Personality Theories of Bandura, Erikson, Maslow, Freud, and Skinner (Essay Sample)

Review of Theorists- Personality
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Review of Theorists- Personality
Personality entails how an individual behaves and feels under different circumstances and situations at various stages of life. It is long-standing patterns and traits that propel a person to behave, feel and think consistently in a specific manner or way. On most occasions, understanding personality has been very challenging, and various theorists have come up with different theories to help people understand personality. The theories differ in how they try to explain personality and tend to be related in one way or another. Personality theories have been useful in explaining some things that make a person's personality. This paper's primary focus will be explaining personality theories developed by theorists like Bandura, Erikson, Maslow, Freud, and Skinner.
Social Learning Theory
Albert Bandura is one of the most widely recognized people in the social; learning theory field of psychology. Based on the social learning theory proposed by Bandura, emphasis is placed on the significance of emotional reactions, attitudes, modeling, and observing imitating behaviors o people. The theory considers how both cognitive and environmental factors influence the behavior and learning processes of human beings. In his theory, Albert Bandura agrees with other learning theories concerning the behavior of human beings, like operant conditioning and classical conditioning. Albert adds two other concepts to the behaviorist learning theories (Stajkovic et al., 2018). These two concepts include the following: The first concept is that an individual can learn behavior from their surroundings through observational learning processes. Another concept is that the process of meditation occurs between responses and stimuli.
Observational Learning
Bandura suggested in his theory that children always observe the behaviors of people around them and are influenced by these behaviors. Numerous influential models within society surround children. Kids always pay attention to these models and always encode their behaviors from them. Later in life, these children get to imitate the behaviors that they observed from these models (Rumjaun & Narod, 2020). When imitating these behaviors, they do it regardless of whether they are appropriate or not, which means that they tend to develop and come up with varied kinds of behavior just through the influence of their environment.
Research by Albert shows that a child is most likely to imitate the behavior of a person they perceive to be similar to themselves. This means that female children are most likely to imitate the female gender. In contrast, the male gender is likely to imitate the behavior of male people within their environment or surrounding. Reinforcement can either be internal or external and negative or positive. Seeking approval from the parents before behaving in a particular manner is an external reinforcement, and feeling happy because their request is approved is an internal reinforcement. Both negative and positive reinforcements if the external reinforcement offered does not match the child's needs.
Mediational Process
Social learning theory is perceived to bridge the gap between the cognitive approach and behaviorism, which is traditional learning theory. The reason why it is seen to be bridging the gap is because of its focus on the cognitive or mental factors that are involved in the process of learning. Albert Bandura believes that human beings actively process information and always think about the relationship between the consequences of behavior and the behavior itself, unlike Skinner. For observational learning to take place, cognitive learning processes must be put to work. It is the responsibility of the mental or the cognitive factors to intervene in the learning processes to enhance whether it is necessary to develop a new response. The meditational processes that Albert Bandura proposed include attention, retention, reproduction, and motivation.
Beginning with attention as a mediational process, people need to pay attention to the consequences of the behaviors and the behaviors themselves to enable them to form the behavior's mental representation. Attention is therefore considered necessary when grabbing a behavior since it significantly shows whether it influenced the imitator. The en start gaining a s