Psychology Chapter on Personality

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He accurately predicted that Hitler would commit suicide rather than be taken alive; Murray’s analysis of Hitler was the first “offender profil” and it has served as a model for modern criminal profiling.

The aspect of Murray’s research that has had the most impact on contemporary personality psychology is his approach to motivation. He believed that our motives are largely unknown to us.

Having this in mind, since researchers couldn’t then simply ask people to say what it is they want; Murray along with Christina Morgan developed the Thematic Appreciation Test (TAT)

TAT: A person looks at an ambiguous picture and writes or tells a story about what is going on in the scene.

The scoring procedures involve content analysis a procedure in which a psychologist takes the person’s story and codes it for different images, words and so forth

Murray found that there were 22 different unconscious needs, three have been the focus of most current research:

- Need for achievement: An enduring concern for attaining excellence and overcoming obstacles

- Need for Affiliation: An enduring concern for establishing and maintaining interpersonal connections

- Need for Power: An enduring concern for having impact on the social world

The Life Story Approach to Identity

Dan McAdams followed the life story approach to identity

His work centers on the idea that each of us has a unique life story, representing our memories of what makes us who we are; this life story is a constantly changing narrative that provides us with a sense of coherence; our life story is our very own identity.

He introduced the concept of intimacy motive: An enduring concern for warm interpersonal encounters for their own sake ; it’s revealed in the warm, positive interpersonal imagery in the stories people tell; it has been shown to relate to positive outcomes

Other personality psychologists have relied on narrative accounts of experiences as a means of understanding how individuals create meaning in life events; they search for the deeper meaning in documents that cannot be revealed through tests

Some personality psychologists use the life story approach to understand individual lives.

Psychobiography: Type of inquiry in which personality psychologists attempt to apply personality theory to one person’s life. ( Erik Erikson’s description of Gandhi’s life in Chapter 2)

EVALUATING THE PERSONOLOGICAL AND LIFE STORY PERSPECTIVES

Although studying individuals through narratives and personal interviews provides and extraordinary rich opportunity for the researcher, these studies are difficult and time-consuming:

- Turning those personal stories into scientific data means transforming them into numbers and that process involves extensive coding and content analysis

- For those studies to be considered, they have to tell us something we couldn’t find out in much easier ways

- Psychobiographical inquiries are prone to the biases of the scholars who conduct them and may not serve the scientific goal of generalizability

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