Personality: Trait & Psychodynamic Perspectives

A collection of flashcards covering key concepts from the lecture on personality theories, specifically the traits and psychodynamic perspectives.

Personality

An individual’s unique set of consistent behavioral traits.

Traits

Durable dispositions to behave a certain way.

Consistency

Stability across time and situations.

Distinctiveness

How people differ even in the same context.

Trait Theory

A theory that aims to identify and measure the traits that compose human personality.

Cardinal traits

Traits that define a person's life purpose.

Central traits

General tendencies that form the core of personality.

Surface traits

Traits that can be observed and described, stemming from deeper source traits.

The Big Five (OCEAN)

A model that encompasses five key dimensions of personality: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.

Id

The primitive and pleasure-seeking component of personality.

Ego

The reality-based mediator that operates on the reality principle.

Superego

The moral conscience that internalizes moral standards and ideals.

Defense Mechanisms

Psychological strategies used to protect the ego from anxiety and guilt.

Repression

A defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-provoking thoughts from consciousness.

Projection

A defense mechanism that attributes one’s own impulses to others.

Inferiority complex

An exaggerated sense of inadequacy stemming from feelings of inferiority.

Collective unconscious

A layer of unconscious containing universal memories shared by all humans, as proposed by Jung.

Archetypes

Universal symbols and themes that recur across cultures and are part of the collective unconscious.

Birth order

The position of a child in the family that influences their personality development.

Neo-Freudians

Psychologists who expanded on Freud's theories, focusing less on sexual and aggressive drives.

Analytical Psychology

Jung's theory that focuses on the role of the unconscious and archetypes.