Gen Psych Exam 2

psychoanalysis

Freud’s theory of personality and associated treatment techniques; techniques used in treating psychological disorders by seeking to expose and interpret unconscious tensions

personality

an individual’s unique and relatively consistent patterns of thinking, feeling, and behavior

Psychoanalytic theory

by Freud (father of psychology), first theory of personality, includes ideas about an unconscious region of the mind, psychosexual stages of development, and defense mechanisms for holding anxiety at bay; believed personality is done developing by adolescence

unconscious

according to Freud is a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories

preconscious

part you can access on your own (asking yourself why you react a certain way, why you’re bothered)

Freudian Slip

an unintentional mistake in speech, writing, or memory that is believed to reveal a person's hidden, subconscious thoughts, desires, or fear →  saying you didn’t mean to do something but you actually did it

free association

 in psychoanalysis, method of assessing the unconscious by asking patients to spontaneously report mental images, thoughts, and feelings as they come to mind

dreams

“royal road to the conscious”

manifest content

the remembered content of dreams, believed to be a censored expression of the dreamer’s unconscious wishes

latent content

the disguised, symbolic meaning of dreams

3 interacting systems that make up the personality

id, ego, and superego

id

the unconscious constantly striving to satisfy basic drives and operates on the pleasure principle and demands immediate gratification.

ego

operates on the reality principle, seeks to gratify the id's impulses in realistic ways. It's the “executive” part of personality.

superego

the voice of our conscience, focuses on how one ought to behave. It strives for perfection and produces feelings of pride or guilt

psychosexual stages

the childhood stages of development during which the id's pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct erogenous zones

oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital

order of psychosexual stages

oral

focus is on oral stimulation

anal

focus is on potty training and control

phallic

focus is on the genitals

latency

sexual urges are repressed, and child prefers same sex friends

genital

sexual urges that remain for the rest of one’s life

oedipus complex/elextra complex

a psychoanalytic theory by Sigmund Freud proposing that a child develops an unconscious sexual desire for the opposite-sex parent and a sense of rivalry or hostility toward the same-sex parent

identification

the process of incorporating their parent’s values into developing superegos

fixation

lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies.

ego defense mechanisms

tactics to reduce, avoid, or redirect anxiety by distorting reality

repression

 banish anxiety-arousing thoughts and feelings from consciousness (think halloween decoration woman)

regression

when faced with anxiety, to retreat to a more infantile stage of development

reaction formation

ego unconsciously makes unacceptable impulses look like their opposites (ex: being excessively nice to someone you despise, bullying someone you have a crush on)

projection

disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others

rationalization

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

displacement

shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person

denial

refusal to acknowledge disturbing aspects of reality

undoing

trying to take back or make up for a behavior or impulse that was hurtful to someone. Replaying and reimagining them

intellecutalization

avoidance of feelings by overly focusing on the intellectual aspects of an issue to avoid the emotional reactions

neo-Freudians

theorists such as Alfred Adler, Karen Horney, and Carl Jung who accepted a portion of Freud's ideas but placed more emphasis on the conscious mind and rejected some of his notions all together; turned psychoanalytic theory into psychodynamic perspective

alfred adler

inferiority complex, believed that much of our behavior is driven by efforts to conquer childhood feelings of inferiority and can be done in a healthy way or an unhealthy way; believed health way is using inferiority as motive for productivity and overcoming obstacles; believed unhealthy way is to strive for overcoming inferiorities at other’s expense or one’s own

karen horney

emphasized the importance of human relationships in personality development; focused on the need to overcome feelings of low self-worth.

horney and adler shared ideas

• believed that social, not sexual tensions are crucial for personality formation.

• faulty parenting contributed significantly to faulty personality development

Carl Jung

less emphasis on social factors, agreed with Freud (ex: the unconscious, but believed it contains more then repressed thoughts and feelings.) also believed 3 levels of consciousness exist (conscious, unconscious, and collective conscious)

collective unconscious

images derived from our species' universal experiences (inherited experiences). Reflects human evolutionary history and is common to all people

humanistic psychologists

see people as being innately good and naturally strive to fulfill his or her unique potential; assess personality by asking people to describe themselves as they would ideally like to be and who they actually are; share interests with positive psychologists in advancing human fulfillment but the positive method is more scientific

humanistic perspective

focuses on the way “healthy” people operate and strive for self-determiniation and self-realization (Maslow and Rogers)

physiological needs, safety/basic needs, belongingness and love, self-esteem, self-actualization, self-transcendence

maslow’s hierarchy of needs

Carl Rogers

known for the Person-Centered perspective, contended that the most basic human motive is the actualizing tendency: the innate drive to maintain and enhance the human organism; believed all other human motives (biological or social) are secondary; believed in condition to promote ultimate goal of self-actualization

