final! Flashcards
personality
individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving
3 broad areas personality focuses on
What are you born with?
How have you adapted to adversity and challenges?
Who are you right now? How do you make sense of your life through time and life stories?
EEA: environment of evolutionary adaptedness
- we are very socially connected, we work well in units
- the mind as subsystems (different levels of processing always going on)
- increased ability for cognition
Why aggression?
maintain social structure
Why altruism?
in order to keep social hierarchy, people need to be cooperative and show altruistic behavior
implicit expectation that altruism will be reciprocated
key epigenetic studies
agouti mice
Meaney’s rats
twin studies
agouti mice study
what mothers ate impacted their offspring (vitamin B-12)
Meaney’s rats study
cross-fostering (mothering is more important than genetics)
temperament
what we’re born with + parenting/teachers/mentors/siblings
culture
all about our worldview (how we make sense of the world)
Hispanic immigrants
first-generation Hispanics are healthier than Anglo Americans—stronger social network, more religious
acculturation
second- and third-generation Mexican-Americans have worse health than Anglo Americans
classical conditioning
by association, pairing
operant conditioning
rewards and punishments
social/emotional learning
Bandura’s bobo doll
we can learn behavior just by watching someone else, so watching parents and siblings has an impact on us
traits
characteristic of you, relatively stable over time
5-factor trait model
OCEAN
most characteristic traits
extraversion and neuroticism
measuring traits
HEXACO, NEO, MMPI (pathology vs health, clinical)
Walter Mischel and traits
personality assessment is overblown
context matters
Cluster A
paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal
Cluster B
emotionally disregulated (narcissistic, antisocial, histrionic, borderline)
Cluster C
dependent, avoidant, OCPD
interactionism
interaction between personality and the situation
triune brain
brain stem, limbic (emotional), neocortex (cognitive functions, most developed in humans)
positive emotion
tied to approaching good things, goals
negative emotion
defense mechanism against things that could actually hurt you, disengaging to conserve energy when things are bad
personality change correlation
0.5 (between twins and between child and adulthood personality)
absolute continuity
overall averages of a group changing over time
differential continuity
individuals changing over time
genes x environment
genes don’t change but the genetic expression changes
agency and expression
diet, exercise, drugs use, cigarette smoke, thoughts we have on a regular basis (ex: pessimistic, anxious)
humanistic theory
people are motivated by self-actualization, hierarchy of needs
multifaceted theory
we’re motivated by lots of different things
self-determination theory
intrinsic (growth, connectedness) vs extrinsic (money, fame, appearance) motivation
determining life values
funeral in spirit form
valued action
living according to what you think is important
purpose of attachment
safe base to grow from
attachment styles
secure, avoidant, disorganized, anxious
avoidant attachment style
I’m ok, you’re not
disorganized attachment style
no one’s okay, the world is a dangerous place
anxious attachment style
I’m not okay, you’re okay, I want support
self schemas
how we construct our world, how we interpret events in our lives
explanatory style
global vs specific
stable vs unstable
internal vs external
social intelligence
effectively interacting in the social world
emotional intelligence
ability to recognize emotions, discriminate between emotions, facilitate thinking, use emotions
religiosity/spirituality
impacts how we see others/world
intrinsic vs extrinsic religiosity (intrinsic is good)
impact of trauma
post-traumatic stress growth/inventory (Calhoun)
trauma can have a negative impact on us, but we can still experience resilience and growth
life story
brain is built to narrate the world and experience
narrative identity
a person’s internalized and evolving life story
gives life overall meaning and purpose
narrative contains setting, main characters, plots, envisioned ending
a person’s identity (talking about narrative)
a person’s identity is capacity to keep narrative going
we make a life by making a story
writing life story
think of life as a story book with chapters
- identify what each chapter is about and outline chapters
- identify 4 to 8 key scenes or episodes
- identify life challenge, main characters, future plot, personal ideology, life theme
momentous event approach to life stories
- originating events
- turning points
- anchoring events (stability, continuity)
- analogous events (similarities across events)
key themes in momentous event approach
agency and communion (common to have both)
psychotherapy as momentous event
self-defining moment, hard-earned victory leading to increased agency and coherent life narrative
listening and friends
being a good listener to friends is therapeutic
being a bad listener is damaging
ignoring friends in stories reduces even their memory for story
psychosocial constructions?
