Chapter 10 Flashcards
Personality
Unique patterns of behaving that are relatively stable
-thinking and feeling
Temperament and Character
chacacter- Kholberg, morality
-Separate from personality
Sigmund Freud
Psychodynamic Perspective (Victorian Ages) -Sex was "hidden" and sexual behavior was considered animalistic and believed that only men had thee urges -Aggression- WWI -Freud was originally a Neurologist
Free association
Freud allowed people to just talk and “vent”
Catharsis
Decrease in stress just by talking/venting
Dynamic Theory
“action”
-multiple forces conflicting at different levels of consciousness
Conscious
Info in immediate awareness
Preconsciousness
Info that can easily be made conscious
ex: phone #
Dreams
Royal road to consciousness
Unconscious
Thoughts, feelings, urges and wishes that are hard to bring to conscious awareness
Freudian slip
Links with consciousness
ex: Bringing up ex’s name to new boyfriend
ID
- Most primitive
- Completely unconscious
- When first born
- Energy: life instinct, to live and survive (Eros), death instinct (Thanatos) - battling
- Pleasure principle: immediate gratification, do what pleasures you right now
EGO
- Develops after ID
- partly conscious
- Rational mediator: between ID and outside world (can’t always get what you want)
- Has defense mechanisms to deal with conflict
SUPEREGO
- Develops after EGO, around age 6;
- Partly conscious
- Establishes ideas and standards for judgement
Fixation
Unresolved conflict at various stages
Oral
(0-18 mo)
Pleasure: oral sensations (sucking, biting, chewing)
Fixations: biting nails, smoking, chewing pen
Anal
(18-36 mo)
Pleasure- bowel and bladder elimination
-Coping with demands for control: potty training, not peeing in class
Anal retentive: details, perfectionist, clean
Anal expulsive: dirty, unorganized
Phallic
(3-6 years)
Pleasure: genitals, finding genitals
-most important stage
Oedipus complex: idea that little boys want their dads out of the picture and like their mom
Castration anxiety: Little boy feels that Dad will castrate him for wanting to get rid of him
Identification: becomes like dad, likes “boy” toys
Penis envy: girls develop envy for a penis
Latency
(6- puberty)
- Dormant sexual urges
- Connecting with same sex peers
Genital
(puberty and on)
- Maturation of sexual interests
- If fixated on phallic, usually choose someone like mom and dad in relationships
Neo-Freudian Viewpoints
New Freudian Viewpoints
Agreements:
- That a lot went on unconsciously
- Personality structures and childhood structures
Disagreements:
- Nature of unconscious sex and aggression
- Too much perspective on males
Carl Jung
- Neo Freudian
- nature of the unconscious
- As a species we have a collective evolutionary
- archetypes- cross culturally we have similar dreams and dream symbolism
- Electra Complex: based on a myth. Wanting to kill mother and avenge father’s death
Alfred Adler
- Neo Freudian
- Inferiority complex: feeling of inferiority as a child and it will be hard to overcome as you get older
- Compensation: ego defense mechanism, if you feel inferior in one aspect, you compensate to feel superior in another aspect.
