PSYC 330 Exam 2

Psychology of the stranger

Knowing someone’s trait profile (decontextualized) but not feeling like you really know them

3 levels of getting to know someone

1. Traits

2. Adaptations

3. Life story

Level 1 data

Traits

• Necessary but not sufficient to fully know someone (because context matters)

Level 2 data

Adaptations

• Considers “personal concerns” which you don’t actively see in every situation

• Ex. Attachment styles, defense mechanisms, long-term goals, coping styles

• Contextualized (contigent, if… then behaviors)

Level 3 data

Life story aka “personal myth”

• A narrative framework that serves as a way in which people find unity, purpose, and meaning in life

  • Has characters, plot, settings

• Weaves together meaningful moments through a theme

• Explains contradictions in identity

• Allows for personality change

When is a life story established? Why then?

Generally in late teens or early adulthood

• The minimum age for higher cognitive awareness

• Kids can reflect, but it’s usually fact-based rather than giving their personal thoughts (due to undeveloped cognition)

What is McAdams’ life story perspective based on? Give one specific way they relate.

Erikson’s stages

• E: Identity vs. role confusion in adolescence

  • M: Identity is necessary to integrate roles and conflicts over time

When would McAdams say identity emerges?

After constructing your life story

Another term McAdams used for a life story is…

An internalized and evolving personal myth

McAdams’ method of finding someone’s identity

Interviewing someone about their life story

• Qualitative approach

• Having people divide the “chapters” of their lives

• Asking them to identify high, low, and turning points, as well as a theme

Relationships between how people narrate their life stories and L-data outcomes (3)

• One sign of overcoming depression is talking about it as a victorious battle (like you’re fighting it)

  • Precedes PTSD symptom reduction

• A sign of mood problems is a contamination sequence, good memories are fully tainted with bad details

• A sign of recovery is a redemptive sequence, talking about the upsides to bad situations

Contamination sequence

When you reflect, good memories are fully tainted with bad details

• Sign of mood problems

Redemptive sequence

When you reflect, you talk about the upsides to bad situaitons

• Sign of recovery

Why is it beneficial to getting to know someone? (2)

• Builds empathy

• Reduces loneliness

How can you collect level 2 and 3 data in real life?

• Seeing people in different settings

• Time, curiosity about others, disclosure of life details

What does the intrapsychic domain claim?

Personality is largely due to internal forces that we might not be aware of

• Traits and biology tell us what is going on, but not why

• Freud says that behavior is due to an unconscious conflict, early childhood issues, defense mechanisms

Key ideas of psychoanalysis (4)

• Psychic determinism

• Internal structures of consciousness

• Constant intrapsychic conflict

• Psychic energy exists in limited supply

Psychic determinism

Everything has a cause

• No room for accidents (explained by Freudian slips)

• Trick is to find cause and bring it to your awareness

Internal structures of consciousness according to psychoanalysis

• Id (pleasure-driven)

• Ego (rational)

• Superego (mediator)

Idea of intrapsychic conflict for psychoanalysis

The id, ego, and superego are in direct, constant conflict

Libido

Psychic energy, life force

• Exists in limited supply

• Relates to limited self-control

Study with evidence toward limited libido supply

People used more energy resisting eating cookies than carrots

• Each group was told they weren’t supposed to have the food

• Cookie condition people did worse on a math test afterward (less libido)

Freud’s developmental model

Focused on gratification from different areas

• If children didn’t have proper development at a certain stage, they gained a fixation which had implications for adult personality

• Stages

  • Oral

  • Anal

  • Phallic

  • Latency

  • Genital

According to the intrapsychic domain, what is our key motivation?

To avoid anxiety

• Can come from external challenges or intrapsychic conflicts

How does our intrapsychic structure help us toward our key motivation?

