Personality Flashcards
Relatively stable patterns of thinking, emotions, and behavior
Personality
Stable, enduring qualities (situationally specific)
Personality traits
Style of personality defined by several traits
Personality types
Your ideas, perceptions, and feelings about who you are
-mental picture of your personality
Self-concept
A positive evaluation of oneself (need for positive regard)
Based on accurate appraisal of strengths and weaknesses
Self-esteem
Face-to-face meeting designed to gain information about someone’s personality, current psychological state, personal history, etc.
Interview
Limitations of an interview (4)
Influenced by preconceptions
Interviewer personality
Deception
Halo effect
Halo effect
Belied that people who are socially attractive have better personalities
Paper and pencil test consisting of questions that reveal personality aspects
Objective test
Personality questionere
Reliability
Does a test give close to the same score each time it is given to the same person
Validity
Does the test measure what it claims to measure
Widely used objective personality questionnaire
567 true of false items
Measures 10 major aspects of personality
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2)
Psychological tests that use ambiguous or unstructured stimuli
Person needs to describe the stimuli or make up stories about them
Projective tests
Developed by Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach
Contains 10 standardized inkblots
Rorschach technique
Developed by Henry Murray, personality theorist
Projective device consisting of 20 drawings (black and white cards) of various situations
People must make up stories about the drawings
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
Limitations of projective tests (3)
Low validity
Objectivity and reliability are low
Still useful in a “test battery”
Trait theorists attempt to: (3)
Analyze
Classify
Interrelate traits
Identifying relatively stable features of your personality that distinguish you from other individuals
Trait approach
Dimension of personality used to categorize people according to the degree to which they manifest a particular characteristic
Assumption:
Stable over time and across situations
Trait
Gordon allport (5 traits)
Common traits Individual traits Cardinal traits Center traits Secondary traits
Characteristics shared by most members of a culture (introverts/extroverts, liberals/conservatives, competitiveness)
Common traits
Define a persons unique personal qualities
Individual traits
So basic that all of a persons activities can be traced back to the trait (Machiavellian, Christ-like)
Ex. Mother Teresa, Abraham Lincoln
Cardinal traits
Core qualities of an individuals personality (building blocks of your personality)
Central traits
Inconsistent or superficial aspects of a person (food preferences, political opinions, music interests)
Secondary traits
A statistical technique used to correlate multiple measurements and identify underlying factors
Factor analysis
The “Big Five” personality factors (Cattell)
Openness to experience Conscientious Extroversion Agreeableness Neuroticism
Viennese physician
Began with hypnosis and eventually switched to psychoanalysis
Followers, jung and Adler
Still influential and very controversial more than 100 years later
Sigmund Freud, M.D.
4 impacts Freud made on popular culture
Defense mechanisms
Freudian slips
Attachment theory
Psychoanalysis
Freuds model portrays personality as a dynamic system directed by what three mental structures
Id
Ego
Superego
Innate biological instincts and urges Self serving, irrational, and totally unconscious Pleasure principle Acts as power source for psyche -libido (Eros, Thanatos)
The Id
Executive, directs id energies
Partially conscious and partially unconscious
Reality principle
The ego
Conscience
Judge or censor for thoughts and actions of the ego
The superego
Stage theory
Personality formed before age 6
In each stage: erogenous zone, fixation
Psychosexual stages (3)
Oral
Anal
Phallic
Oral-dependent personality
Weaned off too late
Gullible, passive, and needs lots of attention
Oral-aggressive personality
Weaned off too soon
Like to argue and exploit others
Anal stage
Ages 1-3
Ego develops
Fixation caused by harsh or lenient toilet training
Anal retentive personality
Holding on
Anal expulsive personality
Letting go
Phallic stage
Vanity, narcissism, pride
Ages 3-6
Increased sexual interest causes the child to by physically attached to the parent of the opposite sex
Oedipus conflict
Boy feels rivalry with his father for his mother’s affection
Electra conflict
Girl loves her father and competes with her mother
Approach that focuses on human experience, problems, potentials, and ideals
Humanism
Ability to choose that is NOT controlled by genetics, learning, or unconscious forces
Free will
11 characteristics of self-actualizers (maslow)
- Efficient perceptions of reality
- Comfortable acceptance of self, others, and nature
- Spontaneity
- Task entering
- Autonomy
- Continued freshness of appreciation
- Fellowship with humanity
- Profound interpersonal relationships
- Comfort with solitude
- Non-hostile sense of humor
- Peak experiences
8 steps to promote self-actualizafion
- Be willing to change
- Take responsibility
- Examine motives
- Experience honestly and directly
- Make us of positive experiences
