Chapter 11 Terms

Question 1

Personality

Answer 1

An individual’s characteristic style of behaving, thinking, and feeling.

Question 2

Self-Report

Answer 2

A method in which a person provides subjective information about his or her own thoughts, feelings, or behaviors, typically via questionnaire or interview.

Question 3

Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)

Answer 3

A well-researched clinical questionnaire that is used to assess personality and psychological problems.

Question 4

Projective Tests

Answer 4

Tests designed to reveal inner aspects of individuals’ personalities by analysis of their responses to a standard series of ambiguous stimuli.

Question 5

Rorschach Inkblot Tests

Answer 5

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.

Question 6

Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

Answer 6

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.

Question 7

Trait

Answer 7

A relatively stable disposition to behave in a particular and consistent way.

Question 8

Big Five

Answer 8

The traits of the five-factor model: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

Question 9

Psychodynamic Approach

Answer 9

An approach that regards personality as formed by needs, strivings, and desires largely operating outside of awareness– motives that also can produce emotional disorders.

Question 10

ID

Answer 10

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.

Question 11

Superego

Answer 11

The mental system that reflects the internalization of cultural rules, mainly learned as parents exercise their authority.

Question 12

Ego

Answer 12

The component of personality, developed through contact with the external world, that enables us to deal with life’s practical demands.

Question 13

Defense Mechanisms

Answer 13

Unconscious coping mechanisms that reduce anxiety generated by threats from unacceptable impulses.

Question 14

Psychosexual Stages

Answer 14

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.

Question 15

Fixation

Answer 15

A phenomenon in which a person’s pleasure-seeking drives become psychologically stuck, or arrested, at a particular psychosexual stage.

Question 16

Oral Stage

Answer 16

The first psychosexual stage, in which experience centers on the pleasures and frustrations associated with the mouth, sucking, and being fed.

Question 17

Anal Stage

Answer 17

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.

Question 18

Phallic Stage

Answer 18

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.

Question 19

Oedipus Conflict

Answer 19

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.

Question 20

Latency Stage

Answer 20

The fourth psychosexual stage, in which the primary focus is on the further development of intellectual, creative, interpersonal, and athletic skills.

Question 21

Genital Stage

Answer 21

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.

Question 22

Self-Actualizing Tendency

Answer 22

The human motive toward realizing our inner potential.

Question 23

Existential Approach

Answer 23

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.

Question 24

Social-Cognitive Approach

Answer 24

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.

Question 25

Person-Situation Controversy

Answer 25

The question of whether behavior is caused more by personality or by situational factors.

Question 26

Personal Constructs

Answer 26

Dimensions people use in making sense of their experiences.

Question 27

Outcome Expectancies

Answer 27

A person’s assumptions about the likely consequences of a future behavior.

Question 28

Locus of Control

Answer 28

A person’s tendency to perceive the control of rewards as internal to the self or external in the environment.

Question 29

Self-Concept

Answer 29

A person’s explicit knowledge of his or her own behaviors, traits, and other personal characteristics.

Question 30

Self-Verification

Answer 30

The tendency to seek evidence to confirm the self-concept.

Question 31

Self-esteem

Answer 31

The extent to which an individual likes, values, and accepts the self.

Question 32

Self-Serving Bias

Answer 32

People’s tendency to take credit for their successes but downplay responsibility for their failures.

Question 33

Narcissim

Answer 33

A trait that reflects a grandiose view of the self combined with a tendency to seek admiration from and exploit others.