User talk:Cgandolfo/sandbox

Personological System: Murray’s Theory of Personality
The personological system is the key element of [| Henry Murray's] theory of personality. This system emphasizes the richness of life of each person as well as the dynamic nature of the individual as a complex organism responding to a specific environment. One’s personality is the result of this dynamic nature. Murray viewed an individual's entire life as one unit. Although certain parts of a person's life can be studied through psychology, Murray noted that this studied episode is capricious, since it is only one part of the entire life unit. This importance of analysis of the entire life cycle is why Murray favored a narrative approach to studying personality. The personological system has been used as an approach for multiple academic disciplines: philosophy, humanism, biological chemistry, and societal and cultural studies. Henry Murray’s perspective on the nature of a human being is as follows: “a human being is a motile, discriminating, valuating, assimilating, adapting, integrating, differentiating and reproducing temporal unity within a changing environmental matrix.” Murray’s theory of personality has a psychoanalytic orientation. The chief business and aim of personology is the reconstruction of the individual's past life experiences in order to explain their present behavior. To study personality, Murray used free association and dream analysis to bring unconscious material to light.

Principles
There are five principles of personology. The first principle is that personality is rooted in the brain. Cerebral physiology governs all aspects of personality. The second principle is tension reduction. People act to reduce physiological and psychological tension to gain satisfaction. We do not strive to be tension-free because a tension-free existence is a source of distress. We need excitement, activity and movement. The ideal state of human nature involves always having tension to reduce. The third principle is that an individual's personality continues to develop over time and is influenced by all of the events that occur over a person’s lifetime. The fourth principle is that personality is not fixed and it can change and progress. Finally, the fifth principle is that every person is unique, however there are similarities among all people.

Needs and Motivations
An inherent part of the personological system are the individual’s needs/motivations. These are internal desires that function in interaction with the environment for an individual’s behavior. Although the origin of a person’s needs are internal, the environment can provoke them, again reflective of the personological system’s emphasis on the relationship between internal forces and one’s environment. This relationship is dependent on the perception of the environment, and an individual’s needs act as the force of the brain region that organizes this perception.

A comprehensive table of a list of Murray’s needs is found in Personality: Classic Theories and Modern Research:

Need	Description Affiliation	Need to be near and enjoyably reciprocate with another Autonomy	Need to be free and independent of others Dominance	Need to control or influence others Exhibition	Need to be seen and heard, to entertain and entice Harm-Avoidance	Need to avoid injury, take precautions Nurturance	Need to help, console, comfort, nurse the weak Order	Need for organization and neatness Play	Need for enjoyment and fun Sex	Need to for an erotic relationship Succorance	Need to be nursed, loved, controlled Understanding	Need to speculate, analyze, generalize

According to Murray, needs are a hypothetical concept. Each needs has a quantitative energy component as well as a qualitative directional component. Needs are dynamic, and are immediate results of one’s current situation (either internal or external). Therefore, needs only exists for a moment. However, needs succeed one another and, if similar to one another, create a pattern. These similar needs are labeled as class of a need, as described by the table above.

Environmental Press
According to Murray, environmental press is the push of the situation. These are directional forces on a person that arises from other people and events in the environment. It is an effect that can be exerted in a positive or negative direction from one subject to another. It often comes in form of either a threat for harm or a chance of benefit. An example is a student seeing his friends get good grades in school. This might be a press that inspires that student to work harder for better grades. With age and experience, an individual learns and remembers ways to react to similar environmental presses.

