AP Psychology - Personality

Freud’s Psychoanalytic Perspective: Exploring the Unconscious

Personality: A person’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting

Sigmund Frued: Founder of psychoanalysis and introduced his ideas of the conscious and unconscious; the id, ego, and superego; and psychosexual development.

Psychoanalysis: Frued’s theory that childhood sexuality and unconscious motivations influence personality. The techniques used in treating disorders while seeking to expose and interpret unconscious motivations.
Unconscious: It is a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and motives. It is information processing of which we are unaware.
Superego: The voice of our moral compass that forces the ego to consider the ideal (internalized ideals).
Id: Operates on the pleasure principle seeking immediate gratification (unconscious energy).
Ego: Operates on the reality principle seeking to gratify the id’s impulses in realistic ways that will bring long term pleasure (mostly conscious/makes peace).
Psychosexual Stages: The childhood stages of development (oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital) during which the id’s pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct erogenous zones.
Oedipus complex: A boys sexual desire toward his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father.
Identification: The process by which children incorporate their parents’ values into their developing superego’s.
Fixation: A lingering focus on pleasure seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage where conflicts remained unresolved.
Defense Mechanisms: The ego’s protective methods of reducing by unconsciously distorting reality.
Repression: The basic defense mechanism that banishes consciousness anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories.

Psychodynamic Theories and Modern Views of the Unconscious

Psychodynamic Theories: Modern-day approaches that view personality with a focus on the unconscious and the importance of childhood experiences.

Collective Unconscious: Carl Jung's concept of a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species' history.
Projective Test: a personality test, that provides ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger projection of one's inner dynamics.
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT): a projective test in which people express their inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes.
Rorschach Inkblot Test: the most widely used projective test, a set of 10 inkblots, designed by Hermann Rorschach; seeks to identify people's inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of the blots.
False Consensus Effect: the tendency to assume that one's own opinions, beliefs, attributes, or behaviors are more widely shared than is actually the case
Terror Management Theory: people feel threatened by their own death and therefore adopt worldviews that allow them to find meaning and worth in their lives.

Humanistic Theories:

Humanistic Theory: view personality with a focus on the potential for healthy personal growth.

Self-Actualization: according to Maslow, one of the ultimate psychological needs that arises after basic physical and psychological needs are met and self-esteem is achieved; the motivation to fulfill one's potential.
Unconditional Positive Regard: according to Rogers, an attitude of total acceptance toward another person.
Self-Concept: all our thoughts and feelings about ourselves, in answer to the question, "Who am I?"

Trait Theories:

Trait: a characteristic pattern of behavior or a disposition to feel and act, as assessed by self-report inventories and peer reports.

Personality Inventory: a questionnaire (often with true-false or agree-disagree items) on which people respond to items designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors; used to assess selected personality traits.
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI): the most widely researched and clinically used of all personality tests. Originally developed to identify emotional disorders (still considered its most appropriate use), this test is now used for many other screening purposes.
Empirically Derived Test: a test (such as the MMPI) developed by testing a pool of items and then selecting those that discriminate between groups.

Social Cognitive Theory and Exploring the Self:

Social Cognitive Perspective: views behavior as influenced by the interaction between people's traits (including their thinking) and their social context.

Behavior Approach: in personality theory, this perspective focuses on the effects of learning on our personality development.
Reciprocal Determinism: the interacting influences of behavior, internal cognition, and environment
Positive Psychology: the scientific study of optimal human functioning; aims to discover and promote strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive.
Self: in contemporary psychology, assumed to be the center of personality, the organizer of our thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Spotlight Effect: overestimating others' noticing and evaluating our appearance, performance, and blunders (as if we presume a spotlight shines on us).
Self-esteem: one's feelings of high or low self-worth.
Self-efficacy: one's sense of competence and effectiveness.
Self-serving Bias: a readiness to perceive oneself favorably.
Narcissism: excessive self-love and self-absorption.
Individualism: giving priority to one's own goals over group goals and defining one's identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identifications.
Collectivism: giving priority to the goals of one's group (often one's extended family or work group) and defining one's identity accordingly.

People to Know:

Alfred Adler: Believed that much of our behavior is driven by efforts to conquer childhood inferiority feelings that trigger our strivings for superiority and power.
Albert Bandura: The social- cognitive perspective on personality proposed to emphasize the interaction of our traits with our situations. Much as nature and nurture always work together, so do individuals and their situations.
Paul Costa and Robert McCrae: primary developers of the five-factor model of personality traits. Here, they introduce the five factors: neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.
Carl Jung: believed we also have a collective unconscious, a common reservoir of images, or archetypes, derived from our species' universal experiences.
Abraham Maslow: developed a hierarchy of needs to explain human motivation. His theory suggested that people have a number of basic needs that must be met before people move up the hierarchy to pursue more social, emotional, and self-actualizing needs.
Carl Rogers: believed that people are basically good and are endowed with self-actualizing tendencies. Unless thwarted by an environment that inhibits growth, each of us is like
Karen Horney: She believed that childhood and anxiety triggers our desire for love and security. She also attempted to balance the bias detected in Freud’s masculine view of psychology.