- Be prepared to be different
- Get involved
- Assess your progress
Self-efficacy (bandura)
Ability to control your own life
Capacity to produce a desired result
“Raw material” that refers to the hereditary aspects of your personality
Temperament
The study of behavioral traits
Behavioral genetics
The expression of personality is motivated by internal processes and conflicts over which individuals have little or no consciousness awareness and consequently limited personal control
Psychodynamic perspectives - Freud
Limited to only those mental activities of which the individual is consciously aware of at any given moment
Conscious mind
Contains mental information that the individual may not be thinking about at any given moment but can easily gain access to when needed, as well as remove from awareness when no longer in need
Preconscious mind
The largest and most influential region of the mind
Seemingly unlimited storage facility containing the thoughts, feelings, memories, needs, desires, wishes, and past experiences deemed too threatening to appear at the conscious level of awareness
Unconscious mind
Manifest content
What a dreamer remembers
Latent content
The expression of the content of unconscious mind and a reflection of a persons true feelings, needs, and desires
The core component of personality that is located completely in the unconscious mind
Present at birth and serves as the primary source driving personality
The Id
Eros
Sexual impulses
Part of pleasure principle that the Id operates on
Thanatos
Unrestrained aggression
Part of the pleasure principle that the id operates on
Develops out of the id towards the end of the first year and beginning of the second year of life
Meets the needs of the id within the constraints of operating in the real world
The ego
Reality principle
The ego develops a strategy that will make it possible to meet these instinctual needs and desires in a manner that will satisfy the unconscious demands of the id but also in a manner that will not threaded the egos sense of self within the context of reality and the conscious level
Exists at all three levels of conscious awareness and is based on a sense of morality reflecting family values, official laws, social conventions, religious beliefs, and a personal moral code
Superego
To mask feelings of anxiety and disguise the source of the tension, as well as from keeping them from being expressed, individuals unconsciously employ a variety of
Defense mechanisms
The principle defense mechanism, characterized by the individuals ego simply removing (ignoring, trying to forget) the threatening impulse from conscious awareness
Repression
Forcing distressing or unacceptable memories, thoughts, and feelings into the unconscious
Repression
Unacceptable thoughts and desires in the unconscious are expressed as their opposite in conscious
Reaction formation
Attributing ones own unacceptable thoughts, feelings, impulses, and motives to others
Projection
A victim of sexual assault during childhood unable to recall the details in adulthood (defense mechanism)
Repression
Speaking out against homosexual behavioral while fantasizing about having sex with same sex individuals
Reaction formation
Easing ones guilt about cheating on a test by believing others are also cheating
Projection
Reaction to a threatening situation with a response characteristic of an earlier stage of development
Regression
“Acting like a baby” by throwing a temper tantrum when co-workers do not agree with you (defense mechanism)
Regression
Transforming inappropriate impulses and motives into socially acceptable and even valuable expressions
Sublimation
Developing a career as a scientist studying deviant sexual behavior to satisfy ones own atypical sexual desires (defense mechanism)
Sublimation
A conscious refusal to perceive and believe painful facts or situations exist
Denial
Creating an acceptable and local explanation to replace a true but threatening cause of behavior
Rationalization
Shifting the expression of an unwanted impulse from a threatening person to a less threatening one
Displacement
Instead of admitting to being a thief, an employee justifies stealing supplies from works as compensation for what is perceived as an unfair salary (defense mechanism)
Rationalization
After a series of job losses and failed relationships, an alcoholic will not admit to having a drinking problem
Denial
Instead of expressing his anger at his boss for humiliating him in a meeting, an office manager yells at his child when arriving home (defense mechanism)
Displacement
Stages that reflect the conflict between the expression of the id’s desire to seek immediate pleasure and society’s demands to restrict it
Psychosexual stages
A region of the body that serves as the source of enjoyment
Erogenous zone
Which stage develops a willingness to delay gratification
Oral stage (birth to 2 years)
Which stage: when seeking pleasure, there is a right time and right place
Anal stage (2-3 years)
Which stage: go along to get along with those more powerful than you
-Oedipal complex and Electra complex
Phalic stage (3 to 6 years)
Which stage: it is good to know you are not alone during difficult times of transition
Latency period (7-11 years)
Which stage: to get pleasure, you just give pleasure
Genital stage (11 years to adulthood)