The ego uses defense mechanisms to keep anxiety-producing thoughts and impulses hidden

• Often operates unconsciously

Defense mechanisms (7, in order of functionality)

• Denial

• Repression

• Reaction formation

• Projection

• Displacement

• Rationalization

• Sublimation

Description of defense mechanisms

• One goal of psychoanalysists is to become aware of them

• These require psychic energy and can be draining

Denial

Refusal to acnowledge source of anxiety

• Simple, often ineffective long-term, can be sign of pathology

• Common in addicts

Repression

Avoiding thinking about the source of anxiety, more work (and psychic energy) than denial

• Aware that a problem exists but distracting yourself or pushing it away so you don’t have to deal with it when thoughts arise

Reaction formation

Keep anxiety-producing thoughts out of awareness by vehemently adopting the opposite viewpoint

• Ex. Dealing with a trait you have (and dislike) by expressing the exact opposite

• Specific, doesn’t apply to every situation

Research support for reaction formation

High sex guilt and homophobia are correlated with more physiological arousal in response to sexual stimuli

Projection

Attributing to someone else a thought or impulse that is feared in oneself

• Ex. You’re tempted to cheat on your partner and feel suspicion about your partner cheating

Rationalization

Coming up with a seemingly reasonable explanation for why you did something you did (that made you feel bad)

• Helps maintain positive view of oneself

• Ex. Justifying a splurge by saying “I deserve this, I’ve been working hard lately”

Psychological process associated with rationalization

Cognitive dissonance

• Preserves self-esteem

Displacement

Taking your inappropriate emotional responses out on a safer target

• Ex. You’re mad at your boss, so you yell at your roommate

• Usually happens for frustration or anger

Sublimation

Taking forbidden impulses and channeling them into constructive behaviors (work, art, sports)

• No downsides!

What does the intrapsychic domain claim the key to understanding personality is?

Accessing, interpreting, transforming, and mastering the unconscious

• Over denying or repressing it

Psychoanalytic tools to understand the unconscious (4)

• Free association

• Dream analysis

• Freudian slips

• Understanding defense mechanisms

Freudian slips

Slips of the tongue that can reveal deeper thoughts and where you actually focus psychic energy

• More likely when tired or unguarded (by defense mechs)

Controversy with Freud on a personal level

• Pessimism about human nature

  • Comparison to animals: Sex and aggression are motivators

  • Misogynistic

  • Personality is fixed in childhood

• Focus on sex

  • At an early age

  • Lack of focus on social factors

Controversy with Freud on a scientific level (3)

• Eysenck said he “set psychiatry back 100 years”

• Theories aren’t parsimonious

• Lack of scientific evidence

Why was there a lack of scientific evidence for Freud’s ideas?

• Case study method (hard to generalize)

• Hard-to-operationalize definitions (fuzzy concepts)

• Low falsifiability (can’t test ideas or prove wrong)

Ways that Freud was still hugely influential (3)

• Produced terms that are still relevant

  • Libido

  • Ego

  • Anal

  • Denial

  • Repression

  • Projection

• Ideas are still relevant

  • Dream analysis

  • Talking cure (therapy)

  • Unconscious motivations

  • Gut feelings

• Was on $ in Austria

What was the first all-encompassing theory of personality? Who made it?

Psychotherapy by Freud

Neo-Freudians’ main three oppositions to Freud

• Emphasis on sex

• Emphasis on unconscious

• Not enough emphasis on social relations

Carl Jung (3)

• Thought the source of conflict was collective (species-wide) unconscious

• Species-specific memories are expressed in archetypes

• Criticized for ambiguity and subjectivity

Who was the first person to use the words introvert and extrovert?

Carl Jung

Carl Jung’s archetypes

Species-specific memories and ideas that we have in humans are expressed in archetypes

• Hero, caregiver, innocent, sage

Carl Jung’s perspective on how you understand a person

How they relate to art, religion, dreams, and mythology

• Criticized for ambiguity and subjectivity

Who established the idea of “personas”?

