Personality Flashcards
What is personality, and what theories inform our understanding of personality?
Personality is an individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling and acting.
- Psychoanalytic
- Psychodynamic
- Trait theory
- social-cognitive theory
- Humanistic theory
How did Sigmund Freud’s treatment of psychological disorders lead to his view of the unconscious mind? +techniques
In treating patients whose disorders had no clear physical explanation. Freud concluded that these problems reflected unacceptable thoughts and feelings hidden away in the unconscious mind.
free association and dream analysis to explore the unconscious mind.
What was Freud’s view of personality?
Personality result of… conflict arising from the interaction between the mind’s three systems:
- id (The pleasure principle)
- Ego (The moral principle)
- Superego (The reality principle)
internalized set of ideals, or conscience
What development stages did Freud propose? GLAOP
Five psychosexual stages:
- (oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital)*
- GLAOP*
Unresolved conflicts at any stage can leave a person’s pleasure-seeking impulses fixated (stalled/fastnat) at that stage.
How did Freud think people defended themselves against anxiety?
What was anxiety a product of?
How do we cope?
For Freud, anxiety was the product of tensions between the demands of the id and superego.
The ego copes by using by using unconscious defense mechanisms, such as repression, which he viewed as the basic mechanism underlying and enabling all the others.
Which of Freud’s ideas did his followers accept or reject?
The neo-Freudians accepted many of his ideas.
+more emphasis on the conscious mind and
+in stressing social motives more than sexual motivation.
Today’s psychodymanic theorists reject…
sexual motivation.
instead:
+ much of out mental life is unconscious
+ our childhood experiences influence our adult personality and attachment patterns
What are projective tests, how are they used, and what are som criticisms of them?
personality tests - free interpretations reveal unconconsious motives
ex: The thematic Apperception test (TAT) or Rorschbach inkblot test
TAT valid and reliable
Inkblot low reliability and validity, suggestive leads, an icebreaker, interview technique
How do contemporary psychologists credit Freud’s psychoanalysis? What didn’t survive?
Credit for:
- drawing attention to the unconsious mind
- to the struggle to cope with anxiety and sexuality
- to the conflict between biological impulses and social restraints and for some forms of defense mechanisms.
Didn’t survive:
his concept of repression and his view of the unconsious as a collection of repressed and unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings and memories.
And development is not fixed in childhood.
How has modern research developed our understanding of the unconscious? Research confirm… 4x
Research confirms:
- we do not have fullt access to mind
- separate and parallell track of information processing. This processing includes schemas that control our perceptions, priming, implicit memories of learned skills, instantly activated emotions and stereotypes that filter
- Research also supports reaction formations and projection (the false consensus effect),
- and the idea that we unconsciously defend ourselves from anxiety (as seen in experiments testing terror management theory)
How did humanistic psychologists view personality, and what was their goal in studying personality?
Concept of self - central feature
focus : personal growth
End goal: self-realization.
Hierarchy of needs motivates
Carl Rogers on growth-promoting environments:
acceptance, genuineness and emapathy.
How did humanistic psychologists assess a person’s sense of self?
Rogers sometimes used questonniaires in which people described their ideal selves and actual selves, which he later used to judge progress during therapy.
How have humanistic theories influenced psychology? 2x
What criticisms have they faced? 4x
- Renew interest in the concept of self
- Laid the groundwork for today’s subfield positive psychology.
Critics: humanistic psychology’s concepts are:
vague
subjective
Its values, self-centered
And its assumptions naively optimistic.
How do psychologists use traits to describe peronality?
Trait Theorists
Trait theorists see personality as a stable and enduring pattern of behaviour.
Describing rather than explaining them.
Factor analysis, identify clusters of behaviour tendencies that occur together. Genetic predispositions influence many traits.
What are some common misunderstandings about introversion? 4x
- Introversion does not equal shyness
- Equally important skills as extroverts
- Extroverts don’t always outperform introverts as leaders or in sales success
- introverts often experience great achievement; many introverts prosper
What are personality inventories, and what are their strenghts and weaknesses as trait-assessment tools?
personality inventories are questionnaires in which people respond to items designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviours.
Test items are empirically derived and objectively scored.
Objectivity does not guarantee validity…
fake their answer to impress.
