Clinical Mental Health Counseling Paper Archive

While the topic of romance and love has been at the root of man’s lament, it is still one that’s source eludes clear definition. Understanding romantic attachment through personality psychology might have saved a lot of poets some heartache.   A neo-analytical approach to explaining love, such that of Erik Erikson, sees love as the result of a healthy childhood where they are not stuck at the sixth stage of psychosocial developmental (Friedman & Schustack, 2016). In later years, a modern psychologist, Philip Shaver, and his associates explained that the nature of one’s childhood attachment is reflected in their adult relationships and how they perceive romantic attachment. Shaver explained there are three styles of romantic attachments, (a) secure lovers who easily form close relationships, (b) avoidant lovers who have trouble trusting others and feel uncomfortable being close and vulnerable, and (c) anxious-ambivalent lovers who want to have close relationships but are insecu...

The subject of aggression and hate has always been one to inspire passionate discussion and opinions. The etiology of hostility can be explained by studying an individual’s personality from different schools of thought or through various personality theories. However, there are many possible explanations for an individual’s or a group’s aggression and hatred. Two Views to Explain Aggression and Hatred It can be a general inference that some aggressive or hateful behaviors are learned from those an individual is surrounded with or from their culture. The learning theory suggests a great deal of a child’s behavior is learned through modeled behavior, observed behavior, imitation, and vicarious learning (Friendman & Schustack, 2016). Consider the cycle of abuse as it occurs in domestic settings, domestic violence is perpetuated through generations. A husband hits his wife and/or his children. If the wife stays with her husband, it is a tacit expression of condoning the behavio...

Today, cultural constructs rarely play a role in mainstream personality psychology. McCrae (2000) writes that old theories such as psychological anthropology that model the fundamental relationship between an individual and the larger society have not kept pace with the development of mainstream personality psychology. The author also explains the importance of understanding how culture is related to human nature and common sense and both will continue to be adaptive. McCrae (2002) also identifies three levels that might be labeled as transcultural, intercultural and intracultural understandings. He strongly believes that trait psychology should be the basis for new personality and culture studies.  One approach to understanding masculinity and femininity is through the trait psychology. Friedman and Schustack (2016) explain that while many psychologists agree these two terms are important traits, they have not in fact been properly identified and nobody has properly defined th...

Culture is a broad term encompassing many elements of a society. Those may include traditions, religions, languages, and other common understandings. Concisely described, culture is the visible manifestation of collective human intellectual achievement. The individual personality emerges from within a cultural context as a unique person, often expressing various aspects of their personality dependent on the context and salient cues ( Lewis-Fernández, & Kleinman, 1994). The relationship between culture and personality has been the subject of controversy for many years. Understanding the diverse cultures of the world need to central to understanding personality development before psychopathology, and the field of psychology can be a force for positive social change, at the roots of society – clinicians only heal social symptoms such as growing divorce rates, increased teenage aggression and shootings, or family degradation ( Lewis-Fernández, & Kleinman, 1994). Ties Between...

There are quite a few broad areas of research that researchers to believe behavioral and personality characteristics are biologically determined; this author will discuss only two of them. Hormone research points to the effects of androgen on the physical development of the fetus, positing the exposure to this hormone during prenatal stages might also affect personality in gender-specific manners. Friedman and Schustack (2016) share two kinds of evidence to support this, (a) experimental data from animal studies and (b) studies of humans who have experienced prenatal hormonal anomalies. Furthermore, hormone research shows the connection between prenatal hormones and pubescent hormones and their effects on personality characteristics. Turner’s Syndrome is one example that may be considered as evidence for genetic or hormonal influences on personality; a result of prenatal abnormalities. Nicholson (1993) and Parsons (1980) explain that Turner’s Syndrome is diagnosed when a child is b...

Friedman and Schustack (2016) discuss the concept of a self-healing personality stems from taking various schools of thought and incorporating them together. These personalities were defined by clusters of emotional styles and traits attributed to promoting health and equilibrium in an individual. The first is an active personality that is the busy, zealous, hard-working and confident individual while the second is a calm and more relaxed personality that can also be seen as active, alert involved and responsive as the first but more relaxed and calm, more philosophical. The first or more active self-healing personality type function best in a stressful environment and are highly extroverted. Individuals possessing a relaxed and healthy personality best function in an environment with low stress by portraying a philosophical reaction and calmness. Each of the two personality types has their own constructs, thresholds, and definitions for stress and their reaction to them. Link B...

