Trait Theory of Personality

The Trait Theory of Personality suggests that individual personalities are composed of broad dispositions. The primary focus of the trait theory of personality is to identify and measure individual personality characteristics. A trait is thought of a stable characteristic that causes individuals to behave in a certain manner.

Cardinal Traits are traits that hold significant dominance over a person's personality, to the point that the individual becomes known for these traits. They are rare and develop later in life, and take over the individual's personality. Central Traits are general characteristics that form the base of one's personality. Although they are not as dominant as Cardinal Traits, they are a mayor characteristic for a person. They are the characteristics you might use to describe an individual with, such as intelligent, frank, serious or honest. Secondary Traits are related to the attitudes and preferences of an individual. They usually appear in certain situations and under specific circumstances. The differences between these traits implies how much power a trait holds over an individual. The most common criticisms to the trait theory are that we cannot use it to predict one's future behavior, and its role holds no explanation of a personality's development, and does not consider the change of negative aspects of a trait. Hence, without understanding how a trait develops, we cannot possibly know how to change it, and change our behavior.

On the other hand we have the Five Factor Model of Personality. It claims that much of what we need to know about an individual's personality can be captured by their standing on the five measurable personality factors or traits. The five factors of this model are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Openness to experience is considered in the means of intuitive and curious vs. consistent and cautious. Typically individuals that score low on the scale are considered  to be down to earth and practical. They hold traditional beliefs and are sometimes described as "plain and straight forward". On the other hand, high scorers are considered to be imaginative and creative, open to experience and sensitive to beauty.

Conscientiousness is considered to hold efficient and organized vs. easygoing and careless. Low scorers are said to be easygoing, unreliable and sloppy. They are described as spontaneous and care free. High scorers are considered organized, tidy and striving. They are self disciplined, dutiful and aim for achievement. Extroversion is the scale between people who are outgoing and energetic, compared to those who are solitary and reserved. People that score low on this scale are reserved, serious and passive. They are often described as "low-key" and deliberate. On the other end, high scorers are usually outgoing, active and sociable. They are engaged in the external world and enthusiastic. Agreeableness considers the tendency to be compassionate and cooperative. Low scorers are hostile, selfish and cold. They are considered to hold self interest over getting along with others, and are less likely to extend themselves to other people. Individuals with high scores are said to be kind, trusting, warm and altruistic. They value getting along with others and hold an optimistic view on human nature. The last trait is neuroticism, which measures how likely you are to experience negative emotions. People who score low  are relaxed and even tempered. They are said to be less likely to get upset, calm and emotionally stable. High scorers are considered emotional, moody and impulsive. They are more susceptible to stress, and their negative mood lasts for a longer time. This scale represents two extremes, and most people fall somewhere in between the two polar ends of each dimension.  Two strengths of McCrae and Costa's five factor model of personality is their objectivity and easy use and understanding. McCrae and his colleagues have also found that the big five traits are remarkably universal. One study that looked at people from more then fifty different cultures found that the theories dimensions could be accurately used to describe the participant's personality. Another food trail of the big five is that it provides an easy continuum with a great deal of information with regards to one's personality, interactions, and beliefs about their self as well as the world.

Stereotyping

The "stereotype threat" is a negative stereotype, and its effects on performance. This is an example of the performance impairment that results when individuals asked to carry out an task are made aware of a negative stereotype held against them regarding their group's ability to preform well in that task. It is scary how even with the slightest manipulation we can find proof for this theory. For example, if you simply tell female participants, before they take a math test, that males usually do better in math, then this will lead to deterioration of female performance in the test. Or if you make older participants aware of their age, they will perform significantly worse on their memory tests, then members of the same age who haven't been reminded of this internal stereotype. Any strong stereotype category that a person belongs to, such as sex, age, or race is susceptible to negative, but also positive stereotype influence. It was shown that positive stereotype reinforcement may be just as powerful as any negative threat. If you invoke a positive stereotype, such as college students are good at math, or older people have more experience, the targeted groups mentioned above can actually better scores then they normally would.  Researchers have determined that stereotypes can have an huge impact on those that they target. It is not anymore about the feeling, not just harmless words. The power of a stereotype is so strong that it can overwhelm many of our traits,  which then results in the saying: you're only as good as you expect to be.

Social Identity Theory

The videos we watched in class showed how in 1968, Jane Elliott, a teacher in a small, all-white Iowa town, divided her third-grade class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups and gave them a daring lesson in discrimination. Most of the children in the Class Divided exercise have been friends, playing around on the playground and getting along well.  The children accepted the views that their teacher gave them, that blue eyed people were superior then brown eyed people. This way, groups of power differences were created, and the class was split in half. Within minutes, the blue eyed kids started to work with this new fact, and discriminate. The children started calling the out-group "brown eyes" as an insult. They were teasing them, separating from them, and suggesting that if the brown eyed people get out of hand, to use a ruler to tame them. The effect was real. During recces, one of the brown eyed children felt so much hurt, and so put down by being in the worse group, that he hit one of his classmates - a kid he was probably a best friend with the day before. This exercise teaches us many lessons. It shows how hurtful, and real life prejudice and discrimination are, but it also shows many interesting psychological aspects of our behavior. The social identity theory as well as minimal group paradigm help explain what actually happened. The children were very easily convinced of their status. Their in-group - "we"- and their out-group - "them"- were clearly stated, and reacted upon. The blue eyed kids were the in-group, believing that they are similar to each-other, but that the out-group, the brown are kids, are all the same, and completely different form them. After all, they were told that blue eyed people were smarter, and better. After a while, the kids were pointing out these differences too. This resulted from their social comparison, and resulted in the outbursts that were clearly their way of showing positive distinctiveness. They pointed out the inter-group differentiation, and after a while, would clearly in-group favoritism. Everything the brown eyes did was because they were "stupid", and the brown eyes weren't fighting at all, they accepted their group and role. 

