Personality Flashcards
Personality Definition
Unique characteristics that account for our enduring patterns of inner experience (thoughts and feelings) and outward behaviour.
Psychodynamic Perspective
Personality forms as a result of primal (often socially unacceptable) needs and social and moral restraints of one’s society.
Id
Represents instinctual desires and needs fed by libido. Impulses governed by the pleasure principle, childlike, unconscious mind.
Ego
Develops as we grow and learn our impulses cannot always be satisfied. Rational, problem-solving, both conscious and unconscious mind.
Superego
Develops as we grow and internalizes values, morals, norms, etiquette displayed in people’s behaviours. Conscious, or parent voice. Both conscious and unconscious mind.
Psychosexual Stages
Oral (weaning), anal (toilet training), phallic (attraction to opposite sex parent), Latency (repression of sexual impulses, identification with same-sex parent), genital (sexual maturation).
Oral
0-18 months, focuses on the mouth, weaning off breast formula. Smoking, overeating, drinking, general dependence on mother is the adult expression of fixation.
Anal
18 months-3 years, focuses on anus, toilet training. Excessive neatness, stinginess, controlling, excessive messiness is adult expression of fixation.
Phallic
3-6 years, focuses on genitals, resolves Oedipus/Electra complex. Sexual role rigidity or confusion; deviancy is adult expression of fixation.
Latency
6 years-puberty. Development of defense mechanisms.
Genital
Puberty-adult. Focuses on genitals, reaching sexual maturity and emotional intimacy. Sexual dysfunction and unsatisfactiory relationships is adult expression if fixation.
Fixations
Extreme or minor, unresolved conflict of psychic energy. Neuroses and anxiety.
Defense Mechanisms
Unconscious tacticts of redirecting energy fixated by unresolved conflicts between the Id and superego.
Neo-Freudians
Psychoanalysts who revised and expanded freudian concepts.
Alfred Alder
Social needs and conscious thoughts are more important than unconscious desires. Innate feelings of inferiority and how people mask and compensate for it. Need for power as motivation for behaviour.
Carl Jung
Collective unconscious, positive drives as well as sexual and aggression drives. Concept of archetype as an expression of collectively held unconscious narratives.
Karen Horney
Early childhood experiences (isolation, helplessness), impacts later neuroses, but argues basic anxiety as a middle step. Cultural differences in application of psychoanalysis.
Situationism
Personality is comprised of response tendencies to situational cues. Personality is a culmination of learned tendencies, past behaviours helped acquire your incentive. Criticised due to there being different reinforcers active in personality.
Interactionism
Personality exists in the interaction between the person and the environment. Albert Bandura and self-efficacy, those high in self-efficacy (confidence in ability to succeed), will achieve greater success.
Humanistic Perspective
Emphasizes human potential, consciousness, free-will, resilience, perseverance and other positive qualities.