Motivation, Emotion, and Personality

Hierarchy of needs

Maslow's pyramid of human needs, beginning at the base with physiological needs that must first be satisfied before higher-level safety needs and then psychological needs become active.

Glucose

The form of sugar that circulates in the blood and provides the major source of energy for body tissues; when levels are low we feel hunger.

Estrogens

Sex hormones secreted in greater amounts by females than by males, contributing to female sex characteristics.

Testosterone

The most important of the male sex hormones - both males and females have it.

Sexual orientation

An enduring sexual attraction toward members of either one's own sex or the other sex.

Motivation

A need or desire that energizes and directs behavior.

Instinct

A complex behavior that is rigidly patterned throughout a species and is unlearned.

Drive-reduction theory

The idea that a physiological need creates an aroused tension state (a drive) that motivates an organism to satisfy the need.

Homeostasis

A tendency to maintain a balanced or constant internal state; the regulation of any aspect of body chemistry, such as blood glucose, around a particular level.

Incentive

A positive or negative environmental stimulus that motivates behavior.

Set point

The point at which an individual's 'weight thermostat' is supposedly set.

Basal metabolic rate

The body's resting rate of energy expenditure.

Anorexia nervosa

An eating disorder in which a person diets and becomes significantly underweight, yet still feels fat, and continues to starve - usually an adolescent female.

Bulimia nervosa

An eating disorder characterized by episodes of overeating followed by vomiting, laxative use, fasting, or excessive exercise.

Binge-eating disorder

Significant binge-eating episodes followed by distress, disgust, or guilt, but without the compensatory purging, fasting, or excessive exercise that marks bulimia nervosa.

Sexual response cycle

The four stages of sexual responding described by Masters and Johnson - excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution.

Refractory period

A resting period after orgasm, during which a man cannot achieve another orgasm.

Emotion

A response of the whole organism involving (1) physiological arousal, (2) expressive behaviors, and (3) conscious experience.

James-Lange theory

Our experience of emotion is our awareness of our physiological responses to emotion-arousing stimuli.

Cannon-Bard theory

Emotion-arousing stimulus simultaneously triggers (1) physiological responses and (2) the subjective experience of emotion.

Schachter-Singer two-factor theory

To experience emotion, one must (1) be physically aroused and (2) cognitively label the arousal.

Facial feedback

The effect of facial expressions on experienced emotions, as when a facial expression of anger or happiness intensifies feelings of anger or happiness.

Catharsis

Emotional release; 'releasing' aggressive energy (through action or fantasy) relieves aggressive urges.

Behavioral medicine

An interdisciplinary field that integrates behavioral and medical knowledge and applies that knowledge to health and disease.

Health psychology

A subfield that provides psychology's contribution to behavioral medicine.

Stress

The process by which we perceive and respond to certain events, called stressors, that we appraise as threatening or challenging.

General adaptation syndrome (GAS)

Selye's concept of the body's adaptive responses to stress in three phases - alarm, resistance, exhaustion.

Coronary heart disease

The clogging of the vessels that nourish the heart muscle; leading cause of death in North America.

Polygraph

A machine, commonly used in attempts to detect lies, that measures several of the physiological responses accompanying emotion.

Feel-good, do-good phenomenon

People's tendency to be helpful when already in a good mood.

Well-being

Self-perceived happiness or satisfaction with life; used along with measures of objective well-being to evaluate people's quality of life.

Adaptation-level phenomenon

Our tendency to form judgments (of sounds, of lights, of income) relative to a neural level defined by our prior experience.

Relative deprivation

The perception that we are worse off relative to those with whom we compare ourselves.

Type A

Friedman and Rosenman's term for competitive, hard-driving, impatient, verbally aggressive, and anger-prone people.

Type B

Friedman and Rosenman's term for easygoing, relaxed people.

Psychophysiological illness

Mind-body illness; any stress-related physical illness.

Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI)

The study of how psychological, neural, and endocrine processes together affect the immune system and resulting health.

Lymphocytes

The two types of white blood cells that are part of the body's immune system.

B lymphocytes

Form in bone marrow and release antibodies that fight bacterial infections.

T lymphocytes

Form in the thymus and other lymphatic tissue and attack cancer cells, viruses, and foreign substances.

Projection

Psychoanalytic defense mechanism by which people disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others.

Rationalization

Psychoanalytic defense mechanism that offers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one's actions.

Displacement

Psychoanalytic defense mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person.

Projective test

A personality test, such as the Rorschach or TAT, that provides ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger projection of one's inner dynamics.

Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

A projective test in which people express their inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes.

Rorschach inkblot test

The most widely used projective test; seeks to identify people's inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of the blots.

Personal control

The extent to which people perceive control over their environment rather than feeling helpless.

External locus of control

The perception that chance or outside forces beyond your personal control determine your fate.

Internal locus of control

The perception that you control your own fate.

Spotlight effect

Overestimating others' noticing and evaluating our appearance, performance, and blunders.

Self-esteem

One's feelings of high or low self-worth.

Self-serving bias

A readiness to perceive oneself favorably.

Individualism

Giving priority to one's own goals over group goals and defining one's identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identifications.

Collectivism

Giving priority to the goals of one's group (often one's extended family or work group) and defining one's identity accordingly.

Free association

In psychoanalysis, a method of exploring the unconscious in which the person says whatever comes to mind, no matter how trivial or embarrassing.

Psychoanalysis

Freud's theory of personality that attributes thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts.

Unconscious

According to Freud, a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories.

Id

A reservoir of unconscious psychic energy that, according to Freud, strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives.

Ego

The largely conscious 'executive' part of personality that mediates among the demands of the id, superego, and reality.

Superego

Represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgment (the conscience) and for future aspirations.

Psychosexual stages

Childhood stages of development (oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital) during which the id's pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct erogenous zones.

Oedipus complex

According to Freud, a boy's sexual desires toward his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father.

Identification

The process by which children incorporate their parents' values into their developing superegos.

Fixation

Lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, in which conflicts were unresolved.

Defense mechanisms

The ego's protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality.

Repression

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

Regression

Defense mechanism in which an individual faced with anxiety retreats to a more infantile psychosexual stage.

Reaction formation

Defense mechanism by which the ego unconsciously switches unacceptable impulses into their opposites.

Sublimation

Defense mechanism by which people re-channel their unacceptable impulses into socially approved activities.

Denial

Defense mechanism by which people refuse to believe or even to perceive painful realities.

Collective unconscious

Carl Jung's concept of a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species' history.

Terror-management theory

A theory of death-related anxiety; explores people's emotional and behavioral responses to reminders of their impending death.

Self-actualization

According to Maslow, one of the ultimate psychological needs that arises after basic physical and psychological needs are met; the motivation to fulfill one's potential.

Unconditional positive regard

According to Rogers, an attitude of total acceptance toward another person.

Self-concept

All our thoughts and feelings about ourselves, in answer to the question 'Who am I?'

Trait

A characteristic pattern of behavior or a disposition to feel and act, assessed by self-report inventories and peer reports.

Personality inventory

A questionnaire on which people respond to items designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors.

Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)

The most widely researched and clinically used of all personality tests.

Empirically derived test

A test (MMPI) developed by testing a pool of items and then selecting those that discriminate between groups.

Social-cognitive perspective

Views behavior as influenced by the interaction between people's traits (including thinking) and their social context.

Reciprocal determinism

The interacting influences of behavior, internal cognition, and environment.

Positive psychology

The scientific study of optimal human functioning; aims to discover and promote strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive.

Self

In contemporary psychology, assumed to be the center of personality, the organizer of our thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Physiological need

A basic bodily requirement.

Yerkes-Dodson Law

The principle that performance increases with arousal only up to a point, beyond which performance decreases.

Obesity

BMI of 30 or higher.

Asexual

Having no sexual attraction to others.

Affiliation need

The need to build relationships and to feel part of a group.

Ostracism

Deliberate social exclusion of individuals or groups.

Narcissism

Excessive self-love and self-absorption.

Achievement motivation

A desire for significant accomplishment; for mastery of skills and ideas, for control, and for attaining a high standard.

Grit

Passion and perseverance in the pursuit of long-term goals.

Behavior feedback effect

The tendency of behavior to influence our own and others' thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Tend-and-befriend response

Under stress, people (especially women) often provide support to others (tend) and bond with and seek support from others (befriend).

Aerobic exercise

Sustained exercise that increases heart and lung fitness; may also alleviate depression and anxiety.

Mindfulness meditation

A reflective practice in which people attend to current experiences in a nonjudgmental and accepting manner.

Subjective well-being

Self-perceived happiness or satisfaction with life; used along with measures of objective well-being to evaluate people's quality of life.

Personality

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

Psychodynamic theories of personality

View personality with a focus on the unconscious and the importance of childhood experiences, suggesting that early life events shape an individual's behavior.

Humanistic theories of personality

Emphasize the growth potential of 'healthy' individuals.