Personality II (Ch 13) Flashcards
1
Q
5 distinct theoretical explanations:
A
Psychoanalysis Humanism Social-cognitive Trait theory Biological theory
2
Q
Psychoanalytic theories
A
-unconscious mind is the most powerful force in personality
-3 layers: unconscious, preconscious, and conscious
-
3
Q
Unconscious layer
A
- contains all drives, urges, instincts and motivates most of our speech, thoughts, feelings, or actions
- only revealed to us through slip of tongue and dreams
4
Q
Provinces/regions of mind (Freud)
A
- Id: seat of impulse and desire; sole function to seek pleasure. Operates on “do it” principle to seek pleasure
- Ego: in direct contact with outside world and operates on “reality principle.” Makes realistic attempt to obtain pleasure
- superego: monitors and controls behaviour. “Stands over us” and evaluates action sin terms of right and wrong; it is our conscious. Operates on “moralistic principle”
5
Q
Defence mechanisms
A
- a way to protect the mind from harmful, threatening, and anxiety-provoking thoughts, feelings, or impulses
- all defence mechanisms share 2 quality: (1) they operate unconsciously; (2) they deny and distort reality in some way
6
Q
Repression
A
- most basic defence mechanism
- unconscious act of keeping threatening or disturbing thoughts, feelings, or impulses out of consciousness
- most likely sexual and aggressive impulses
- may be disguised or distorted and reveal themselves through dreams, slips of tongue, and neurotic behaviour
7
Q
Reaction formation
A
- occurs when an unpleasant idea, feeling, or impulse is turned into its opposite
- results in exaggerated or compulsive behaviour and feelings
- eg. Homophobia sometimes explained by certain individuals being insecure of their own sexuality
8
Q
Sublimation
A
- expressing a socially unacceptable impulse in a socially acceptable way
- Freud believed that unfulfilled sexual desires drive creative output
9
Q
Psychosexual stage theory
A
- theory that adult personality traits stem from early childhood experiences
- sexual feelings key to each stage of personality development
- as we move through each stage, a different region of our body is most erogenous
- 4 major stages: oral, anal, phallic, genital
10
Q
Oral stage of psychosexual development
A
- 0-18 months
- pleasure comes from mouth, sucking, biting, chewing
- fixations may results in smoking and sarcasm
11
Q
Anal psychosexual stage
A
- 18-36 months
- pleasure comes from anus and bowels, bladder and elimination
- fixations may result in obsessive and compulsive cleaning behaviours
12
Q
Phallic stage of psychosexual theory
A
- 3-6 years
- pleasure comes from the genitals (self-focused) and attraction for opposite sex parent
- fixations may result in attraction to people like one’s opposite sex parent
13
Q
Latency stage of psychosexual theory
A
- 6-puberty
- no applicable pleasure centre, sexual feelings remain latent and dormant
14
Q
Genital phase of psychosexual theory
A
- puberty and up
- pleasure comes from the genitals (self and other focused) and mature sexual behaviour
- fixations may result in immature sexuality
15
Q
Oedipal complex
A
- desire for opposite sex parent, and hostility toward the same sex parent
- resolved by identifying with their same sex parents and choosing to be more like them
16
Q
Fixation (psychosexual theory)
A
-defence mechanisms whereby a person continues to be concerned and even preoccupied with an earlier stage of development
17
Q
Adler
A
- humans naturally strive to overcome their inherent inferiorities or deficiencies, both physical and psychological
- striving for superiority is major Drive behind behaviour
18
Q
Compensation (Adler)
A
- people attempt to compensate for their feelings or weakness or inferiority
- some develop and unhealthy need to dominate or upstage other as a way of compensating for feelings of inferiority
- this is called inferiority complex
19
Q
Carl Jung
A
-unconscious has 2 distinct forms: personal and collective
20
Q
Personal unconscious
A
-consists of our repressed and hidden thoughts, feelings, and motives
21
Q
Collective unconscious
A
- consists of shared experiences of our ancestors
- God, mother, life, death, water, earth, aggression, survival etc
- collective unconscious is made up of archetypes
22
Q
Archetypes
A
- ancient or archaic images that result from common ancestral experiences and show up most often in dream, fantasies, hallucinations, myths, and religious themes
- shadow, anima, animus
- shadow: dark and morally questionable
- anima/animus: female/male part of personality
23
Q
Karen Horney
A
- social/cultural forces
- psychoanalytic social theory
- neurosis stems from basic hostility and basic anxiety
