Personality Flashcards
Approaches that assume that personality is motivated by inner forces and conflicts about which people have little awareness and over which they have no control.
Psychodynamic approaches to personality
Freud’s theory that unconscious forces act as determinants of personality.
Psychoanalytic theory
A part of the personality that contains the memories, knowl-edge, beliefs, feelings, urges, drives, and instincts of which the individual is not aware.
Unconscious
The raw, unorganized, inborn part of personality whose sole purpose is to reduce tension created by primitive drives related to hunger, sex, aggres-sion, and irrational impulses.
Id
According to Freud, the final personality structure to develop; it represents the rights and wrongs of society as handed down by a person’s parents, teachers, and other important figures.
Superego
Developmental periods that children pass through during which they encounter conflicts between the demands of society and their own sexual urges.
Psychosexual stages
Conflicts or concerns that persist beyond the developmental period in which they first occur.
Fixations
According to Freud, a stage from birth to age 12 to 18 months, in which an infant’s center of pleasure is the mouth.
Oral stage
According to Freud, a stage from age 12 to 18 months to 3 years of age, in which a child’s pleasure is centered on the anus.
Anal stage
According to Freua, a period beginning around age 3 during which a child’s pleasure focuses on the genitals.
Phallic stage
A child’s sexual interest in his or her opposite-sex par-ent, typically resolved through identification with the same-sex parent.
Oedipal conflict
The process of wanting to be like another person as much as possible, imitating that person’s behavior and adopting similar beliefs and values.
Identification
According to Freud, the period between the phallic stage and puberty during which children’s sexual concerns are temporarily put aside.
Latency period
According to Freud, the period from puberty until death, marked by mature sexual behavior (that is, sexual intercourse).
Genital stage
In Freudian theory, unconscious strategies that people use to reduce anxiety by concealing the source of the anxiety from themselves and others.
Defense mechanisms
The primary defense mechanism in which unacceptable or unpleasant id impulses are pushed back into the unconscious.
Repression
According to Jung, a common set of ideas, feelings, images, and symbols that we inherit from our ancestors, the whole human race, and even animal ancestors from the distant past.
Collective unconscious
According to Jung, universal symbolic representations of a particular person, object, or experience (such as good and evil).
Archetypes
Psychoanalysts who were trained in traditional Freudian theory but who later rejected some of its major points.
Neo-Freudian psychoanalysts
According to, Adler, a problem affecting adults who have not been able to overcome the feelings of inferiority that they developed as children, when they were small and limited in their knowledge about the world.
Inferiority complex
A model of personality that seeks to identify the basic traits necessary to describe personality.
Trait theory
Consistent personality characteristics and behaviors displayed in different situations.
Traits
Theories that emphasize the influence of a person’s cognitions-thoughts, feelings, expectations, and values as well as observation of others’ behavior, in determining personality.
Social cognitive approaches to personality
Belief in one’s personal capabilities. Self-efficacy underlies people’s faith in their ability to carry out a particular behavior or produce a desired outcome.
Self-efficacy
The component of personality that encompasses our positive and negative self-evaluations.
Self-esteem
Theories that suggest that important components of personality are inherited.
Biological and evolutionary approaches to personality
The innate disposition that emerges early in life.
Temperament
Theories that emphasize people’s innate goodness and desire to achieve higher levels of functioning.
Humanistic approaches to personality
A state of self-fulfillment in which people realize their highest potential, each in a unique way.
Self-actualization
An attitude of acceptance and respect on the part of an observer, no matter what a person says or does.
Unconditional positive regard
Standard measures devised to assess behavior objec-tively; used by psychologists to help people make decisions about their lives and understand more about themselves.
Psychological tests
method of gathering data about people by asking them questions about a sample of their behavior.
Self-report measures
A widely used self-report test that identifies people with psychological difficulties and is employed to predict some everyday behaviors.
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2)
A technique used to validate questions in personality tests by studying the responses of people with known diagnoses.
Test standardization
A test in which a person is shown an ambiguous stimulus and asked to describe it or tell a story about it.
Projective personality test
A test that involves showing a series of symmetrical visual stimuli to people who then are asked what the figures represent to them.
Rorschach test
A test consisting of a series of pictures about which a person is asked to write a story.
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
Direct measures of an individual’s behavior used to describe personality characteristics.
Behavioral assessment
Direct measures of an individual’s behavior used to describe personality characteristics.
Behavioral assessment
