Personality Flashcards
Define Personality.
Enduring patterns of thought, feeling, motivation and behaviour that are expressed in different circumstances.
It gives distinctiveness (unique), consistency and behaviour.
What is personality?
Often conceptualised as a cluster of traits; relatively stable and long lasting tendencies that influence behaviour across environments.
Similar across lifespan; but it has actually been found that it changes more than we originally thought.
What are the two broad areas that personality focuses on?
Nomothetic: understanding individual differences in particular personality characteristics (how they vary in responses)
Ideographic: understanding how the various parts of a person come together as a whole (how varying traits interact together)
What are the 3 core assumptions of Freud’s Psychodynamic approach?
- Psychic Determinism: we are at the mercy of our underlying drives and conflicts.
- Symbolic meaning: all actions (even minor) reveal our underlying drives.
- Unconscious motivation: we are mostly unaware of our motivations.
FREUD
What are freudian slips?
It can be defined a psychological conflict bubbling to the surface; they are repressed and then unconsciously released.
A type of freudian slip is parapraxis:
includes error in speech, memory or physical action. In Freudian terms believed to be caused by the unconscious mind.
FREUD
What are the 3 types of mental processes?
Conscious: rational, goal directed, centre of awareness.
Preconscious: could become conscience at any given time
Unconscious: irrational, not based on logic, repressed and this inaccessible
they influence personality
FREUD
What is Freud’s Drive (instinct) model?
Based on Darwin’s work, Freud suggested human behaviour is motivated by two drives:
Aggressive & sexual drives
What is a structural model?
A change in Freud's thinking morality governs behaviour. Includes ID (our basic desires and drives), ego (interacts with the real world and makes decisions) and superego (sense of right and wrong, directing us to behave morally).
DEFENCE MECHANISMS
What are defence mechanisms?
People regulate their emotions and deal with conflicts by employing defence mechanisms. Unconscious aim is to strengthen or reinforce positive emotion & protect from negative or unpleasant emotion.
DEFENCE MECHANISMS
What is repression?
memories or thoughts kept out of awareness
DEFENCE MECHANISMS
What is denial?
refusal to acknowledge external reality.
DEFENCE MECHANISMS
What is displacement?
Emotions directed towards a substitute target.
DEFENCE MECHANISMS
What is regression?
Return to an earlier stage of psychosexual development. As we age, sexual gratification comes form different parts of the body.
DEFENCE MECHANISMS
What is reaction formulation?
Unacceptable feelings or impulses turned into opposites.
DEFENCE MECHANISMS
What is rationalisation?
Actions explained away to avoid uncomfortable feelings.
NEO-FREUDIANS
What are neo-freudians?
Shifted focus from sexual to social drives. It was suggested that personality was more malleable and could change over time. Thinking more broadly than Freud did.
NEO-FREUDIANS
Who is Alfred Adler?
Primary motive is not sex or aggression but to strive for superiority.
Origin of the phrase ‘inferiority complex’.
NEO-FREUDIANS
Who is Carl Jung?
Collective unconscious ancestral memory that explains similarities in beliefs across cultures.
Shared historical experiences.
NEO-FREUDIANS
Who is Karen Horney?
Feminist perspective. Penis envy and oedipal complex are the symptom of women’s enforced dependency on men.
NEO-FREUDIANS
Who is Erich Fromm?
Escape from freedom; increasing tech, means humans are able to live independently of others but what we crave is closer connection
What were the contributions and limitations of Freudian perspective?
Acknowledgement of unconscious forces and their potential influence on behaviour.
Importance of childhood experience in determining adult personality.
Human thought and action
Inadequate scientific base and poor testability
Sexism
What are behavioural approaches?
Differences in our personalities stem largely from our learning histories.
Personality are bundles of habits acquired by classical and operant conditioning.
Personality is controlled by genes and contingencies. It argues that personality is what we have learnt.
What are cognitive-social theories?
The way people encode, process and think about information determines their personality (slightly more interactive process engaging with environment)
Several necessary conditions for a behaviours:
1. Situation encoded as relevant and meaningful
2. Belief in own ability and actual ability
3. self regulation of ongoing activity
BANDURA
What is the social learning theory?
We learn to be the person we are by watching other people and seeing who/what get rewarded and who/what does not (learn who we are through watching people (if no reward we might be less likely to develop)
A child who sees others involved in helping and being rewarded will emulate this behaviour
BANDURA
What is reciprocal Determinism?
Personality is a constant interplay between environment, behaviour and our beliefs.
Other factors besides ourselves determine personality
What is locus of control?
Internal:
life outcomes are under personal control, positively correlated with self esteem. Internals use more problem focused coping.
External:
Luck, chance, and powerful others control behaviour
What is behaviour outcome expectancies?
Belief that a certain behaviour will lead to a certain outcome.
What is self efficacy expectancy?
Individual conviction that necessary actions can be performed to produce the desired outcome.
What are competencies?
Possession of skills and abilities for solving particular problems.
What is self regulation?
Setting goals, evaluating performance and adjusting behaviour. Used to monitor what is happening.