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Personality
An individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting.
Free association
Method of exploring the unconscious in which the person relaxes and says whatever comes to mind, no matter how trivial or embarrassing.
Psychoanalytic theory
Freud, emotional disorders come from unresolved childhood conflicts and fixation at different psychosexual stages. Personality consists of id, ego, and superego.
Unconscious
Reservoir of unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories.
Id
Pleasure principle, reservoir of unconscious energy that strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives. Demands immediate gratification.
Ego
Largely conscious “executive” part of personality that mediates among the demands of the id, superego, and reality.
Reality principle
Ego’s way of satisfying the id’s desires in ways that will realistically bring long-term pleasure rather than pain.
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) which id’s pleasure-seeking focuses on ergogenous pleasure zones.
Identification
Process by which children incorporate their parents’ values into their developing superegos.
Fixation
Basic defense mechanism that banishes from consciousness anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories.
Repression
Basic defense mechanism that banishes from consciousness anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories.
Psychodynamic theory
Adler, Horney, Jung; unconscious and conscious minds interact, childhood experiences and conflict are important. Personality is the dynamic interplay between unconscious motives and conflicts.
Alfred Adler
Neo-Freudian, believed social tensions are crucial for personality formation. Proposed the idea of the inferiority complex.
Karen Horney
Childhood anxiety triggers our desire for love and security → detected bias in Freud’s masculine views on psychology.
Carl Jung
Collective unconscious, archetypes.
Collective unconscious
Carl Jung’s concept of a shared and inherited reservoir of memory traces from our specie’s history.
Projective tests
Personality tests that provide ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger projection of one’s inner dynamics.
Thematic appreciation test
Projective test in which people express the inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes.
Inkblot test
Most widely used projective test, 10 inkblots that seek to identify people’s inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of the blots.
False consensus effect
Tendency to overestimate the extent to which others share our beliefs and behaviors.
Terror-mangement theory
Theory of death-related anxiety; explores people’s emotional and behavioral responses to reminders of their impending death.
Humanistic theory
View personality with a focus on the potential for healthy personal growth. Studied people through their own self-reports. Abraham Maslow & Carl Rogers.
Self-actualization
According to Maslow, one of the ultimate psychological needs that arises after basic physical and psychological needs are met and self-esteem is achieved; the motivation to fufill one’s potential.
Growth-promoting climate
Acceptance/unconditional positive regard
Genuineness
Empathy
Self-concept
All our thoughts and feelings about oneself.
Trait
Characteristic pattern of behavior or a disposition to feel and act, as assessed by self-report inventories and peer-reports.
Personality inventories
Questionnaire on which people respond to items designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors; used to assess selected personality traits.
MMPI
Most widely researched and clinically used of all personality tests. Originally used to help diagnose emotional disorders.
Empirically derived test
Tests developed by testing a pool of items and then selecting those that discriminate between groups.
Big five traits
Conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness, extraversion.
Social cognitive perspective
Proposed by Bandura; states that behavior is influenced by the interaction between people’s traits (including their thinking) and their social context.
Behavioral approach
Focuses on effects of learning (punishment and reward) on our personality development.
Reciprocal determinism
Interacting influences of behavior, internal cognition, and environment.
Personal control
Whether we learn to see ourselves as controlling or as controlled by our environment.
Attributional style
Optimism or pessimism.
Self
Center of the personality, organizer of our thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Spotlight effect
Overestimating others’ noticing and evaluating our appearence, performance, and blunders.
Self-esteem
One’s feelings of high or low self-worth.
Self-efficacy
One’s sense of competence and effectiveness.
Self-serving bias
A readiness to perceive oneself favorably.
Narcissism
Excessive self-love or self-absorption.
Individualism
Giving priority to one’s own goals over group goals and defining one’s identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identification.
Collectivism
Giving priority to the goals of one’s group(s) over the individual.
Positive psychology
The scientific study of optimal human functioning; aims to discover and promote strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive.
Trait theory
Allport, Eysenk, McCrae, Costa; we have certain stable characteristics influenced by genetic predispositions. Personality is the scientific study of traits, which has isolated important dimensions of personality such as the Big 5.