Carl Jung

• Defined this as a “mask” worn in public

Karen Horney’s main conflict with Freud

How he viewed women

• Proposed womb envy over penis envy

• Said that we could talk about penises symbolically, potentially representing power (envy in society, not in sex)

Karen Horney’s idea on basic human motive

To overcome anxiety stemming from social probelm in childhood

• Too much of this → neuroses

What did Karen Horney propose?

Self analysis can work

Erik Erikson’s 2 conflicts with Freud

• Conscious, social, external life is important too (psychosocial)

• Personality isn’t fixed in childhood

What did Erikson focus on?

Constructive adaptations to reality

• Morals are gained through psychosocial stages, which fuel development

Marcia’s outcomes of identity vs. role confusion (4 combinations of commitment and exploration of identity)

• Commitment + exploration → Identity achievement

• No commitment + exploration → Identity moratorium

• Commitment + no exploration → Identity foreclosure

• No commitment + no exploration → Identity diffusion

Modern implication of fixation theories

Attachment styles

• Whether you’re secure, avoidant, or ambivalent is set early in childhood (when you learn expectations for how people treat you)

Object relations theory

Neo-Freudian idea that encompasses attachment styles

• Objects: Emotionally important people

• Focus on relationships (early relationships are prototypes)

• Att. theory is a type of ORs

Can attachment styles become healthier over the course of the lifespan?

Yes

Bowlby, Ainsworth, et al. study findings on attachment

Found that early attachment experiences form working models for later adult relationships

• These are internalized in the form of unconscious expectations about relationships

Westen (and their arguments)

Modern-day psychoanalytic theorist, very academic

• Argues that unconscious does play a large role in life but less than F said

• Behavior reflects compromises in conflict between mental processes

• Childhood plays an important role, particularly in att. styles

• Previously little dialogue between academics and psychoanalysis

Comparison between Westen and Freud

Westen argues that the unconscious does play a large role in life, but less than Freud said

• Used social psych research on priming and research on repressed memories

• Didn’t focus on sex or aggression as much, said that there might be positive things we’re unconscious of too

Why study psychoanalytic approaches?

• Focused on ideas that are underemphasized elsewhere (conflict, anxiety, childhood experiences)

• Can lead to empirically testable Q’s

• Unconscious processes can impact personality

David McClelland’s idea of needs

• People experience each in different degrees

• Implicit, can be unconscious and orthogonal

• Inspired by Henry Murray

• These shape how you see the world

David McClelland’s three needs

• Need for achievement

• Need for intimacy

• Need for pwoer

Thematic Apperception Test

Measures McClelland’s needs, which project onto ambiguous stimuli

• Participants see ambiguous photos of people/situations, and are asked to tell a story based off of how they interpret them

• Answers are coded to find underlying motives

• Moderate reliability and validity but takes a lot of work

• T-data

Need for achievement correlates

People high on this prefer challenging activities, enjoy autonomy and agency in outcomes, and prefer tasks with feedback

• Overlaps with growth mindset for progress and improvement

Need for intimacy correlates

People high on this prefer warm, close social interactions, spend more time thinking about relationships, smile more, more eye contact, feel better around people, start more conversations

• Not the same as extraversion

• Women tend to be higher for this than men

Need for power correlates

Being dominant, in control, having an impact on people (because they care)

• W/M aren’t different here but M with high nPow tend to be more aggressive and don’t deal well with frustration or conflict

Main humanistic motive

The need to be better

Humanism in personality psych

• PP can create models of human nature and implement these into clinic (therapy)

• Built off ideas of free will and personal consciousness

Two main assumptions of humanism

• People are essentially good

• They want to improve themselves and the world

Is humanism a deficit model? Why?

No, it doesn’t focus on deficits that people need to fill in at different stages but rather how they continually improve

What is Carl Rogers known for?

