Personality Test Study Guide

Personality

Personality

A person’s pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting

Id

• Present at birth

• Consists of urges, instincts, desires

• Demanding, insistent, impatient, selfish

• Requires immediate gratification

• Operates according to the “Pleasure Principle”

• Focus = what you WANT

Ego

• Controls all thinking & reasoning

• Serves as a mediator or referee between id demands & superego morals

• Takes into account what is practical & possible

• Operates according to the “Reality Principle”

• Focus = what you CAN do

Superego

• The last to develop

• Represents internalized rules of parents & society

• Operates according to the “Morality Principle”

• Conscience

• Sits in judgement of your behavior

• Focus = SHOULD

Repression

• Involves excluding threatening or painful thoughts, feelings, memories from our awareness.

• Involuntary removal of something from consciousness.

Regression

• A return to behavior, thoughts, feelings that you exhibited as a child

• Revert back to behaviors you have outgrown

Projection

• We attribute our own unacceptable, inappropriate feelings & impulses onto other people

• Motives & feelings that you are unwilling to recognize in yourself are “projected” into someone else.

Displacement

• The transfer of unacceptable feelings from their appropriate target to an undeserving, safer one

• We use displacement when we perceive the real target as too threatening or unavailable

Sublimation

• Redirecting id urges & impulses to forms of activity that are socially acceptable & appropriate

Reaction Formation

• Replacement of anxiety-producing feelings with their opposite

• Act the opposite of how you really feel

• Excessive, you protest too much

Denial

• Refusing to admit that something unpleasant is happening or that you are experiencing an inappropriate emotion

• Refuse to acknowledge reality

Intellectualization

• Undertaking an academic, unemotional study of a topic

Rationalization

• Explaining away failures & losses

• Offers self-adjusting explanations in place of real, more threatening reasons for your actions.

• Manufacture excuses for behavior

• Excuses to justify behavior

• Trying to convince YOURSELF that it’s ok

Jung

Analytical Psychology

Two Levels of the Unconscious:

1. Personal Unconscious - contains our own repressed thoughts, experiences, etc. (similar to Freud)

2. Collective Unconscious - contains universal images, ideas, & symbols Inherited & common to all human beings

   1. Archetypes:

      1. Stored in the collective unconscious

      2. Symbolic characterizations that represent the different aspects of human nature.

      3. Common to all people

      4. Reflections of the history of our species

Persona: The social mask one wears in public

4 basic ways of thinking:

1. Rational thinking

2. Feeling

3. Sensing

4. Intuiting

Horney

• Disagreed with Freud’s portrayal of women as obsessed by “penis envy” and the desire to be male.

• If there is envy of men it is due to the structure of society--not body structure

Adler

Individual Psychology

• Rejected Freud’s ideas about sexual drives being the root of behavior

• He believed that people, instead, have a “drive for superiority”:

  • NOT a desire to dominate others

  • A desire for self-improvement

  • This stems from natural feelings of inferiority

• He believed that the personality develops through an individual’s attempts to overcome limitations

• He agreed with Freud regarding the impact of childhood

• He focused on the effects of “Birth Order”,:

  • A child’s position in the family can have an impact on a child’s experience, development & personality

Big Five Personality Traits

• Emotional Stability/neuroticism

  • (calm/anxious, secure/insecure, self-satisfied/self-pitying)

• Extroversion

  • (sociable/retiring, fun-loving/sober, affectionate/reserved)

• Agreeableness

  • (soft-hearted/ruthless, trusting/suspicious, helpful/uncooperative)

• Openness

  • (imaginative/practical, variety/routine, independent, conforming)

• Conscientiousness

  • (organized/disorganized, careful/careless, disciplined/impulsive)

Cardinal Traits

• One trait that dominates everything you do (rare)

Central Traits

• These are the basic building blocks that shape most of our behavior although they are not as overwhelming as cardinal traits

• Usually number from 5 to 10 in any one person

• An example of central traits: honest, outgoing, moody, passive…

Secondary Traits

• Attitudes or preferences and often appear only in certain situations or under specific circumstances

• These are characteristics that affect behavior in fewer situations & are less influential

• A preference for ice cream or dislike of modern art would be considered a secondary trait

Humanistic perspective

• Do not believe in Determinism (your actions are dictated by your past).

• They believe that humans have free will (our ability to choose your own destiny).

• We are innately good and as long as our self-esteem and self-concept are positive we will be happy.

General theory of personality

Behaviorist Theory of Personality:

• The way most people think of personality is meaningless

• Personality changes according to the environment (reinforcers and punishments)

• If you change environment then you change the personality