Chapter 11: Personality

Agreeableness

Agreeableness

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

Albert Bandura

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

Psychoanalytic theory

________ is also criticized for overestimating the importance of early childhood and of sex.

Heritability

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

Sublimation

________ is viewed as a particularly healthy defense mechanism.

Bandura

________ also posited that personality is affected by peoples sense of self- efficacy.

Idiographic theorists

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

Self concept

________ is a persons global feeling about himself or herself.

Hippocrates

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

Libido

________ is the energy that directs the life instincts.

Sheldon

________ identified three body types: endomorphs (fat), mesomorphs (muscular), and ectomorphs (thin)

Freud

________ posited that the personality consists of three parts: the id, the ego, and the superego.

Adler

________ is also known for his work about the importance of birth order in shaping personality.

Extroversion

________ refers to how outgoing or shy someone is.

emotional style

Temperaments, typically defined as their ________ and characteristic way of dealing with the world.

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.

Free

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

Sigmund Freud

________ believed that ones personality was essentially set in early childhood.

Gordon Allport

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

Reliability

________ is often likened to consistency; reliable measures yield consistent, similar results even if the results are not accurate.

id

The ________ is in the unconscious and contains instincts and psychic energy.

Jung

________ contrasted the personal unconscious with the collective unconscious.

Factor analysis

________ allows researchers to use correlations between traits in order to see which traits cluster together as factors.

George Kelly

________ proposed the personal- construct theory of personality.

term anal retentive

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

Kelly

________ argued that people, in their attempts to understand their world, develop their own individual systems of personal constructs.

thematic apperception test

The ________ (TAT) consists of a number of cards, each of which contains a picture of a person or people in an ambiguous situation.

Stage theories

________ are ones in which development is thought to be discontinuous.

Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory

The ________ (MMPI- 2) is one of the most widely used self- report instruments.

Biological theories of personality

________ view genes, chemicals, and body types as the central determinants of who a person is.

Self report inventories

________ are essentially questionnaires that ask people to provide information about themselves.

Projective tests

________ are often used by psychoanalysts.

Freud

________ believed that much of peoples behavior is controlled by a region of the mind he called the unconscious.

Adler

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

Freud

During the oral stage (birth to one year), ________ proposed that children enjoy sucking and biting because it gives them a form of sexual pleasure.

Adler

________ believed that people are motivated by the fear of failure, which he termed inferiority, and the desire to achieve, which he called superiority.

Freud

________ contrasted the unconscious mind with the preconscious and the conscious.

Freud

________ influenced culture more than psychology.

Freud posited that the personality consists of three parts

the id, the ego, and the superego

Freud believed two types of instincts exist

Eros (the life instincts) and Thanatos (the death instincts)

More recently, 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)

Sheldon identified three body types

endomorphs (fat), mesomorphs (muscular), and ectomorphs (thin)

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.