- Birth order, inferiority vs. superiority
Karen Horney
- Neo Freudian
- balanced Freud’s sexism with “womb envy”- men will never experience giving life
- Neurotic personalities: emotional stability issues. We develop maladaptive (bad) ways of dealing with relationships
Denial
Refusal to recognize or acknowledge a threatening situation
*Ben is an alcoholic who denies being an alcoholic
Repression
Pushing or threatening or conflicting events or situations out of conscious memory
*Elise, who was sexually abused as a child, cannot remember the abuse at all
Rationalization
Making up acceptable excuses for unacceptable behavior
*If I don’t have breakfast, I can have that piece of cake later without hurting my diet
Projection
Placing one’s own unacceptable thoughts onto others, as if the thoughts belonged to them and not to oneself
*Keisha is attracted to her sister’s husband but denies this and believes the husband is attracted to her
Reaction formation
Forming an emotional reaction or attitude that is the opposite of one’s threatening or unacceptable actual thoughts
*Matt is unconsciously attracted to Ben but outwardly voices an extreme hatred of homosexuals
Displacement
Expressing feelings that would be threatening if directed at the real target onto a less threatening substitute target
*Sandra gets reprimanded by her boss and goes hoe to angrily pick a fight with her husband
Regression
Falling back on childlike patterns as a way of coping with stressful situation
*4 year old Jeff starts wetting his bed after his parents bring home a new baby
Identification
Trying to become like someone else to deal with one’s anxiety
*Marie really admires Suzy, the most popular girl in school, and tries to copy her behavior and dress
Compensation (substitution)
Trying to make up for areas in which a lack is perceived by becoming superior in some other areas
*Reggie is not good at athletics, so he puts all of his energies into becoming an academic scholar
Sublimation
Turning socially unacceptable urges into socially acceptable behavior
*Alain, who is very aggressive, becomes a professional hockey player
Freud’s Weaknesses
- Inadequate scientific evidence
- Lack of testability (no testing)
- no predictive validity (proved from his observations)
- sexist views
- myth of repression
- Dream interpretation and hypnosis
Freud’s Strengths
- much of mental life is unconscious
- early childhood influences psychological adjustment
- people differ in their ability to regulate impulses, emotions, and thoughts
Goals of personality assessment in general
- we want to be accurate and consistent
2. want it to be predictive of future behavior
Assessing personality with psychoanalysis
- Interviews (free association)
- Projective tests (Inkblot tests) (TAT)
Projective Tests
Strengths:
-qualitative feedback for further exploration
Weaknesses:
- highly subjective
- inconsistent results (reliability)
- not predictive (validility)
- subject can be influenced by examiner
Social-Cognitive Behaviorist Perspective
- Behavior is governed not just by the influence of external stimuli and response patterns, but also by cognitive proceses such as anticipating, judging and memory as well as learning through the imitation of models
- Albert Bandura
- Social origin of thought and action
- conscious thought processes
- Human capacity for self-regulation (self-control)
Reciprocal Determinism
- Interaction of behavior, cognition, and environment
ex: someone not waving hi in the hallway and you believe you are being ignored
ex: loud student with no teacher, tells jokes, class laughs, teacher walks in(environment), behavior changes
Self-efficiancy
A person’s expectancy of how effective his or her efforts to accomplish a goal will be in any particular circumstance
- beliefs in your ability to act in a situation, past experiences
ex: go up to opposite sex and talk to them
Mastery experience
something you’ve done in the past and have been successful
Other social-cognitive components
- Personal control
- learned helplessness
Assessing personality with social-cognitive
- Interviews
- Halo effect- tendency to form a favorable or unfavorable impression of someone at the first meeting, so all the person’s comments and behavior will be interpreted to agree with the impression
Behavioral assessments
- Past performance: look to it to gain an impression of how you behave in the future
- Current performance in similar situations
Strengths of Social-Cognitive
- Testable
- Substantial impact on therapy
Weaknesses
- Personality is more complex
- Ignores traits and unconscious influences
- Too much emphasis on behavior/self regulation
Humanistic Perspective
Underlying the human part- doing good human things
Carl Rogers
After Freudians and behaviorists
*How we function normally
Person-Client Centered Perspective
Created an environment where people can self actualize by:
- being genuine: showing you’re a real person
- accepting of that person regardless of their behavior
- showing empathy
Self-concept
Conscious subjective perception of ourselves
- Real self: one’s actual perception of characteristics
- Ideal self: the perception of what one should be like or would like to be
Unconditional positive regard
Loving someone even though their behaviors bother you
Conditioned positive regard
Loved depends on if they are doing what those people want
Examples of conditioned/unconditioned
/congruence/incongruence
Conditional Positive regard: You’re not a good father/husband unless you provide support for the family
- Self concept- usually positive
- experience- positive if he provides
- congruent
- Self-concept- positive
- experience- negative if we fail to provide
- incongruent
Potential results if incongruence is experienced
- Distort or deny the feeling of being a bad person- blaming others
