Chapter 13

These flashcards cover key vocabulary related to personality theories and concepts discussed in the psychology lecture.

Personality

An individual's characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting.

Unconscious Mind

A reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories, which has a profound impact on personality.

Psychoanalysis

A treatment method to retrieve information from the unconscious mind and work through it in therapy.

Eros

Life Instinct which includes drives for eating, breathing, and reproduction.

Thanatos

Death Instinct that encompasses aggression and fighting.

Id

The selfish, animalistic part of the mind that is present at birth.

Ego

The rational, conscious part of the mind that emerges in toddlerhood and helps navigate the id's demands.

Superego

The moral part of the mind that imposes social restrictions on behavior, developing around age 5-6.

Psychosexual Stages

A series of 5 stages through which personality develops during the first few years of life.

Free Association

A technique used to access the unconscious mind by encouraging clients to speak freely.

Dream Analysis

A method of interpreting dreams to uncover latent content that reflects unconscious thoughts.

Defense Mechanisms

Psychological strategies used by the ego to protect itself from anxiety and manage the conflict between the id and superego.

Repression

A defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness.

Projection

A defense mechanism where individuals disguise threatening impulses by attributing them to others.

Rorschach Inkblot Test

A projective test that consists of 10 inkblots designed to identify people's inner feelings through their interpretations.

Heritability

A statistical estimate of the proportion of total variance in some trait that is attributable to genetic differences among individuals.

The Big Five Factors

Five broad dimensions of personality traits: Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Openness, and Extraversion.