Chapter 11: Personality

**Sigmund Freud**

believed that one’s personality was essentially set in early childhood.

**Stage theories**

are ones in which development is thought to be discontinuous.

**oral stage**

(birth to one year) Freud proposed that children enjoy sucking and biting because it gives them a form of sexual pleasure.

**anal stage**

(one to three years) children are sexually gratified by the act of elimination.

**phallic stage**

(three to five years) sexual gratification moves to the genitalia.

**Oedipus crisis**

in which boys sexually desire their mothers and view their fathers as rivals for their mothers’ love, occurs in this stage.

**Electra crisis**

in which they desire their fathers and see their mothers as competition for his love.

**Castration anxiety**

the fear that if they misbehave, they will be castrated.

**identification**

Freud believed that the boys used the defense mechanism of

**latency**

(six years to puberty), during which they push all their sexual feelings out of conscious awareness (repression).

**fixation**

could result from being either undergratified or overgratified.

**oral fixation**

A child who was not fed regularly or who was overly indulged might develop an

**anal retentive**

is used to describe people who are meticulously neat, hyperorganized, and a bit compulsive.

**unconscious**

Freud believed that much of people’s behavior is controlled by a region of the mind he called the

**conscious mind**

contains everything we are thinking about at any one moment, while the preconscious contains everything that we could potentially summon to conscious awareness with ease.

id, ego, superego

Freud posited that the personality consists of three parts:

Eros

The life instincts

Thanatos

the death intincts

**Libido**

is the energy that directs the life instincts.

**reality principle**

which means its job is to negotiate between the desires of the id and the limitations of the environment.

**Repression**

Blocking thoughts out from conscious awareness.

**Denial**

Not accepting the ego-threatening truth.

**Displacement**

Redirecting one’s feelings toward another person or object.

**Projection**

Believing that the feelings one has toward someone else are actually held by the other person and directed at oneself.

**Reaction formation**

Expressing the opposite of how one truly feels.

**Regression**

Returning to an earlier, comforting form of behavior.

**Rationalization**

Coming up with a beneficial result of an undesirable occurrence.

**Intellectualization**

Undertaking an academic, unemotional study of a topic.

**Sublimation**

is viewed as a particularly healthy defense mechanism.

**Karen Horney** and **Nancy Chodorow**

believe that this idea grew out of Freud’s assumption that men were superior to women rather than from any empirical observations.

collective unconscious

is passed down through the species and, according to Jung, explains certain similarities we see between cultures.

Adler

is called an ego psychologist because he downplayed the importance of the unconscious and focused on the conscious role of the ego.

**inferiority**

Adler believed that people are motivated by the fear of failure

**superiority**

the desire to achieve

Trait theorists

believe that we can describe people’s personalities by specifying their main characteristics, or traits.

**Hans Eysenck**

believed that by classifying all people along an introversion-extroversion scale and a stable-unstable scale, we could describe their personalities.

**Raymond Cattell**

developed the 16 PF (personality factor) test to measure what he believed were the 16 basic traits present in all people, albeit to different degrees.

**Paul Costa** and **Robert McCrae**

have proposed that personality can be described using the **Big Five** personality traits: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and emotional stability (or neuroticism).

Extroversion

refers to how outgoing or shy someone is.

Agreeableness

has to do with how easy to get along with someone is.

**Factor analysis**

is a statistical technique used to accomplish this feat.

**Idiographic**

theorists assert that using the same set of terms to classify all people is impossible.

**Gordon Allport**

believed that although there were common traits useful in describing all people, a full understanding of someone’s personality was impossible without looking at his or her personal traits.

**Central dispositions**

have a larger influence on personality than **secondary dispositions**

**Heritability**

is a measure of the amount of variation in a trait in a given population that is due to genetics.

**Temperaments**

typically defined as their emotional style and characteristic way of dealing with the world.

**Hippocrates**

believed that personality was determined by the relative levels of four humors (fluids) in the body.

**William Sheldon’s somatotype theory**

argued that certain personality traits were associated with each of the body types.

Behaviorist Theories

According to this view, personality is determined by the environment.

**Albert Bandura**

suggested that personality is created by an interaction between the person (traits), the environment, and the person’s behavior.

**self-efficacy**

Bandura also posited that personality is affected by people’s sense of

**George Kelly**

proposed the **personal-construct theory** of personality.

**fundamental postulate**

that essentially states that people’s behavior is influenced by their cognitions and that by knowing how people have behaved in the past, we can predict how they will act in the future.

locus of control

A person can be described as having either an internal or an external

**external locus of control**

generally believe that luck and other forces outside of their own control determine their destinies.

**Determinism**

is the belief that what happens is dictated by what has happened in the past.

Self-concept

is a person’s global feeling about himself or herself.

Third force

Free will is an idea that has been embraced by humanistic psychology.