13: Personality Flashcards
Personality
An individual’s characteristic style of behaving, thinking and feeling
Self-Report
A series of answers to a questionnaire that asks people to indicate the extent to which sets of statements or adjectives accurately describe their own behaviour or mental state
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
A well-researched, clinical questionnaire used to assess personality and psychological problems
Trait
A relatively stable disposition to behave in a particular and consistent way
Oblique Factors
Items that correlate with each other
Orthogonal Factors
Items that are uncorrelated
Big Five
The traits of the five-factor model:
- Openness to experience
- Conscientiousness
- Extroversion
- Agreeableness
- Neuroticism
Subjective Wellbeing (SWB)
An individual’s evaluation of their own life in terms of how satisfied they are and how they feel about their life
Psychodynamic Approach
An approach that regards personality as formed by needs, strivings and desires, largely operating outside awareness - motives that can also produce emotional disorders
Id
The part of the mind containing the drives present at birth; it is the source of our bodily needs, wants, desires and impulses, particularly our sexual and aggressive drives
Ego
The component of personality, developed through contact with the external world, that enables us to deal with life’s practical demands
Superego
The mental system that reflects the internalisation of cultural rules, mainly learned as parents exercise their authority
Pleasure Principle
The psychic force that motivates the tendency to seek immediate gratification of any impulse
Reality Principle
The regulating mechanism that enables the individual to delay gratifying immediate needs and function effectively in the real world
Defence Mechanism
Unconscious coping mechanisms that reduce anxiety generated by threats from unacceptable impulses
Rationalisation
A defence mechanism that involves supplying a reasonable-sounding explanation for unacceptable feelings and behaviour to conceal (mostly from oneself) one’s underlying motives or feelings
Reaction Formation
A defence mechanism that involves unconsciously replacing threatening inner wishes and fantasies with an exaggerated version of their opposite
Projection
A defence mechanism that involves attributing one’s own threatening feelings, motives or impulses to another person or group
Regression
A defence mechanism in which the ego deals with internal conflict and perceived threat by reverting to an immature behaviour or earlier stage of development, a time when things felt safer and more secure
Displacement
A defence mechanism that involves shifting unacceptable wishes or drives to a neutral or less threatening alternative
Identification
A defence mechanism that helps deal with feelings of threat and anxiety by enabling us unconsciously to take on the characteristics of another person who seems more powerful or better able to cope
Sublimation
A defence mechanism that involves channelling unacceptable sexual or aggressive drives into socially acceptable and culturally enhancing activities
Psychosexual Stages
Distinct early life stages through which personality is formed as children experience sexual pleasures from specific body areas and carers redirect or interfere with those pleasures
Fixation
A phenomenon in which a person’s pleasure-seeking drives become psychologically stuck, or arrested, at a particular psychosexual stage