Themas
Themas are the combination of needs and presses typical for the individual, and can be seen in everyday life. Murray defines a thema as “the dynamical structure of a simple episode, a single creature-environment interaction.” An individual’s themas all together help to construct one’s identity. To determine one’s themas, Murray used his measurement of a Thematic Apperception Test (also referred to as a TAT). The purpose of the TAT is “diagnostic and differentiate one group from another by indicating the tendency or trend of the subjects of one group to attribute to or to project onto the characters in their protocol stories certain types of moods, attitudes, personality traits, and emotional states or qualities which the subjects of the other group did not attribute to or project onto the characters into their protocol stories.” In this test, the subject produces fantasies in response to pictures, which he is asked to regard as if they were illustrations in a story. Through the test, the dynamic case history becomes possible. The leading concepts include: need or instinct, press, thema, libidinal drives and their stages of development, abnormal adjustment as a result of fixation at a stage of development, ego-defense mechanisms and symptoms as an expression of failure to adjust adequately, complexes, and the conception of personality as a Biography Gesalt. The past plays a highly significant role in shaping personality.The TAT is a projective test, therefore it provides ambiguous stimuli to an individual, and the results are interpreted subjectively based on how the test-taker interprets the neutral stimuli. Other forms of personality measures that utilize pictures/drawings include the the Rosenzweig Picture-Frustration Study, the Revised Bender Visual-Motor Gestalt Test, and the House-Tree-Person Drawing Technique. Sample TAT photo — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.62.63.45 (talk) 21:57, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

Application of the Personological System to Henry Murray's Research Studies
As previously noted, Henry Murray's view of the personological system as present within an individual's entire life lead him to have a narrative and interpretive style of research study. The relationship between an individual's needs, environment, and subsequent perceptions was often used when explaining the results of his data. A few examples of research studies lead by Henry Murray are as follows:

"The Effect of Fear upon Estimates of the Maliciousness of Other Personalities"[1] In this study, Henry Murray explored an individual's emotional state, fear, upon perceptions of the personalities of others. Projection, an individuals subjective truth seen as objective in the external environment, is a key component of the study. The individual's creation of an interpretation of the environment parallel's the personological system's creation of themas. The findings of the study noted that after a fear-invoking event, participant's perceived faces in photographs to be more malicious. The results of this study can be directly explained through Murray's personological system.The fear-provoking activity increased the participants' need for harm-avoidance. Therefore, when creating interpretations of their external environment, the participants perceived the faces in the photographs to be more malicious in pursuit of self-protection.

"Family Planning in a Rural Nurse-Midwifery Program" [2] This article is a discussion about the Frontier Nursing Service, a postpartum and family planning care service for rural women. Infant immunization, use and choice of maternal contraceptives, and sterilization are discussed. The popularity of the Frontier Using Service over time is also mentioned. The discussion concludes an increase in acceptance of contraceptive use over time, and notes that the nurse-midwife can have a very beneficial role for family planner services for poor women. Although most births now occur in hospitals, the role of the midwife is essential for providing quality care to women in need. This discussion reflects some interesting insights of Murray's personological system. As birth control and hospital use become more popular, it becomes an environmental press for pregnant women in regards to the decisions they will make about giving birth. Pregnant women also have a heightened succorance need, which is well-balanced with the nurse-midwife's high need for nurturance. Perhaps if a pregnant women has a higher order need, she would choose a hospital instead of the Frontier Nursing Service. In contrast, the close personal attention provided by the Frontier Nursing Service has great appeal for a pregnant women with a stronger need to be nurtured.

"Studies of Stressful Interpersonal Disputations" In this study, Murray examined stressful interpersonal disputes. He studied subject’s reactions in a heated debate in which they were personally insulted. He defines anger as a state of excitation in certain regions of the brain, which produces various manifestations. These include covert manifestations, physiological manifestations, and overt manifestations. Covert manifestations involve experienced or felt anger, for example thinking aggressive words or thoughts. Physiological manifestations are automatic excitations and are physical symptoms that include heart and respiration rate. Finally, overt manifestations are able to seen and heard in videos of the debates and involve aggressive words, and vocal quality changes such as raised voice. He examined physiological manifestations of anger by tracing heart rate and respiration rate. He found that anger and anxiety are positively correlated with increased heart and respiration rate. The observed anger and subsequent actions of the subjects during the debate can be explained by Murray’s personological systems theory. The environmental press of the stressful debate situation involving the lawyer being offensive to the subject caused the subject to react by getting angry and more aggressive. Two of Murray’s needs, dominance and exhibition, relate to the study. Subjects tried assert their need for dominance, or control or influence of others, by arguing their points in hopes that their ideas would dominate their opponent’s. Subjects also showed their need for exhibition, or to be seen and heard, by raising their voices to try and get their opponent to listen to them.