Client-centered therapy, having clients self-reflect and lead the sessions

Actualizing tendencies

Maintaining and enhancing life is our goal of existence

• Thought of by Carl Rogers

• Goal is to become a fully-functioning person otw to being self-actualized

Carl Rogers’ definition of “doing badly”

People are off-track from goals → leads to anxiety

• Limited by conditions of worth (if… then for social approval)

• Need unconditional positive regard

Unconditional positive regard

Affirming thoughts, providing empathy and validation

• Thought of by Carl Rogers

• Rare in reality

Maslow

Humanistic contemporary of Rogers who assumed that needs must be met in a specific hierarchy

• Physiological → safety → love/belonging → esteem → self-actualization (this is the ultimate goal!)

Csikszentmihalyi’s main idea

Introduced flow state

How to spell psychologists’ name pronounced as “chick-sent-me-hi”

Csikszentmihalyi

Flow state

A state where you’re completely absorbed in enjoyable interaction with the environment

• Subjective state of engagement

• Lose track of time

• Devote 100% of attention to challenging task

How is flow state interrupted?

• Any distraction

• If you’re not challenged enough

What does flow state require?

An appropriate challenge for one’s skill level

• Too difficult: Anxiety

• Too easy: Boredom

Construal

Everyone perceives the world through their own filter, not perfectly objectively

What does the cognitive-experiential domain focus on?

Individual differences of processing information (construal)

Three dimensions of interest for the cognitive-experiential domain

• Perception

• Interpretation

• Beliefs and desires

Perception

Taking in and imposing order on information brought in from your organs

Field dependence

Balance between focusing on details and background stimuli

• Influences perception

• Field-ind people are able to focus despite clutter in background (aren’t distracted)

Field independence correlates (4)

• FI people are more drawn to STEM

  • FD people favor social services and education

• FI people tend to be more introverted and interpersonally detached

• FI people are better at simulated shooting tasks

• FI people may be better at multitasking

Interpretation

Making sense of, or explaining, events in the world

• Aka construal or habits of thinking

• Can improve habits through CBT

• Ex. “Why didn’t they text me back?”, “Who’s at fault here?”, “What did they mean by that?”

Role Construct Repertory Test

Shows that each person constructs the world in their own way (construal, interpretation is individual)

• By George Kelly

• List 7 people, choose #s 2 4 and 7, invent a descriptive factor that distinguishes one from the rest, and rank everyone on the scale → whatever you choose is an important personal construct

Personal constructs

Paired opposites of all sorts, come from past experience

• Ex. Good vs. evil, strong vs. weak, creative vs. dull, republican vs. democrat

• Whatever is most important to you, shapes your sense of reality

• Anxiety results from when your constructs fail you and you can’t predict the world

According to George Kelly and the cognitive domain, how does anxiety originate?

When personal constructs fail and you can’t predict the world

Sociality corollary

To know someone, you need to understand their personal constructs

Rotter’s Locus of Control

Figuring out who’s responsible for the events of your life

• Rooted in learning theory, acknowledges S → R but asks who controls that

• Brings in cognitive piece of expectancy based on personal responsibility

• Figuring out if what you do matters in comparison to other people, luck, fate

• Part of interpretation

Internal vs. external locus of control (meaning and correlates)

• Internal: I’m responsible

  • Predicts lower obesity, on-time grad, better credit ratings, but also more self-blame when things go wrong

• External: Something/one outside myself is responsible

What is Rotter’s locus of control related to?

Bandura’s self-efficacy

• You have what you need in order to achieve your goals, and believe this

Learned helplessness

After a series of failed attempts, people learn to not even bother trying to change things

• One outcome of a certain method of interpretation

• Hallmark of depression

• Can be unlearned

Explanatory style (and 3 aspects)

• Part of interpretation

• People’s tendencies of explaining events through their own or others’ behaviors or responsibility

• Can be practiced or learned

• Aspects

  • Internal vs. external

  • Stable vs. unstable

  • Global vs. specific

Internal vs. external explanatory style

Inside self vs. outside self

• Ex. I was very bad at the job vs. the economy sucks

• Best to have a balance