- Damage to self-concept, realizing they really are a bad person, seek Carl Rogers
Assessing personality with humanistic perspective
- Questionnaire- ideal vs. perceived self
- Carl Rogers thought standardized tests are dehumanizing
- Linked interviews and intimate conversation
Strengths of Humanistic
- Insight approach- make “ah-ha” moment in life
- Substantial impact on Therapy
Weaknesses of Humanistic
- Too optomistic- there are evil people
- Hard to scientifically validate
- Promotes extreme individualism or rationalization
Trait Perspective
- Stable pattern of thinking and behaving (more genetically determined)
- Doesn’t explain how, just states type of personality
Gordon Allport
- went through dictionaries and counted 18,00 traits which later turned into 200 traits create constellation of who you are
- Believed that traits were literally wired into the nervous system to guide one’s behavior across many different situations
Han Eysenck
Surface trait: superficial, see on surface (to describe people)
Source trait: underlying dimension
The Big Five
Openness
high: creative, artistic
low: uncreative, down to earth
Conscientiousness
high: organized, reliable
low: unreliable lazy
Extraversion
high: talkative
low: reserved
Agreeableness
high: trusting,helpful
low: rude, irritable
Neuroticism
high: worrying, anxious
low: calm, secure, relaxed
- heritable, genetic
- stable across time
- cross cultural
- predicts other qualities
Assessing personality with trait perspective
- Personal inventories
- examples and applications
- strengths: standardized, reliable, and valid
- weaknesses: people fake responses, people are prone to make similar responses on test items, innaccurate judge of own behavior
Jeff has to get up early to go to school, but he wants to stay up late and watch television. His parents disapprove of him staying up late, but when they go out for the evening he disregards their wishes and stays up late anyway. The next day he feels extremely guilty. How would Carl Rogers explain Jeff’s guilt?
It results from a psychological conflict between Jeff’s personal desire to stay up late and the opinion adopted from his parents that it is wrong to stay up late
Cattell and Allport are both prominent ________ theorists.
trait
Which of the following viewpoints has different goals from the other three?
trait theory
How many source traits did Cattell use in developing his personality inventory?
16
According to Rogers, people brought up with unconditional positive regard ________.
feel valued regardless of their attitudes and behaviors
Which of the following descriptions is likely to fit the quality of self-actualization?
real self close to ideal self
For Freud, the only personality structure present at birth is the ________.
ID
Which of the following is NOT one of the four basic types of tools used by psychologists to measure personality?
aptitude tests
You are about to undergo delicate brain surgery that requires great skill on the part of the surgeon. As the surgical team wheels you into the operating room, you hope the surgeon has a high level of ________.
self-effciancy
In the metaphor the angel, the devil, and me, the devil is the ________.
ID
According to Freud, the ________ acts as our conscience.
Superego
Which of the following, according to Rogers, is MOST likely to become a fully functioning person?
someone brought up with unconditional positive regard
When one thinks of “value judgment” in relation to personality, one is thinking about ________.
character
According to Freud, during the first 18 months of life, the dominant source of sensual pleasure is the ________.
the mouth
Albert Bandura’s notion that people are affected by their environment but can also influence that environment is known as ________.
reciporcoal determinism
A baseball player’s son is quite talented; he has received lots of awards over the years. When he gets up to bat he expects to get a hit, and when he is in the field he expects to make every catch. According to Bandura, what characteristic does this young man seem to have?
self-efficacy
To explain a person’s personality, behaviorists would look to ________.
the early experiences of rewards and punishments for certain behavior
What do Abraham Maslow’s and Carl Rogers’s theories have in common?
They believe that each human being is free to choose his or her own destiny.
The striving for fulfillment of one’s potential is called ________.
self-actualization
According to Rogers, all people have a need for:
positive regard
The push toward fulfillment of our inborn capacities and potentialities is what Rogers calls the ________.
actualizing tendency
_______ theory is called the third force in personality theory.
humanistic
Which of the following statements describes the relationship between temperament and personality?
temperament, which we are born with, is the basis upon which one’s personality is built.
Ellen has been described as creative, imaginative, curious, artistic, and nonconforming. She is likely to obtain an elevated score on a questionnaire designed to measure ________.
openness
From what Latin phrase is the term superego derived?
“over the self”
Jessie becomes furious when her favorite hockey player is intentionally hurt by an opponent. According to Freud’s model of the mind, her id would unconsciously say ________.
“Im so angry I could kill that player!”
Explain why Psychodynamic theorists believe that objective tests are of little use because ________
people are not usually aware of the unconscious determinants of their behavior
For Bandura, one of the most important person variables in determining personality is ________.
self-efficacy
According to Freud, rationality and logical thinking and reasoning are controlled by the ________.
Ego
Unlike the psychodynamic view, the social cognitive view of personality ________.
has been scientifically tested
