Unit 10 - Personality

Personality

Personality

- an individual's characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting

Psychodynamic Theory

- theory of behavior that emphasizes internal conflicts, motives, and unconscious forces
- therapy is derived from views that express individuals as responding to unconscious forces and childhood experiences, and that seeks to enhance self-insight

Unconscious

- according to Freud, a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories
- according to contemporary psychologists, information processing of which we are unaware

Psychosexual Stages

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

Defense Mechanism

- in psychoanalytic theory, the ego's protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality

Repression

- in psychoanalytic theory, the basic defense mechanism that banishes from consciousness anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories

Sigmund Freud

- 1856-1939
- Austrian physician whose work focused on the unconscious causes of behavior and personality formation
- founded psychoanalysis

Alfred Adler

- 1870-1937
- Field: neo-Freudian, psychodynamic
- Contributions: basic mistakes, style of life, inferiority/superiority complexes, childhood influences personality formation
- Studies: Birth Order
- argued that our behavior is driven by efforts to overcome childhood feelings of inferiority

Karen Horney

- 1885-1952
- Field: neo-Freudian, psychodynamic
- Contributions: criticized Freud, stated that personality is molded by current fears and impulses, rather than being determined solely by childhood experiences and instincts, neurotic trends
- argued that childhood anxiety triggers our desire for love and security

Carl Jung

- 1875-1961
- Field: neo-Freudian, analytic psychology
- Contributions: people had conscious and unconscious awareness; archetypes; collective unconscious; libido is all types of energy, not just sexual
- Studies: dream studies/interpretation
- created concept of "collective unconscious" and wrote books on dream interpretation

Collective Unconscious

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

Projective Test

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

TAT

- a projective test in which subjects look at and tell a story about ambiguous pictures

Rorschach Inkblot Test

- a projective personality test in which individual interpretations of the meaning of a set of unstructured inkblots are analyzed to identify a respondent's inner feelings and interpret his or her personality structure

Humanistic Theory

- view personality with a focus on the potential for healthy personal growth
- explanation of behavior that emphasizes the entirety of life rather than individual components of behavior and focuses on human dignity, individual choice, and self-worth

Carl Rogers

- 1902-1987
- Field: humanistic
- Contributions: founded person-centered therapy, theory that emphasizes the unique quality of humans especially their freedom and potential for personal growth, unconditional positive regard, fully functioning person

Person-Centered Perspective

- people are basically good and are endowed with self-actualizing tendencies
- people are basically good, and given the right environment their personality will develop fully and normally

Unconditional Positive Regard

- a caring, accepting, nonjudgmental attitude, which Carl Rogers believed would help clients to develop self-awareness and self-acceptance

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
- as assessed by self-report inventories and peer reports

Factor Analysis

- a statistical procedure that identifies clusters of related items (called factors) on a test
- used to identify different dimensions of performance that underlie a person's total score

MMPI

- the most widely researched and clinically used of all personality tests
- originally developed to identify emotional disorders (still considered its most appropriate use)
- this test is now used for many other screening purposes

Big Five

- five traits that have surfaced repeatedly in factor analyses of personality measures
- openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism

Social-Cognitive Perspective

-according to this perspective, personality is formed by a reciprocal interaction among behavioral, cognitive, and environmental factors
- views behavior as influenced by the interaction between people's traits (including their thinking) and their social context