Psychology 45,46,47 Flashcards
How did humanistic psychologists view personality, and what was their goal in studying personality?
The humanistic psychologists’ view of personality focused on the potential for healthy personal growth and people’s striving for self-determination and self-realization. Abraham Maslow proposed that human motivations form a hierarchy of needs; if basic needs are fulfilled, people will strive toward self-actualization and self-transcendence. Carl Rogers believed that the ingredients of a growth-promoting environment are acceptance (including unconditional positive regard), genuineness, and empathy. Self-concept was a central feature of personality for both Maslow and Rogers.?
How did humanistic psychologists assess a person’s sense of self?
Some rejected any standardized assessments and relied on interviews and conversations. Others, like Rogers, sometimes used questionnaires in which people described their ideal and actual selves; these were later used to judge progress during therapy. Some now use the life story approach, enabling a rich narrative detailing each person’s unique life history.
How have humanistic theories influenced psychology? What criticisms have they faced?
Humanistic psychology has had pervasive cultural impact and helped renew interest in the concept of self; it also laid the groundwork for today’s scientific subfield of positive psychology. Critics have said that humanistic psychology’s concepts are vague and subjective, its values self-centered, and its assumptions naively optimistic.
How do psychologists use traits to describe personality?
Trait theorists see personality as a stable and enduring pattern of behavior. They have been more interested in trying to describe our differences than in explaining them. Using factor analysis, they identify clusters of behavior tendencies that occur together. Genetic predispositions influence many traits.
What are some common misunderstandings about introversion?
Western cultures prize extraversion, but introverts have different, equally important skills. Introversion does not equal shyness, and extraverts don’t always outperform introverts as leaders. Introverts handle conflict well, seeking solitude rather than revenge.
What are personality inventories, and what are their strengths and weaknesses as trait-assessment tools?
Personality inventories (such as the MMPI) are questionnaires on which people respond to items designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors. Test items are empirically derived, and the tests are objectively scored. Objectivity does not guarantee validity; people can fake their answers to create a good impression (but may then score high on a lie scale that assesses faking).
Which traits seem to provide the most useful information about personality variation?
The Big Five personality factors—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (OCEAN)—currently offer our best approximation of the basic trait dimensions. These factors are generally stable and describe people in various cultures reasonably well. Many genes, each having small effects, combine to influence our traits.
Does research support the consistency of personality traits over time and across situations?
A person’s average traits persist over time and are predictable over many different situations. But traits cannot predict behavior in any one situation.
How do social-cognitive theorists view personality development, and how do they explore behavior?
Albert Bandura’s social-cognitive perspective emphasizes the interaction of our traits with our situations. Social-cognitive researchers apply principles of learning, cognition, and social behavior to personality. Reciprocal determinism describes the interaction and mutual influence of behavior, internal cognition, and environment. Assessment situations involving simulated conditions exploit the principle that the best predictor of future behavior is a person’s actions in similar situations.
What criticisms have social-cognitive theories faced?
Social-cognitive theories build on well-established concepts of learning and cognition, sensitizing researchers to the ways situations affect, and are affected by, individuals. They have been faulted for underemphasizing the importance of unconscious motives, emotions, and biologically influenced traits.
Why has psychology generated so much research on the self? How important is self-esteem to our well-being?
The self is vigorously researched as the center of personality, organizing our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Considering possible selves helps motivate us toward positive development, but focusing too intensely on ourselves can lead to the spotlight effect. High self-esteem and self-efficacy correlate with benefits such as higher school achievement and with being able to meet challenges. But the direction of the correlation is unclear. Rather than unrealistically promoting self-worth, it’s better to reward achievements, thus promoting feelings of competence.
How do excessive optimism, blindness to one’s own incompetence, and self-serving bias reveal the costs of self-esteem, and how do defensive and secure self-esteem differ?
Excessive optimism can lead to complacency and prevent us from seeing real risks, while blindness to one’s own incompetence may lead us to make the same mistakes repeatedly. Self-serving bias is our tendency to perceive ourselves favorably, as when viewing ourselves as better than average or when accepting credit for our successes but not blame for our failures. Defensive self-esteem is fragile, focuses on sustaining itself, and views failure or criticism as a threat. Secure self-esteem enables us to feel accepted for who we are.
How should we draw the line between normality and disorder?
According to psychologists and psychiatrists, psychological disorders are marked by a clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior. Such dysfunctional or maladaptive thoughts, emotions, or behaviors interfere with daily life, and thus are disordered.
How do the medical model and the biopsychosocial approach influence our understanding of psychological disorders?
The medical model assumes that psychological disorders have physical causes that can be diagnosed, treated, and often cured through therapy, sometimes in a hospital. The biopsychosocial perspective assumes that disordered behavior comes from the interaction of biological characteristics, psychological dynamics, and social-cultural circumstances. This approach has given rise to the vulnerability-stress model, in which individual characteristics and environmental stressors combine to increase or decrease the likelihood of developing a psychological disorder, a model supported by epigenetics research.
How and why do clinicians classify psychological disorders, and why do some psychologists criticize diagnostic labels?
The American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition) contains diagnostic labels and descriptions that provide a common language and shared concepts for communication and research. Critics of the DSM say it casts too wide a net, pathologizing normal behaviors. A complementary approach to classification is the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health’s Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project, a framework that organizes disorders according to behaviors and brain activity along several dimensions. Any classification attempt produces diagnostic labels that may create preconceptions, which bias perceptions of the labeled person’s past and present behavior.
