Personality Essays

Personality Essays Personality Essay Personality Essay While there are many different theories of personality, the first step is to understand exactly what is meant by the term personality. The word personality itself stems from the Latin word persona, which referred to a theatrical mask work by performers in order to either project different roles or disguise their identities. A brief definition would be that personality is made up of the characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviors that make a person unique. In addition to this, personality arises from within the individual and remains fairly consistent throughout life. Some other definitions of personality: Personality refers to individuals characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior, together with the psychological mechanisms hidden or not behind those patterns. This definition means that among their colleagues in other subfields of psychology, those psychologists who study personality have a unique mandate: to explain whole pers ons. (Funder, D. C. , 1997) Although no single definition is acceptable to all personality theorists, we can say that personality is a pattern of relatively permanent traits and unique characteristics that give both consistency and individuality to a persons behavior. (Feist and Feist, 2009) While there are many different theories of personality, the first step is to understand exactly what is meant by the term personality. The word personality itself stems from the Latin word persona, which referred to a theatrical mask work by performers in order to either project different roles or disguise their identities. A brief definition would be that personality is made up of the characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviors that make a person unique. In addition to this, personality arises from within the individual and remains fairly consistent throughout life. Some other definitions of personality: Personality refers to individuals characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior, together with the psychological mechanisms hidden or not behind those patterns. This definition means that among their colleagues in other subfields of psychology, those psychologists who study personality have a unique mandate: to explain whole persons. (Funder, D. C. , 1997) Although no single definition is acceptable to all personality theorists, we can say that personality is a pattern of relatively permanent traits and unique characteristics that give both consistency and individuality to a persons behavior. (Feist and Feist, 2009) These personality types are Sanguine Phlegmatic Choleric Melancholic Long ago, each of these types was associated with a dominant humor present in the body: sanguine – blood humor, phlegmatic – phlegm humor, choleric – yellow bile humor, melancholic – black bile humor. Additionally to that, the latest research shows that these four basic temperaments are associated with chemicals, like dopamine (for sanguine type), estrogen (for phlegmatic type), testosterone (for choleric type) and serotonin (for melancholic type). The Sanguine Type This type is characterized by spontaneity, optimism, enthusiasm, high energy, mental flexibility, novelty seeking, impulsiveness and curiosity. These traits are associated with specific genes in the dopamine system. These people often have very expressive faces and love using words like â€Å"adventure†, â€Å"energy†, â€Å"new†, â€Å"fun†, â€Å"active†, â€Å"travel† and similar. The Phlegmatic Type These people are mainly defined by their social skills, such as their ability to express themselves and read other people face expressions and body language. They do well at connecting facts and seeing â€Å"the big picture†. They are nurturing, sympathetic, agreeable and emotionally expressive. Some of these character traits are linked with estrogen that is present in both men and women. Physically you can recognize them by their smooth skin, full lips, round faces and small noses. Their favorite words are â€Å"passion†, â€Å"passionate†, â€Å"sensitive† and â€Å"sweet†. The Choleric Type This type is associated with testosterone, which is also present in men and women, but more so in men. These people are direct, focused, tough, analytical, logical and strategic. They have a great deal of courage and like to compete, often against each other. They often have square jaws, high cheekbones and high foreheads and love to use words like â€Å"intellect†, â€Å"ambition† and â€Å"challenge†. More  » The Melancholic Type Melancholics tend to be calm, loyal and orderly, just as their personality name sounds. They are cautious and conventional. These men and women inherited genes in the serotonin system and their favorite words are â€Å"family†, â€Å"loyal†, â€Å"respect†, â€Å"caring†, â€Å"values† and â€Å"moral†. Thorndikes theory of learning 1. Learning is incremental. [9] 2. Learning occurs automatically. [9] 3. All animals learn the same way. [9] 4. Law of effect- if an association is followed by a â€Å"satisfying state of affairs† it will be strengthened and if it is followed by an â€Å"annoying state of affairs â€Å" it will be weakened. 5. Thorndike’s law of exercise has two parts; the law of use and the law of disuse. . Law of use- the more often an association is used the stronger it becomes. [15] 2. Law of disuse- the longer an association is unused the weaker it becomes. [15] 6. Law of recency- the most recent response is most likely to reoccur. [15] 7. Multiple response- problem solving through trial and error. An animal will try multiple respo nses if the first response does not lead to a specific state of affairs. [15] 8. Set or attitude- animals are predisposed to act in a specific way. [15] 9. Prepotency of elements- a subject can filter out irrelevant aspects of a problem and focus and respond only to significant elements of a problem. [15] 10. Response by analogy- responses from a related or similar context may be used in a new context. [15] 11. Identical elements theory of transfer- This theory states that the extent to which information learned in one situation will transfer to another situation is determined by the similarity between the two situations. [9] The more similar the situations are, the greater the amount of information that will transfer. 9] Similarly, if the situations have nothing in common, information learned in one situation will not be of any value in the other situation. [9] 12. Associative shifting- it is possible to shift any response from occurring with one stimulus to occurring with another stimulus. [15] Associative shift maintains that a response is first made to situation A, then to AB, and then finally to B, thus shifting a response from one condition to another by associating it with that condition. [16] 13. Law of readiness- a quality in responses and connections that results in readiness to act. 16] Thorndike acknowledges that responses may differ in their readiness. [16] He claims that eating has a higher degree of readiness than vomiting, that weariness detracts from the readiness to play and increases the readiness to sleep. [16] Also, Thorndike argues that a low or negative status in respect to readiness is called unreadiness. [16] Behavior and learning are influenced by the readiness or unreadiness of responses, as well as by their strength. [16] 14. Identifiability- According to Thorndike, the identification or placement of a situation is a first response of the nervous system, which can recognize it. 16] Then connections may be made to one another or to another response, and these connections depend upon the original identification. [16] Therefore, a large amount of learning is made up of changes in the ident ifiability of situations. [16] Thorndike also believed that analysis might turn situations into compounds of features, such as the number of sides on a shape, to help the mind grasp and retain the situation, and increase their identifiability. [16] 15. Availability- The ease of getting a specific response. 