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Psych 108 > Personality > Flashcards

Personality Flashcards

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1
Q

Personality

A

Is a set of behavioural, emotional and cognitive tendencies that people display over time and across situations and that distinguish individuals from each other.
Relatively stable and consistent, aspects of people you encounter multiple times should be similar

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2
Q

Freud’s Theory: The dynamic personality

A

The view that all behaviour and personality has an underlying psychological cause. Two major drivers, sex and aggression, primary motivating forces of human behaviour

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3
Q
  1. Conscious Level
  2. Preconscious Level
  3. Unconscious Level
A
  1. Normal awareness - thoughts, feelings, motivations you are aware of. e.g. do you like cats, dogs, chocolate?
  2. Easily brought to consciousness - subjective material you can bring to the conscious level, might not consciously think of it daily, will be brought up when asked questions
  3. Hidden thoughts and desires - influences behaviour but not able bring to the surface. Underlying, that will influence your personality - not actively aware of them
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4
Q

Denial

A

Threatening thoughts denied outright

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5
Q

Intellectualisation

A

Keep threatening thoughts at arms length, thinking about them rationally or logically

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6
Q

Projection

A

Threatening thoughts are projected onto someone/something else

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7
Q

Rationalisation

A

Create explanations to justify threatening thoughts and behaviour

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8
Q

Reaction Formation

A

When a person unconsciously changes an unacceptable feeling to the opposite

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9
Q

Sublimation

A

Threatening impulses are directed into more socially accepted activities

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10
Q

Undoing

A

One’s action tries to undo a threatening wish or thought

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11
Q

Freud: Defence Mechanisms

A

Unconscious attempts to prevent unacceptable thoughts from reaching conscious awareness.
Overreliance of these defence mechanism puts you at risk of experiencing neurosis and thus fixations that leads to a break in reality

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12
Q

Critiques of Freud:

A

Not scientific, therefore, hard
Too broad - claims are hard to falsify
Based on Limited Sample - female patients, upper class

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13
Q

Trait View:

A
  • We think and behave consistently across situations

- Traits are not always accurate in predicting behaviour

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14
Q

Situationist View:

A

Our thoughts and behaviours change with the situation

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15
Q

Interactionist View:

A

Both traits and situations affect thoughts and behaviour

Situations and traits both determine their particular behaviour.
Traits can help to influence what situation they find themselves. e.g. we choose who our friends are, where we go for lunch etc. all have influences in our personality

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16
Q

OCEAN of Traits: Cattell

  1. Openness
  2. Conscientiousness
  3. Extraversion
  4. Agreeableness
  5. Neuroticism
A
  1. Open to new ideas, curious
  2. Competence, order, sense of duty
  3. Warm, outgoing, assertive, excitement seeker, positive emotions
  4. Likes to get along/agree with people
  5. How anxious you are, are you hostile, depressed, insecure?
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17
Q

Measuring Personality: Interviews

A
  • Structured set of questions (can be modified)
  • Focuses on specific thoughts and behaviours
  • Hard to generalize beyond interview
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18
Q

Measuring Personality: Observation

A
  • Focuses on behaviours, not thoughts

- Works best if judge/observer knows participants

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19
Q

Measuring Personality: Inventories

A
  • Questionnaires (paper or computer)
  • Produce a personality profile
  • Easy to score and statistically analyse
  • Social Desirability
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20
Q

Measuring Personality: Projective Tests

A
  • Includes Rorschach and early attempts at personality assessment assumed that they need to tap into dimensions that the individual was unconscious of
  • Primarily developed within clinical context, often highly subjective
  • Concerns about validity and reliability
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21
Q

Temperament:

A
  • Innate tendencies to behave in certain ways
  • Correlation between temperament at infancy and adulthood but they are still able to change slightly
  • Can be influenced by your upbringing
22
Q

Theories of Temperament: Buss and Plomin’s 4 Factors

A
  • Sociability
  • Emotionality
  • Activity
  • Impulsivity
    Shows that a person’s temperament is at least partly inherited
23
Q

Reactivity

A

how people respond to novel or challenging events

24
Q

Self-regulation

A

the ability to control attention and inhibit responses

25
Q

shyness

A

is inherited to some extent, because of the genetic aspect as to whether a person is more likely to be a shy person

26
Q

Heritability of Work and leisure interests

A

.5

27
Q

Heritability for happiness

A

.44 - .8

28
Q

Heritability Estimates are not fixed because..

A

Changes in environment or in the gene pool can increase or decrease the percentage contribution of either factor

29
Q

Psychoticism:

A

Likely to engage in criminal behaviour, drug/alcohol abuse, lack conventional socialisation or lack of respect for the rules or feelings of others, elements of agreeableness an conscientiousness from the big five.

30
Q

The Behavioural Inhibition System (BIS)

A

Right frontal lobe - Your stop system, based on inhibition or punishment and relates to neuroticism.

