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(Answer to Q. 1) ANS: One theorist suggested that personality continues to develop over time on three levels: dispositional traits, personal concerns, and life narrative (McAdams, 1994).
Dispositional traits are inherited traits of the kind discussed by McCrae and Costa, those characteristics found to remain stable and relatively unchanging from age 30 on.
Personal concerns refer to conscious feelings, plans, and goals; what we want, how we try to achieve it, and how we feel about the people in our lives. These may change often over the life span as a result of the diverse situations and influences to which we are exposed. Although these situations can alter our feelings and intentions, our underlying dispositional traits (such as our basic level of neuroticism or extraversion) with which we confront these life situations may remain relatively stable.
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 situations. As adults we may adjust our narrative to adapt to each stage of life and its needs, challenges, and opportunities.
In sum, then, this view holds that the underlying dispositional traits of personality remain largely constant, while our conscious judgments about who we are and who we would like to be are subject to change.
(Answer to Q. 2) ANS: Students' answers will vary.
Although Freud was the first theorist to emphasize parental influences on the formation of personality, virtually every theorist thereafter has echoed his views to some degree.
There are various examples of how parental behaviors can determine, or undermine, specific aspects of personality, such as self-efficacy, locus of control, learned helplessness or optimism, and subjective well-being. Parental behaviors can influence primarily inherited traits such as sensation seeking.
A study of adolescents in Singapore found that those whose parents were authoritative had greater confidence in their abilities and were better adjusted socially than those whose parents were authoritarian (strict, harsh, and demanding obedience) (Ang, 2006). A large-scale analysis of parentchild relationships found clear evidence that parents who were high in extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to new experience behaved in more warm and consistent ways toward their children than parents who scored low on those factors.
Parents in Arab cultures tend to be more authoritarian than authoritative. A study of mothers who had immigrated with their children to Canada showed that the women from collectivist cultures such as Egypt, Iran, India, and Pakistan were more authoritarian than women from individualistic countries in Western Europe (Rudy & Grusec, 2006).
Another study found that mothers characterized by negative emotions and disagreeableness had children who scored higher in defiance, anger, disobedience, and other behavior problems than did mothers who did not exhibit negative emotional qualities (Kochanska, Clark, & Goldman, 1997).
(Answer to Q. 3) ANS: Environmental influences continue to affect our behavior and personality throughout our life.
Adler spoke of the impact of birth order, arguing that personality is influenced by our position in the family relative to our siblings. We are exposed to different parental and social problems and challenges as a function of the age difference between our siblings, or whether we have siblings at all. In Adler's view, these different home environments can result in different personalities.
Horney believed that the culture in which we grow up can produce different effects, such as those she found in the different kinds of neuroses exhibited by her German and her American patients. She also pointed out the vastly different social environments to which boys and girls are exposed as children. She spoke of female inferiority developing 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 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 of his 16 personality factors than for others, but environmental influences will ultimately affect 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 realized. He believed that social and historical forces influence the formation of ego identity.
(Answer to Q. 4) ANS: F
FEEDBACK: Most aspects of personality remain mysterious, and some are still not fully accessible. We have gone through diverse ways of defining and describing personality, and each theory we have discussed has contributed another part of the answer to that vital question of what is personality.
(Answer to Q. 5) ANS: T
FEEDBACK: A meta-analysis of 152 longitudinal studies involving more than 55,000 people showed a high level of consistency in personality traits at all ages. According to these findings, traits are consistent over the life span, reaching the highest level after age 50.
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