*This takes you through only one of the days of the experiment, the day when blue eyed people were on the top.

How to work a placebo.

Through the use of placebos, it is becoming clear that our mind has an even greater influence on our daily lives then we thought, influencing not only our perceptions, but also our well- being. The placebo, which is Latin for "to please", is usually thought of as a sugar-pill, that is given under the impression of being a medication thought to treat an ailment. The use of placebos has shown us that the mind has tremendous potential to induce physiological changes in our body based solely on our perceptions. For example, if we swallow a sugar pill thinking that it is Advil, we may actually physically feel fewer symptoms of headache or other pain, as a result of our mind's perception. A placebo is a substance or a procedure that activity has no effect on the condition being treated. When we use a placebo, to cure for an example, it is not the placebo that causes the effect. The consequence of  using it are very real physical responses created by our mind, and generating very real benefit or result. The placebo effect is today seen as an important part of the healing process. Although some ethical questions are asked on this subject, in my opinion it is a natural way for you to heal. Would you rather be filled with chemicals and and drugs, or heal with the power of your mind? A placebo offers, in most cases, the therapeutic effect, without the risk of negative side effects. I think it is more ethical then most things out there, and that healing the patient in any way, is healing. And many cases have been found where medicine did not help, but a placebo did. It has power. The ethics issue was probably created by drug companies, who would be more than happy to get rid of the idea of the placebo effect. However, the word is out and more and more incredible stories are being shared about the power to heal ourselves.  It’s all in what we believe.

Here is a summary of a placebo:

Our brain anticipates outcomes, and anticipation produces those outcomes. The placebo effect is basically a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it follows the patterns predicted, as if the brain was indeed, producing its own desired outcomes. Researchers have found the factors that we should play up on.
• Placebos follow the same dose-response curve as real medicines. Two pills give more relief than one, and a larger capsule is better than a smaller one.
• Placebo injections do more than placebo pills.
• Substances that actually treat one condition but are used as a placebo for another have a greater placebo effect that sugar pills.
• The greater the pain, the greater the placebo effect. It's as if the more relief we desire, the more we attain.
• You don't have to be sick for a placebo to work. Placebo stimulants, placebo tranquilizers, even placebo alcohol produce predictable effects in healthy subjects.

 Nowadays, a placebo is mostly used in medical research, placebos are given as control treatments along with legitimate substances to measure it's the drugs actual effectiveness.  Placebos are mostly used to replace painkiller or in depression treatments.

A placebo is very effective - if you truly believe.             

The Placebo Effect.

 A placebo is a simulated or otherwise ineffective treatment for a disease or other medical condition intended to deceive the recipient. Sometimes patients given a placebo treatment will have a perceived or actual improvement in a medical condition, a phenomenon commonly called the placebo effect

An article titled Placebo Effect: How it works explained an experiment done to test the strength of placebos. They gathered 300 subjects with headaches, and divided them into three groups of 100.  The first group was given no treatment, or explanation. The second group was told that they are testing a super drug, notably better then and faster as a pain reliever, while they were actually given aspirin with codeine, a proven old school pain reliever. The third group was told the same thing, but instead they received placebo sugar pills. After an hour, 20 people of the first group said that their headaches were gone. In the second group, 90 said that they are cured - they have never had a better medicine. In the last, "placebo" group, 55 people did not have headaches anymore. Taking into consideration that in the treatment free group - group one- , headache pain ceased in 20 percent of subjects after one hour regardless, the results show that 35 percent of the subjects in the experiment stated that the sugar pill was just as much a miracle drug as the painkiller the members of the second group received. A sugar pill has no physiological action that will cure a headache, but the headache-free subjects in the third group provide evidence to the contrary.  This "cure" in the absence of any truly therapeutic agent is the placebo effect, and it's more than a curiosity. It's a direct result of brain action.. The placebo effect is not a deception or self-delusion. The people whose headaches disappear after ingestion of the sugar pill are not lying, cheating, simple-minded, or insane. Their pain disappears--and not because they consciously wish it to. "The human brain anticipates outcomes, and anticipation produces those outcomes. The placebo effect is self-fulfilling prophecy, and it follows the patterns you'd predict if the brain were, indeed, producing its own desired outcomes".  The physical changes are real. The placebo effect is self-fulfilling prophecy.

