General Psychology Unit 4

Unit 4 

Individuality and Sociality 

Personality 

  • Individuals characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting 

  • Theories on Personality

  • Psychoanalytic (freud) 

  • Humanistic 

  • Contemporary

Psychoanalytic Theory of Personality 

  • Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory: Behavior is an interaction between our conscious and unconscious mind 

  • Childhood experiences and unconscious motivations influence our personality 

  • Free association

  • Personality structure 

  • Personality arises from the conflict between impulse and restraint and the efforts to resolve this 

  • Id: pleasure principle 

  • Ego: reality principle 

  • Superego: conscience 

  • Personality development 

  • Children pass through a series of Psychosexual stages

  • The Id’s pleasure-seeking erogenous zones 

  • Each stage presents challenges or conflicting tendencies 

  • Example: Oedipus complex 

Freud’s Psychosexual Stages

  • Oral stage: Birth to 1 year. Erogenous Zone: Mouth 

  • Anal Stage: 1 to 3 Year Erogenous Zone: Bowel and Bladder Control 

  • Phallic Stage: 3 to 6 Year Erogenous Zone: Genitals 

  • Latent Stage: 6 to Puberty Libido Inactive 

  • Genital Stage: Puberty to Death Maturing Sexual Interests

Psychoanalytic Theory of Personality 

  • Defense Mechanisms: ego’s protective ways of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality

  • Repression: underlies all Defense Mechanisms 

  • Helps us shove things down 

  • Repressed urges may appear in dreams on in slips of the tongue 

  • Regression: retreating to an earlier psychosexual stage, where energy remains fixated 

  • Reaction formation: switching unacceptable impulse into their opposite, “acting fake” 

  • Projection: pushing your own threatening impulses onto others 

  • Rationalization: Justifying actions in the place of real, threatening unconscious reasons

  • Displacement: Shifting unacceptable impulses toward a more acceptable one 

  • Denial: Refusing to believe painful realities 

  • Projective tests: how psychologists assess the unconscious

  • Thematic Apperception Test: people interpret ambiguous images 

  • Rorschach Inkblot Test: people say what they see in a series of inkblots 

  • Neo- Freudians and Psychodynamic Theorists: Adapted some of Frued’s theories, basic structure of personality, impact of childhood on personality, and the idea of defense mechanisms. They rejected other ideas like more emphasis on conscious mind, and doubted the psychosexual stages 

Humanistic Theory of Personality 

  • Focused on the potential for human growth 

  • Emphasize the way people strive for self-determination and self-realization 

  • Key Figures: Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers 

  • Roger’s person-centered perspective: Acceptance, unconditional positive regard, genuineness, empathy, and self-concept 

  • Evaluating humanistic theories 

  • Contributions: Laid groundwork for positive psychology, influence on counseling and therapy 

  • Criticisms: vague, subjective concepts, individualist 

Contemporary Theories of Personality 

  • Trait Theories: suggests that people have certain people have certain basic traits and it is the intensity of those traits that account for personality differences 

  • Gordon Allport: Counted all words that could describe people, identified the major themes of human personality, known as the Big Five Trait Theory of Personality

  • Remember OCEAN: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism

  • Openness: curious, creative, original, open to new experiences 

  • Conscientiousness: organized, punctual, achievement-oriented

  • Extraversion: outgoing, sociable, talkative, and assertive

  • Agreeableness: kind, trusting, warm, sensitive, friendly

  • Neuroticism: anxious, irritable, moody, emotional

Extraversion vs. Introversion 

  • Eysenck explored what makes some people more extraverted and others more introverted 

  • Extraverts seek stimulation because of their relatively low brain arousal 

  • Introverts avoid stimulation because of their relatively high brain arousal 

Contemporary Theories of Personality 

  • The Person-Situation Debate: do people always act the same in every situation? 

