Personality Flashcards
An individual’s unique and relatively stable patterns of behavior, thoughts, and feelings
Peronsonality
What are the theoretical approaches that help to explain how our personality develops?
-Psychoanalytic
-Trait
A method developed by Freud in which the attempt is to bring repressed unconscious material into the consciousness
Psychoanalysis
One’s current thoughts; what ever is being thought or experienced in the present moment
Conscious level
Contains memories not currently in use but can be accessed in the need arises.
-Memory bank
-The archive
Preconscious level
Forms the bulk of the mind; are the thoughts, desires, and impulses that on is unaware of
Unconscious level
Portion of personality concerned with immediate gratification of basic needs.
-Operates using pleasure principle (if it feels good, do it)
-Occurs in the unconscious level
Id
Portion of personality concerned with managing the impulses with reality.
-Operates using reality principle (consider the consequences)
-Occurs partially on conscious and preconscious levels
Ego
Portion of personality representing the conscience.
-Occurs on all three levels
Superego
An innate sequence of stages through which all humans pass. At each stage, pleasure is focused on a different region of the body.
-These stages determine our overall personality
Psychosexual stages of development
The psychic energy that powers all mental activity. An instinctual for residing in the id that focuses on pleasure
Libido
Excessive investment of psychic energy resulting in various psychological complexes/ disorders
Fixation
Pleasure is centered around the mouth through oral activities.
-Feeding, thumb sucking, and babbling
-birth - 2 years
Oral stage
- Reduce tension through oral activity
-Smokers or overeaters - hostile and verbally abusive to others
-Sarcastic people and bullies
- Oral repetitive personality
- Oral aggressive personality
Pleasure is centered around elimination
-Child learns to respond to the demands of society; exerting bladder and bowel control
- 2 - 4 years
Anal stage
- Stingy, favor order and tidiness
-Stubborn and perfectionists - Lack of self control
-Generally messy and careless
- Anal retentive personality
- Anal expulsive personality
Pleasure source is the genitals
-child learns to recognize the difference between males and females
- 4 - 7 years
Phallic stage
- Boys fear that if they anger their father’s he will cut off their penis; Think they need to eliminate the father
- Girls are envious that they do not have a penis, girls want to get rid of mother
- Oedipus complex (castration anxiety)
- Electra complex (penis envy)
Pleasure is focused on developing new skill, knowledge, socializing
-Libido is repressed, no conflict
- 7 - 12 years
Latency stage
Pleasure is sexual gratification
-Repressed need awakened and focuses on others instead of self
-12 years and up
-Adult capacity to combine lust and affection
Genital stage
Personality theorists who accept portions of Freud’s theory, but reject or modify portions
Neo-freudian
Shared Freud’s view of the importance of the unconscious but saw an area Freud missed
-Analytic
Carl Jung
Portion of personality that all humans share
-Experiences are part of our biological heredity that humans have acquired since we originated
Collective unconsiousness
The inherited images our collective unconsciousness holds that shapes our perception of the world
Archtype
Theories on personality that focus on identifying the key dimensions along which people differ
Trait approach
Specific dimensions along which people differ in consistent, stable, and unique ways.
-Both over time and across situation which is the reason they are measurable
Personality trait
Two key focuses of personality traits:
1. Evaluation of the person not just description through their mental and moral qualities
2.0 The core of an individual’s disposition that is apparent from infancy
-Seeming to be their nature
- Character
- Temperment
Establishes over 4500 different traits people display and classified them in to 3 categories
Allport’s trait theory
Trait that dominates an individual’s entire personality, typically rare since many traits are working at once
-“Christ like”
Cardinal traits
Basic building blocks of an individual’s personality
-“pessimistic, funny”
Central traits
Traits that are only present under certain conditions and are more superficial qualities
-Food preference, religious preference
Secondary traits
McCrae et al theory of personality dimensions in which an individual’s personality is places into themes
Big Five Factors
What makes up the big five factor
O: openness
C: conscientious
E: extraversion
A: agreeableness
N: neuroticism
