| Term | Definition |
|---|
| personality | 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 thory of personality that attributes thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts |
| unconscious | according to Freud, a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories |
| id | contains reservoir of unconscious psychic energy that, according to Freud, strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives |
| ego | conscious "executive" part of personality that, according to Freud, mediates among the demands of the id, superego, and reality |
| superego | part of the personality that, according to Freud, represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgement 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 focused on distinct erogenous zones |
| Oedipus | according to Freud, a boy's sexual desires toward his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father |
| identification | process by which, according to Freud, children incorporate their parents' value into their developing superegos |
| fixation | according to Freud, a lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, in which conflicts were unresolved |
| defense mechanism | in psychoanalytic theory, the ego's protective method of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distoring reality |
| repression | basic defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness |
| regression | defense mechanism in which an individual faced with anxiety retreats to a more infantile psychosexual stage, where some psychic energy remains fixated |
| reaction formation | defense mechanism by which the ego unconsciously switches unacceptable impulses into their opposites; "I hate him" becomes "I love him" |
| projection | 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 | defense mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impluses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person |
| collective unconscious | Carl Jung's concept of a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species' history |
| projective test | 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) | projective test in which people express their inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes |
| Rorschach inkblot test | most widely used projective test, set of 10 inkblots, seeks to identify people's inner feelings by analyzing their interpretation 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, 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 Roger's, an attitude of toal acceptance toward another person |
| self-concept | all our thoughts and feelings about ourselves, in answer to the question, "Who am I?" |
| trait | characteristic pattern of behavior or a disposition to feel and act, as assessed by self-report inventories and peer reports |
| personality inventory | questionnaire (often with true-false or agree-disagree) on which people respond to items designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors |
| Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) | most widely researched and clinically used of all personality tests |
| empirically derived test | a test (such as the MMPI) developed by testing a pool of items and then selecting those that discriminate between groups |
| social-cognitive perspective | views behavior as influenced by the interaction between persons (and their thinking) and their social context |
| reciprocal determinism | interacting influences between personality and environmental factors |
| personal control | our sense of controlling our environment rather than feeling helpless |
| external locus of control | perception that chance or outside forces beyond one's personal control determine one's fate |
| internal locus of control | perception that one control's one's own fate |
| learned helplessness | hopelessness and passive resignation an animal or human learns when unable to avoid repeated aversive events |
| spotlight effect | overestimating others' noticing and evaluating our appearance, performance, and blunders |
| self-esteem | one's feeling of high or low self-worth |
| self-serving bias | readiness to perceive oneself favorably |
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