| Term | Definition |
|---|
| personality | an individual's characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. |
| 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 and therapeutic technique that attributes thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts. Freud believed the patient's free associations, resistances, dreams, and transferences—and the therapist's interpretations of them—released previously repressed feelings, allowing the patient to gain self-insight. (pp. 597, 686) |
| 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. |
| id | contains a reservoir of unconscious psychic energy that, according to Freud, strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives. The id operates on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification. |
| ego | the largely conscious, "executive" part of personality that, according to Freud, mediates among the demands of the id, superego, and reality. The ego 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 Freud, 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 | [ED-uh-puss] according to Freud, a boy's sexual desires toward his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father. |
| identification | the process by which, according to Freud, children incorporate their parents' values into their developing superegos. |
| fixation | the inability to see a problem from a new perspective; an impediment to problem solving. |
| 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. (pp. 381, 600) |
| 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. |
| 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 our 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 | 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 Rorschach; seeks to identify people's inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of the blots. |
| unconditional positive regard | according to Rogers, an attitude of total acceptance toward another person. |
| 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. |
| Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory | 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 test | a test (such as the MMPI) developed by testing a pool of items and then selecting those that discriminate between groups. |
| reciprocal determinism | the interacting influences between personality and environmental factors. |
| 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. |
| positive psychology | the scientific study of optimal human functioning; aims to discover and promote strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive. |
| spotlight effect | overestimating others' noticing and evaluating our appearance, performance, and blunders (as if we presume a spotlight shines on us). |
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