and remembers, enabling us to
interact with the real world. Through the ego, we are able to perceive stimuli
and later recall an image of them. Jung wrote about rational functioning,
making conscious judgments and evaluations of our experiences. Adler described
humans as conscious, rational beings capable of planning and directing the
course of our life. We formulate hopes, plans, and dreams and delay
gratification, and we consciously anticipate future events.
Allport believed that people who are not
neurotic will function in a conscious, rational way, aware and in control of
the forces that motivate them. Rogers thought people were primarily rational
beings, governed by a conscious perception of themselves and their world of
experience. Maslow also recognized the role of consciousness; he proposed
cognitive needs to know and to understand.
Kelly offered the most complete theory
based on cognitive factors. He argued persuasively that we form constructs
about our environment and about other people and that we make predictions
(anticipations) about them based on these constructs.
We formulate hypotheses about our social
world and test them against the reality of our experience. Based on everyday
evidence, it is difficult to deny that people construe, predict, and anticipate
how others will behave and then modify or adapt their behaviour accordingly.
Bandura credits people with the ability to
learn through example and vicarious reinforcement. To do so, we must be able to
anticipate and appreciate the consequences of the actions we observe in others.
We visualize or imagine the results of our reinforcements for behaving the same
way a model does, even though we may never have experienced those consequences
personally. Thus, there is widespread agreement that consciousness exists and
is an influence on personality. However, there is less agreement on the role or
even the existence of another influence, that of the unconscious.
The Unconscious Factor
Sigmund Freud introduced us to the world of the unconscious, that murky repository of our darkest fears and conflicts, forces that affect our conscious thoughts and behaviours. Psychologists have found some evidence to support Freud’s notion that thoughts and memories are repressed in the unconscious, and that repression (as well as other defence mechanisms) may operate at the unconscious level. Along with the cognitive movement in psychology has come not only an interest in conscious processes but also a renewed interest in the unconscious.
Recent research confirms that
the unconscious is a powerful force, perhaps even more pervasive in its
influence than Freud suggested. However, the modern depiction of the
unconscious is not the same as Freud’s view. Contemporary researchers focus on
unconscious cognitive processes and describe them as more rational than
emotional.
The rational unconscious is often referred
to as the nonconscious, to distinguish it from Freud’s unconscious, his
so-called dark cauldron of repressed wishes and desires.
One method for studying the nonconscious
involves subliminal activation, in which various stimuli are presented to
research participants below their level of conscious awareness.
Despite the research participants’ inability to perceive the stimuli, their
conscious processes and behaviours can be activated by those stimuli. The
obvious conclusion to be drawn from such research is that people can be
influenced by stimuli they can neither see nor hear.
Although the unconscious is an ongoing
research topic in psychology today, many of the personality theorists who
followed Freud ignored it. We may suggest that the emotional unconscious as
Freud envisioned it, the startling idea that signalled the formal beginning of
the study of personality, remains the least understood factor and still very
much what it was in Freud’s time, mysterious and inaccessible.
And so it is with the study of
personality, as we have seen throughout this book. There are diverse ways to
define and describe personality, and each theory we have discussed has
contributed another part of the answer to that vital question. We have spanned
the viewpoints from Sigmund Freud and his emphasis on anxiety, the unconscious,
and a life of fear and repression to positive psychology and the
characteristics of the happy personality. And we have covered many other ideas
in between, all of which have added to our understanding. But there are more
possibilities to consider, more to be learned, and no doubt new approaches will
be presented, new theories as yet unimagined.
Your formal coursework in this field may be
ending, but the attempt to understand personality is not. Although it is true
that enormous progress has been made in charting personality and detailing the
factors that shape it, the challenge for psychologists remains active and
dynamic, a thriving area of study. Perhaps the question, what is personality,
is the most important of all, for it reflects the attempt to understand ourselves.
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