MIDTERM II CHAPTER 14 Flashcards
Distinctive and relatively enduring ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that characterize a person’s responses to life situations
Personality
Generated by instinctual drive which powers the mind and constantly presses for either direct or indirect release
Psychic energy
mental events that we are presently aware of
Conscious
contains memories, thoughts, feelings, events that we are unaware but can be called into conscious awareness
Preconscious
dynamic real of wishes, feelings and impulses that lies beyond the awareness
Unconscious mind
Exist within the unconscious mind and the innermost core of the personality. Present at birth and source of all psychic energy
Id
Principle which the Id acts accordingly which seeks immediate gratification or release
Pleasure principle
Par of the conception of personality which functions primarily at a conscious level
Ego
Ego operates according to what principle
Reality principle
Said to be the moral arm of the personality which developed by the age of four or five and was the repository of the values and ideals of society
Superego
When realistic strategies are ineffective in reducing anxiety, the ego is said to resort to this mechanism which deny or distort reality
Defensive mechanism
The primary means by which the ego “keeps the lid on the id”. An active defensive process through which anxiety-arousing impulses or memories are pushed into the unconscious mind
Repression
A person refuses to acknowledge anxiety-arousing aspects of the environment
Denial
An unacceptable or dangerous impulse is repressed and then directed at a safer substitute target
Displacement
Emotional connection with an upsetting event is repressed, and situation is dealt with an intellectually interesting event
Intellectualization
An unacceptable impulse is repressed, and then attributed to (projected onto) other people
Projection
A person constructs a false but plausible explanation or excuse for an anxiety-arousing behaviour or event that has already occured
Rationalization
An anxiety-arousing impulse is repressed, and psychic energy finds release in an exaggerated expression of the opposite behaviour
Reaction formation
A repressed impulse is released in the form of a socially acceptable or even admired behaviour
Sublimation
A state of arrested psychosexual development in which instincts are focused on a particular psychic theme. Resulted from potential deprivations or overindulges during any of Freud’s Stages of Psychosexual Development.
Fixation
Major shortcoming of Freud’s psychoanalytical theory
Many of it’s concepts are ambiguous and hard to operationally define or measure
Psychoanalysts that disagree with some aspects of Freud’s thinking and believed that he did not give social and cultural factors a sufficiently important role in the development of the dynamics of personality and focus too much on childhood events
Neoanalysts
Carl Jung’s belief that humans possess not only a personal unconscious based on their life experiences but also a collective unconscious that consist of memories accumulated throughout the entire history of the human race
Analytical psychology
Representation of memories which are inherited tendencies to interpret experience in a certain way
Archetypes
Focus on the images and mental representations that people form of themselves and other people as a result of early experience with caregivers
Object relations theorists
The total realization of one’s human potential
Self-actualization
Cognitive categories into which people sort the people and events in their lives . Said to be the primary basis for individual differences in personality.
Personal constructs
According to this humanistic theorist, people’s primary goal is to make sense out of the world, and find personal meaning to it.
George Kelly
Believed that behaviour is not a reaction to unconscious conflicts but a response to our immediate conscious experience of self and environment
Carl Rogers
Central concept of Roger’s theory which is an organized, consistent set of perceptions of the beliefs about oneself
Self
An absence of conflict among self perceptions
Self-consistency
Consistency between self-perception and experience
Congruence
Dictates what we approve or disapprove of ourselves
Conditions of worth
Rogers view people who have successfully reached self-actualization as ______ as they do not need to hide behind masks or adopt artificial roles
Fully functioning person
Refers how positively or negatively do we see or feel about ourselves
Self-esteem
People are motivated to preserve their self-concept by maintaining self-consistency and congruence
Need for self-verification
A strong and pervasive tendency to gain and preserve a postive self-image
Self-enhancement
Organized mental structures that contain our understanding of the attributes and behaviours that are appropriate and expected for males and females
Gender schema
Critics on the humanistic theories include
1) too much reliance on individual reports of personal experience
2) circular reasoning: difficult to define an individual’s self-actualizing tendency except in terms of the behaviour that it supposedly produce
Identifying cluster of specific behaviours that are correlated with one another so highly that they can be viewed as reflecting a basic dimension/trait on which people vary
Factor analysis
Pioneering trait theorist who developed a widely used personality test called 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire to measure individual differences on each of the dimensions and provide a comprehensive personality description
Cattell
Eysenck argues that personality within the normal range can be understood with only these two basic dimensions which are independent and uncorrelated
Introversion-Extraversion
Stability-Instability
The Big Five Factors:
Openness Conscientiousness Extraversion Agreeableness Neuroticism
People’s tendency to tailor their behaviour according to the situation
Self-monitoring
Critics on trait theories
1) making specific predictions on the basis of single measured personality trait without taking into account other personality factors that may influence behaviour
2) description vs explanation
Combined the behavioural and cognitive perspectives into an approach to personality that stresses the interaction of a thinking human with a social environment that provides learning experience
Social cognitive theorists
States that the person, the person’s behaviour, and environment all influence one another in a pattern of two-way causal link
Reciprocal determinism
Expectancy concerning the degree of personal control we have in our lives
Internal-external locus of control
Bandura’s idea that human’s are active agents of their own lives and not just at the mercy of the environment
Human agency
Four aspects of human agency
Intentionality
Forethought
Self-reflectiveness
Self-reactiveness
Key factor in way people regulate their lives which is their belief concerning their ability to perform the behaviours needed to achieve desired outcome
Self-efficacy
Suggests that there is consistency in behaviour but is found in similar situations
If…then.. behaviour consistencies
Psychologists devise an explicit coding system that contsins the behavioural categories of interest
Behavioural assessment
Researchers and clinicians can collect samples of behaviour from respondents as they live their daily lives
Remote behaviour sampling
Termed objective measure because they include standard sets of questions, usually in a true-false or rating scale format, that are scored using an agreed upon scoring key
Personality scales
Advantages of personality scales
1) ability to collect data from many people at the same time
2) people respond to the same items
3) ease of scoring
Major disadvantage of personality scales
People not answering questions truthfully, therefore making the score invalid
Formulation of personality scales where items are based on the theorist’s conception of the personality trait to be measured
Rational approach
Approach to personality test where in items are chosen not because their content seems relevant to the trait on rational grounds, but because previous research has shown that items were answered differently by groups of people known to differ in their personality characteristic of interest
Empirical approach
Assumption underlying projective test
When a person is presented with an ambiguous stimulus whose meaning is not clear, the interpretation attached to the stimulus will have to come partly from within
