Prelim Flashcards
Originated from the latin word persona, which referred to a theatrical mask worn by Roman actors in Greek dramas
A pattern of relatively permanent traits and unique characteristics that give both consistency and individuality to a person’s behavior
Personality
contribute to individual differences in behavior, consistency of behavior over time, and stability of behavior across situations
Traits
unique qualities of an individual that include attributes such as temperament, physique, and intelligence.
Characteristics
A set of related assumptions that allows scientists to use logical deductive reasoning to formulate testable hypotheses.
Theory
Theory relates most closely to a branch of ___________ called epistemology , or the nature of knowledge, because it is a tool used by scientists in their pursuit of knowledge.
Philosophy
o Theories are useful tools employed by scientists to give meaning and organization to their observations
Speculation
is a branch of study concerned with the observation and classification of data and with the verification of general laws through the testing of hypotheses.
Science
are useful tools employed by scientists to give meaning and organization to their observations
Theories
is an educated guess or prediction specific enough for its validity to be tested through the use of the scientific method
hypothesis
a scientific investigator can derive testable hypotheses from a useful theory and then test these hypotheses
Deductive reasoning
the investigator then alters the theory to reflect these results
Inductive reasoning
A classification of things according to their natural relationships.
Taxonomy
exist because the very nature of a theory allows the theorist to make speculations from a particular point of view.
Alternate theories
The death instinct
Thanatos
THE FIVE MAJOR THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
o Psychodynamics
o Humanistic – Existential
o Dispositional
o Biological – Evolutionary
o Learning - Cognitive
First 5 years of life most shape personality
o Unconscious forces are most important
o Neurosis results from unhealthy moving toward, against, or away from others
Psychodynamics
o Unconscious - Freud
o Early recollections - Adler
o Collective unconscious - Jung
o Archetypes - Klein
o Object relations - Horney
o Identity crises - Erikson
o Relatedness - Fromm
Psychodynamics
o People strive to live meaningful, happy lives
o People are motivated by growth and psychological health
o Personality is shaped by freedom of choice, response to anxiety, and awareness of death
Humanistic Existential
Examples of Humanistic
Meaningful life - Maslow
Psychological well-being - Rogers
Growth - May
o People are predisposed to behave in unique and consistent ways; they have unique traits
o There are five trait dimensions in human personality
Dispositional
Examples of Dispositional
- Traits
- Allport
- Motives
- McCrae & Costa
o The foundation for thought and behavior is biological and genetic forces
o Human thoughts and behaviors have been shaped by evolutionary forces (natural and sexual selection
Biological Evolutionary
Examples of Biological
o Brain structures - Eysenck
o Neurochemicals and genes - Buss
o Adaptive mechanisms
o Only explanation for behavior is the conditions that create behavior and occurs through association and consequences of our behavior
Learning Cognitive
Examples of Skinner learning
o Conditioned responses
o Shaping
o Reinforcement
o Observational learning
-Affective units
-Rotter
-Mischel
Cognitive
constructs we develop to perceive the
world and others mold our personalities
Cognitive
Constructs
Kelly
develops as an interaction between the internal and external characteristics of a person
Personality
- Investigates the impact of an individual scientist’s psychological processes and personal characteristics on the development of his or her scientific theories and research
- Examines how scientists’ personalities, cognitive processes, developmental histories, and social experience affect the kind of science they conduct and the theories they create
Psychology of Science
WHAT MAKES A THEORY USEFUL?
o Generates Research
o Is Falsifiable
o Organizes Data
o Guides Action
o Is Internally Consistent o Is Parsimonous
o A theory generates a number of hypotheses that can be investigated through research, thus yielding research data
o These data flow back into the theory and restructure it
o From this newly contoured theory, scientists can extract other hypotheses, leading to more research and additional data, which in turn reshape and enlarge the theory even more
Generates Research
concerned with the measurement, labeling, and categorization of the units employed in theory building.
