Chapter 12 Flashcards
What is Personality?
A pattern of enduring, distinctive thoughts, emotions and behaviors that characterize the way an individual adapts to the world.
What is the Psychodynamic Perspective on personality? Introduced by?
View that emphasizes that personality is primarily unconscious and powerfully shapes our behavior. This view also stresses that early childhood experience shapes adult personality. It was introduced by Sigmund Freud.
What is Hysteria?
Refers to physical symptoms that have no physical cause (girl leg hurting because she wanted to walk outside but couldnt due to taking care of her father)
What are the 3 structures of personality described by Freud?
Id: consists of unconscious drives and is the individual’s reservoir of sexual energy. Works according to the pleasure principle (immediate gratification)
Ego: Deals with demands of reality. Abides by the reality principle (tries to get what the id wants within social norms)
Superego: harsh internal judge of our behavior. Reflected in what we often call conscience and evaluates the morality of our behavior.
What are Defense Mechanisms?
Tactics the ego uses to reduce anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality. They are unconscious, we are not aware of using them.
List all Defense Mechanisms
Repression: most powerful and pervasive. Pushes impulses back into the unconscious.
Rationalization: ego replaces a less acceptable motive with a more acceptable one
Displacement: ego shifts feelings toward from unacceptable object to a more acceptable one.
Sublimation: ego replaces unacceptable impulse with socially acceptable one.
Projection: ego attributes personal shortcomings onto others.
Reaction Formation: ego transforms an unacceptable motive into its opposite.
Denial: ego refuses to acknowledge anxiety-producing realities
Regression: ego seeks the security of an earlier developmental period in the face of stress.
What are the psychosexual stages of personality development?
Oral stage (first 18 months): infant’s pleasure centers on the mouth.
Anal stage (18-36 months): greatest pleasure involved anus and urethra and their functions.
Phallic stage (3-6 years): Pleasure focuses on the genitals as the child discovers that self-stimulation is enjoyable. Triggers Oedipus complex.
Latency period (6 years to puberty): Child sets aside all interest in sexuality.
Genital stage (adolescence and adulthood): Time of sexual reawakening, sexual pleasure shifts to someone outside of the family. Freud believed that in adulthood, individuals become capable of love and work.
What is the Oedipus complex?
The boy’s intense desire to replace his father and enjoy affections of his mother. Boy recognizes his father will found out and mutilate him.
Leads to castration anxiety: intense fear of being mutilated by his father, which leads to the boy adopting the male gender role. This anxiety is repressed into the unconscious and serves as the foundation for the development of the superego.
Describe how Castration anxiety would work for girls. Do they develop super egos?
A girl experiences Castration completed, which is the intense desire to obtain a penis by eventually marrying and bearing a son. No, thus Freud deduced that women are inferior to men.
What is Fixation? Example.
Occurs when a particular psychosexual stage colors an individual’s adult personality.
An anal retentive person is someone who is obsessively neat organized because they are fixated at the anal stage.
What are some critics about the psychodynamic view.
-Sexuality is not the pervasive force that Freud believed it to be. Oedipus complex is not as universal as Freud maintained.
- First five years of life are not as powerful in shaping adult personality as Freud thought.
-Ego and conscious thought processes play a larger role in personality than Freud believed.
-Sociocultural factors are much more important that Freud believed.
What is Horney’s Sociocultural approach?
She rejected the notion that anatomy is destiny. She pointed out that women might envy the penis because of the status that society bestows on those who have one
What is Carl Jung’s analytical theory?
He believed that the roots of personality go back to the dawn of humanity.
Collective unconsciousness: the impersonal deepest layer of the unconscious mind, shared by all human beings because of their common ancestral past.
this collective unconsciousness contains archetypes: emotionally laden ideas and images that have symbolic meaning for all people.
3 archetypes?
Anima: passive feminine side each of us possess.
Animus: assertive masculine side.
Persona: the public mask we all wear during social interactions.
What is Adler’s individual psychology
People are motivated by purposes and goals. Thus, perfection, not pleasure, is the key motivator in human life.
What is Compensation?
Adler’s term for the individual’s attempt to overcome imagined or real inferiorities or weaknesses by developing one’s own abilities. (a persona with bad physical compensated by being smart)
What are the Humanistic perspectives?
They stress a person’s capacity for personal growth and positive qualities.
What is Maslow’s approach?
He believed that we can learn the most about human personality by focusing on self-actualizers.
What is Carl Roger’s approach?
He believed that we are all born with the raw ingredients of a fulfilling life. We simply need the right conditions to thrive. (Sunflower example).
What is Unconditional positive regard?
It means being accepted, valued and treated positively regardless of one’s behavior.
What are conditions of worth?
The standards we must live up to in order to receive positive regard.
What is a self-concept?
Our conscious representation of who we are and who we wish to become during childhood. This self concept reflects our genuine, innate desires according to Roger’s theory.
What should a person who strays from their self concept do to be happy?
They must experience a relationship that includes Unconditional positive regard, Empathy, and genuineness
What are some critics about the humanistic perspective?
-Critics believe that humanistic psychologists are too optimistic about human nature.
-Humanistic approaches do not hold individuals accountable for their behavior, if all negative human behavior emerges out of negative situations.
What are Trait theories?
Views stressing that personality consists of broad, enduring dispositions that tend to lead characteristic responses.
What was Gordon Allport’s view on personality psychology?
He rejected the notion that the unconscious was central to an understanding of personality and believed that to understand healthy people, we must focus on their lives in the present, not on their childhood experiences. Lexical Approach.