- basic hostility: anger or rage that originates in childhood and stems from fear of being neglected or rejected by parents
- basic anxiety: a feeling of being isolated and helpless in a world conceived as potentially hostile
24
Q
Basic anxiety
A
- not itself neurotic, can give rise to normal behaviours or in some people neurotic behaviours
- 3 neurotic trends/needs:
- Moving toward others (compliant personality: clinging to other people, belittling oneself)
- Moving against others (aggressive personality: competing against others, prone to hostility and anger)
- Moving away from others (detached personality: not responding emotionally, commitment shy)
25
Humanistic-Positive psychology
- humans are naturally interested in realizing their full potential
- two major influencers: Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers
26
Maslow
- self-actualization: people inherent drive to realize their fullest potential
- defined set of characteristics that he believed to be more common in self-actualizing people
- 5 of these are: spontaneity, problem-centred, creativity, interpersonal relations, and resistance to enculturation
27
Carl Rogers
-developed unique form of psychotherapy based on the assumption that people naturally strive toward growth and fulfillment and need unconditionally positive regard for that to happen
28
Unconditional positive regard (Rogers)
- ability to respect and appreciate another person unconditionally
- separate person from behaviour to do this
29
Conditions of worth
- to love people only when they do things that we want and like is to love them conditionally
- as people become more and more responsive to conditional positive regard, they run the risk of becoming the type of person others want them to be
- pose barrier to self-actualization
- real self vs ideal self
30
Congruence of real and ideal self
-the more the ideal self overlaps with the real self, the more fulfilled and happier the person is
31
Albert Bandura
- argues that 3 factors influence our personality:
1. Internal personal factors (cognitive characteristics)
2. The environment
3. Our behaviour
- terms the give and take relationship between factors the reciprocal determinism
32
Reciprocal determinism
-personality determined by interaction between environment, personal factors, and behaviour
33
Self-efficacy
- a persons beliefs about their ability to perform the behaviours needed to achieve desired outcomes
- can impact individuals level of accomplishment and well-being
- impacts types of tasks people engage in, how long they spend on given tasks, and effort put in
34
Walter Mischel
- people respond to different situations differently, producing unique personality-situation profiles
- social-cognitive theory advantage is that it has been tested under scientific conditions
35
Trait theories
-assumes that traits or disposition are the major force behind personality
36
Gordon Allport
- tried to figure out how many personality traits existed
- if a word existed for a trait, it must be important enough
- went through dictionary and found 18,000 words that described traits
- narrowed down to 4,000
37
Raymond Cattell (personality)
- had thousands of people rate themselves on characteristic then used a statistical tool (factor analysis) to look for groupings and commonalities
- identified 16 source traits that underlie human personality
- athlete vs artist profiles
38
Big-5 or Five-factor
-the 5 dimensions are:
```
Openness to experience
Conscientiousness
Extraversion
Agreeableness
Neuroticism
```
39
Openness to experience
How interested in new experiences or new ideas someone is
How imaginative, original, curious etc
40
Conscientiousness
How planned, organized, orderly, hard-working, controlled, preserve ring, punctual and ambitious someone is
41
Extraversion
How social, talkative, active, outgoing, confident, and fun-loving is someone
42
Agreeableness
How friendly, warm, trusting, generous, and good-natured someone is
43
Neuroticism
How anxious, worrying, tense, emotional and high strung someone is
44
Culture and personality
- compared ratings of self-reports to people within specific countries
- research found that self-reports did NOT match the cultural stereotypes
- eg. Canadians aren't actually more agreeable and less neurotic than other cultures despite popular belief
45
National character
Shared perceptions of personality characteristics of citizens of a particular country
46
Basic tendencies
- the big 5 personality dimensions along with talent, aptitude, and cognitive abilities
- have their origin in biological forces
47
Biological theories
-assume that differences in personality are partly based in differences in structures and systems in the central nervous system, such as genetics, hormones, and neurotransmitters.
