Chapter nine

CHAPTER NINE
OUTLINE

I.Gordon Allport

A. The Life of Allport

1.Gordon Allport reports being isolated from children and did not fit in with his older three brothers as a child. However, little more is revealed by him about his childhood besides having a father who was a physician and a mother who had rigid spiritual beliefs. Allport was later to believe that childhood events do not affect normally healthy adults. Gordon Allport felt inferior to others on into adulthood, even when he became a noted psychologist. Allport attended Harvard and was active as a volunteer for a boy’s club, a group of factory workers, and a contingent of foreign students.

2.Allport met Freud in Vienna while visiting one of his brothers. Freud took the meeting as an opportunity to offer Allport a quick analysis for Allport. Allport resented this intrusion by Freud and later believed that psychoanalysis probed too deeply into the unconscious. Allport’s theory would reflect this opinion in his own theory of personality which he believed we should pay more attention to conscious or visible motivations.

3.Allport completed his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1922 and studied further in Germany and England. Gordon Allport spent forty years teaching at Harvard and received many distinguished honors for his contributions to the field of psychology.

B.The Nature of Personality

1.Allport gave this definition of personality, “Personality is the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine…characteristic behavior and thought,” according to the text. Allport believed that heredity provides the personality with physique, intelligence and temperament; which can be shaped, expanded, or limited by the conditions of our environment. Our genetic endowment then works with our social environment, where no two people are exactly alike. Therefore, Allport concluded that to study personality, psychology must deal with the individual. Allport found no continuum of personality between childhood and adulthood, so the adult personality is not restrained by childhood experiences.

C.Personality Traits

1.According to Allport, traits are consistent enduring ways of reacting to our environment. Traits are real and exist within ourselves. Traits determine or cause behavior and can be demonstrated empirically. Traits are interrelated, and may overlap, even though they represent different characteristics. Traits can also vary by the situation. Allport was to re-lable traits as personal dispositions in three categories. A cardinal trait was described by Allport as a “ruling passion.” Everyone may possess central traits such as, aggressiveness, self-pity, and cynicism. The least influential individual traits are secondary traits, such as preferences for a particular food or for certain kinds of music.

2.Habits have a more limited impact than traits and personal dispositions because they are relatively inflexible and involve a specific response to a specific stimuli. Sometimes the concepts of attitudes and traits can be closely related. However an attitude has some specific object of reference and can be positive or negative. An attitude involves a judgement or evaluation.

D.Motivation: The Functional Autonomy of Motives

1.Allport believed that whatever happened in the past such as during toilet training, schooling, or some other childhood crisis; this no longer current and does not explain adult behavior unless it exists as a current motivating force. Allport’s concept of functional autonomy proposes that the motives of mature, emotionally healthy adults are not functionally connected to the prior experiences in which they initially appeared. Perseverative functional autonomy is concerned with such behaviors as addictions and repetitive physical actions such as habitual ways of performing some everyday task.

2.Allport considered propriate functional autonomy more important than perseverative functional autonomy and is essential to the understanding of adult motivation. Out propriate functioning is an organizing process that maintains our sense of self. This determines how we perceive our world, what we remember from our experiences, and how our thoughts are directed. This is an organizing process that includes organizing, mastery and competence, and patterning which describes a striving for consistency and integration of the personality.

E.Personality Development in Childhood

1.Allport proposed seven stages of the nature and development of the proprium from infancy through adolescence. The infant begins to emerge, without the proprium; with no awareness of self. Allport described infants as pleasure seeking, destructive, selfish, impatient, and dependent. They are simply driven by reflexes to reduce tension and maximize pleasure. During the first three stages from infancy to age four, Allport referred to as a “bodily me.”

2.Children gain self-identity when they learn their name and self-esteem develops when they discover that they can accomplish things on their own. The extension-of-self stage involves the growing awareness of objects and people in the environment and the identification of them as belonging to the child. The self-extension and self-image stage typically occur between the ages of 4 and 6. The self as rational stage occurs between ages 6 and 12 and the propriate striving stage follows, when adolescents begin to formulate plans and goals for the future. Parent-child interaction is vitally important throughout the stages of development of the proprium.

F.The Healthy Adult Personality

1.We change from a biologically dominated organism infancy to a mature psychological organism in adulthood. In adulthood, we are no longer dominated by childhood drives. Allport described six criteria for the normal, mature, emotionally healthy, adult personality: The mature adult (A) extends their self to people and to activities beyond themselves and then (B) relates warmly to other people. A mature adult’s self-acceptance (C) helps to achieve emotional security, holds a (D) realistic view of life, (E) has a sense of humor and self-objectification, and (F) subscribes to a unifying philosophy of life.

G.Assessment in Allport’s Theory

1.Allport listed eleven major methods for assessment and relied on the personal-document technique which involves examining diaries, autobiographies, letters, literary compositions, and other samples of a person’s written or spoken records to determine the number and kinds of personality traits. Allport and two others developed an objective self-report assessment called the Study of Values, according to the text. Allport believed that everyone possesses some degree of each type of value but one or two will be dominant in the personality.

H.Research in Allport’s Theory

1.Allport opposed the use of case studies and projective techniques with emotionally disturbed persons and opted for the study of emotionally healthy persons. Allport favored the ideographic approach-the study of the individual case-as indicated by personal documents. However, Allport did apply the nomothetic method with his use of psychological tests like the Study of Values. Allport conducted research on expressive behavior, which is described as behavior that expresses our personality traits. With coping behavior, Allport identified a behavior orientation that has a specific purpose and is consciously planned and carried out. Expressive behavior is spontaneous, difficult to change, has no specific purpose, and is usually displayed without awareness. Considerable research and experimental work on expressive behavior has become popular today. This research has shown that personality can be assessed from audiotapes, films, and videotapes. Reliable research has been done with expressive behaviors linked to specific traits. Studies have shown that observers can accurately assess personality factors such as anxiety from watching brief films of a person or form impressions of strangers by photographs. In further research findings, Type A behavior patterns can be discerned from Type B behavior by their expressions of disgust, glaring, grimacing, and scowling. However, cultural differences have been found in the study of facial expressions and personality between Chinese infants who showed consistently less facial expression than American infants.