Personality & Social Psych Flashcards
Personality
characteristic thoughts, emotional responses + behaviours relatively stable over time + across circumstances
Strong Situations
-Powerful social environments
-Mask differences in personality
-Job interviews, funerals, hanging out with your boss
behaviour constrained, ppl tends to behave in similar ways
Weak Situations
Allow ppl to behave more freely
-Easier to discern personality differences
-At home, at bar, hanging out with friends
•situation doesn’t have a strong influence on behaviour
•see more variation in behaviour
Different Ways of Studying & Understanding Personality: Unconscious processes
–Sigmund Freud
Different Ways of Studying & Understanding Personality: Personal experiences
–Carl Rogers
Different Ways of Studying & Understanding Personality: Trait approaches
–Hans Eysenck
not focused on explain personality, descriptive approach
Different Ways of Studying & Understanding Personality: Cognitive approaches
–Walter Mischel
Freud’s Psychodynamic Theory
- Emphasizes influence of unconscious forces on behaviour
- We could access preconscious
- We don’t have access to unconscious mind
defense mechanisms
Unconscious mental strategies mind uses to protect itself + self esteem
3 Levels of Consciousness
-id, ego, superego
Ego, Id, Superego
-Id: selfish, hedonistic principles
•Supergo: polar opposite of id, strict moral rules, do right thing, driven by moral principles
•Represented by devil + angel on your shoulder
•Conflict leads to unconscious anxiety
•Important that ego strongest force, focus on reality, mediate forces
Humanistic Approaches
•Emphasize personal experience + belief systems;
propose ppl seek personal growth to fulfill potential: self-actualization
•Be the best person you can be
Roger’s person-centred approach
–Phenomenology: Subjective human experience
–Unconditional positive regard: Important for parents to have unconditional, important for self esteem + achieve self actualization
Positive psychology
–Broaden-and-build theory: broaden horizons, build resources, explore
•Importance of positive emotions
•Negative emotions narrow everything down
Personality types
Discrete categories based on global personality characteristics
–Implicit personality theory: tend to believe certain personality characteristics go together
Personality trait
characteristic; dispositional tendency to act in a certain way over time and across circumstances
–emphasizes extent to which individuals differ in personality dispositions
How Many Traits?
-5
Eysenk’s Hierarchical Model
- Introversion/Extroversion
- Emotional Stability/Neuroticism
- Psychoticism (Constraint) : aggressive, impulsive, empathy