Chapter 11 Terms Flashcards
Personality
An individual’s characteristic style of behaving, thinking, and feeling.
Self-Report
A method in which a person provides subjective information about his or her own thoughts, feelings, or behaviors, typically via questionnaire or interview.
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)
A well-researched clinical questionnaire that is used to assess personality and psychological problems.
Projective Tests
Tests designed to reveal inner aspects of individuals’ personalities by analysis of their responses to a standard series of ambiguous stimuli.
Rorschach Inkblot Tests
A projective technique in which respondents’ inner thoughts and feelings are believed to be revealed by analysis of their responses to a set of unstructured inkblots.
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
A projective technique in which respondents’ underlying motives, concerns, and the way they see the social world are believed to be revealed through analysis of the stories they make up about ambiguous pictures of people.
Trait
A relatively stable disposition to behave in a particular and consistent way.
Big Five
The traits of the five-factor model: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
Psychodynamic Approach
An approach that regards personality as formed by needs, strivings, and desires largely operating outside of awareness– motives that also can 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.
Superego
The mental system that reflects the internalization of cultural rules, mainly learned as parents exercise their authority.
Ego
The component of personality, developed through contact with the external world, that enables us to deal with life’s practical demands.
Defense Mechanisms
Unconscious coping mechanisms that reduce anxiety generated by threats from unacceptable impulses.
Psychosexual Stages
Distinct early life stages through which personality is formed as children experience sexual pleasures from specific body areas and caregivers 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.
Oral Stage
The first psychosexual stage, in which experience centers on the pleasures and frustrations associated with the mouth, sucking, and being fed.
Anal Stage
The second psychosexual stage, in which experience is dominated by the pleasures and frustrations associated with the anus, retention and expulsion of feces and urine, and toilet training.
Phallic Stage
The third psychosexual stage, in which experience is dominated by the pleasure, conflict, and frustration associated with the phallic-genital region, as well as coping with powerful incestuous feeling of love, hate, jealousy, and conflict.
Oedipus Conflict
A developmental experience in which a child’s conflicting feelings toward the opposite-sex parent are (usually) resolved by identifying with the same-sex parents.
Latency Stage
The fourth psychosexual stage, in which the primary focus is on the further development of intellectual, creative, interpersonal, and athletic skills.
Genital Stage
The fifth and final psychosexual stage, the time for the coming together of the mature adult personality with a capacity to love, work, and relate to others in a mutually satisfying and reciprocal manner.
Self-Actualizing Tendency
The human motive toward realizing our inner potential.
Existential Approach
A school of thought that regards personality as governed by an individual’s ongoing choices and decisions in the context of the realities of life and death.
Social-Cognitive Approach
An approach that views personality in terms of how the person thinks about the situations encountered in daily life and behaves in response to them.
Person-Situation Controversy
The question of whether behavior is caused more by personality or by situational factors.
Personal Constructs
Dimensions people use in making sense of their experiences.
Outcome Expectancies
A person’s assumptions about the likely consequences of a future behavior.
Locus of Control
A person’s tendency to perceive the control of rewards as internal to the self or external in the environment.
Self-Concept
A person’s explicit knowledge of his or her own behaviors, traits, and other personal characteristics.
Self-Verification
The tendency to seek evidence to confirm the self-concept.
Self-esteem
The extent to which an individual likes, values, and accepts the self.
Self-Serving Bias
People’s tendency to take credit for their successes but downplay responsibility for their failures.
Narcissim
A trait that reflects a grandiose view of the self combined with a tendency to seek admiration from and exploit others.
