A.P. Psychology: Chapter 13 - Personality
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84 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 Personality | An individual's characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. |
| Humanistic Approach | This theory focused on our inner capacities for growth and self-fulfillment. |
| Nervous Disorders | Freud went to medical school and then set up a private practice, initially specializing in... |
| The Interpretation of Dreams | Freud's first solo book, published in 1900. |
| Free Association | In psychoanalysis, a method of exploring the unconscious in which the person relaxes and says whatever comes to mind, no matter how trivial or embarrassing. |
| Psychoanalysis | Freud's theory of personality that attributes thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts; the techniques used in treating psychological disorders by seeking to expose and interpret unconscious tensions. |
| Unconscious | According to Freud, a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories. According to contemporary psychologists, information processing of which we are unaware. |
| Preconscious Area | In Freud's theory, an area where we temporarily store some thoughts which we can retrieve into conscious awareness. This is the surface of the water in the iceberg metaphor. |
| Id | Contains a reservoir of unconscious psychic energy that, according to Freud, strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives. It operates on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification. |
| Ego | The largely conscious, "executive" part of personality that, according to Feud, mediates among the demands of the id, superego, and reality. It operates on the /reality principle/, satisfying the id's desires in ways that will realistically bring pleasure rather than pain. |
| Superego | The part of personality that, according to Fred, represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgment (the conscience) and for future aspirations. |
| Psychosexual Stages | The childhood stages of development (oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital) during which, according to Freud, the id's pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct erogenous zones. |
| Oedipus Complex | According to Freud, a boy's sexual desires toward his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father common in the phallic psychosexual stage. |
| Electra Complex | The female equivalent of the Oedipus Complex. |
| Identification | The process by which, according to Freud, children incorporate their parents' values into their developing superegos. One example of this is a boy overcoming Oedipus complex fears of his father and assuming "if you can't beat him, join him." |
| Fixation | According to Freud, a lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, in which conflicts were never resolved. |
| Defense Mechanisms | In Psychoanalytic Theory, the ego's protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality. |
| Repression | In Psychoanalytic theory, the basic defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness. Underlies all other defense mechanisms. |
| Regression | Psychoanalytic defense mechanism in which an individual faced with anxiety retreats to a more infantile psychosexual stage, where some psychic energy remains fixated. |
| Reaction Formation | Psychoanalytic defense mechanism by which the ego unconsciously switches unacceptable impulses into their opposites. Thus, people may express feelings that are the opposite of their anxiety-arousing unconscious feelings. |
| Projection | Psychoanalytic defense mechanism by which people disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others. For example, "I don't trust him" may become "He doesn't trust me." |
| Rationalization | Defense mechanism that offers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one's actions. |
| Displacement | Psychoanalytic defense mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person, as when redirecting anger toward a safer outlet. |
| Collective Unconscious | Carl Jung's concept of a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from out species' history. |
| Projective Test | A personality test such as the Rorschach or TAT, that provides ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger projection of one's inner dynamics. |
| Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) | A projective test in which people express their inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes. |
| Rorschach Inkblot Test | The most widely used projective test, a set of 10 inkblots, designed by Hermann __________; seeks to identify people's inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of the blots. |
| Terror-Management Theory | Proposes that faith in one's worldview and the pursuit of self-esteem provide protection against a deeply rooted fear of death. |
| Self-actualization | According to Maslow, the ultimate psychological need that arises after basic physical and psychological needs are met and self-esteem is achieved; the motivation to fulfill one's potential. |
| Unconditional Positive Regard | According to Rogers, an attitude of total acceptance toward another person. |
| Self-concept | All our thoughts and feelings about ourselves in answer to the question, "Who am I?" |
| Trait | A characteristic pattern of behavior or a disposition to feel and act, as assessed by self-report inventories and peer reports. |
| Personality Inventory | A questionnaire (often with true-false or agree-disagree items) on which people respond to items designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors; used to assess selected personality traits. |
| Barnum Effect | As in the case of horoscopes, this is the acceptance of stock, positive descriptions. |
| Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) | The most widely researched and clinically used of all personality tests. Originally developed to identify emotional disorders (still considered its most appropriate use), this test is now used for many other screening purposes. |
| Empirically Derived | A test (such as the MMPI) developed by testing a pool of items and then selecting those that discriminate between groups. |
| Lie Scale | Used to root out those who put fake answers on personality inventories (for example, to always pick the answer that seems the most socially acceptable). |
| Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Opennesss, and Extraversion | The "Big Five" personality factors used often by today's trait researchers. (Hint: CANOE); stable in adulthood; average heritability of a Big Five trait is 50% |