Descriptive Research
leads to an indirect verification of the usefulness of the theory
Hypothesis Testing
o A theory must also be evaluated on its ability to be confirmed or disconfirmed
o A theory must be precise enough to suggest research that may either support or fail to support its major tenets
ohowever, is not the same as false; it simply means that negative research results will refute the theory and force the theorist to either discard it or modify it
Is Falsifiable
oA useful theory should also be able to organize those research data that are not incompatible with each other
o A useful theory of personality must be capable of integrating what is currently known about human behavior and personality development
Organizes Data
o The ability to guide the practitioner over the rough course of day-to-day problems
o Without a useful theory, practitioners would stumble in the darkness of trial and error techniques; with a sound theoretical orientation, they can discern a suitable course of action
o The extent to which the theory stimulates thought and action in other disciplines
Guides Action
o A useful theory need not be consistent with other theories, but it must be consistent with itself
o An internally consistent theory is one whose components are logically compatible
o Its limitations of scope are carefully defined and it does not offer explanations that lie beyond that scope
o Uses language in a consistent manner
Is Internally Consistent
o In general, simple, straightforward theories are more useful than ones that bog down under the weight of complicated concepts and esoteric language
o Should strive for simple measurement models that use the minimum number of parameters needed to explain a given phenomenon
Is Parsimonous
What are the DIMENSIONS FOR A CONCEPT OF HUMANITY?
o Determinism vs Free Choice
o Pessimism vs Optimism
o Causality vs Teleology
o Conscious vs Unconscious
o Biological vs Social
o Uniqueness vs Similarities
o Are people’s behaviors determined by forces over which they have no control, or can people choose to be what they wish to be?
o Can behavior be partially free and partially determined at the same time
Determinism vs Free Choice
o Are people doomed to live miserable, conflicted, and troubled lives, or can they change and grow into psychologically healthy, happy, fully functioning human beings?
Pessimism vs. Optimism
o Do people act as they do because of what has happened to them in the past, or do they act as they do because they have certain expectations of what will happen in the future?
Causality vs. Teleology
behavior is a function of past experiences
Causality
an explanation of behavior in terms of future goals or purposes
Teleology
Are people ordinarily aware of what they are doing and why they are doing it, or do ________ forces impinge on them and drive them to act without awareness of these
underlying forces?
Conscious vs. Unconscious
Are people mostly creatures of biology, or are their personalities shaped largely by their social relationships?
Are personal characteristics more the result of heredity, or are they environmentally determined?
Heredity vs. Environment
Biological vs. Social
Is the salient feature of people their individuality, or is it their common characteristics?
Should the study of personality concentrate on those traits that make people alike, or should it look at those traits that make people different?
Uniqueness vs. Similarities
To improve their ability to predict, personality psychologists have developed a number of assessment techniques, including personality inventories
RESEARCH IN PERSONALITY
THEORY
The extent to which it yields consistent results
Reliability
The extent to which an instrument measures some
hypothetical construct
Construct Validity
the extent that scores on that
instrument correlate highly (converge) with scores on a variety of valid measures of that same construct
Convergent Validity
it has low or insignificant correlations with other inventories that do not measure that construct
Divergent Validity
it discriminates between two groups of people known to be
different
Discriminant Validity
The extent to which a test can predict future behavior
The ultimate value of any measuring instrument is the degree to which it can
predict future behavior or condition
Predictive Validity
The most famous of all personality theories
Exploration of the unconscious
Sex and aggression is the cornerstone of this theory
People are motivated primarily by drives of which they have little or no awareness
Psychoanalysis
Born on either March 6 or May 6, 1856 in Frieberg, Morovia (Czech Republic)
The firstborn child of Jacob and Amalie Nathanson Freud
Was drawn into medicine, not
because he loved medical practice, but because he was intensely curious about human nature
Sigmund Freud
disorder typically characterized by paralysis or the improper functioning of certain parts of the body
Hysteria
the process of removing hysterical symptoms through “talking them out”
Catharsis
The two levels of mental life
Conscious and Unconscious
contains all those drives, urges, or instincts that are beyond our awareness but that nevertheless motivate most of our words, feelings, and actions.
UNCONSCIOUS
conscious forgetting
Suppression
unconscious forgetting
Repression
level of the mind contains all those elements that are not conscious but can become conscious either quite readily or with some difficulty.
preconscious
What a person perceives is conscious for only a transitory period
Conscious Perception
turned toward the outer world and acts as a medium for the perception of external stimuli
Perceptual Conscious
PROVINCES OF THE MIND
Id, Ego and Superego
The Pleasure Principle
Has no contact with reality, yet it strives constantly to reduce
tension by satisfying basic desires
Illogical and can simultaneously entertain incompatible ideas
Has no morality; that is, it cannot make value judgments or distinguish between good and evil
THE ID
The Reality Principle
The only region of the mind in contact with reality
The decision-making or executive branch of personality
Constantly tries to reconcile the blind, irrational claims of the
id and the superego with the realistic demands of the external
world
THE EGO
The Morality Principle
It has no contact with the outside world and therefore is
unrealistic in its demands for perfection
A well-developed superego acts to control sexual and
aggressive impulses through the process of repression
THE SUPEREGO
To Freud, people are motivated to seek pleasure and to
reduce tension and anxiety
This motivation is derived from psychical and physical energy
that springs from their basic drives.