48
Eysenck
- proposed 3 rather than 5 fundamental dimensions of personality
- neuroticism, extraversion and psychoticism (combination of openness, conscientiousness and agreeableness)
- combination of genes, neurochemistry and characteristic of CNS
- differences in DNA create a different level of arousal and sensitivity to stimulation
- cognitive-perceptual learning differences lead to difference in social behaviours
49
Cortical arousal
- how active the brain is at resting state and how sensitive it is to stimulation
- connection between cortical arousal and some personality traits (extraversion)
- having a higher baseline level of cortical arousal, introverts require lower stimulus level to arouse them and reach comfort zone
50
4 methods of measuring personality
- behavioural observation
- interviewing
- projective tests
- questionnaires
51
Behavioural observation
- observe behaviour and count specific number of behaviours that are associated with particular traits
- do not depend on people's view of themselves
- direct and relatively objective
- costly and time-consuming
- not all personality traits can be observed by other people (anxiety/depression)
52
Inter-rater reliability
-if 2 or more raters are to accurately rate and agree upon their rating
53
Interviewing
- most natural and comfortable
- advantage of open-ended nature
- can be difficult to score
54
Projective tests
- present ambitious stimulus or situation to participants and ask them to give their interpretation of or tell a story about what they see.
- techniques based on the assumption that unconscious wishes, thoughts, and motives will be projected onto the task
- most widely used are inkblot test and thematic apperception test
55
Rorschach inkblot test
- series of ambiguous ink blots are presented one at a time, and the participant is asked to say what they see
- coded by human and non-human movement
- help diagnose certain disorders (depression, pedophilia, PTSD)
56
Thematic apperception test
- series of hand-drawn cards depicting simple ambiguous scenes
- participant must make up story to describe what is happening
57
Personality questionnaires
- consist of individual statements or items
- respondents indicate the extent to which they agree or disagree
- questions based on either rational or empirical method
58
Rational/Face valid method of questionnaire
- involves using reason or theory to come up with a question
- eg. To test for anxiety might ask "I feel anxious much of the time"
- taken at face value
- participants might give socially desirable or false answers rather than honest ones
59
Empirical method of questionnaire
- focuses simply on whether a question distinguishes groups it is supposed to distinguish
- eg. The statement "i prefer baths to showers" distinguishes anxious from non-anxious people
- Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory (assesses degree of depression, paranoia etc)
- California personality inventory (measure of non-pathological or normal personality traits such as sociability, dominance, self-control)
60
Personality + career and college majors
-used MPQ to assess whether personality scores can accurately predict majors/careers
61
Personality-environment fit and job performance
- how well a person matches to their job/work environment
- weed out people who might behave counterproductively
- can also predict how long people will stay in their jobs
- people high in agreeableness and openness are more likely to switch jobs more frequently
62
Does personality change over time?
- high levels of stability of personality traits
- genetics contribute to the personality consistency we see from adolescence to adulthood
- environmental factors contribute to both stability and changes in personality traits
63
Typical personality changes across lifespan
- in general, people become steadily more agreeable and conscientious from adolescence to late adulthood
- become more assertive/dominant and emotionally stable from adolescence to adulthood and then level off
- people become more social and open from adolescence to early adulthood
- traits level off in adulthood and then decline into old age
64
Parenting and personality changes
- affects women differently, depending on their evaluation of motherhood
- if she likes being a parent, having a child led to increase in flexibility, self esteem, adjustment, resourcefulness and control
- opposite occurred if she doesnt like being a mother
- self-esteem goes down and irritability goes up in mothers but not fathers
- having child with differing temperament affects father but not mothers anxiety
65
Brain injury and personality change
-children and adults who suffer brain injury often lose ability to control impulses, are socially inappropriate, have a temper, and are more prone to anger
66
Alzheimer's disease and personality change
- neuroticism increases and openness and conscientiousness decrease after the onset of Alzheimer's
- no change in agreeableness
- become less kind, generous, enthusiastic and self-reliant and more irritable
