Intro to Psychology Areas and Applications - Chapter 12: Personality

Flashcards covering the influential psychologists of the 20th century, Freudian psychoanalytic concepts, art movements influenced by the unconscious, and modern personality models including OCEAN and HEXACO.

Thanatos (Greek Mythology)

The personification of death, son of Nyx (Goddess of Night) and twin brother of Hypnos (God of Sleep), representing non-violent death.

Thanatos (Freudian Theory)

The death drive representing a basic human instinct towards destruction, aggression, and a return to an inanimate state.

Surrealism

An art movement that sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind through spontaneous, automatic creation and irrational juxtaposition of images.

Abstract Expressionism

An art movement where painters expressed emotions and universal themes through shapes, colors, and lines, rooted in the collective unconscious and often using massive canvases.

Automatism

A method used by Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists to make the invisible visible by suppressing conscious control and allowing the unconscious mind to lead.

Automatic Writing

Writing that occurs without thinking or editing, often in a trancelike state, intended to provide a truthful record of unconscious psychic forces.

Automatic Drawing

A method where an artist suppresses conscious control over the drawing process and allows the unconscious mind, dreams, or drug-induced states to control the hand.

Psychoanalysis

A theory and therapy founded by Freud that identifies pent-up emotions and repressed memories to lead a client to catharsis and healing.

The Unconscious

According to Freud's Iceberg Model, the part of the mind containing things we are unaware of and cannot become aware of, such as fears, violent motives, and traumatic experiences.

Id

The primitive, instinctive component of personality and psyche that operates on the pleasure principle, containing the biological instincts Eros and Thanatos.

Id (III)

Is referred to as the reservoir of psychic energy.

I.e The id houses the raw biological urges (to eat, sleep, defecate, copulate, and so on) that energize human behaviour

Pleasure principal

Demands immediate gratification of its urges

Ego

The decision-making component of personality that operates according to the reality principle.

Ego (con’t)

The rational part of the psyche that mediates between the Id's instinctual desires and the Superego's moral standards, operating primarily at the conscious level.

Reality principle

Seeks to delay gratification of the id’s urges until appropriate outlets and situations can be found.

Superego

The moral compass of the psyche and personality representing internalized societal values and rules that guide an individual toward right and wrong

Conscious

Consists of whatever one is aware of at a particular point in time.

e.g. Your conscious may include the train of thought in this text and a dim awareness in the back of your mind that your eyes are getting tired an you’re beginning to get hungry

Unconscious

Contains thoughts, memories, and desires that are well below the surface of conscious awareness but that nonetheless exert great influence on behaviour.

e.g. A forgotten trauma from childhood, hidden feelings of hostility toward a parent, and repressed sexual desires.

Psychosexual Stages of Development

A Freudian theory stating that personality develops through a series of stages where the libido is fixated on different erogenous zones.

Defense Mechanisms

Strategies used by the Ego to protect itself from anxiety, including repression, denial, projection, displacement, rationalization, and regression.

Repression

A defense mechanism involving the unconscious blocking of disturbing thoughts or feelings.

Manifest Content

The remembered storyline of a dream, consisting of images, thoughts, and emotions that mask the dream's hidden meaning.

Latent Content

The hidden meaning of a dream representing unconscious thoughts, drives, and desires that are blocked from consciousness by repression.

Personality

The stable characteristics and behaviors including major traits, motivations, values, self-concept, and emotional patterns that make up each unique person.

Lexical Hypothesis

The theory that all important personality characteristics are reflected in the everyday words that people use.

The Five-Factor Model (O.C.E.A.N.)

A personality group consisting of five traits:

• Openness to experience

• Conscientiousness

• Extraversion

• Agreeableness

• Neuroticism

Openness to experience

Is associated with curiosity, flexibility, imaginativeness, intellectual pursuits, interests in new ideas, and unconventional attitudes.

Openness to experience (con’t)

People who are high in openness to experience also tend to be tolerant of ambiguity

Conscientiousness

Tend to be diligent, well-organized, punctual, and dependable

Conscientiousness (con’t)

Is associated with strong self-discipline and the ability to regulate oneself effectively; females tend to score higher

Agreeableness

Those who score high in agreeableness tend to be sympathetic, trusting, cooperative, modest, and straightforward

Agreeableness (con’t)

Is also correlated with empathy and helping behaviour; females tend to score higher

Extraversion

Are characterized as outgoing, sociable, upbeat, friendly, assertive, and gregarious.

