Personality as an Affect-processing System

Toward An Integrative Theory

Jack Block

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781135645830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

At least since Hippocrates, human beings have been trying to describe and analyze the behavioral and cognitive consistencies now referred to as personality. And in recent decades, no less than in the preceding centuries, they have generated a bewildering variety of construals and constructs. In this landmark book, Jack Block, who has spent more than 50 years studying the many facets of personality, takes a long look at current debates and finds common ground on which to construct an integrative model. Perceiving more congruence among disparate formulations than has hitherto been appreciated, he elaborates his vision of personality as an adaptive system that enables the individual to maintain equilibrium in an environment that is both threatening and engaging. Taking in and organizing information and maintaining nondisruptive levels of anxiety while responding to outer and inner demands are the tasks of this system, which consists of a perceptual apparatus and a control apparatus operating in delicate balance. After presenting his model of personality, Block discusses its intellectual history and its connections to major current alternatives. He lays out some implications for practitioners confronted by dysfunction. Finally, he traces the developmental origins of personality. Provocative, innovative, and analytical, Personality as an Affect-Processing System: Toward an Integrative Theory points to new directions for all those who seek to understand human psychological functioning.

Chapter 1

Introduction and Orientation

INTENTION OF THIS BOOK

The purpose of this book is to bring forward a limited but presumably useful theory of personality functioning and motivation. It is limited, as all theories are, in that certain critical features of experience and of behavior are not expressed in the present terms of the model. On the other hand, a usefulness is claimed on the ground that some central concerns of what a proper personality theory must consider do appear to be encompassed by the constructs, defined system goals, and consequently generated relations of the present formulation. A grand sufficiency is not pretended. As Meyer Schapiro, the art historian, remarked in a somewhat different context, “Perfection, completeness, strict consistency are more likely in small works than in large.”

This first chapter is largely devoted to a spelling out of the special emphases and interests that have guided the choice and definitions of subsequent concepts. Chapter 2 presents a variety of opinions on psychological matters that broadly condition the present theoretical effort. The third chapter considers some presystematic matters, to indicate the orientation and the ground rules within which the theoretical game is to be played. Chapters 4 through 8 present the concepts and their posited interrelations that, together, form a theoretical system. Chapter 9 sets the theory down in a variety of personality and clinical contexts to see how well it corresponds to or maps into the behavioral and experiential realities it has been designed to relevantly abstract or speak to. Chapter 10 analyzes and compares the possibilities inherent in two major alternatives to the theory espoused herein. And finally, in chapter 11, I seek to state the developmental process by which the structural variables of the theory evolve.

PHENOMENA STIMULATING THE THEORY

Theories are intended to order observations, to encompass in a reasonably unified and simple scheme what otherwise would appear as a heterogeneous and unwieldy aggregation of facts. As G. E. P. Box, the significant statistician has remarked, “all models are wrong but some are useful.” A limited usefulness is all to which one can aspire.

What are the phenomena that have prompted the present theoretical formulation, and what aspects of experience and behavior is the theory interested in explaining?

The domain of personality functioning I am concerned with in this book may be conveyed by listing, with no especial ordering of importance, the kinds of behaviors, relations, and recognitions that have stimulated the present theoretical essay. The theory will presumably have, in its turn, something useful to contribute toward understanding the systematics of the observations from which it arose.

A second reason for indicating some phenomena for which the present formulation is designed to have relevance is to permit the reader, by gauging the intent, to gauge also prospective interest in the present effort.

1. Under certain circumstances, individuals develop feelings or manifest behavior that psychologists have tried to understand in terms of a vague construct labeled “anxiety.” People experience “anxiety states”; they employ coping strategies or defense mechanisms to prevent the emergence of anxiety; they are held back from many forms of pleasure by the anxiety they anticipate will follow gratification; they are made anxious by special contexts of surprise or novelty.

For most well-ordered lives, anxiety may not be present in massive or chronic amounts, but it is presumed by perhaps all conceptualizations of personality that its potential is always present—no one goes untouched by anxiety or by its nominal surrogates. As Freud (1963) remarked, “one thing is certain, that the problem of anxiety is a nodal point, linking up all kinds of most important questions; a riddle, of which the solution must cast a flood of light upon our whole mental life” (p. 401).

In its more general terms, the formulation to be developed is an attempt to model the several ways in which anxiety comes about in an individual and the several ways by which anxiety is reduced. Especially to be noted is the contention, incorporated into the theory, that anxiety is a function of the specific relation existing among several intrapersonal variables. It further follows that anxiety may be managed within the personality system by changes in variables other than those initially involved in the anxiety rise.

