Unit 11: Personality Flashcards
What’s Freud’s psychic energy theory?
- The belief that everyone has a fixed amount of psychic energy
- Based on chances of survival and sexual reproduction
- Characterized by two energies:
1) Eros - also known as libido, its your sex drive
2) Thanatos - the death drive, a humans drive for destruction, violence, and corruption
What are Freud’s three parts of the mind?
Id - Impulses towards pleasure, short-term pleasure, unregulated
Ego - Based in reality, the moderate part, strikes a balance, very rational
Superego - Complete opposite of Id, always trying to do what is right, practically angelic, concerned about how you are percieved by others
What are the defense mechanisms denial, repression, and suppression?
- Denial - Refusal to accept that something happened, don’t even consider or contemplate it, very maladaptive
- Repression - Bury down experiences into the unconscious, unable to remember it happened. Helps in the short-term
- Suppression - Involves effortful blocking in order to keep ideas in the preconscious, but eventually rise to the surface. Very taxing as it requires a lot of energy
What are the defense mechanisms displacement, projection, reaction formation, and rationalization?
- Displacement - Transferring negative emotions onto accessible targets. Very stressed but cannot take out stress on what’s causing the stress.
- Projection - Displacement and denial combined. You’ve done something bad (ashamed), so you accuse others of doing the same thing in order to make themselves feel better
- Reaction formation - Adopting beliefs contrary to your own for the appearance of more social acceptance, attempt to persecute other groups
- Rationalization - Swapping the truth for a socially desirable cause. Must beleive in the excuse for it to be rationanlization. Can get out of hand very quickly
What are the defense mechanisms regression, anticipation, humour, and sublimation?
- Regression - An age inappropriate response to a situation. Can be healthy as you’re working your way through it, but also damaging depending on the environment
- Anticipation - Accepting that things are stressing you out. Helpful as it helps you prepare for big events, but always in panic mode which is stressful in itself
- Humour - Very healthy way of coping with anxiety/stress as you’re acknowledging and accepting your flaws.
- Sublimation - Most adaptive mechansim as you’re taking stress and anxiety and turning it into something artful/creative. Always a conscious and adaptive transformation
What’s an important thing to remember about defense mechanisms?
- A lot of them are learned from our surroundings/people who influence us (ex. parents)
What are the historical types of personality types?
- Ayurveda - a traditional hindu way of treatment composed of the three components pitta, vata, and kapha
- Hippocrates humors - believed that when the four humors aren’t balanced (phlegm, blood, yellow bile, and black bile) , a doctor must rid the patient of the excess.
- Astrology
What were the Jungian personality types?
- Attempted to associate science to elemental symbols
- Earth types - sensing types, more grounded
- Fire types - Intuitive, more passionate
- Water types - Emotional
- Air types - More rational, thinking
- You could be mixed/combos of these personality types
What are the four dimensions of the Myers-Briggs type indicator ?
1) Extraversion - Introversion
2) Sensing - intuition
3) feeling - thinking
4) Judging - percieving
What are some criticisms of the MBTI?
- Not empirically supported to be true
- It’s a forced choice
- Categories does not allow for nuanced distributions
- Not statistical, type vs. trait
- The Barnum effect - using broad statements that could apply to anyone, and people only filter what they want to hear
What were Eysenck’s ideas on personality?
- Biology based personality
- 3 traits, all identify on a spectrum:
1) extraversion - tied to levels of arousal, sociability, energy etc.
2) neuroticism - levels of stress and anxiety, leads to more frustration and loneliness
3) Psychoticism - Not necessarily well-regarded, but thought that increased levels of testosterone led to more aggressivness and risk-taking, manipulation and creativity.
What was Cattell’s approach to assigning personality types?
- Used a lexical appraoch and discovered 20 000 words that are used to describe people’s personalities.
- After extensive surveys and statitstics he discovered that there are 16 distinct factors of personality, where there can be ranges and distribution
- A very well-regarded theory in the 1960s.
What’s the Big Five Factor Model?
- Researchers took Cattell’s 16 factor model and simplified it to five. Very well-regarded even today, can be ranges in distribution
- The five factors include:
1) Extraversion vs. Introversion
2) Agreable vs. Disagreable
3) Conscientious vs. Casual
4) Emotionally stable vs. Neurotic
5) Open vs. Closed
What’s the Dark Triad?
- Developed by Paulhus, wanted to categorize the darker side of humanity
- Composed of three factors: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, (take pleasure in manipulating others) and psychopathy.
- If you have all three then that’s very concerning as you are very high in the dark triad
- Could become clinical
What is the HEXACO theory?
- Developed by Lee and Ashton
- Similar to Cattell but used a lexicon including non-english languages and discovered six factors instead of five:
1) Honesy-humility
2) Sincerity
3) Fairness
4) Greed-avoidance
5) Modesty