Extraversion (con’t)

They also have a more positive outlook on life and are motivated to pursue social contact, intimacy, and interdependence

Neuroticism

Tend to be anxious, hostile, self-conscious, insecure, and vulnerable

Neuroticism (con’t)

They also tend to exhibit more impulsiveness and emotional instability than others; females tend to score higher

HEXACO Model

A six-dimensional model of personality created by Michael Ashton and Kibeom Lee, adding the Honesty-Humility dimension to the standard five factors.

Honesty-Humility Factor

A personality dimension in HEXACO where high scorers avoid manipulating others, feel little temptation to break rules, and lack interest in lavish wealth or social status.

Emotionality Factor (HEXACO)

A dimension assessing fearfulness, anxiety, dependence, and sentimentality; high scorers feel a need for emotional support and experience fear of physical danger.

Authoritarianism

A personality trait characterized by a tough attitude towards violations of social rules and a desire for a strong leader to impose order against external threats.

The Bell Curve

A statistical distribution pattern showing that most people score toward the middle of a trait scale, with fewer people at the extreme high or low ends.

Narcissism

A personality trait marked by an inflated sense of importance, need for attention and admiration, a sense of entitlement, and a tendency to exploit others

Narcissism (con’t)

The term is drawn from the greek myth of narcissus, who was an attractive young man in search of love, saw his reflection in water, fell in love with his own image, and gazed at it until he died

Narcissism (III)

Research suggests that either narcissists need validation because underneath the façade, they loath themselves, or because they feel good about themselves and have inflated views of themselves

What do people who score high in narcissism have?

People who score high in narcissism have:

• Have an inflated view of themselves as being generally superior to others

• A highly positive but easily threatened self-concept

• Display a craving for approval and admiration that resembles an addiction

• Relentlessly pursue social status and situations that allow them to attain increased status

What do people who score high in narcissism have? (con’t)

People who score high in narcissism have:

• They work overtime to impress people by bragging about their accomplishments.

• When they get the attention and admiration that they seek, they feel elated; when they don’t, they feel terribly let down and often lash out at others with hostility

Grandiose narcissism

Is characterized by arrogance, extraversion, immodesty, and aggressiveness; males tend to score higher in this area

Vulnerable narcissism

Is characterized by hidden feelings of inferiority, introversion, neuroticism, and a need for recognition

Narcissism and social media

Narcissism correlates positively (albeit modestly) with time spent on social media, the frequency of tweets and updates, and the frequency of posting selfies

Narcissism and social media (con’t)

Narcissists use it for self-promotion

How narcissism correlates with extraversion agreeableness, honesty, and humility

Positively for extraversion, but negatively with agreeableness, honest, and humility.

Dark triad

A specific combination of three traits leading to negative, antisocial behavioural tendencies

• Machiavellianism

• Psychopathy

• Narcissism

Dark triad (con’t)

Individuals displaying this personality type exhibit vengeful attitudes and show a tendency to engage in antisocial activities

Psychopathy

Someone who scores high on this scale might feel little empathy, likes to control and hurt others, is impulsive, and often lives a parasitic lifestyle (a psychopath)

Machiavellianism

Is someone who enjoys, and is good at, manipulating others

Sadism

Involves an appetite for cruelty, as opposed to callous indifference

What’s personality used to explain?

1. The stability in a person’s behaviour over time and across situations (consistency)

2. The behavioural differences among people reacting to the same situation (distinctiveness).

Distinctiveness

The different personalities people may have in a given situation

Personality traits

A durable disposition to behave in a particular way in a variety of situations

e.g. Honest, dependable, moody, impulsive, suspicious, anxious, excitable, domineering, and friendly

Personality traits (con’t)

A small number of fundamental traits determine other, more superficial traits

e.g. A person’s tendency to be impulsive, restless, irritable, boisterous, and impatient might all be derived from a more basic tendency to be excitable

Factor analysis

Correlations among many variables are analyzed to identify closely related clusters of variables

Psychodynamic theories

Includes all of the diverse theories descended from the work of Sigmund Freud, which focus on unconscious mental forces

Psychoanalytic theory

Attempts to explain personality by focusing on the influence of early childhood experiences, unconscious conflicts, and sexual urges.

