ch 12 Flashcards
What is personality?
Personality refers to the unique characteristics that account for enduring patterns of inner experience and outward behavior.
What is individual difference psychology?
It is a branch of psychology focused on understanding how people differ in traits like personality and intelligence.
Who identified four distinct personality types?
Hippocrates, who described types as sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic, and choleric.
What question does the trait approach to personality seek to answer?
The “what” question, or the ways people differ in personality traits.
What does the psychodynamic perspective emphasize?
It emphasizes unconscious desires and conflicts that shape personality.
Who is considered the founder of psychoanalytic theory?
Sigmund Freud.
What are the three levels of consciousness according to Freud?
The conscious, preconscious, and unconscious.
What is the id?
The personality element representing basic instinctual drives, present from birth and operating on the pleasure principle.
What is the ego’s role according to Freud?
To satisfy the id’s impulses within social and moral constraints, operating under the reality principle.
What is the superego?
The part of personality that determines which impulses are socially acceptable, embodying moral standards.
What are Freud’s psychosexual stages?
Oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital stages, each associated with specific conflicts and erogenous zones.
What are defense mechanisms?
Unconscious tactics used by the ego to protect from anxiety by managing id impulses.
Define repression
A defense mechanism that keeps unpleasant thoughts buried in the unconscious.
Define denial.
A defense mechanism involving the refusal to accept an unpleasant reality.
What did Alfred Adler believe was a major motivator in human behavior?
Feelings of inferiority stemming from childhood helplessness.
What is Carl Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious?
An inherited storehouse of memories shared by all humankind, containing archetypes.