our life stories are psychosocial constructions gender, race, and social class as cultural factors Americans have more self-focused memories, Asians have more social memories
Confucius
we should scrutinize our autobiographical past for mistakes in social conduct
autobiographical memory
age 2
theory of mind
age 4-5
scaffolding
parents help children construct stories
personal fable (adolescence, teenagers)
fantastical stories about self, underscoring one’s uniqueness in the world, destined for great goodness or badness, forever misunderstood
ontological strategy (young adulthood)
how did I come to be?, mythologically rearranging past
mythologically rearranging past
- dynastic
- antithetical
- compensatory
- self-absolutory
dynastic
good past, good present
antithetical
good past, bad present
compensatory
bad past, good present
self-absolutory
bad past, bad present
life story schemas - time period
adulthood
4 skills to construct life schemas
- temporal coherence
- biographical (cultural) coherence
- causal coherence
- thematic coherence
mythic archetypes
comedy (spring, birth), romance (summer, passion, adventure), tragedy (fall, dying), irony (winter, death)
Joseph Campbell
myth of the hero common in all world’s mythologies
separation, initiation, return
Gergen & Gergen
stability, progressive, regressive
Sartre
people’s lives are true novels, people create own myths
generic plots
- establishing a home
- fighting a battle
- taking a journey
- enduring suffering
- pursuing consummation or completion
redemptive self
- early advantage
- suffering
- moral steadfastness
- redemption sequences
- prosocial goals for future
redemption sequence
negative scene suddenly turns positive
contamination sequence
positive scene turns suddenly negative
6 standards of a good story
- coherence
- openness
- credibility
- differentiation
- reconciliation
- generative integration
meaning
Stories we tell as groups give us shared identity and link us together in time and meaning, stories are more about meanings than facts, by our stories we know ourselves, truth is not simply what happened but how we feel about it then and now
paradigmatic mode
just the facts, say no more than you mean
narrative mode
human intention organized in time, you mean more than you say because a good story will generate different meanings depending on person, context, time
health
Stories can integrate aspects of our lives and heal that which is broken or sick; parables and fairytales provide wisdom; we can learn from and be healed from other people’s stories (Frankl)
writing as therapy
human life is ideally a connected and coherent story, illness amounts at least in part to suffering from an incoherent story or inadequate account of oneself; psychotherapists can help us rewrite or revise our stories about ourselves; Pennebaker research on expressive writing about traumatic events and improved physical health
Tomkins’ Script Theory
emotion and feeling more important than needs or drives, each affect is linked to characteristic movements of the muscles of the face, the face is the organ of emotion, primary universal emotions, recognized by anyone anywhere in the world; display rules: cultural differences in appropriate emotional expression
Darwin
humans evolved with particular facial expressions for showing particular emotions, emotions area adaptive response pattern for dealing with recurring life situations allowing quick response; emotions also form of social communication
scenes and scripts
affect is the great motivator, scenes and scripts are the great organizers, each person is their own playwright
scenes
memories of specific events in life
scripts
making sense of relations among various scenes
psychological magnification
process of connecting related scenes in a meaningful pattern by constructing analogs, negative affect scenes magnified by noticing how negative emotional events are similar, positive affect scenes are magnified by noticing how positive emotional events are different
negative emotions
demand more storytelling
discounting
repression, denial , dissociation, because story is so bad it cannot be told; narrator lacks cognitive constructs to make sensible story
Acceptance and Commitment Theory
Finding meaning in suffering, explore what happened and why in depth, meditate and contemplate situation, commit to positive action that will lead to satisfying conclusion (???)