16] For example, it would be easier for a person to learn to touch their nose or mouth than it would be for them to draw a line 5  inches long with their eyes closed. [16] Development of law of effect Thorndikes research focused on instrumental learning, which means that learning is developed from the organism doing something. For example, he placed a cat inside a wooden box. The cats used various methods trying to get out, however it does not work until it hits the lever. Afterwards, Thorndike tried placing the cat inside the wooden box again, this time, the cat is able to hit the lever quickly and succeeded to get out from the box. At first, Thorndike emphasized the importance of dissatisfaction stemming from failure as equal to the reward of satisfaction with success, though in his experiments and trials on humans he came to conclude that reward is a much more effective motivator than punishment. He also emphasized that the satisfaction must come immediately after the success, or the lesson would not sink in. [ Transfer of learning is the study of the dependency of human conduct, learning, or performance on prior experience. The notion was originally introduced as transfer of practice by Edward Thorndike and Robert S. Woodworth. [1] They explored how individuals would transfer learning in one context to another context that shared similar characteristics  Ã¢â‚¬â€œ or more formally how improvement in one mental function could influence another related one. Their theory implied that transfer of learning depends on the proportion to which the learning task and the transfer task are similar, or where identical elements are concerned in the influencing and influenced function, now known as identical element theory. Transfer research has since attracted much attention in numerous domains, producing a wealth of empirical findings and theoretical interpretations. However, there remains considerable controversy about how transfer of learning should be conceptualized and explained, what its probability occurrence is, what its relation is to learning in general, or whether it may be said to exist at all. 2] Most discussions of transfer to date can be developed from a common operational definition, describing it as the process and the effective extent to which past experiences (also referred to as the transfer source) affect learning and performance in a current novel situation (the transfer target). [3] This, however, is usually where the general consensus between various research approaches ends. There are a wide variety of viewpoints and theoretical frameworks apparent in the literature. For review purposes, these are categorized as follows: a taxonomical pproach to transfer research that usually intends to categorize transfer into different types; an application domain-driven approach by focusing on developments and contributions of different disciplines that have traditionally been interested in transfer; the examination of the psychological scope of transfer models with respect to the psychological functions or faculties that are being regarded; and a concept-driven evaluation, which reveals underlying relationships and differences between theoretical and empirical traditions. Do we really forget? Many people think that the human mind is too complex to explain, and memory is no exception. Even though vast amounts of research have been carried out into how we remember (and forget! ) things, nobody knows for sure the model on which human memory is based. There are, nonetheless, two main reasons for which psychologists think we forget information: You store information in your memory but are unable to remember it when you need to, but perhaps can at a later date. In this case, information is inaccessible The human memory simply forgets information, permenantly, and the physical traces of the memory disappear. In which case, information is unavailable Forgetting You can’t talk about remembering without mentioning its counterpart. It seems that as much as we do remember, we forget even more. Forgetting isn’t really all that bad, and is in actuality, a pretty natural phenomenon. Imagine if you remembered every minute detail of every minute or every hour, of every day during your entire life, no matter how good, bad, or insignificant. Now imagine trying to sift through it all for the important stuff like where you left your keys. There are many reasons we forget things and often these reasons overlap. Like in the example above, some information never makes it to LTM. Other times, the information gets there, but is lost before it can attach itself to our LTM. Other reasons include decay, which means that information that is not used for an extended period of time decays or fades away over time. It is possible that we are physiologically preprogrammed to eventually erase data that no longer appears pertinent to us. Failing to remember something doesn’t mean the information is gone forever though. Sometimes the information is there but for various reasons we can’t access it. This could be caused by distractions going on around us or possibly due to an error of association (e. g. , believing something about the data which is not correct causing you to attempt to retrieve information that is not there). There is also the phenomenon of repression, which means that we purposefully (albeit subconsciously) push a memory out of reach because we do not want to remember the associated feelings. This is often sited in cases where adults ‘forget’ incidences of sexual abuse when they were children. And finally, amnesia, which can be psychological or physiological in origin Memory Human memory, like memory in a computer, allows us to store information for later use. In order to do this, however, both the computer and we need to master three processes involved in memory. The first is called encoding; the process we use to transform information so that it can be stores. For a computer this means transferring data into 1’s and 0’s. For us, it means transforming the data into a meaningful form such as an association with an existing memory, an image, or a sound. Next is the actual storage, which simply means holding onto the information. For this to take place, the computer must physically write the 1’ and 0’s onto the hard drive. It is very similar for us because it means that a physiological change must occur for the memory to be stored. The final process is called retrieval, which is bringing the memory out of storage and reversing the process of encoding. In other words, return the information to a form similar to what we stored. The major difference between humans and computers in terms of memory has to do with how the information is stored. For the most part, computers have only two types; permanent storage and permanent deletion. Humans, on the other hand are more complex in that we have three distinct memory storage capabilities (not including permanent deletion). The first is   Sensory memory, referring to the information we receive through the senses. This memory is very brief lasting only as much as a few seconds.