Personality— Test 4 Flashcards
Psychodynamic Theory
Unconscious forces—wishes, desires, hidden memories—determine behavior
Freud believed that our conscious awareness was only a small fraction of our mental activity and that most mental processes are unconscious
Not testable
Levels of Awareness
Conscious: Thoughts we are aware of
Preconscious: Content that is not currently in awareness but that could be brought to awareness
Unconscious: Contains material that the mind cannot easily retrieve
Superego:
Ego:
Id:
Internalized societal and parental standards of conduct
Tries to satisfy the wishes of the id while being responsive to the superego
Completely submerged in the unconscious; operates according to the pleasure principle, which is powered by libido (sex drive)
Conflicts between the id and the superego lead to anxiety. The ego then copes through various defense mechanisms
Contemporary Assessment
—Projective measures
Personality tests that examine unconscious processes by having people interpret ambiguous stimuli
Contemporary Assessment
—Objective measures
Relatively direct assessments of personality, usually based on information gathered through self-report questionnaires or observer ratings
—NEO Personality Inventory consists of 240 items, which are designed to assess the Big Five personality factors.
—California Q-Sort: Participants are given 100 cards with statements printed on them.They then sort the cards into nine piles according to how accurately the statements describe them.
Factor Analysis
Identified 16 basic dimensions of personality
Statistical analysis that essentially tries to model large data sets using a minimum number of ‘explanatory factors’
Lead to the idea of general intelligence (g)
Hierarchal Model of Personality
Introversion/extraversion: sociability & positive affect
Neuroticism: emotional stability & negative affect
Psychoticism: aggressiveness & interpersonal hostility
The Big Five (OCEAN)
Identifies five basic personality traits:
Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (OCEAN)
The Big Five approach currently dominates how many psychologists study personality
Personality and Genetics
Children who aren’t biologically related, yet raised in the same household (adopted siblings) tend to be no more alike in personality than any two strangers!
Personalities of adopted children bear no significant relationship to those of the adoptive parents.
Temperaments
The innate biological structures of personality. General tendencies to feel or act in certain ways.
Three personality characteristics considered as temperaments:
—Activity level: Overall amount of energy and behavior a person exhibits
—Emotionality: Intensity of emotional reactions
—Sociability: General tendency to affiliate with others
Sociometer Theory
Self-esteem has been proposed to be a mechanism for monitoring the likelihood of social exclusion
Social Comparison
When people evaluate their own actions, abilities, and beliefs by contrasting them with other people’s
People with high self-esteem tend to make downward comparisons, whereas people with low self-esteem tend to make upward comparisons
People use a form of downward comparison when they recall their own pasts: They often view their current selves as better than their former selves
Self-serving bias
People with high self-esteem tend to take credit for success but blame failure on outside factors
