Psych 4 RC 2 Practice

  • Personality: an individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting

  • Psychodynamic theories: theories that view personality with a focus on the unconscious mind and the importance of childhood experiences

  • Psychoanalysis:Frued’s theory of personality that attributes thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts; techniques used in treating psychological disorders by seeking to expose and interpret unconscious tensions; Sigmund Frued’s therapeutic technique, he believed the patient’s free associations, resistances, dreams, and transferences, and analysts’s interpretations of them, released previously repressed feelings, allowing the patient to gain self-insight

  • Unconcious: according to Freud, a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, memories; according to modern psychologists, information processing of which we are unaware

  • Free association:  in psychoanalysis, a method of exploring unconscious where ther person relaxes and says whatever comes to mind despite how trivial or embarrassing

  • Id: reservoir of unconscious psychic energy that stives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives; operates on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification

  • Ego: partially conscious executive part of personality → mediates among the demands of the id, superego, and reality; ego operates of teh reality principle, satisfying the id’s desires in ways that will realistically bring pleasure than pain

  • Suerpego: partly conscious part of personality that represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgements (the concience) for future aspirations

  • Defense mechanisms: psychoanalytic theory, ego’s protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconciously distorting reality

  • Repression: psychoanalytic theory, basic defende mechanism that banishes from consciousness anxiety-arounsing thoughts, feelings, memories

  • Collective unconscious: Carl Jung’s concept of shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species’ history

  • Terror-management theory: a theory of death-related anxiety; explroed people’s emotional and behavioral responses to reminders of their impending death

  • Thematic Apperception Test (TAT): a projective test where people express inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes

  • Projective test; a personality test that provides ambiguous images designed to trigger projection of one’s inner dynamics and explore the preconcious and unconscious mind

  • Rorschach inkblot test: a projective test designed by Hermann Rorschach, seeks to identify people’s inner feelings bvy analyzing how they interpret 10 inkblots

  • Humanistic theorists: theories that view personality with a focus on the potential for healthy personal growth

  • People are motivated by a heirarchy of needs: Maslow’s levels of human needs, beginning at the base with physiological needs; often visualized as a pyramid, with needs nearer the base taking priority until they are satisfied

  • 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 achieves; the motivation to fulfill one’s potential

  • Self-transcendence: according to Maslow, the striving for identity, meaning, and purpose beyond the self

  • Healthy people were comfortable with seeking new experiences and not always being th best → Maslow considered these to be adult qualitites where they had outgrown mixed feelings and become courageous

  • Unconditional positive regard: a caring, accepting, nonjudgemental attitude, which Carl Rogers believes, would help clients develop self-awareness and self-acceptance; aka unconditional regard

  • Self-concept: all our thoughts and feelings about ourselves in answer to the question “Who am I?”

  • Traits: characteristic behavior patter or a disposition to feel and act in certain ways as assessed by self-report inventories and peer reviews

  • Personality inventories: questionnaire (usually with true vs false or agree-disagree) where people respond to items that are designed to gauge wide ranges of feelings and behaviors; used to assess selected personality traits

  • Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI): most widely researched and clinically used personality test; first made to identify emotional disorders (its most appropritate use), now used for many other screening purposes

  • Empirically derived: a test created by selecting from a pool of items that can help with discriminating between groups

  • Big Five Factors: five traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeablness, and neuroticism) that describ personality