Chapter 13: Personality

Personality Traits

Are relatively stable cognitive, emotional, and behavioral characteristics of people that help establish their individual identities and distinguish them from others.

Defense mechanisms

Unconscious mental operations that deny or distort reality.

Congruence

Consistency between self- perceptions and experience.

Phenomenology

Emphasis on the primacy of immediate experience is known as.

Object Relations Theories

Focus on the images or mental representations that people form of themselves and other people as a result of early experiences with caregivers.

Sublimation

Taboo impulses may even be channeled into socially desirable and admirable behaviors, completely masking the sinister underlying impulses.

Archetypes

Inherited tendencies to interpret experiences in certain ways.

Reciprocal Determinism

The person, the persons behavior, and the environment all infl uence one another in a pattern of two- way causal links.

Ego

Has direct contact with reality and functions primarily at a conscious level.

Id

Is the innermost core of the personality, the only structure present at birth, and the source of all psychic energy.

Factor analysis

Is used to identify clusters of behaviors that are highly correlated (positively or negatively) with one another, but not with behaviors in other clusters.

Rational Theoretical Approach

Items are based on the theorists conception of the personality trait to be measured.

Regression

A psychological retreat to an earlier psychosexual stage,

Superego

The moral arm of the personality.

Emprical Approach

In which items are chosen not because their content seems relevant to the trait on rational grounds, but because each item has been answered differently by groups of people (for example, introverts and extraverts) known to differ in the personality characteristic of interest.

Neoanalytic

Were psychoanalysts who disagreed with certain aspects of Freuds thinking and developed their own theories.

Threat

In Rogerss theory, any experience we have that is inconsistent with our selfconcept, including our perceptions of our own behavior.

Personality

As the distinctive and relatively enduring ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that characterize a persons responses to life situations.

Conginitve Affective Personality System (CAPS)

An organized system of fi ve person variables that interact continuously with one another and with the environment, generating the distinctive patterns of behavior that characterize the person

Genetic factors

Account for as much as half of the group variance in personality test scores, with individual experiences accounting for most of the remainder.

Efficacy

Their beliefs concerning their ability to perform the behaviors needed to achieve desired outcomes.

Gender Schemas

Organized mental structures that contain our understanding of the attributes and behaviors that are appropriate and expected for males and females.

Pleasure Principle

It seeks immediate gratification or release, regardless of rational considerations and environmental realities.

Personal Unconscious

Based on their life experiences.

Structures Interviews

Contain a set of specifi c questions that are administered to every participant.

Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

Consists of a series of pictures derived from paintings, drawings, and magazine illustrations.

Conditions of Worth

That dictate the circumstances under which we approve or disapprove of ourselves.

Self Regulation Processes

Refer to internal, self- administered rewards and punishments.

Psychosexual Stages

During which the ids pleasure-seeking tendencies are focused on specific pleasure- sensitive areas of the body- the erogenous zones.

Need for Positive Regard

We are born with an innate need for acceptance, sympathy, and love form others.

Remote Behavior Sampling

Researchers and clinicians can collect self-reported samples of behavior from respondents as they live their daily lives.

Oedipus Complex

A conflictual situation involving love for the mother and hostility toward the father.

Behavioral Assesment

Psychologists devise an explicit coding system that contains the behavioral categories of interest.

Personal Constructs

Cognitive Catagories into which they sort the people and events in their lives.

Reality Principle

Testing reality to decide when and under what conditions the id can safely discharge its impulses and satisfy its needs.

Fixation

A state of arrested psychosexual development in which instincts are focused on a particular psychic theme.

Projective Tests

Present subjects with ambiguous stimuli and ask for some interpretation of them.

Self Esteem

How positively or negatively we feel about ourselves.

Self

An organized, consistent set of perceptions of and beliefs about oneself.