Midterm Flashcards
What is personality?
the characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviours that make a person unique
What is personality psychology?
studies the individual differences in basic traits, motives, and other personality variables as they are expressed in the lives of adults
What is developmental psychology?
rare use of the term “personality” and instead examine what they call “temperament” and “socioemotional development”
What is an agent?
to articulate and pursue goals in life that instantiate what you want and what you value
- to be an agent is to make decisions about where you want your life to go in the future
What is extraversion?
tendency to be outgoing, sociable, and assertive
What is neuroticism?
tendency to experience negative emotions
What is openness to experience?
tendency to be receptive to new ideas, approaches and experiences
What is agreeableness?
kind, cooperative, sympathetic
- the tendency toward doing one’s work well and thoroughly
What are homo erectus?
Learned how to control fire for domestic use, which ultimately transformed the nature of hominid social relations
What are homo habilis?
Characterized by a less protruding face than their ancestors and a significantly enhanced cranial capacity, used their hands (and brains) to fashion primitive stone tools for scavenging and scraping meat off dead animals.
What is bipedalism?
The australopithecine species that inhabited Africa between 4 and 2 million years ago had evolved to the point that they could walk on their two hind legs, freeing their hands to reach for and carry fruits, vegetables, and nuts, and to handle objects with ease and skill.
What is different about homo sapiens?
They developed disproportionate expansion in the prefrontal cortex and the temporal lobes
What is group identification?
People naturally identify with social groups—nearly any social group—and experience the group’s triumphs and setbacks as if they were their own.
What is group selection?
Even though cooperative individuals are often appreciated in their groups, they may still lose out in the battle with their more selfish counterparts to obtain maximal resources in the group.
What is kin selection?
The idea that individuals may show altruism toward those with whom they share a significant allotment of genes
What is mother-infant attachment?
A bond of love that forms in the first year of the infant’s life in order to serve the evolutionary demand of protecting the helpless infant from predators and other dangers in the environment
What is reciprocal altruism?
In that human beings evolved to live in well-coordinated social groups, helping other individual human beings typically meant helping other members of your group.
What is shared intentionality?
To the extent that we can share with each other what we each are planning to do, we will be able to work together more efficiently to accomplish a joint task.
What is social identity?
Encompasses your own thoughts and feelings regarding how you fit into the group, your role and function in the group, and what membership in the group means more generally for your life.
What is the need to belong?
A relentless desire for attachment to families, clans, teams, tribes, and all sorts of social groupings
Describe the neurotic cascade
Highly neurotic actors (1) are more reactive to signs of threat and negative emotion in the social world, and thereby (2) are exposed to more negative events, which (3) reinforces their tendency to appraise objectively neutral or even positive events in negative terms. Heightened reactivity, exposure, and negative appraisals tend to precipitate (4) mood spillover, whereby negative feelings in one area of life spill over into others, and negative moods from one day carry over to ruin the next day as well.
What is responsivity?
Actors respond favorably to those features of a social scene that are consistent with their preexisting tendencies, which reinforces those tendencies.
What are externalizing behaviours?
When the young social actor is acting out against the external world
What are spindle cells?
Spindle cells are well designed to address difficult cognitive problems, especially those that involve the detection of errors in a stimulus array and the adjudication of conflicting cognitions
What are the fundamentals of extraversion?
(1) seeking and (2) enjoying rewards, especially social rewards.
What is a sociopath?
When certain adults prove to be hardened and express absolutely no empathy for other human beings and no remorse for their antisocial behavior
What is effortful control?
Exerted effort to control impulses, developing a course of action that keeps one focused on a long-term goal in the presence of an alluring short-term distraction.
What is ego depletion?
Happens when people use up their available willpower on one task. As a result, they are unable to exert the same level of self-control
What is evocation?
Actors evoke responses from their audiences that are consistent with or reinforce preexisting tendencies.
What is extraversion associated with?
(1) social behavior, (2) emotion regulation, (3) learning and memory, (4) vocational interests and identity, and (5) various indices of risk and psychopathology.
What is mean-level change in personality?
the extent to which members of the group, on the average, tend to increase or decrease on a given dispositional trait as it is tracked over time
What is objective self-awareness?
whereby the actor becomes explicitly aware of the self as an object of perception
What is performance of emotion?
how the infant expresses and regulates the feelings that well up inside.
What is positive emotionality?
the basic temperament tendency to feel positive affect such as joy, excitement, and pleasure, and to act in such a way as to suggest a positive emotional engagement with the social world
What is rank-order stability?
the extent to which individual differences in a given trait hold steady over time
What is role selection?
Actors select and are selected into social roles that are consistent with their preexisting tendencies, serving to reinforce those tendencies.
What is serotonin centrally implicated in?
Serotonin may be centrally implicated in the development of effortful control and the broader psychological challenge of self-regulation itself
What is temperament?
Differences in the overall quality of the baby’s mood, the baby’s energy level, behavioral tempo, and alertness appear early on in human development, reflective of inborn differences in physiological makeup.
What is the behavioural approach system (BAS)?
the BAS motivates the individual to approach potentially rewarding situations, which themselves are often social in nature, and to experience the positive emotion that is associated with the pursuit and attainment of rewards
What is the behavioural inhibition system (BIS)?
The BIS functions to alert the actor to potential threats associated with uncertainty and conflict in the environment, especially conflict about whether to approach or to avoid particular stimuli, situations, people, and events.
What is the executive attention network?
The network is activated in situations in which a person needs to:
- detect errors in the environment
- cope with conflicting cognitive appraisals
- overcome habitual or automatic response patterns
- monitor his or her own behavior in the face of competing demands
What is the fight–flight–freeze system (FFFS)?
The FFFS serves as the brain’s control center for behavioral responses to imminent threat, motivated mainly by fear, but sometimes also anger. It plays an important role in the development and expression of negative emotionality.
What is the function of the anterior cingulate cortex?
Plays important roles in a wide range of functions, including:
- regulation of blood pressure and heart rate
- mediation of reward-seeking behavior
- control of empathy and other social emotions
- governing certain kinds of conscious
- rational decisions
What is the function of the prefrontal cortex?
The brain region most implicated in planning complex social behavior.
What is the internalized working model of attachment?
The working model details the infant’s emotional history of attachment and sets forth expectations about how experiences of love and trust may transpire in the future.
What is the opioid system?
The opioid system releases endogenous neuropeptides such as beta-endorphin when the organism achieves rewards, producing feelings of joy and pleasure
What is the HEXECO model?
- Humility/honesty
- Emotionality
- Xtraversion
- Agreeableness
- Conscientiousness
- Openness
What is Miller’s argument on trait theories?
• Helpful in 3 ways:
- Can anticipate and understand the client’s private experience
- Can anticipate the problems presented in treatment
- Helps you formulate a practical treatment plan and anticipate opportunities and pitfalls of it