2. In facing and reacting to a complex world, individuals may show a variety of behaviors. There is the phenomenon of curiosity, the relaxed, seemingly purposeless meandering through an unknown and unthreatening environment. The casual quality of curiosity may be converted by certain conditions into something more urgent and focused that may be labeled, after Bartlett (1932), “effort after meaning,” the attempt to perceive pattern and coherence in what begins as uncomprehended complexity. In turn, this “effort after meaning” may, under certain circumstances, grade into what has been called an “intolerance of ambiguity” (Frenkel-Brunswik, 1949), wherein meaning is established by procrustean measures in a brittle effort to stave off a personal panic. These behaviors and the conditions of their change and conversion are a second special concern of the present theory.

3. To illustrate a developmentally crucial aspect of behavior, consider a simple game one can play with children. Let an adult dare a 4 year old not to laugh when the count—one, two, three!—is slowly and portentously made. Perhaps invariably, the child will impulsively burst into paroxysms of laughter or dissolve into giggles before the slow count is completed. With an 8 year old, sobriety is sometimes maintained and sometimes not. With an adolescent, the game is never won. Alternatively, consider the game of “Simon Says,” wherein a child is supposed to restate verbatim a spoken command rather than respond to the imperative in that spoken command. Young children tend to make the contextual error of saying their name when the command is issued, “What is your name?” With increasing age, the child becomes less susceptible to this kind of error. We wish to be able to explain these developmental differences in the ability to control impulse, inhibit spontaneity, maintain directed attention for sustained periods of time, and the like. Especially in recent decades, much psychological conceptual and research attention has been directed toward understanding the development of response inhibition.

4. Still another central concern of the present theory is an effort to conceptualize and integrate the varieties of adaptive behavior. In situations of stress, some individuals are characteristically maladaptive. Their maladaptations are various and almost uniformly regressive in nature. These maladaptations may be grouped into two broad classes—disorganized, fitful, transient, highly variable maladaptive behaviors or rigidified, perseverative, overly focused, unvarying maladaptive behaviors.

Other individuals are characteristically resourceful in responding to environmental or existential stressors. They psychologically rise to the occasion and resourcefully increase their organization of thoughts and behavior in adaptive response to the objectively pressing demands of the moment. However evolved, this characteristic ability to dynamically and progressively “adapt to stress” in specifically unrehearsed yet effective ways as required by existing circumstances, appears to be a decisive dimension in terms of which to order individuals. It should also be noted that, within a person, over short and long periods of time and also as a function of context, there may be changes in the individual’s capacity to cope effectively with the flux of experience.

5. There is another property of the personality systems of individuals that warrants consideration, one that is a kind of converse of the progressive ability to “adapt to stress.” Just as certain contexts appear to demand a tighter, more directed organization of the personality if the situation is to be mastered, other contexts demand a looser, less directed organization of the individual’s personality in the interests of surmounting or easing a problem. This latter capacity for change is what Kris (1952) has called “regression in the service of the ego” (see also Schafer, 1958). Individuals appear to vary widely in their ability (or affectively controlled willingness) to permit these nominally lower, less contained (normatively, more “primitive,” “childlike,” “irrational”) levels of personality organization to operate. Indeed, individuals change over time and over context in their capacity to “regress” in deliberate ways, to willingly release what has been restrained. This capacity for willful, “playful” cognitive reversion is important because many hunches about the essential basis of creativity revolve about some such notion (Martindale, 1990; Russ, 1996). The present formulation, by the terms of its system, attempts to encompass both “progressive” and “regressive” forms of adaptation.

6. Studies of attachment have consistently observed that a toddler of a certain age repeatedly ventures forth by him- or herself to explore the environment and then rushes back to the attachment figure, the mother. This behavioral alternation has been called secure-base behavior or the exploration-attachment balance or the attachment behavior system (Hinde, 1984). However, this cyclic phenomenon may be viewed not as a “balance” but rather as an alternating sequence. Within the young and still world-constructing child manifesting this behavioral cycling, there are fluctuations in priorities of two quite different motivations: There is a going out to an attracting world so as to experience and encompass it and then a rushing back to mother—the safe base—when there is too much of the world to make comfortable and comforting sense of. How shall this undoubted observation be conceptualized?

7. Although psychology has tended to emphasize behavior response processes, to escape the dangers of introspection and to objectify behavior, it should be remembered that a case has also been made for emphasizing as well the necessary preliminary of perceptual reaction processes (Gibson & Gibson, 1955; Tighe & Tighe, 1966). Thus, we have “response generalization” and “response discrimination,” a widening or narrowing of behavioral responses, and we have “stimulus generalization” and “stimulus discrimination,” a widening or narrowing of perceptual reactions. The intrusion of the computer metaphor as a model of mind has also brought attention and respect to the idea of input (percepts) as well as output (actions)—one must consider what is being entered into the system as well as what is being derived from the system, and the connections between them. These distinctions, between perceptual processing and behavioral processing, if they are useful for the “cold” field of cognition, may also have implications for the study of “hot” personality.