DYNAMICS OF PERSONALITY
a constant motivational force
Drive
sex, The aim of the sexual drive is pleasure, but this pleasure is
not limited to genital satisfaction
The ultimate aim of the sexual drive (reduction of sexual
tension) cannot be changed, but the path by wLibido is the psychic energy which the aim
is reached can be varied
Can take many forms, including narcissism, love, sadism,
and masochism
Eros
Aggression
The aim of the destructive drive is to return the organism to
an inorganic state
The ultimate inorganic condition is death, the final aim of
the aggressive drive is self-destruction
Is flexible and can take a number of forms, such as teasing,
gossip, sarcasm, humiliation, humor, and the enjoyment
obtained from other people’s suffering
Psychic energy remained nameless
Thanatos
is the psychic energy
Libido
Freud emphasized that________ is a felt, affective,
unpleasant state accompanied by a physical sensation
that warns the person against impending danger
ANXIETY
as apprehension about an unknown danger
Neurotic
an unpleasant, nonspecific feeling involving a
possible danger
Realistic
stems from the conflict between the ego and the superego
Moral
are normal and universally used, but when carried to an extreme they lead to compulsive, repetitive, and neurotic behavior
Defense mechanisms
The most basic defense mechanism
Present in all defense mechanism
Whenever the ego is threatened by undesirable id impulses,
it protects itself by repressing those impulses; that is, it
forces threatening feelings into the unconscious
Repression
A disguise that is directly opposite its original form
Reactive behavior can be identified by its exaggerated character
Reaction Formation
Redirecting unacceptable urges onto a variety of people or
objects so that the original impulse is disguised or
concealed
Displacement
The permanent attachment of the libido onto an earlier,
more primitive stage of development.
Fixation
Once the libido has passed a developmental stage, it may, during times of stress and anxiety, revert back to that earlier stage
Regression
Seeing in others unacceptable feelings or tendencies that actually reside in one’s own unconscious
Projection
A defense mechanism whereby people incorporate positive
qualities of another person into their own ego
Introjection
Infants possess a sexual life and go through a period of
pregenital sexual development during the first 4 or 5 years
after birth
Infantile
three kinds of infantile
Oral Phase
Anal Phase
Phallic Phase
The first phase because the mouth is the first organ to
provide an infant with pleasure
Infants obtain life-sustaining nourishment through the oral
cavity, but beyond that, they also gain pleasure through the
act of sucking
The sexual aim of early oral activity is to incorporate or
receive into one’s body the object-choice, that is, the nipple
Oral Phase
Reaches fuller development during the second year when the anus emerges as a sexually pleasurable zone
Characterized by satisfaction gained through aggressive behavior and through the excretory function
The anus is the leading erogenous zone
Anal Phase
children receive satisfaction by destroying or losing objects
Early Anal Period
children take a friendly interest toward their feces, an interest that stems from the erotic pleasure of defecating
Late Anal Period
At approximately 3 or 4 years of age, children begin in this third stage of infantile development
The genital area becomes the leading erogenous zone
Marked for the first time by a dichotomy between male and female development
Phallic Phase
An infant boy forms an identification with his father; that is, he wants to be his father
Later he develops a sexual desire for his mother; that is, he wants to have his mother
Plays a role in the evolution of the castration complex,
which for boys takes the form of castration anxiety or the fear of losing the penis
Male Oedipus Complex
Girls become envious of the male appendage, feel
cheated, and desire to have a penis (penis envy)
Her libido is turned toward her father, who can satisfy
her wish for a penis by giving her a baby, an object that to her has become a substitute for the phallus
Female Oedipus Complex
From the 4th or 5th year until puberty, both boys and girls usually, but not always, go through a period of dormant psychosexual development
Brought about partly by parents’ attempts to punish or discourage sexual activity in their young children
Latency Period
Puberty signals a reawakening of the sexual aim
Adolescents give up autoeroticism and direct their sexual energy toward another person instead of toward themselves
For girls, the vagina finally obtains the same status for them that the penis had for them during infancy
For boys, they see the female organ as a sought-after object rather than a source of trauma
Genital Period
Stage attained after a person has passed through the earlier developmental periods in an ideal manner
Unfortunately, psychological maturity seldom happens,
because people have too many opportunities to develop
pathological disorders or neurotic predispositions
Maturity