| Gordon Allport | After a meeting with Freud in 1919, he began to describe personality in terms of traits. He was less concerned with explaining traits than with describing them. |
| Personality types | Broad categories that signal one's most noteworthy trait and its associated characteristics. |
| Melancholic | Greek humor - depressed. |
| Sanguine | Greek humor - cheerful. |
| Phlegmatic | Greek humor - unemotional |
| Choleric | Greek humor - irritable. |
| Myers-Briggs Type Indicator | An attempt to sort people according to Carl Jung's personality types; it has 126 questions. Most people agree with their assigned type, as each trait has strengths. However, though it is widely used for job assessment, it probably is not well-suited for that purpose. |
| Factor analysis | A statistical procedure to identify clusters of test items that tap basic components of personality. |
| Hans Eysenck | Believed that we can reduce many of our normal variations to two or three dimensions, including extraversion-introversion and emotional stability-instability. They believe these traits are genetically influenced. |
| Temperament | Emotional reactivity, possibly influenced by the autonomic nervous system. |
| Samuel Gosling | Determined that the personalities of dogs are as evident and constant as are personalities of humans. |
| Starke Hathaway | One of the creators of the MMPI. |
| The Big Five | A personality measurement judging five dimensions that is the "common currency for personality psychology" and the best approximation of the best trait dimensions. |
| Person-situation controversy | The debate among psychologists about whether it is personality traits or the situation at hand that influences personality more. |
| Walter Mischel | The author who raised the person-situation controversy, asserting that personality had little ability to predict behavior. |
| Expressive style | Our animation, manner of speaking, and gestures. |
| Nalini Ambady, Robert Rosenthal | These psychologists researched 13 Harvard University graduate students, testing reactions to brief 30 second clips of teaching professors. Students were able to accurately understand a teacher's personality from these clips. |
| Thin slices | Brief clips of a person's behavior. From even these brief clips, people are able to accurately assess the personality of the speaker. |
| Bella DePaulo | This psychologist asked people to feign either expressiveness or reservedness, and found that people had difficulty disguising their true nature. |
| Maurice Levesque, David Kenny | Seated groups of university women together, and had them introduce themselves. It was evident who was the most talkative just from the introduction. |
| Social-cognitive perspective | Proposed by Albert Bandura, views behavior as influenced by the interaction between persons (and their thinking) and their social context. |
| Albert Bandura | Proposed the social-cognitive perspective. He believed that though we learn by imitation, we also think about our situation, and this influences our behavior. |
| Reciprocal determinism | The interacting influences between personality and environmental factors. People choose different environments, our personalities shape how we interpret and react to events, and our personalities help create situations to which we can react. |
| Personal control | Our sense of controlling our environment rather than feeling helpless. |
| External locus of control | The perception that chance or outside forces beyond one's personal control determine one's fate. |
| Internal locus of control | The perception that one controls one's own fate. |
| Learned helplessness | The hopelessness and passive resignation an animal or human learns when unable to avoid repeated aversive events. |
| Julian Rotter | The psychologist who hypothesized about internal and external loci of control. |
| Self-control | The ability to control influences and delay gratification, which predicts good adjustment, better grades, and social success. |
| Martin Seligman | Discovered that, when dogs are repeatedly shocked with no opportunity to avoid pain, they learn a sense of helplessness because of their perceived lack of control and cower without hope. |
| Excess of freedom | When one has too many choices, as seen in Western culture, there is ensuing decreased life satisfaction, increased depression, and sometimes paralysis. |
| tyranny of choice | When there are too many choices, there is an information overload and a greater likelihood that we will feel regret over unchosen options. |
| Positive-thinking bias | Our tendency to see ourselves as more intelligent, more invulnerable to disease, more moral, etc. than others, despite inherent pessimism or optimism. This vanishes while we are waiting for feedback. |
| Positive psychology | the scientific study of optimal human functioning; aims to discover and promote strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive. |
| Martin Seligman | The father of the positive psychology movement; president of the American Psychological Association. |
| Focuses too much on the situation and not enough on innate traits | Flaw of the social-cognitive perspective: |
| Possible selves | A concept that we build, including our visions of who we dream to become eventually, and who we fear to become. |
| Spotlight effect | Overestimating others' noticing and evaluating our appearance, performance, and blunders. |
| Self-esteem | One's feelings of high or low self-worth |
| -They compare themselves to their own group -They value the things at which they excel -They attribute problems to prejudice | How do people in oppressed groups manage to keep relatively high levels of self-esteem? |
| Self-serving bias | A readiness to perceive oneself favorably. Consider: -People accept more responsibility for good deeds than for bad, and for successes than for failures. -Most people see themselves as better than average. |
| Subtly strategic self-deprecation | People often say bad things about themselves to elicit favorable comments from others, or else to prepare for failure. These comments often refer to an "old self," and not to one's current state of being. |
| Defensive self-esteem | This type of self-esteem focuses on sustaining itself, which makes failure and criticism feel threatening. It correlates with aggressive and antisocial behavior. |
| Secure self-esteem | This form of self-esteem is less contingent on external evaluations. This can be maintained by losing ourselves in relationships and purposes larger than ourselves. |
| genuineness, acceptance, and empathy | Rogers' 3 conditions of a growth-promoting environment. |
| self | In contemporary psychology, the self is the organizer of our thoughts, feelings, and actions |
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