commitment script
life program of long-term positive affect and investment in self-improvement
nuclear script
confusion over life goals, approach-avoidance conflicts
autobiographical memory
recollection of experienced past events, central to our sense of self and overall functioning, improves current goal pursuit through past problem solving efforts
prospective brain
brain is structured to use information about our past to imagine and predict our future
mood congruent memory
memory recall is biased by current state, in positive mood we remember more positive, in negative mood we remember more negative, “A memory recalled is a memory modified”
memory
a constructive process that is formed by our ongoing narrative of self in the world, neuroimaging studies show same brain regions are involved in remembering and imagining, par of common constructive mechanism, memory system should be called ‘remembering-imagining system’
imagined future events
cluster around future self-images the way that memories cluster around past self-images
over general memory
past is too painful to remember so repress, avoid, depressed individuals often lack specific memories about past events, Debeer article: reduced autobiographical memory specificity is an avoidant coping style
memory specific training
Involves practicing recalling specific memories over four one-hour session using word cues; it is like a less intense version of Pennebakers’ expressive writing intervention
MEST effectively improves memory specificity, decreases over general memory, and decreases depression
Clinician’s Illusion
Clinicians see people with severe pathology all day long in the office and then assume a higher rate of pathology in the general populace than is accurate (Freud suffered from this)
psychoanalysis
goal: uncover secrets, decode disguised messages
never trust what you see because surface level is deceptive, the real truth lies beyond the obvious
human behavior is like a text
interpreted on many different levels
human behavior is like a treaty
compromise among conflicting forces
manifest level of dreams
what is consciously known and seen
latent level of dreams
what is unconscious must be discovered
hidden forces, conflicts, impulses, wishes
overdetermination
all behavior is caused by many different unconscious and conflicting factors
dream work
process brain uses to distort latent content and create the manifest dream, four strategies:
condensation
compressing various latent elements into a single manifest image
displacement
shift of emphasis from important but threatening image to trivial but safer one
symbolism
concrete images and actions convey hidden but common meanings
secondary revision
unconsciously smoothing over a dreams rough spots, editing dream to make it coherent
Jung
collective unconscious
more interested in development throughout the lifespan
spirituality over sexuality
collective unconscious
storehouse of remnants from our evolutionary past, inherited racial memory we are all born with
archetypes
major components of the collective unconscious
universal patterns that structure how humans consciously and unconsciously adapt to the world
Jung
Jung on midlife
midlife is an important life transition from materialism to spiritual focus
symbol of the mandala (circle)
symbol of the self’s unity and integrity achieved through lifelong adventure of individuation
Jung’s view on dreams
symbols of the striving for balance in personality
expressions of universal myths
anticipations of life problems for the future
influenced by the collective unconscious which contains symbols and meanings from the dawn of human history
modern approaches to dream analysis
we consolidate memories during sleep and dreaming
dreams are like brain exercises, works areas of the brain that didn’t get enough stimulation during the day
limbic system
active during REM
dreams are full of emotional content
Murray and personology
take a broad approach to analyzing life stories
diagnostic councils
overall patterns and persons unique adaptations to the world
identifying recurrent thematic constellations and story elements
personality is determined by multiple and numerous forces, a close examination of conscious and unconscious processes
diagnostic councils
group of professionals working together using info from a variety of disciplines
time and personlogy
humans are ‘time-bound’ organisms
history is the narrative reconstruction of how past gave birth to present in light of an anticipated future
proceeding (personology)
a single episode of behavior
multitasking (personology)
more than one proceeding
durance (personology)
all of the overlapping proceedings during a given period of time
serials (personology)
relatively long and directionally organized series of proceedings involving a particular life domain
serial programs (personology)
orderly arrangement of sub goals stretching into future to achieve desired end state
unity-thema (personology)
well-organized pattern of related needs and environmental press that provides meaning to a large portion of the individual’s life; a central organizing motif of person’s life story, linking distant past with present and future
psychobiography (Murray)
systematic use of psychological and personality theory to transform a life into a coherent and illuminating story
goal is to formulate central story of life according to one psychological theory
key guidelines for collecting psychobiography information
primacy frequency uniqueness negation emphasis omission distortion isolation incompletion
life structure and course
sociological views incorporated within personality psychology
focus on life structure or patterning of an individual life at a given time
including sociocultural world
social clock
series of expectations about age-appropriate life transitions
standards against which people evaluate the extent to which their lives’ are on-time
spiritual lifemaps
A way to diagram and write about your life history from a spiritual perspective, focuses on your relationship with God, spiritual beliefs, spiritual rituals/practices, spiritual support
Begin by identifying 5 to 10 key events in your life (both good and bad) that have shaped you and contributed to who you are now; try to identify key events in childhood, adolescence, later teenage years, and as an adult, contemplate and ponder spiritual ramifications of these events and how they formed you
relationship with God (spiritual lifemaps)
how does your relationship with God impact your lifemap? What has God taught you about important events/situations? How have you applied those lessons in your life? How has God supported you during times of crises? What are the spiritual strengths of your relationship with God?