• believed that healthy personality development is the result of being unconditionally valued and loved as a person

Roger’s 3. conditions to promote ultimate goal of self-actualization

to be genuine, accepting, empathetic

unconditional positive regard

refers to the sense of being unconditionally loved and valued, even if you don’t conform to the standards and expectations of others

conditional positive regard

the sense that you will be valued and loved only if you behave in a way that is acceptable to others, conditional love or acceptance.

fully functioning person

has a flexible, constantly evolving self-concept. Realistic, open to new experiences, and capable of changing in response to new experiences.

albert bandura

•  proposed the social-cognitive perspective of personality development

• Emphasized the interaction between the person (personal traits), their situation and the resulting behavior

• believed our self-system guides how we perceive, evaluate, and control our behavior in different situations

• believed most critical element influencing self-system are our beliefs or self-efficacy

social cognitive theory of personality emphasizes:

-observational learning

-conscious cognitive processes

-social experiences

-self-efficacy beliefs

-reciprocal determinism

self-efficacy

the degree to which you are subjectively convinced of your own capabilities and effectiveness in meeting the demands of a particular situation; begins in childhood and continues all through life

reciprocal determinism

determined to act in a way that’s based on how you look at the prior situation and the end result (ex: guy with two big grocery bags hitting people and bags spill, so you think he got what he deserved); what Bandura believed human behavior and personality are caused by

positive psychology

Seligman, the scientific study of optimal human functioning; Positive and humanistic psychology share interested in advancing human fulfillment but the positive method is more scientific

possible selves

includes your visions of the self you dream of becoming and the self you fear of becoming

the trait perspective of personality

basically says biological genetics, traits you’re born with, trump everything else (ex: why siblings who grew up in the same household and school have such different personality traits)

Gordon Allport

describes personality in terms of fundamental traits

traits

relatively stable, enduring predisposition to behave in a certain way; People’s characteristic behaviors and conscious motives (motivations)

factor five model

specifics where you fall in five dimensions of personality; describes the universal structure of human personality and the Big Five personality traits are basic features of the human species, universal, and biologically based; Cross-cultural research on traits have found that people in varied cultures describe personality in terms of these same basic traits that are identified by the five-factor model → cultures agree with 5 personality traits

1. Conscientious

2. Agreeableness

3. Neuroticism

4. Openness

5. Extraversion

factor five model dimensions

neuroticism

calm/worrying, even-tempered/temperamental, unemotional/emotional, hardy/vulnerable; High in neuroticism = constantly worrying

extraversion

reserved/affectionate, loner/joiner, quiet/talkative

openness to experience

down to earth/imaginative, conventional/original, uncreative/creative, prefer routine/prefer variety

agreeableness

antagonistic/acquiescent, ruthless/softhearted, suspicious/trusting

Conscientiousness

lazy/hardworking, aimless/ambitious, quitting/persevering

psychological tests

a test that assesses a person’s abilities, aptitudes, interests, or personality on the basis of a systematically obtained sample of behavior

goals of psychological tests

1. Accurately and consistently reflects a person’s characteristics on some dimension.

2. Predicts future psychological functioning or behavior. → personality inventories can predict POSSIBLE behavior but not exact behavior

two types of personality tests

projective tests, self-reports

projective tests

personality test that involves a person’s interpreting an ambiguous image used to assess unconscious motives, conflicts, psychological defenses and personality traits; what Freud used with inkblot → projecting whats in unconscious onto the picture (ex: Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), Rorschach inkblot test)

strength of projective tests

provide qualitative information about an individual that can be describe with numbers, helpful in psychotherapy with ambiguous picture

Self-Report inventory (personality inventories)

psychological test in which a person’s responses in standardized questions are compared to established norms.

• better than a projective test in that scoring is not subjective and cannot vary from one examiner to another. They are objectively scored by comparing a person’s answers to standardized norms collected on large groups of people

• common types: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, California Psychological Inventory (CPI), Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF)

problems with self-report inventroy

• People lie for more desirable answers

• people may misjudge their own attitudes and behaviors → don’t know themselves well, 

• Some inventories have hundreds of items, so people may not answer every item carefully and accurately → matter of patience

person-situation controversy

are personality traits stable or shaped by external environmental factors? Personality trait scores years later will correlate to newer scores, but aren’t consistent across situations

• this inconsistency in behavior makes personailty test scores weak predictors of behavior → Not predictors of behavior, but predictors of our innate personality