Clinical Mental Health Counseling Paper Archive

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...

This discussion takes observational learning and applies it to a real-world situation. The author will discuss a group of people rather than one person. This author believes observational learning is one that has high potential applications and does not lack in literature or research. Friedman and Schustack (2016) explained that Bandura expanded the scope of the theory of observational learning, which is also known as vicarious learning, to encompass the notion of people learning simply by watching others perform a behavior and without needing to perform it themselves. Later research would explain that observational learning can be considered as motivational learning whether it is done consciously or unconsciously but a skill or behavior will be better cemented in persons, regardless of age, when they too perform the observed act. Ashuri, Dvir-Gvisman, and Halpern (2018) researched how observational learning affects personal self-disclosure on social networking websites. ...

            Locus of Control (LOC) relates to a person attributing events internally or externally to  themselves. An individual with an internal LOC would believe their behavior or reactions have a direct impact on their lives, the events occurring in their lives and their future. In other words, good things happen because the person behaves in a right way according to their standards and they are goal oriented by nature (Friedman & Schustack, 2016).  Internally focused individuals tend to be achievement and goal oriented. A good marriage or promotion is the result of hard work, not good luck or fate. When negative things occur to them, they are more likely to examine the situation and learn from it and endeavor to overcome it. For example, receiving a mediocre or low grade on an exam is less likely to be seen as the instructor being biased or grading unfairly but more likely determined that they need to stud...

           Observational learning is also known as vicarious learning or learning through modeling. This occurs when a person learns through observation without direct reinforcement or punishment of behavior, i.e., vicariously (Friedman & Schustack, 2016; Nicholle, Symmonds, & Dolan, 2011).            Bandura postulated that vicarious learning is dependent upon the positive or negative consequences of modeled behavior as well as possible anticipated consequences of the behavior which he termed outcome expectancy. If the initial behavior observed is neither rewarded nor punished, but there is a strict rule in place against the behavior, it is less likely the behavior will be imitated. This is because Bandura explains that “people will not mindlessly copy the behavior of others, but rather they consciously decide whether or not to perform a behavior that is learned by observation (Friedman & Schustack, 2016, pp.16...