Mischel’s Observations on Personality Walter Mischel is considered to have an interactionist approach to personality science. An interactionist believes a person’s behavior varies depending on the situation they are presented; this approach makes studying personality regarding broad traits difficult at best. However, by the time Mischel published his claims, it was well accepted by personality psychologists that situations do influence behaviors. Mischel’s opinion looked at the size of the relation between an individual’s behavior across a variety of situation and the degree of behavioral variance in them (Friedman & Schustack, 2016). Mischel’s Argument The foundation of Mischel’s argument is on “how well could we predict people’s behavior knowing something about their traits, and just how consistent is personalty-based behavior across differing situations?” (Friedman & Schustack, 2016, p. 238). In essence, Mischel viewed personalty as an invalid construct to accurat...

Humanistic and Existential Approach to Free Will One approach to personality is through the humanistic and existential perspectives and it is based on a quality versus quantity view of life. Seeking a reason for being and a meaning for life to become self-actualizing are the hallmarks of this perspective. The humanistic thought is positive and spiritual while the existentialists can be bleak. However, both emphasize the individual owns their existence and within the constraints of their situation they can choose through exercising free will to make the most of it or subsist. The humanistic/existential approach does not ignore that individuals have responses to drives, rewards, and punishments, however, it extends motivation to positive actualized fulfillment. Self-determination represents “decision(s) independent of external constraints but in accordance with the inner motives and goals of the actor” (Wilks & Ratheal, 2010). This approach posits that individuals strive t...

What is positive psychology? The culturally perceived criteria for happiness stems from the hypothesized perspective of individual fulfillment for the collective agreement of the definition of happiness. In other words, if an individual is seen to have "good food to eat, a safe place to live, good friends, good health, and a family filled with love... (Friedman & Schustack, 2016)" then they have a good quality of life and should be considered happy.  These six factors emerge in many different cultures as the definition of living a good life. However, for a psychologist, this does not always mean the individual is leading a happy life. Thus, the search for the definition of personal or individual happiness has lead Edward Diener to coin the term subjective well-being (as cited in Friedman & Schustack, 2016, p. 222). The question arose, "What makes an individual happy if it isn't wealth, space and freedom?" The driving question in the pursuit of sub...

Personality Trait Theory in the Marriage Market One of the popular uses of research in personality traits has been for the matrimonial industry, sometimes referred to as the “marriage market” or the “dating scene” where people are reduced to aggregated data meant to sort their personalities in categories and match them with others in similar categories. Friedman and Schustack (2016) aptly explained Carl Jung’s work on neo-analytic aspects of personality helped launch further research into introversion and extroversion for Hans Eysenks and further when Allport created the personality trait categorization system or lexicon and Cattel further enhanced this by grouping, rating and “factor analyzing” the thousands of trait adjectives.   Dupuy and Galichon (2014) discuss how personality traits are aggregated and used in the marriage market. They posit that sorting is not unidimensional, individuals face important trade-offs and that level of education explains a greater level of a...

Psychogenic Needs Friedman and Schustack (2016) discuss a different approach to personality assessment as seen from Henry Murray’s perspective, who believes an individual’s personality develops through satisfying psychogenic needs. These needs are inspired by motives which are “internal psychobiological forces that help induce particular behavior patterns toward a goal (Friedman & Schustack, 2016).”  The term “need” refers to an individual’s readiness to respond to certain situations under different conditions. Meeting many of these needs are easily understood by their labels such as achievement, recognition or rejection; others, require a little more definition. Three Needs The long list of psychogenic needs has been subject to interpretation and the list of names has varied over the years depending on the time frame and the authors. Although many of the psychogenic needs have not been researched enough or find support for their individualistic incarnations, many of the...

While there are many approaches to analyzing personality, the field of study continues to see growth as humans continue to be presented with new avenues that challenge and shape behavior and our understanding of personality . Some theories such as “The Big Five” is research driven (Friedman & Schustack, 2016); however, this author believes such research springs from foundational theories and any further research will draw on historically posited knowledge. Friedman and Schustack (2016) explain that one of the approaches to analyzing personalities is a contemporary trait approach which requires an assumption that “an individual’s consistent reaction patterns can be predicted from knowing his or her core personality traits (Friedman & Schustack, 2016).” This approach to understanding and labeling a personality uses “basic and limited sets of adjectives or adjective dimensions to describe and scale individuals (Friedman & Schustack, 2016).” However, just looking at a dic...