31
Q

Easily activated BIS

A

Easily activated by threat related stimuli, trigger anxiety and can inhibit behaviour.
People with an easily active BIS system become more distressed when confronted with minor threats.

32
Q

Insensitivity to BIS

A

Those with insensitivity to BIS are not distressed even with major threats, and in serious situations, are only a little but stressed.

33
Q

The Behavioural Approach System (BAS)

A

Left Frontal lobe - involves our reward behaviour. BAS is more easily activated and more sensitive and more easily controlled by idea of a reward for those who are highly extraverted.
Less easily active, less sensitive and more easily conditioned by punishment for people who show high levels of being an introvert

34
Q

Notion of “locus of control”

A

extent to which individuals see events in their lives as under their control (internal locus) or determined by outside factors (external locus)

35
Q

Related notion of “self-efficacy”

A

Roughly a measure of individual’s confidence in ability to perform particular tasks, achieve goals etc.

36
Q

Reciprocal Determinism

A

The interactive relationship among the environment, cognitive/personal factors and behaviour

37
Q

Females + Personality

A

More empathic
More neurotic
Greater social connectedness

38
Q

Male + Personality

A

Greater individuality
More aggressive
More assertive

39
Q

Differences developed: Socio-cognitive approach

A

Boys and girls raised in different ways that put different emphasises in different areas e.g. encourage girls to care and nurture for each other

40
Q

Differences developed: Evolutionary approach

A

Women are more invested and caring for people because from a genetics point of view, they have to invest more in their offspring

41
Q

Differences developed: Power

A

Traditionally, women have less power in society than males, therefore had to learn to assess situations, to be good at readying and interacting different situations, to be able to succeed and achieve when they may not necessarily have the same power levels

42
Q

The Id - Unconscious

A
  • Unconscious level
  • Present at birth
  • Home to sexual and aggressive drive
  • Governed by PLEASURE PRINCIPLE
  • Driven to get what they want, no negotiation
43
Q

The Ego -

A
  • Conscious, preconscious and unconscious levels
  • Develops in childhood (before superego)
  • Cognitive functions - problem solving, thinking processes
  • Acts ars a referee between id and superego
  • Governed by REALITY PRINCIPLE
  • Leads to understanding of what is realistically possible in the real world..
44
Q

The Superego -

A
  • Preconscious and unconscious levels
  • Develops in childhood
  • Home to morality and conscience
  • Ego Ideal: Ultimate standard of what a person should be
  • What is wrong/right, a judge of your moral behaviour
  • Balances id and ego to make sure there is a balance between these are your moral reasoning
45
Q

Psychoanalytic theory:

A
  • Individual personality development seen in term of progression, through series of stages
  • The use of various kinds of defence mechanisms through which they deal with problems of internal psychological processes of anxiety.
  • Original Freudian theory
46
Q

Humanistic Theories

A
  • Humanists focus on people’s positive aspects; their innate goodness, creativity and free will
  • People heading towards self-actualization, innate motivation to reach their highest emotional potential
  • Humanistic theories are built around the idea of individual self-concept, and relation of this to ideal self
    The notion of striving towards Self-actualisation (COGTE)
47
Q

Humanistic Theories: Abraham Maslow:

A
  • Hierarchy of needs - motivation to meet needs of heirarchy

- Self actualisation

48
Q

Humanistic Theories: Carl Rogers

A
  • People can find the answer themselves, given the right support, time, space to do so
  • The idea of sense of self is central to our development of our personality
  • It is important that we feel accepted and supported for who we are, if done, it can form a positive self concept
  • Being preoccupied by this can also result in not reaching higher levels of personality development
49
Q

Development of systematic procedures

A
  • Drive to make personality assessment more thorough, led to development of objective personality tests, involving specific sequence of interview questions
  • One of the earliest attempts at systematic psychological assessment was that of Frances Galton at the end of the 19th Century - range of objective measures taken from volunteers
50
Q

Systematic or objective assessments can be subdivided into

  1. idiographic procedures
  2. Nomothetic procedures
A
  1. Idiographic procedure, are specific to the individual concerned
  2. Nomothetic procedures, in which the same procedure is given to large numbers of people against whom the individual is compared

The distinction reflects a tendency to concentrate either on those traits which are specific to the individual, or those to a greater or lesser extent we all share.

51
Q

Biologically Based Personality Theories:

  1. Cloninger’s Theory
  2. Zuckerman’s Theory
A
  1. Cloninger’s Theory:
    - Reward dependence
    - Harm avoidance
    - Novelty seeking
    - Persistence
  2. Zuckerman’s Theory:
    - Sociability
    - Neuroticism-anxiety
    - Impulsive sensation seeking
    - Activity
    - Aggression-hostility
52
Q

Personality and Culture:

A
  • Difficult to compare personality across cultures
  • Terms don’t translate universally such as OCEAN
  • Differences in personality from collectivist vs individualistic culture
  • Culture has a strong influence in personality

Psych 108 (6 decks)

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