Personality

Question 1

Personality

Answer 1

Is the distinctive and relatively enduring ways of thinking, feeling and acting that characterise a person’s responses to life situations

Question 2

Freud’s psychoanalytic theory

Answer 2

Freud divide personality into three separate but interacting structures; id, ego and supergo

Question 3

The ID

Answer 3

Is the innermost core of the personality, is the only structure that is present at birth and the source of all psychic energy. It is totally within the unconscious mind and has no direct contact with reality and functions in a totally irrational manner. It operates accroding to hte pleasure principle. It also cannot directly satisfy itself by obtaining what it needs from the environment because it has no contact with the outer world.

Question 4

Pleasure principle

Answer 4

It seeks immediate gratification or releasem regardless of rational considerations and environmental realities. The ego trues to postpone instinctual gratification until the conditions are safe and appropriate.

Question 5

The ego

Answer 5

Has direct contact with reality and functions primarily at a conscous level. It operates according to the reality principle

Question 6

Reality Principle

Answer 6

Testing reality to decide when and under what conditions the id can safetly discharge its impulses and satisfy its needs.

Question 7

Preconscious

Answer 7

Available to awarness (e.g. names of friends, home address)

Question 8

Unconscious

Answer 8

Unavailable to awareness (infantile memories, repressed wishes and conflicts)

Question 9

Conscious

Answer 9

Immediate awareness of current environment

Question 10

The superego

Answer 10

Is the moral arm of the personality. It contains the traditional values and ideals of family and society. The superego similar to the ego strives to control the instincts of the id. In particular sexual and agressive impulses that are condemned by society. It tries to block gratification permentaly.

Question 11

Defence mechanisms

Answer 11

Unconscious mental operations that deny or distort reality. Some defence mechanisms permit the release of impulses of the id in disguised forms that will not conflict the forces in the external world or with the prohibitions of the superego.

Question 12

Repression

Answer 12

The ego uses some of its energy to prevent anxiety-arousal memories, feelins and impuses from entering consciousness

Question 13

Sublimation

Answer 13

Taboo impulses may even be channelled into socially desirable and admirable behaviours, completely masking the sinister underlying impulses

Question 14

Psychosexual stages

Answer 14

Children pass through psychosexual stages during which the id’s pleasure-seeking tendencies are focused on specific pleasure-sensitive areas of the body - the erogenous zones.

Question 15

Fixation

Answer 15

Is a state of arrested psychosexual development in which instincts are focues on a particular psychic theme

Question 16

Regression

Answer 16

A psychological retreat to an earlier psychosexual stage

Question 17

Oral stage (psychosexual stages)

Answer 17

Occurs during infancy during which the infant gains primary stastifaction from taking food and sucking on a breast, a thumb or some other object. Freud proposed that either excessive gratification or frustration of oral needs can result in fixation on oral themes of self-indulgences or dependency as an adult

Question 18

Anal stage (psychosexual stage)

Answer 18

2-3rd year of life. Pleasure becomes focused on the process of elimination. During toilet training the child is faced with society’s first attmept to control a biological urge. According to Freud, harsh toilet training can produce compulsions, overemphasis on cleanliness, obessive concerns with orderlineness and insistence on rigid rules and rituals. He also speculated that extremely lax toilet training resulted in a messy, negative and dominant adult personality.

Question 19

Phallic stage

Answer 19

Begins at 4 to 5 years old. Time when children begin to derive pleasure from their sexual organs. Freud believed that during this stage of early sexual awakenings the male experiences erotic feelings towards his mother

Question 20

Weaknesses of Freud’s theory

Answer 20

The theory didn;t have a lot of experimental evidence and it is incredibly hard to test

Question 21

Neoanalytic theorists

Answer 21

Were psychologists who disagreed with certain aspects of Freud’s thinking and developed their own theories.

Question 22

Alfred Adler

Answer 22

Insisted that humans are inherently social beings who are motivated by social interest, the desire to advance the welfare of others rather than Freud who seemed to view people as savage animals caged behind the bars of civilisation. He also postulated a general motive of striving for superiority which drives people to compensate for real or imagined defects in themselves (inferiority complex) and to strive to be ever more competent in life.

Question 23

Carl Jung

Answer 23

He believed that humans possess not only a personal unconscious but also a collective unconscious

Question 24

Personal unconscious

Answer 24

Based on a persons life experiences

Question 25

Collective unconscious

Answer 25

Consists of memories accumulated throughout the entire history of the human race represent by archetypes

Question 26

Archetypes

Answer 26

Inherited tendencies to interpre experiences in certain ways. They find expression in symbols, myth and beliefs that appear across many cultures such as the image of a god, good and evil

Question 27

Object relation theories

Answer 27

Focus on images or mental representations that people form of themselves and other people as a result of early experiences with caregivers. Whether these are realistic of distorted, these internal representations of important adults become lenses or working models through which later social interactions are viewed and these relational themes are exert on unconscious influence on a person’s relationship thorughout life.

Question 28

Weaknesses of the Psychodynamic approach

Answer 28

It is hard to test
It doesn’t explain enough but at the same time it explains too much to allow clear behavioural predictions
Specific prospositions have not held up under the scruntiny of research

Question 29

George Kelly’s personal construct theory

Answer 29

Personal constructs are cognitive categories into which they sort the people and events in their lives. Kelly’s personal construct system was the primary basis for individual differences in personality

Question 30

Personal construct theory

Answer 30

People are intuitive scientists driven to understand their world/reality and find personal meaning. The way people construct and interpret their world/reality is by their individual system of personal constructs

Question 31

Constructs

Answer 31

Categories of knowledge people collect over time. Constructs are developed by identifying patterns/irregularities in our social world

Question 32

Rep test (Role Construct Repertory Test

Answer 32

Is used to assess individuals’ personal construct system

Question 33

Rep test (Role Construct Repertory Test)

Answer 33

Is used to assess individuals’ personal construct system. It tests the basic dimensions of similarity and differences that people use to categories people and events and other aspects of a persons construct system such as the number of different constructs that people use.

Question 34

Fixed role Therapy

Answer 34

Kelly got his patients to follow a role description and behavioural script that differed from their typical views of themselves hoping that through trying out this new role the client might gain firsthand appreciation for the ways in which different constructions and behaviours could lead to more satisfying life outcomes.

Question 35

Carl Rogerson theory of self

Answer 35

Believed that forces that direct human behaviour are within them and when they are not disorted or blocked by our environment they can be trust to lead humans toward slef-actualisation

Question 36

Self-actualisation

Answer 36

Is the highest realisation of human potential

Question 37

The self

Answer 37

Is an organised, consistent set of perceptions of and beliefs about oneself. The self has two facets: it is an object of perception (the self-concept) and an internal entity that directs behaviour

Question 38

Development of the self

Answer 38

At the start of children lives they cannot distinguish between themselves and the environment and as they interact with the world, children begin to distinguish between ‘me’ and the ‘not-me’. It continues to develop in response to our life experiences and remains quite stable over time

Question 39

Self-concept

Answer 39

Once the self-concept is established there is a tendency to maintain it as it helps people understand their relationship with the world around them

Question 40

Self-consistency

Answer 40

An abscence of conflict among self-perceptions

Question 41

Congruence

Answer 41

Consistency between self-perceptions and experiences

Question 42

What theory is John Bowlby’s attachment theory closely related to?

Answer 42

Object relations theory