Unit 5: Chapter 12: Personality: Theory, Research, and Assessment Flashcards
Personality
An individual’s unique constellation of consistent behavioral traits.
Personality Trait
A durable disposition to behave in a particular way in a variety of situations.
Raymond Cattell
Used statistical procedure of factor analysis to reduce a huge list of personality traits compiled by Gordon Alport to just 16 basic dimensions of personality.
Factor Analysis
Correlations among many variables are analyzed to identify closely related clusters of variables.
The Five-Factor Model of Personality Traits
Extraversion
Neuroticism
Openness to Experience
Agreeableness
Conscientiousness
Extraversion
Outgoing, sociable, upbeat, friendly, assertive, and gregarious.
Neuroticism
Anxious, hostile, self-conscious, insecure, and vulnerable.
Openness to Experience
Curiosity, flexibility, imaginativeness, intellectual pursuits, interests in new ideas, and unconventional attitudes.
Agreeableness
Sympathetic, trusting, cooperative, modest, and straightforward.
Conscientiousness
Diligent, well-organized, punctual, and dependable.
Delroy Paulhus
Personality researcher who focuses on response styles and dark personalities.
The Dark Triad
Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism.
Psychodynamic Theories
All of the diverse theories descended from the work of Sigmund Freud, which focus on unconscious mental forces.
Sigmund Freud
Developed procedure called psychoanalysis; suggests that individuals are not masters of their own minds; adult personalities are shaped by childhood experiences and other factors beyond one’s control.
Psychoanalytic Theory
Attempts to explain personality by focusing on the influence of early childhood experiences, unconscious conflicts, and sexual urges.
The Id
Primitive, instinctive component of personality that operates according to the pleasure principle; houses raw biological urges (to eat, sleep, defecate, copulate); primary-process thinking.
The Ego
The decision-making component of personality that operates according to the reality principle (seeks to delay gratification of the id’s urges until appropriate outlet and situations can be found); secondary-process thinking.
The Superego
The moral component of personality that incorporates social standards about what represents right and wrong.
Structure of Personality
Freud divided personality into three components: The Id, the Ego, and the Superego.
Levels of Awareness
Freud’s model of personality structure consists of the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious.
The Conscious
Consists of whatever one is aware of at a particular point in time.
The Preconscious
Contains material just beneath the surface of awareness that can easily be retrieved.
The Unconscious
Contains thoughts, memories, and desires that are well below the surface of conscious awareness.
Anxiety
Can be attributed to your ego worrying about (1) The id getting out of control, (2) the superego getting out of control and making you feel guitly.
Defense Mechanisms
Are unconscious reactions that protect a person from unpleasant emotions such as anxiety and guilt.
Repression
Keeping thoughts buried in the unconscious.
Projection
Say your own emotions are caused by someone else.
Displacement
Divert other emotions onto someone else.
Reaction Formation
Behaving the opposite way of your feelings.
Regression
Go back to immature behavior.
Identification
Bolstering self-esteem by forming an imaginary or real alliance with some person or group.
Sublimation
When unconscious, unacceptable urges are channeled into socially acceptable ones.
Rationalization
Creating false but plausible excuses to justify unacceptable behavior.
Psychosexual Stages
Developmental periods with a characteristic sexual focus that leave their mark on adult personality.
Oral Stage
First year of life (0-1); main source of erotic simulation; mouth, biting, sucking, chewing, and feeding; obsession can lead to eating disorders or smoking later in life.
Anal Stage
Second year (2-3);erotic pleasure from their bowel movements, through either the expulsion or retention of feces; crucial event is toilet training.
Phallic Stage
Age four (4-5); genitals become the focus for erotic energy-largely self-stimulation; Oedipal Complex emerges.
Oedipal Complex
Children manifest erotically tinged desires for their opposite-sex parent, accompanied by feelings of hostility toward their same sex-parent.
Latency Stage
Age six through puberty (6-12); child’s sexuality is largely suppressed, becomes latent.
Genital Stage
Puberty onward; sexual urges reappear-normally channeled toward peers of the other sex, rather than toward oneself.