Issues with psychoanalytic theory

1. Freud made the disconcerting suggestion that individuals are not masters of their own minds, arguing that people’s behaviour is governed by unconscious factors of which they are unaware

2. Freud suggested that people are not masters of their own destinies by claiming that adult personalities are shaped by childhood experiences and other factors beyond one’s control

3. Freud offended those who held the conservative, Victorian values of his time by emphasizing the importance of how people cope with their sexual urges,

Rationalization

Creating false but plausible excuses to justify unacceptable behaviour.

e.g. After cheating someone in a business transaction, you might reduce your guilt by rationalizing that “everyone does it.”

Repression

Keeping distressing thoughts and feelings buried in the unconscious.

Projection

Attributing one’s own thoughts, feelings, or motives to another

e.g. If lusting for a co-worker makes you feel guilty, you might attribute any latent sexual tension between the two of you to the other person’s desire to seduce you.

Displacement

Diverting emotional feelings (usually anger) from their source to a substitute target.

e.g. If your boss gives you a hard time at work and you come home and slam the door, kick the dog, and scream at your spouse, you’re displacing your anger onto irrelevant targets.

Reaction formation

Behaving in a way that’s exactly the opposite of one’s true feelings.

e.g. Freud theorized that many males who ridicule gay men are defending against their own latent impulses.

Regression

A reversion to immature patterns of behaviour.

e.g. When anxious about their self-worth, some adults respond with childish boasting and bragging (as opposed to subtle efforts to impress others)

Identification

Bolstering self-esteem by forming an imaginary or real alliance with some person or group.

Sublimination

Occurs when unconscious, unacceptable impulses are channelled into socially acceptable, perhaps even admirable, behaviours

e.g. Intense aggressive impulses might be rechannelled by taking up mixed martial arts or football or your sexual urges rechannelled into painting o poetry

Sublimination

A (regarded as) healthy defence mechanism

Oral stage

Encompasses the first year of life, where the main source of erotic stimulation is the mouth

e.g. biting, sucking, chewing

Anal stage

When children get their erotic pleasure from their bowel movements, through either the expulsion or retention of feces during their second year

Phallic

When the genitals become the focus for the child’s erotic energy, largely through self-stimulation around the age of 4

Oedipal complex

When children manifest erotically tinged desires for their opposite-sex parent, accompanied by feelings of hostility toward their same-sex parent

Latency stage

When a child’s sexuality is largely suppressed from the ages of 6 - 12

Genital stage

When sexual urges reappear around puberty and children focus on the genitals once again.

Genital stage (con’t)

Sexual energy is normally channelled toward peers of the other sex, rather than toward oneself, as in the phallic stage

Personal unconscious

Proposed by Carl Jung, and houses material that is not within one’s conscious awareness because it has been repressed or forgotten

Collective unconscious

A deeper layer which serves as a storehouse of latent memory traces inherited from people’s ancestral past

Archetypes

Emotionally charged ideas and images and thought forms that have universal meaning

Archetypes (con’t)

They show up frequently in dreams and are often manifested in a culture’s use of symbols in art, literature, and religion.

Individual psychology

An approach to personality developed by Alfred Adler

Striving for superiority

A universal drive to adapt, improve oneself, and master life’s challenges

Compensation

Involves efforts to overcome imagined or real inferiorities by developing one’s abilities

Inferiority complex

Exaggerated feelings of weakness and inadequacy

Overcompensation

Concealing feelings of inferiority, even from oneself

Overcompensation (con’t)

These people work to acquire status, power, and the trappings of success (fancy clothes, impressive cars) to cover up their underlying inferiority complex

The psychodynamic approach

1. Unconscious forces can influence behaviour

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 defence mechanisms to reduce their experience of unpleasant emotions

Criticisms of the psychodynamic approach

1. Poor testability

2. Inadequate evidence

3. Sexism against women

4. Unrepresentative samples

Humanism

A theoretical orientation that emphasizes the unique qualities of humans, especially their freedom and their potential for personal growth

Humanism (con’t)

Maintains that a person’s subjective view of the world is more important than objective reality

Phenomenological approach

Which assumes that one has to appreciate individuals’ personal, subjective experiences to truly understand their behaviour

Self-concept

A collection of beliefs about one’s own nature, unique qualities, and typical behaviour.

e.g. “I’m easygoing” or “I’m sly and crafty”

Dunning-Kruger effect

When someone is so stupid, their own stupidity shields them from it

Incongruence

The degree of disparity between one’s self-concept and one’s actual experience

Conditional

It depends on the child’s behaving well and living up to expectations, thus children often block out of their self-concept those experiences that make them feel unworthy of love

Unconditional

When children are assured that they’re worthy of affection, no matter what they do, and thus have less need to block out unworthy experiences