Personality Theories and Development

A set of flashcards covering key concepts from personality theories, providing definitions and insights into various perspectives on personality development.

Personality

An individual’s unique and relatively consistent pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving.

Psychoanalytic Perspective

A theory that stresses the importance of unconscious forces, sexual and aggressive instincts, and early childhood experiences on personality development.

Humanistic Perspective

Focuses on growth and fulfillment of individuals, emphasizing fundamental goodness and potential for personal growth.

Social Cognitive Perspective

Stresses conscious thought processes, self-regulation, and situational influences on personality.

Trait Perspective

A characteristic pattern of behavior assessed by self-report inventories and peer reports.

Freud

Pioneered the psychoanalytic perspective, emphasizing the role of unconscious forces in personality.

Unconscious

A reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories according to Freud.

Id

The part of personality that contains a reservoir of unconscious psychic energy, striving to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives.

Superego

The part of personality that presents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgment.

Ego

The largely conscious 'executive' part of personality that mediates between the demands of the id, superego, and reality.

Psychosexual Stages

Childhood stages of development during which the id’s pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct erogenous zones.

Fixation

A lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage where conflicts were unresolved.

Oral Stage

Psychosexual stage from 0-18 months where pleasure centers on the mouth.

Anal Stage

Psychosexual stage from 18-36 months where pleasure focuses on bowel and bladder elimination.

Phallic Stage

Psychosexual stage from 3-6 years where pleasure zone is the genitals and involves coping with incestuous feelings.

Latency Stage

Psychosexual stage from 6 years to puberty involving dormant sexual feelings.

Genital Stage

Psychosexual stage from puberty onward where sexual interests mature.

Defense Mechanisms

Ego's protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality.

Repression

A defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness.

Projection

A defense mechanism where people disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others.

Self-Actualization

The process of realizing and fulfilling one's potential and capabilities, as proposed by Abraham Maslow.

Unconditional Positive Regard

An attitude of total acceptance toward another person, as emphasized by Carl Rogers.

Reciprocal Determinism

The interacting influences between personality and environmental factors as proposed by Albert Bandura.

Self-Efficacy

The degree to which a person is convinced of their own capabilities and effectiveness in a situation.

Internal Locus of Control

The perception that one controls their own fate.

External Locus of Control

The perception that outside forces determine one’s fate.

Personality Inventory

A questionnaire used to assess selected personality traits.

MMPI

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, widely used to identify emotional disorders.

Cattell's 16 Personality Factors

A personality assessment tool developed to measure various personality traits.

Eysenck's Personality Factors

Uses two primary factors to describe personality variation: introversion/extroversion and stable/unstable.

Alfred Adler

A neo-Freudian who emphasized the importance of childhood social tensions in personality development.

Karen Horney

A neo-Freudian who sought to balance Freud’s masculine biases.