Jung’s Analytical Psychology
Carl Jung new approach called analytical psychology; proposed that the unconscious consists of two layers: personal unconscious, and collective unconscious.
Personal Unconscious
First layer; houses material that is not within one’s conscious awareness because it has been repressed or forgotten.
Collective Unconscious
A storehouse of latent memory traces inherited from people’s ancestral past.
Archetypes
Emotionally charged images and though forms that have universal meaning; show up frequently in dreams and are often manifested in a culture’s use of symbols in art, literature, and religion.
Introverts
Preoccupied with the internal world of own thoughts, feelings, and experiences.
Extraverts
Interested in the external world of people and things.
Alfred Adler
Member of Freud’s inner circle-the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society; developed approach to personality called individual psychology; suggests foremost source of human motivation is a striving for superiority.
Compensation
Efforts to overcome imagined or real life inferiorities by developing one’s coping abilities.
Overcompensation
People engage in order to conceal their feelings of inferiority.
Inferiority Complex
Exaggerated feelings of weakness and inadequacy.
Psychodynamic Approach
Provided far-reaching theories of personality, (1) unconscious forces can influence behavior, (2) internal conflict often plays a key role in generating psychological distress, (3) early childhood experiences can have powerful influences on adult personality, and (4) people do use defense mechanisms to reduce their experience of unpleasant emotions.
Criticism
Poor testability, inadequate evidence, sexism, and un representative samples.
Behaviorism
A theoretical orientation based on the premise that scientific psychology should study only observable behavior.
B.F Skinner
Most prominent behavioral theorist; research on the principles of learning, which were mostly discovered through the study of rats and pigeons.
Skinner’s Theory
Focused on how the external environment molds overt behavior; behavior is fully determined by environmental stimuli; believed most human responses are shaped by the type of conditioning that he described-operant conditioning.
Albert Bandura
Helped reshape the theoretical landscape of behaviorism; model called social cognitive theory; believes that personality is largely shaped through learning-reciprocal determinism.
Reciprocal Determinism
The idea that internal mental events, external environmental events, and overt behavior all influence one another.
Observational Learning
When an organism’s responding is influenced by the observation of others, who are called models.
Model
A person whose behavior is observed by another.
Self-Efficacy
Refers to confidence in oneself to perform and have desired outomces.
Walter Mischel
Social Learning theory; believes people will behave in a way that will lead to reinforcement in the situation at hand; people will behave differently in various situations.
Carl Rogers
Human potential movement -emphasizes self-realization through sensitive training, encounter groups, and other exercises intended to foster personal growth; approach called person-centered theory.
Abraham Maslow
Created influential theory of motivation. Argued psychology should take an optimistic view of human nature.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
A systematic arrangement of needs, according to priority; physiological needs, safety and security needs, belongingness and love needs, esteem needs, cognitive needs, aesthetic needs, need for self actualization.
Self-Actualization
The need to fulfill one’s potential.
Self Actualizing
Persons are people with exceptionally healthy personalities, marked by continued personal growth.
Hans Eysenck
Biological perspective-personality is a hierarchy of traits, person’s genes allows them to be conditioned easier than others; suggests personality emerge from three higher-order traits: extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism.
Extraversion
Sociable, assertive, active, and lively.
Neuroticism
Anxious, tense, moody, and low in self-esteem.
Psychoticism
Egocentric, impulsive, cold, and antisocial.
David Buss
Evolutionary theorist-argues the Big Five personality traits stand out as important dimensions of personality across a variety of cultures.
Individualism
Involves putting personal goals ahead of group goals.
Collectivism
Involves putting group goals ahead of personal goals.
Self-Enhancement
Involves focusing on positive feedback from others, exaggerating one’s strength, and seeing oneself as above average.
Self-Report Inventories
Personality tests that ask individuals to answer a series of questions about their characteristic behavior.
Projective Tests
Ask participants to respond to vague stimuli in ways that may reveal the subjects’ needs, feelings, and personality traits.
Hindsight Bias
Tendency to mold one’s interpretation of the past to fit how events actually turned out.
