AP Psychology Unit 4B: Personality, Motivation, and Emotion

1. Psychodynamic theory: Argues that unconscious processes drive personality. 2. Unconscious processes: mental processes occurring outside of and not available to conscious awareness. 3. Ego defense mechanisms: largely unconscious distortions of thoughts or perceptions that act to reduce anxiety. 4. Denial: Refusing to admit that something unpleasant is happening. 5. Displacement: Shifting sexual or aggressive impulses towards a more acceptable or less threatening object or person. 6. Projection: People disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others. 7. Rationalization: Justifying one's behavior with socially acceptable reasons rather than real reasons. 8. Reaction formation: The ego transforms anxiety-producing thoughts into their opposites. 9. Regression: Returning to more primitive levels of behavior. 10. Repression: Blocking a threatening memory from consciousness. 11. Sublimation: Channeling unwanted feelings in to more acceptable forms. 12. Projective tests: personality assessments that present ambiguous visual stimuli to the client and ask the client to respond with whatever comes to mind; used to uncover unconscious motives/thoughts as part of psychodynamic therapy. 13. Preconscious mind: level of the mind in which information is available but not currently conscious. 14. Unconscious mind: level of the mind in which thoughts, feelings, memories, and other information are kept that are not easily or voluntarily brought into consciousness. 15. Humanistic psychology: Argues that humans are motivated by a self-actualizing tendency, which pushes each of us to reach our full potential. 16. Unconditional (positive) regard: The basic acceptance and support of a person regardless of what the person says or does. 17. Self-actualizing tendency: the striving to fulfill one's innate capacities and capabilities. 18. Social-cognitive theory: It emphasizes the learning that occurs within a social context. In this view, people are active agents who can both influence and are influenced by their environment. 19. Reciprocal determinism: Argues the environment influences behavior, behavior influences the environment, and both influence the individual, who also influences them. 20. Self concept: One's description and evaluation of oneself. 21. Self-efficacy: An individual's subjective perception of their capability to perform in a given setting or to attain desired results. 22. Self-esteem: The degree to which the qualities and characteristics contained in one's self-concept are perceived to be positive. 23. Trait theories: A trait is a personality characteristic that meets three criteria: it must be consistent, stable, and vary from person to person. These theories try to identify and measure traits. 24. Big Five Theory of Personality: A leading theory that holds that personality can be effectively organized and described by five broad dimensions of personality—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. 25. Agreeableness: A personality dimension that describes someone who is good natured, cooperative, and trusting. 26. Openness: a personality dimension that describes one's willingness to try new things and be open to new experiences. 27. Conscientousness: A personality dimension describing someone who is organized, careful, disciplined. 28. Extraversion: A personality dimension describing someone who is sociable, gregarious, and assertive. 29. Emotional stability: A personality dimension that describes the degree to which someone is not angry, depressed, anxious, emotional, insecure, and excitable; it's the opposite of neuroticism. 30. Personality inventories: a self-report questionnaire on which people respond to items designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors; used to assess selected personality traits. 31. 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. 32. Drive-reduction theory: It assumes all motivated behavior arises from drives, stemming from a disruption in homeostasis. 33. Homeostasis: a balanced, internal state. 34. Arousal theory: People seek an optimal level of arousal when they behave as demonstrated by the Yerkes-Dodson Law. 35. Optimal level of arousal: the level of arousal at which performance peaks. 36. Yerkes-Dodson law: the principle that performance increases with arousal only up to a point, beyond which performance decreases. 37. Self-determination theory: People are motivated by intrinsic (internal) or extrinsic (external) motivations. People want to feel competence, autonomy, and relatedness. 38. Intrinsic motivation: A desire to perform a behavior for its own sake. 39. Incentive theory: A theory of motivation stating that behavior is directed toward attaining desirable stimuli and avoiding unwanted stimuli. 40. Extrinsic motivation: a desire to perform a behavior to receive promised rewards or avoid threatened punishment. 41. Instincts: Innate, typically fixed patterns of behavior in response to certain stimuli. 42. Lewin's motivational conflict theory: idea that motivation to achieve desirable outcomes (approach motivation) and motivation to stay away from undesirable outcomes (avoidance motivation) causes internal conflicts within a person. 43. Approach-approach conflict: Conflict that results from having to choose between two attractive alternatives. 44. Approach-avoidance conflict: Conflict that results from having to choose an alternative that has both attractive and unappealing aspects. 45. Avoidance-avoidance conflict: Conflict that results from having to choose between two distasteful alternatives. 46. Sensation-seeking theory: The tendency to search out and engage in thrilling activities as a method of increasing stimulation and arousal. 47. Experience seeking: the tendency to seek novel experiences through the mind and the senses. 48. Thrill seeking: the desire to engage in physically risky activities. 49. Disinhibition: Acting without consideration of the consequences. 50. Boredom susceptibility: low tolerance for repetitious or constant experiences. 51. Ghrelin: A hunger-arousing hormone secreted by an empty stomach. 52. Leptin: hormone that signals the hypothalamus and brain stem to reduce appetite (satiety). 53. Hypothalamus: a neural structure lying below the thalamus; directs eating, drinking, body temperature; helps govern the endocrine system via the pituitary gland, and is linked to emotion. 54. Pituitary gland: The endocrine system's most influential gland. Under the influence of the hypothalamus, it regulates growth and controls other endocrine glands. 55. Affect: Appearance of observable emotions. 56. James-Lange: the theory that our experience of emotion is our awareness of our physiological responses to emotion-arousing stimuli. 57. Cannon-bard: the theory that an emotion-arousing stimulus simultaneously triggers (1) physiological responses and (2) the subjective experience of emotion. 58. Schachter-Singer two-factor theory: theory that to experience emotion one must be physically aroused and cognitively label the arousal. 59. Broaden-and-build theory: positive emotions prompt people to consider novel solutions to their problems. 60. Positive emotional experiences: Emotions including joy, interest, contentment, love... 61. Negative emotional experiences: Emotions including anxiety, sadness, anger, despair... 62. Cognitive label/appraisal: the personal interpretation of a situation that ultimately influences the extent to which the situation is perceived as stressful. 63. Facial-feedback hypothesis: The hypothesis that emotional expressions can cause the emotional experiences they signify. 64. Display rules: learned ways of controlling displays of emotion in social settings. 65. Elicitors: Something that leads to the experience of an emotion. 66. Universal emotions: according to Paul Ekman, they are anger, disgust, sadness, happiness, surprise, and fear.