The article reveals many interesting research findings, such as the fact that placebos follow the same dose-response curve as real medicines. Two pills give more relief than one, and a larger capsule is better than a smaller one. Or the fact that the greater the pain, the greater the placebo effect. It's as if the more relief we desire, the more we attain.The article also raised an interesting relation of the placebo effect to the topic of overall perception. "The placebo effect is not a single phenomenon, but the result of the complex interplay of anatomical, biochemical, and psychological factors. The same can be said for all our perceptions, I suspect. We see, hear, taste, touch, and smell pretty much what we expect to."It is agreeable that this effect, just like our perception, is a trickery, and creates the world of our reality. What you truly believe in, is the truth for you. 

PTSD Treatments

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder can be helped. Today, a good amount of treatments are available for PTSD. This anxiety disorder may cause a lot of people to keep closed up, but therapy and counseling may actually be one of the best ways to improve their condition.Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, is one type of such counseling. In cognitive therapy, a therapist helps patients understand and change how they think about the trauma and its aftermath. The goal is to understand how certain thoughts about their trauma cause stress and make the symptoms worse. According to the National Institute of Mental Health  "Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a form of psychotherapy designed to help a person develop a more adaptive response to a fear" (NIMH-CBT). The NIMH states that "CBT is a blend of two therapies: cognitive therapy (CT) and behavioral therapy (BT)" (NIMHs-CBT). As a combination of the two, CBT emphasizes the important role of thinking in how we feel and what we do.Trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy, involves carefully and gradually “exposing” yourself to thoughts, feelings, and situations that remind you of the trauma. Therapy also involves identifying upsetting thoughts about the traumatic event–particularly thoughts that are distorted and irrational—and replacing them with more balanced picture.

Another way to help deal with severe anxiety and PTSD are medical drugs. Another possibly effective treatment are medications. For example, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which are a type of antidepressant medicine, may be used. These help people be less sad and worried. They appear to be helpful, and for some people they are very effective. SSRIs include citalopram (Celexa), fluoxetine (such as Prozac), paroxetine (Paxil), and sertraline (Zoloft). They often work, because chemicals in your brain affect the way you feel. For example, when you have depression you may not have enough of a chemical called serotonin. SSRIs raise the level of serotonin in your brain.

Medications are often used to help speed up another treatment that the patient is receiving,  and increase the efficiency in the overall response to a treatment. Often, medications are used as a way to help a patient calm down, so that they are able to go through therapy which will help them on a greater level.Medications, therefore, are often paired with psychological treatments for PTSD, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy. On their own, medications and psychotherapy may be effective; but by pairing them together, their effectiveness is maximized.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Selective nature of memory has often helped us thrive; our very survival may depend upon learning the lessons from life-threatening episodes, just like it did hundredths of years ago. However, our ability to selectively remember traumatic episodes can also harm us. Seven percent of the general population suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a form of an anxiety disorder. It usually occurs after you have been through a traumatic event, or events that are life threatening or devastating, bear strong negative emotions or cause intense fear.An interesting fact is that women are twice as likely as men to develop PTSD.
Virtually any trauma, defined as an event that is life-threatening or that severely effects the physical or emotional well-being of a person and causes intense fear, may cause PTSD. Such events often include either experiencing or witnessing a severe accident or physical injury. It can be divided into three main categories: 
Direct experience - such as military combat, kidnapping or a violent personal assault (sexual assault, physical attack, robbery, mugging etc.)
Witnessed situations - including the observing the serious injury or unnatural death of another person due to violent assault, or unexpectedly witnessing a dead body or body parts.
Learned events - meaning events that do not happen to you, and you do not witness, but are tragic to those around you. When you learn of a serious accident, or a serious injury experienced by a family member or close friend, even learning about the sudden death of a loved one.

Experienced any of the mentioned events? You might have PTSD if you develop the specific symptoms.
There are different levels of symptoms for traumatic disorders such as PTSD. Some basic symptoms include re-experiencing of the event, such as flashbacks or nightmares. A more serious step from this is avoidance and fear of anything that may resemble or remind them of the trauma. This also brings on lack of interest for life circumstances. Most striking  symptoms include hyperarousal, inability to sleep, and irritability all the time.



Although you might fall into some of the mentioned categories, do not be in distress as there are different levels for traumatic experiences. They include the following:

• Acute – when the duration of symptoms is shorter than 3 months.
• Chronic – when the symptoms last three months or longer.
• With Delayed Onset - between the traumatic event and the onset of the symptoms there is at least 6 month period.

Both memory and emotion relate to PTSD, as it is a highly negative and emotional experience that can cause you this disorder. It is important to face your memories, and overcome the emotions that stop you from living a normal life. This disorder also effects your memories and emotions of the future. Not only can it cause you to heavily distress your emotional state, it can also affect the formation of future memories. Research reveals the fact that people who have been exposed to extreme stress, and traumatic experiences sometimes have a smaller hippocampus, compared to people who have not been exposed to trauma. The hippocampus is a region of the brain that plays a very important role in memory. This is significant in understanding the effects of trauma in general and the impact of PTSD, specifically since the hippocampus is the part of the brain that is thought to have an important role in developing new memories about life events.