Personality Flashcards
Nomothetic approach
understanding personality by identifying rules that govern behaviour of all individuals
Idiographic approach
Understanding personality by identifying unique characteristics and life history within the individual
3 factors that cause personality
- Genetics
- Shared environment (house)
- Non-shared environment (different schools)
What was the correlation of personality factors between identical twins
Moderate correlation
What fraction of personality is shared via genetics in twin studies
1/3
When genetic similarity was low between mother and child but environmental similarity was high,
Correlation between personality was weak - suggesting genes play more of a role in personality than environment
3 core aspects of psychoanalytic theory
- Psychic determinism: idea we are not free to choose our own level of awareness
- Symbolic meaning: idea that no action, however trivial, is meaningless and that we can come up with a meaning for most behaviours
- Unconscious motivation: We rarely understand what we do e.g. like an iceberg that we can only see the tip of.
What/where is the Id
Pleasure principle (unconscious level)
What/where is the ego
Decision making component (Conscious and preconscious)
What/where is the superego
Moral component (all levels of awareness)
What did Freud think psychological distress was a result of?
Conflict between id and superego
Stages of psychosexual theory
Oral phase (biting)
Anal
Phallic (genitals)
Latency (suppressed or latent sexuality)
Genital (sexual drive)
Purpose of psychosexual theory
Freud would interpret clients distress on where he thought they got fixated e.g. excessive eating, would believe they are stuck at oral stage
Behavioural theory of personality
Personality is in terms of behaviour rather than just their thoughts since we can measure behaviour
Social learning theory
Personality is an interaction between person’s traits, their thoughts and environment