AP Psychology Unit 4 Part 2

Personality

An individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting.

Psychoanalytic Theory

Freud’s theory that childhood sexuality and unconscious motivations build an individual’s personality.

Psychodynamic Theories

Successors to Freud’s theory based on how childhood sexuality and the unconscious builds a person’s personality.

Unconscious

According to Freud, a reservoir of unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories.

Free Association

Psychoanalytic technique for exploring the unconscious where a patient says anything that comes to their mind, even trivial things.

Repression

A defense mechanism that involves forcibly blocking unsettling thoughts.

Preconscious

Freudian concept of the area between consciousness and unconsciousness, where unconscious thoughts are held for a period of time.

Id

Reservoir of unconscious psychic energy that strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives, based on the pleasure principle.

Pleasure Principle

Freudian concept explaining how the id drives pleasure seeking.

Libido

Life energy force that fuels pleasure seeking behavior.

Ego

The partly conscious “executive” part of personality that mediates the demands of the id and superego, operates on the reality principle.

Reality Principle

Freudian principle explaining how the ego mediates other parts of consciousness with reality.

Superego

Partly conscious segment of personality that represents internal ideals and provides standards for judgement and aspirations.

Psychosexual Stages

Periods in development where the id’s pleasure seeking focuses on specific areas.

Erogenous Zones

Specific areas that the id focuses on during different psychosexual stages.

Oral Stage

Psychosexual stage between 0-18 months where individuals derive pleasure through the mouth, sucking and chewing on things.

Phallic Stage

Psychosexual stage between 3-6 years where individuals derive pleasure through the genitals and undergo incestuous ideation.

Latency

Psychosexual stage between 6-puberty where individuals have dormant sex characteristics.

Genital Stage

Psychosexual stage from puberty onward where individuals carry mature sex interests.

Anal Stage

Psychosexual stage between 18-36 months where individuals derive pleasure from their bowels and bladder.

Oedipus Complex

Collection of feelings associated with sexual desires towards the mother and jealousy towards the father in young males.

Electra Complex

Female parallel to the Oedipus complex.

Identification

Process by which children cope with threatening feelings through repression and become like their same-sex parent.

Fixation

Situation where people lock on a specific psychosexual stage and never advance beyond it.

Defense Mechanisms

Ego’s protection methods that reduce anxiety by distorting reality.

Regression

Defense mechanism where people retreat to a earlier psychosexual stage.

Reaction Formation

Defense mechanism where people switch unacceptable impulses to their opposite.

Projection

Defense mechanism where people disguise threatening impulses by attributing them to other causes.

Rationalization

Defense mechanism where people offer self-justifying explanations instead of unconscious reasons.

Displacement

Defense mechanism where people shift impulses to a more acceptable or less threatening object or person.

Denial

Defense mechanism where people refuse to believe or percieve painful realities.

Manifest Content

Remembered content of dreams, censored content from unconscious.

Latent Content

Dream content that is not remembered, true expression of people’s unconscious wishes.

Collective Unconscious

Carl Jung’s concept of a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces.

False Consensus Effect

Effect where people tend to believe that more people agree with their side when that’s potentially not true.

Terror Management Theory

Theory describing how anxiety manifests through a fear of death.

TAT

Projective test in which people express their inner feelings through stories that they make up about ambiguous scenes.

Projective Test

Personality test that provides ambiguous images to trigger projections of internal mechanisms to explore the preconscious and unconscious.

Rorschach Inkblot Test

Projective test designed to interpret inner feelings.