For a further recognition coming from the clinical literature, there appears to be a difference between individuals manifesting attention deficit without hyperactivity as compared with individuals manifesting hyperactivity that is not plagued by attention deficit (there is, of course, attention deficit conjoined with hyperactivity, a confounded and frequent case also requiring understanding). And in the ordinary sphere of interpersonal functioning, there seem to be individuals who know how they are perceived but are poor perceivers of others in contrast to individuals who are good perceivers of others but do not know how they are construed by others (Block & Bennett, 1955). Instances can be multiplied of why it would appear worthwhile, for general and specific reasons, to keep under consideration the separation and difference between what goes into the individual’s psychology and what comes out.

8. One can readily observe, within oneself or in others, that emotions, especially negative ones, can summate their effects. A succession of closely timed frustrations—rejection by a sought-after one, an incessant traffic jam, the return of an unaccepted manuscript, and so forth—can prompt a vehement kick of the unwitting cat one has almost stumbled over. Such accumulation of diversely based but also commensurately summating affects poses a problem for conceptualizations of personality functioning that do not recognize the existence of this phenomenon.

9. Individuals appear for the most part to live psychologically in an interpersonal, social world more than in a physical world. They must construct intake, output, and integrational structures for dealing with this interpersonal world. But this social world is complex and perhaps ultimately fractious, behaving in ways only fuzzily comprehensible. Efforts by the individual to test the nature of the interpersonal reality have erratic or dim results. Social feedback is often indirect, delayed (sometimes forever), and equivocal, permitting only the uneasiness of uncertain inference instead of the pleasures of certain deduction afforded usually by the physical world. Because there may be little or no external feedback on the basis of which to build intrapsychic structures for dealing with the social world, the individual inferentially evolves personally functional structures sufficient for the predication of behavior. In doing so, the principles that come into play, construed in the absence of unmistakable, unambiguous feedback, are principles that may be construed as less than rational when judged by external logical and empirical criteria. They include the forms of “irrationality” called primary process modes of thought (Freud, 1963; Hilgard, 1962), primordial thought (Martindale, 1990), the cognitive illusions of Tversky and Kahneman (1974), and attributional errors in social judgment (e.g., Nisbett & Ross, 1980), among others.

These irrational biases are generally prepotent or heuristically evolved. They are usually helpful or correct on a quotidian basis, but being only evolutionarily or heuristically based, they can go wrong or be misled. Thus, we tend to attend to the rare to which we have not yet accommodated rather than the daily, which is clichéd and boringly predictable; the immediately vivid attracts attention rather than background base rates; what is superficially or apparently similar is dramatic rather than what is deeply similar or a similarity slow to realize; the immediately recent is given more weight than the long past; what information is easily accessible, even if perhaps untrustworthy, is depended on rather than looking further and laboriously for validity. All of these are “Darwinian algorithms,” a phrase of Cosmides and Tooby (1987, p. 296).

Although these formally irrational modes of perception, action, and cognition are due at least in part to limitations of the human mind, these limitations provide the possibility for individuals to be influenced by strong motivations, pervading fears, and prevailing aspirations. Thus, one can formulate a fully encompassing paranoid view of the world that is never diametrically contradicted; one can live a lifetime believing—unwarrantedly—that one is smarter than everyone else or that one is unloved (or loved). The achievement of personally functional but not-so-rational structures—unresponsive to, unclear, or rationalizing about received behavior; fuzzy in their workings; projective; affectively involving—involves adaptations that may be quite effective if they go undiscorroborated (albeit to an outside observer they may appear not fully “rational”). The study of personality must consider these adaptations that are not deemed truly “intelligent.”

10. Attending more deeply to what was earlier mentioned only in a developmental context, it should be noted again that individuals vary widely in the degree to which they delay or do not delay responding to immediate environmental contingencies, to emotional or somatic pressures, or to the possibilities and costs of pleasuring. Within a person over time and contexts, there can ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction and Orientation
• 2 Some Logical, Psycho-Logical, and Definitional Matters
• 3 Theoretical Orientation and Aspiration
• 4 A First Characterization of the Personality System
• 5 A Beginning Discussion of Drive, Percept, and Anxiety
• 6 Drives, Tension, and Control
• 7 Percept, Environment, and Perceptualizing
• 8 Closing the Ring
• 9 Clinical Implications
• 10 Connections to Theoretical Alternatives
• 11 Prescript: Developmental Aspects of Ego Control and Ego-Resiliency
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index