chapter 10: personality

personality

unique attitudes, behaviors, and emotions that characterize a person

Type A personality

tend to feel a sense of time pressure, are easily angered, competitive and ambitious, and are at a higher rate for heart disease than the general population

Type B personality

tends to be relaxed and easygoing

penis envy

the desire for a penis, girls experience this

castration anxiety

boys have the fear of if they misbehave, they will be castrated (testicles are removed)

identification

when people attach themselves to an individual who they believe threatens them

adult genital stage

people remain in this stage for the rest of their lives and seek sexual pleasure through sexual relationships with others.

oral fixation

a child who was not fed regularly or who was overly indulged

anal expulsive personality

messy and disorganized

anal retentive personality

neat, hyper-organized, and a little compulsive

unconscious

where we don’t have access to our thoughts

conscious mind

contains everything we are thinking about at one moment

preconscious mind

contains everything that we could potentially summon to conscious awareness with ease

Eros

life instincts

Thanatos

death instincts

id

is controlled by the pleasure principle, exists in the unconscious mind

pleasure principle

immediate gratification

ego

follows the reality principle, is partly in the unconscious mind and in the conscious mind, part of its job is to protect the conscious mind from threatening thoughts in the unconscious and uses defense mechanisms to protect the conscious mind

reality principle

to negotiate between the desires of the id and the limitations of the environment

superego

operators on both the conscious and unconscious, is the sense of conscience and thinking about what is right and wrong

libido

the energy that directs the life instincts

repression

blocking thoughts out from conscious awareness

denial

not accepting the ego-threatening truth

displacement

redirecting one’s feeling 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

channeling one’s frustration toward a different goal, is viewed as a particularly healthy defense mechanism

Karen Horney and Nancy Chodorow

stated that if women were truly envious of men, it was because of the advantages men had in society

womb envy

jealousy of women’s reproductive capabilities

Carl Jung

proposed that the unconscious consists of two different parts: the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious

personal unconscious

contains the painful or threatening memories and thoughts the person does not wish to confront

complexes

memories and thoughts someone does not wish to confront

collective unconscious

passed down through the species and explains certain similarities we see between cultures, contains archetypes

archetypes

universal concepts we all share as part of the human species

shadow

represents the evil side of personality

persona

people’s creation of a public image

Alfred Adler

believed that people were motivated by the fear of failure and the desire to achieve

inferiority

the fear of failure

superiority

the desire to achieve

nomothetic approach

the same basic set of traits can be used to describe all people’s personalities

Hans Eyesenck

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 personality factor test to measure what e believed were the 16 basic traits in all people

Paul Costa and Robert McCrae

proposed that personality can be described using the big five personality traits

extraversion

refers to how outgoing or shy someone is

agreeableness

how easy to get along with someone is

conscientiousness

people high on this scale tend to be hardworking, responsible, and organized

openness to new experiences

related to one’s creativity, curiosity, and willingness to try new things

emotional stability

how consistent one’s mood is

factor analysis

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

idiographic theorists

assert that using the same set of terms to classify all people is impossible and that each person needs to be seen in terms of what few traits best characterize their own unique self

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 their personal traits

cardinal dispositions

influenced by one trait that it plays a pivotal role in virtually everything they do

central dispositions

have a larger influence on personality and are more often apparent and describe more significant aspects of personality

secondary dispositions

has a smaller influence on personality

heritability

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

temperaments

people’s emotional style and characteristic way of dealing with the world

Hippocrates

believed that personality was determined by the relative levels of four humors (or fluids) that were in the body: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm

William Sheldon

created an early biological theory of personalty called somatotype theory, argued that certain personality traits were associated with each of the body types

somatotype theory

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

Albert Bandura

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

triadic reciprocality

means that each of the three factors (the person, the environment, and the person’s behavior) influence both of the other two in a loop

self-efficacy

Bandura proposed that personality is affected by people’s sense of this

George Kelly

proposed the personal-construct theory of personality

personal-construct theory of personality

argued that people develop their own individual systems of personal constructs in an attempt to understand the world

fundamental postulate

tates that people’s behavior is influenced by their cognitions and that by knowing people have behaved in the past, we can predict they will behave in the future

Julian Rotter

created the concept of locus of control

internal locus of control

people with this feel as if they are responsible for what happens to them

external locus of control

people with this generally believe that luck and other forces outside of their own control determine their destinies

determinism

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

free will

an individual’s ability to choose his or her own destiny

third force

what humanistic psychology is often referred to because it arose against determinism that was central to psychoanalytic and behaviorist models

self-concept

a person’s global feeling of themselves and develops through a person’s involvement with others

Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers

two of the most influential humanist psychologists, believed that people are motivated to reach their full potential or self-actualize

unconditional positive regard

expressing empathy, support, and acceptance to someone, regardless of what they say or do

projective tests

used by psychoanalysts and involve asking people to interpret ambiguous stimuli

Rorschach inkblot

involved showing people a series of inkblots and asking them to describe what they see

thematic apperception test (TAT)

consists of a number of cards, each of which contains a picture of a person or people in an ambiguous situation, then people are asked to describe what they see

self-report inventories

questionnaires that ask people to provide information about themselves

Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory (MMPI-2)

one of the most widely used self-report instruments, but a disadvantage to these types of tests is that people may not be completely honest when answering these questions

Barnum effect

people have the tendency to see themselves in vague, stock descriptions of personality