Unit 7 - personality Flashcards
personality
An individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting
Free Association
A method of exploring the unconscious in which the person relaxes and says anything that comes to their mind
Psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud’s theory of personality that attributes thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts
Conscious
Awareness
Preconscious
In between conscious and unconscious, a place where unconscious thoughts can be retrieved into conscious awareness
Unconscious
A reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, feelings, and memories
Id
A reservoir of unconscious psychic energy that strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives
Pleasure principle
Immediate gratification
Ego
a conscious part of personality that mediates demands of the id, superego, , and reality
Reality principle
Realistic, long term gratification
Superego
The part of personality that represents internalized ideals and provides standards
Psychosexual stages
Childhood stages of development in which the id’s pleasure seeking energies focus on erogenous zones
Fixate
A lingering focus on earlier psychosexual stages in which there was conflict that wasn’t resolved
Defense Mechanisms
protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality
Collective unconscious
A shared, inherited reservoir of memory collected from our species’ universal experiences
Projective tests
A personality test that has interpretive stimuli designed to reveal inner dynamics
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
A projective test where people make stories about a stimulus
Rorschach Inkblot Test
Widely used projective test where people find images in blots of ink
False consensus effect
The tendency to overestimate the extent to which others share our beliefs and behaviors
Terror Management Theory
One source of anxiety is the terror resulting from our awareness of vulnerability and death
Humanism
People strive for self determination and self realization
Self Actualization
The motivation to fulfill one’s potential
Genuineness
Being open with their own feelings, transparent, self disclosing
Acceptance
An attitude of value despite failures
Unconditional Positive regard
Attitude of total acceptance towards someone else
Empathy
Sharing and reflecting feelings and meanings
Self concept
A collection of beliefs about oneself
Traits
A characteristic pattern of behavior or a disposition to feel and act
Personality inventories
A questionnaire on which people respond to items designed to test a wide range of feelings/behaviors
Minnesota Multiphastic Personality Inventory (MMPI)
A widely used personality test that uses scales to assess things like depressive tendencies, work attitudes, anger, etc
Social - Cognitive perspective
Behavior is influenced by the interaction between people’s traits and their situations/social context
Reciprocal Determinism
The interacting influences between behavior, environment, and internal cognition
Personal control
The extent to which people view their control over the environment
Internal locus of control
The perception that you control your own fate
External locus of control
The perception that you don’t control your own fate
Learned helplessness
The hopelessness and passive resignation someone learns when repeatedly faced with traumatic evens they have no control over
Self
The center of our personality
Spotlight effect
Overestimating how much others notice and evaluate our appearance, performance, and mistakes
Self - esteem
One’s feelings of self worth
Self - efficacy
One’s belief in their ability to do something
Self serving bias
Our readiness to percieve ourselves favorably
Narcissism
When a person has an inflated sense of self importance