spiritual beliefs (spiritual lifemaps)
What does your faith teach about trials? Is there a deeper reason for life’s challenges? What are your favorite scriptures? Are there certain scriptures that really speak to you during times of stress? What spiritual principles have you learned from life’s experiences?
Spiritual Rituals: Are there certain rituals or regular spiritual practices that help you cope with life’s trials? Are some practices particularly effective in certain situations? Are there particular rituals/practices that strengthen your relationship with God?
spiritual rituals (spiritual lifemaps)
Are there certain rituals or regular spiritual practices that help you cope with life’s trials? Are some practices particularly effective in certain situations? Are there particular rituals/practices that strengthen your relationship with God?
social support (spiritual lifemaps)
what role has your faith community played during your life challenges? Are there relationships in your church that are particularly supportive? Has there been a spiritual mentor in your life that has been particularly significant? How have these individuals assisted you in coping with trials?
Adler
earliest memory reveals major themes in a person’s style of life
will to power, striving for superiority big themes for Adler
fictional finalism
people more oriented to subjectively expected and hoped for future than to objective past, people understand lives and organize behavior in terms of final goals; envisioned final goals are fictions because haven’t happened yet and may never happen, but we act as if they were true
narrative as root metaphor
adult life not orderly progression of developmental stages but an evolving narrative situated in culture and history
Herman’s dialogical self
person is a multi-voiced storyteller whose identity is expressed through dialogue, different parts of self speak to and about different aspects of personality that are to be valued
valuation
anything person finds of importance when thinking about life situation, can be positive, negative, or mixed
meaning comes from organizing valuations into life narratives
2 primary motives (dialogical self)
agentic (S) and communion (O)
self-confrontation method (dialogical self)
each research participant acts as co-investigator, people are their own experts in understanding their own lives, review past, present, and future in self-confrontation
In second phase, person goes back and rates each valuation on 6-point scale, finds top 16 different emotion terms: 4 S-motives (summed to form S index); 4 O-motives (summed to form O index); 4 positive affect (summed to form P index); 4 negative affect (summed to form N index); then have S minus O score and P minus N score
music as a metaphor
harmony (vertical) and melody (horizontal)
personality as a fugue
several voices play variations on a single theme
feminist perspective
most history and writing based white men’s lives, frameworks traditionally used to make sense of middle-class white men’s lives do not always work well when applied to other people; feminist perspectives place gender, power, social structure at center of interpretive process
Stewart’s 7 feminist strategies
1) keep an eye open for what has been left out
2) analyze our own role or position as it affects understanding and research process
3) identify women’s agency in midst of social constraint
4) use of gender as an analytic tool
5) be sensitive to how gender defines power relationships in which power relationships are gendered
6) identify other significant aspects of individuals’ social position (not all women are the same)
7) be suspicious of psychological prescriptions that stem from experiences of male elite
