2/4/14 Notes Flashcards
Repression
The basic defense mechanism that banishes anxiety arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness
Defense mechanisms
The egos protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality
Regression
Defense mechanism on 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. Thus people may express feelings that are the opposite of their anxiety arousing unconscious feelings
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 ones actions
Displacement
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
Denial
Defense mechanism by which people refuse to believe or even to perceive painful realities
Collective unconscious
Carl Jungs concept of a shared inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species history
Projective test
A personality test, provides ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger projection of ones inner dynamics
TAT
Projective test in which people express their inner feelings and interacts through the stories they make up
Rorschach inkblot test
The most widely used projective test, a set of 10 inkblots, seeks to indentify people’s inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of the blots
Terror management theory
A theory of death related anxiety explores people’s emotional and behavioral responses to reminders of their impeding death
