Personality Midterm 1 Flashcards
Nomothetic study
Normal pattern of association between individuals, examining people on common core of traits - most common form of personality research.
Ideographic study
Case study on an individual ex. Biography, psychoanalysis
Sources of personality data I.e. LOTS
L- life outcome data: events, activities, and outcomes in persons life
- things in public record, but you can’t match people with records
O - observer-report data: professional personality assessors, people who know the target person also make good observers. Can be naturalistic or artificial.
T - test data: semi-objective scoring, there is right and wrong answer, test takes may try to manipulate answers with impression management, researcher might influence answers
S - self report data: social desirability and faking may be at play
Psychoanalysis
Sometimes we don’t know why we do things, there is unconscious which holds thoughts, urges, and memories bit acceptable and unacceptable.
Goal of psychoanalysis is so my uncover the unconscious. Uses free association, dream analysis and projective tests.
Freud’s psychoanalysis
I’d, ego, superego
Conscious, preconscious, unconscious
Psychosexual stages of development
Anna Freud
Defence mechanisms
Carl Jung
Dream analysis
Archetypes: highly developed elements of collective unconscious
Persona: social role/ mask what you want the world to see
Anima - man’s feminine potential
Animus - women’s masculine potential
Progression and aggression
BALANCE
First to talk about introversion and extroversion and direction of energy (inward or outward)
Alfred Adler
Organ inferiority - thinking you’re less then others because of attribute perceived or real causes complexes
Everyone has some form of inferiority even those with superiority complexes
People deal with these complexes in different ways
Genius - overcomes inferiority and succeeds
Neurosis -fails and fixates either with self loathing or narcissism
Superiority - represses inferiority
Personality is:
Hypothetical construct to explain why people act, think, and feel the way they do. Set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual.
Central personality features
Tend to be wide ranging and present to various degrees in most people most of the time
Change slowly, more stable through lifetime
Peripheral personality features
More specific to individual or cultural circumstances,
Change faster
Tolerance threshold
Measure of tolerance and intolerance toward specific personality traits in a society or within a cultural group
High threshold = social tolerance to varying traits
How much a group accepts people who are different
Scarcity mindset
Reaction to shortage of resources
Determinism
Psychologically phenomena causally determined by pre wedding events or identifiable factors
Encourages theorists to study where traits come from
Too many factors, factors are interconnected
Fatalism
Humans are not in control of their lives - up to god, date, chance
Psychologists avoid this
Self-determination
People are in control
Popular or folk science
Everyday assumptions about behaviour, change frequently, can be tested but often aren’t
Pop psychology - reaches people through media
Values
Consistent set of beliefs about the world stable and based on set principal
Stable perceptions about the world and individuals place in it
Purpose of existence
Religion
Legal - social status
Law is custom of practice or within community recognized and binding
Provides strict guidelines about social status
Functions of academic traditions
Organizational - groups of people sharing views coming together to discuss
Consolidation of knowledge - working together is more efficient then separately
Regulatory - rendering professional judgments so important high quality research can be seperated from pop psych
Censorship: rare practice of selecting what knowledge is appropriate to share
Knowledge requires analysis which leads to development of theories
Nomothetic
Used the same method to compare people to a certain average standard or norm
Dichotomous testing
People get only two answers
Content analysis
Systematically organizes and summarizes both the manifest - what was said and latent - what it meant content of communication
Themas
Projecting fantasy imagery onto objective stimulus
Holistic ideas of personality research
Using several methods and integrating them, not unscientific. People must be studied together as a whole, emphasizes spiritual aspect
How research is prepared and conducted
Reviewing sources, describing goals, formulating hypothesis, choosing a sample, specific methods (qualitative or quantitative)
Test-retest reliability
Measure obtained by administering same test twice to same group
Parallel forms reliability
Giving two or several forms to test the same group
Construct convergent and predictive validity
Construct validity: used to ensure the method assesses what it’s supposed to
Convergent: extent to which methods yield results obtained by other methods
Predictive: how well study predicts what could happen in the future
Self-fulfilling prophecy
Opinions and beliefs we hold towards other people can with or without our intention produce to encourage that behaviour we expect
Dichotomous vs continuous
Dichotomous: two mutually exclusive or contradictory categories - no middle ground
Continuous: infinite number of points lying between two opposites
Cross cultural psychology
Critical and comparative study of cultural effects on human psychology, examined diversity and underlying reasons for such diversity
Pleasure principle
Demand that instinctual need be immediately gratified
Reality principle
Realization of the demands of the social world and adjustment of behaviour to demands
Freud’s theory
Human desires are repressed early childhood trauma of sexual nature leads to accumulation of unreleased energy which manifests as mental illness
Four ways to deal with reality
Thinking - organizes knowledge provided by sensation and intuition and sorts out significance
Feeling - brings evaluation moral judgment attachments
Sensation - focuses on details
Intuition - embraces the whole
Transpersonal psychology
Theoretical and applied field focusing on spiritual and transcendent states of consciousness
Psychobiography
Historical biography based on psychoanalysis
