Chapter 12 -- Personality Flashcards
What is personality?
A pattern of enduring and distinctive thoughts, emotions, and behaviours that characterize the way an individual adapts to the world.
What does the psychodynamic perspective say about personality?
Personality is primarily unconscious (beyond awareness).
Behaviour is surface level
Childhood experiences shapes adult personality.
What are Freud’s three structures of personality?
ID: Pleasure principle that seeks immediate gratification. Unconscious drives; the individual’s reservoir of sexual energy.
EGO: Reality principle. Tries to get what the id wants within societal norms. Higher mental functions. Mediator between id and superego.
SUPEREGO: Our conscience that evaluates the morality of our behaviour.
What is a defence mechanism?
The Freudian term for tactics the ego uses to reduce anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality.
What is the repression defence mechanism?
The ego pushes unacceptable impulses out of awareness into the unconscious mind.
An individual forgets an event to protect themselves from psychological stress
What is the rationalization defence mechanism?
The ego creates a comfortable, reassuring explanation to deal with stressful experiences, distorting facts.
What is the displacement defence mechanism?
The ego takes pushes feelings towards an unacceptable object to another
What is the sublimation defence mechanism?
The ego replaces an unacceptable impulse with a socially acceptable one.
EX: A man with strong sexual urges ends up painting nudes instead
What is the projection defence mechanism?
The ego projects personal problems to criticizing others
What is the reaction formation defence mechanism?
The ego copes with negative experiences by focusing on the opposite.
- EX: Going to the gym after an argument with your friend
What is the denial defence mechanism?
The ego denies that a situation happens and refuses to acknowledge reality to cope with stress
What is the regression defence mechanism?
The ego seeks the security of an earlier developmental period to cope with stresses
What are Freud’s psychosexual stages of personality development?
Oral stage (18 months): Infant’s pleasure relies on their mouths – relieves tension the most
Anal stage (18-36 months): greatest pleasure involves their anus and urethra and their functions – controlling their execratory functions and their parents.
Phallic stage (3-6 years old): pleasure is focused on genitals.s
Latency period (6 years - puberty): A child sets aside all interests in sexuality.
Genital stage (12+): Sexual re-awakening. Individuals become capable of love and work, but are subject to conflict as the id will always press for expression and they must face unconscious conflicts during previous stages.
According to Freud, what are the 3 types of fixations that occur when individuals are overdisciplined or overindulged during developmental stages?
Oral: smoking, eating, kissing - uses sublimation to be a food critic, uses reaction formation to develop a dislike for milk.
Anal: interest in bowel movements, messiness/cleanliness, stubborness –> uses sublimation to paint/sculpt, uses reaction formation to be disgusted by feces, dirt, irritable.
Phallic: masturbation, flirting –> uses sublimation to take interest in love, poetry, success, uses reaction formation to reject sex on moral grounds
What was Carl Jung’s analytical theory on personality?
- We all had a COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS: the impersonal, deepest layer of the unconscious mind, shared by all human beings because of their common ancestral past.
- The collective unconscious has ARCHETYPES character types that represent certain characteristics
- anima (feminine archetype)
-animus (masculine archetype)
What was Adler’s individual psychology view on personality?
- People are motivated by purposes and goals. Perfection, not pleasure, is thus the key motivator in human life.
- Compensation is an individual’s attempt to overcome imagined weaknesses in developing abilities by excelling in another one.
What are the stages of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs?
1) Physiological - food, air, water
2) Safety – employment, health, personal security
3) Love and Belonging - companionship
4) Esteem – (self)respect, status
5) Self-Actualization – the desire to optimize yourself
What is the Allport’s trait theory?
- Personality consists of broad, traits that tend to lead to characteristic responses.
- traits are stable over time and situations
- traits are used to understand and predict behaviour
- We all have the same traits, but exhibit some more than others
- Flawed for missing the importance of situational factors in personality and behaviour.
What are the big five factors of personality?
The five broad traits that are thought to describe the main dimensions of personality:
OCEAN
- Openness to experience
- Conscientiousness [organized, careful, disciplined]
- Extroversion
- Agreeableness [generosity, altruism]
- Neuroticism [emotional instability]
What is HEXACO?
A six-factor trait model of personality that updates and expands on the five factor model with 4 corresponding facets.
- Honesty-humility
- Emotionality
- eXtroversion
- Agreeableness
- Conscientiousness
- Openness to experience
What are the personological and life story perspectives?
Theoretical views describing that the way to understand a person is to focus on their life history and life story.
personology is the concept that personality is determined by experiences and can change.
What is Murray’s Thematic Apperception Test?
A person must look at an ambiguous picture and write about what is going on. Their answers are analyzed, and out of the 22 unconscious needs, the 3 most important are:
- Need for achievement
- Need for affiliation
- Need for power
What is Bandura’s Social Learning theory and reciprocal determinism?
- Behaviour is a product of a variety of forces either from a situation or what a person brings to a situation
- We learn observationally
Reciprocal determinism describes the way behavioural, environmental, and personal factors interact to create personality.
- Influenced by observational learning and internal/external control
What is self-efficacy?
- The belief that one can accomplish a given goal or task and produce positive change.
- Related to a number of positive developments in people’s lives.
What is Michel’s CAPS theory?
[cognitive affective processing systems theory]
individuals’ thoughts and emotions about themselves and the world affect their behaviour and become linked in ways that matter to that behaviour.
What was B.F. Skinner’s theory of
Radical Behaviorism?
Personality is a collection of behavior patterns
- a black box theory
What is RET –
Rational Emotive Therapy?
Assumes that all humans have fundamental goals, purposes and values (e.g., stay alive, be satisfied)
- if people choose to stay alive & try to be happy/satisfied they are acting “rationally”
- when people think/emote/behave in a way that interferes with these goals, they act “irrationally”
What was Roger’s person-centered approach to psychology?
Rogers believed that humans are good by nature (in contrast to psychodynamic view)
Emphasized the notion of SELF-CONCEPT (beliefs one holds about oneself) where each person has multiple selves:
TRUE SELF – the core aspect of being
FALSE SELF – the self that is created by distortions from interpersonal experiences
IDEAL SELF – what the person would like to be
