AP PSYCH: Personality

Personality

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

Free Association

A therapeutic technique where patients talk freely to explore their feelings, introduced as the 'talking cure' by Breyer

three forces the mind is made up of

id, ego, superego

Ego

The part of the mind that balances the id's biological impulses and the superego's social restraints

operates on the reality principle; rational, organized, logical

Superego

The part of the mind that represents social restraints and moral standards

Id

The part of the mind that operates on the pleasure principle, seeking immediate gratification.

Defense Mechanisms

protect against unacceptable or uncomfortable thoughts.

Psychodynamic Perspective

An approach focusing on the influence of the unconscious mind and childhood experiences on behavior.

Neo-Freudians

Psychologists who adapted Freud's theories, emphasizing social and cultural influences.

Humanistic Perspective

A psychological viewpoint emphasizing personal growth, free will, and the fulfillment of potential.

Unconditional Positive Regard

An attitude of total acceptance toward another person, crucial for therapeutic relationships.

Existential psychology

A therapeutic approach that emphasizes finding meaning in suffering and the awareness of death.

Rollo May and Victor Frankl

Trait Theorists

Psychologists who focus on identifying and categorizing individual personality traits.

Cardinal Traits

Strong personality traits that dominate one's behavior, though most individuals do not possess them.

Central Traits

Highly characteristic (common) traits of a person, such as being shy or outgoing.

Empirical Tests

Tests developed by selecting items that effectively discriminate between different groups.

Self-Efficacy

The belief in one's ability to meet the demands of a specific situation.

Social-Cognitive Perspective

A perspective emphasizing the interaction between personal traits and social context in shaping personality

popularized by Albert Bandura

Reciprocal Determinism

A model explaining personality through interlocking influences of behavior, cognition, and environment.

Self-Serving Bias

The tendency for individuals to view themselves in an overly favorable manner.

Spotlight Effect

The phenomenon where individuals overestimate how much others notice their appearance or behavior.

projection

the attribution of one’s own unacceptable urges or qualities to others

reaction formation

thinking or behaving in a way that is the extreme opposite of anacceptable urges or impulses

denial

the failure to recognize or acknowledge the existence of anxiety-provoking information

undoing

a form of unconcious repentance that involves neutralizing or atoning for an unacceptable action or though with a second action or thought

regression

retreating to a behavior pattern characteristic to an earlier stage of development

repression

the complete exclusion from conciousness of anxiety-producing thoughts, feeliungs, or impulses; most basic defence mechanism

displacement

emotional impulses are redirected toward a substiture person or object, usually one less threatening or dangerous than the original source of conflict

sublimation

a form of displacement in which sexual urges aare rechanneled into productive, nonsexual activities

rationalization

justifying one’s actions or feelings with sociallt acceptable explanations rather than consciously acknowledging one’s true motives or desires

Karen Horney

neo-freudian

claimed men have womb envy (response to Freud’s penis envy)

believed in social aspects of childhood growth and development

countered the idea that women have weak superegos

Carl Jung

neo-freudian

thought our minds are all connected because of out ancestral past - collective unconcious

Alfred Adler

neo-freudian

believed in childhood tensions like Freud, but instead that these tensions were social, not sexual

believed children struggle with inferiority complexes during growth

Carl Rogers

Father of Humanism

focused on the growth and fufillment of individuals

emphasized genuineness, acceptance, and empathy

unconditional positive regard

Abraham Maslow

humanist

maslow’s hiearchy of needs

emphasized reaching full potential

congruence

self-concept meshes well with actual experience

incongruence

self-concept does not mesh well with actual experience

trait

a characteristic pattern of behavior

a disposition to feel and act, as assessed by slf inventories and peer reports

secondary traits

subjective preferences

Gordon Allport

trait theorist that studied cardinal, central, and secondary traits

Raymond Cattel

trait theorist that studied surface traits, source traits, and developed the 16 personality factors (using factor analysis)

surface traits

easily observable traits

how people act in their day to day lives

source traits

underlie surface behavior

how people act in serious situations

Hans and Sybil Eyesneck

uggested that personality could be reduced down to two polar dimensions, extraversion-introversion and emotional stability-intability.

Costa and McCrae

studied the “Big Five” personality factors (CANOE)

extroversion-introversion

extroverts seek stimulation because their normal levels of brain arousal are relatively low

emotional stability-instability

Emotionally stable people react calmly because their autonomic nervous systems are not so reactive as those of unstable people.

Big Five Personality Factors

conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openess, extraversion

MMPI (The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory)

type of personality inventory

most widely researched and used personality test

originally used to identify emotional disorders, assess mental health and detect psychological systems- but now used mainly for screening purposes

example of an empirically derived test

person-situation controversy

questions whether it is one’s personal traits or the situation that influences and guides their actions more

explored by Walter Mischel

terror-management theory

tendency for individuals to cling to/have faith in their world view to protect against deep-rooted fear of death and catastrophe

projective tests

rorscach ink blot test

• seeks to identify people’s inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of the blots

TAT (thematic apperception test)

• developed by Henry Murray

• people express their inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes

myers-briggs test

type of personality inventory

categorizes people into one of 16 personality types using letters representing: extraversion/intraversion, sensing-intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving

inspired by jung’s 16 personality types

The Barnum Effect

cognitive bias that occurs when people believe general statements apply to them specifically. It's also known as the Forer effect or the Barnum–Forer effect.