  • Behavior is influenced by our environment 

  • Personality traits are stable, but the consistency of behaviors in situations is not 

  • Social-Cognitive Theories (Albert Bandura): Many behaviors are learned through conditioning or observing and modeling others 

  • Reciprocal determinism: behavior, personality traits, and environment all influence each other

  • Influence of Culture 

  • Individualist: cultures that place an emphasis on independence, assertiveness, and individuality, like the US

  • Collectivist: cultures that place an emphasis on group cohesion, connectedness, and group membership, like China 

Social Psychology 

  • Scientific study of how we think about, influence, and relate to one another

Attributions

  • Attribution Theory: explaining someone’s behavior by crediting either the situation or the person’s disposition 

  • Fundamental Attribution Error: tendency to underestimate the impact of the situation and to overestimate personal disposition 

Attitudes 

  • Attitudes can affect actions and vice versa

  • Foot in the door phenomenon: getting someone to agree to a large request by having them agree to small requests first 

  • Cognitive dissonance theory: conflicting attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors that produce a feeling of discomfort, leading to an alteration to reduce the discomfort 

Conformity 

  • Complying with social pressures 

  • Asch’s Experiments: Which of the lines are equal? More than ⅓ of the time, college students would go along with the wrong answer just to fit in with the group 

Obedience 

  • Milgram’s Obedience Experiements: 1963 Post World War 2, he explored if people would obey commands that were immoral. 65% of participants obeyed the experiemter’s commands and continued to the highest level of 450 volts (lethal) 

Zimbardo Prison experiment

  • One of the most famous and controversial experiments in all of psychology 

  • 2 week simulation of a prison that examined the effects of power and group membership on participants behaviors 

  • Demonstrated that the situation can have a very strong influence on people becoming violent and aggressive 

Social Influence

  • Social facilitation: doing better when others are around 

  • Social loafing: putting in less effort in a group than by yourself 

  • Deindividuation: loss of self-awareness when in a group 

  • Group polarization: group decisions that are more extreme than the average of the group’s initial attitudes 

  • Groupthink: desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional outcome 

Prosocial Relations 

Attraction 

  • Why are we attracted to the people we are attracted to?

  • Proximity effect: tendency for individuals to form interpersonal relations with those who are close by 

  • Mere exposure effect: people tend to develop liking for things simply because they are familiar with them 

  • Research finds that, in general, opposites do not attract 

  • Rather, birds of a feather flock together 

  • Similarity between partners influences the likelihood that a relationship will endure 

  • However, research is complicated, and we aren’t great at predicting compatibility 

  • Passion, intimacy, and commitment are the three parts of love (triangle) 

  • Passion + commitment= Fatuous love. Lacks intimacy, and usually doesn’t last very long. 

  • Passion + intimacy= Romantic love. Honey moon stage, but no commitment

  • Intimacy+ commitment= Companionate love. Stronger then friendship, but no fire and no desire for sex

  • All 3= Consummate Love. This is the ideal type of love, and are more likely to stay together and be more satisfied in their relationship 

Altruism 

  • Unselfish concern for the welfare of others 

  • Situational factor influence 

  • Bystander effect 

  • When people thought they alone heard calls for help, they usually help 

  • But if they think others also heard, they are significantly less likely to respond 

  • Helping someone depends on the person and the situation 

The 4 C’s of Altruism

  • Contact: Increased positive contact 

  • Cooperation: Superordinate goals 

  • Communication: Third-party mediation 

  • Conciliation: Reciprocity of negotiation 

Emotions, Health, and Happiness

Theories of Emotion

  • Is there a universal expression of emotions?

  • Sort of, but it’s not perfect 

  • James-Lange Theory: Arousal is emotion, awareness of bodily responses to emotional stimuli 

  • Cannon-Bard Theory: Arousal and emotion happen together, emotional stimuli trigger bodily responses, and simultaneous subjective experience 

  • Schachter-Singer Two Factor Theory: Arousal and a conscious cognitive label is emotion. 

  • Categories of emotion

  • Two dimensions- 

  • Valence: positive or negative 

  • Arousal: gives energy or drains

  • Lying: changes in heart rate, breathing, and sweating  

  • Polygraphs are wrong at least 33% of the time 

Emotion

  • What makes an emotion?

  • Bodily arousal 

  • Expressive behavior 

  • Conscious experience 

Expressing and Experiencing Emotions

  • Detecting emotions in other people 

  • The brain detects subtle nonverbal cues 

  • Facial muscles reveal emotional signs 

  • But deceit is still very possible 

  • Influence of gender: Women are often socialized to feign smiles. People attribute women's emotions more to their disposition and men’s to circumstances

  • Influence of culture, signs across culture 

  • Facial expressions: communicate, amplify, and regulate emotions

  • Facial feedback effect: facial muscles triggering corresponding feelings like fear, anger, or happiness