Personality

8 examples of defense mechanisms

Repression Regression Reaction formation Projection Rationalization Displacement Sublimation Denial

Why do psychologists criticize Freud's theory for its scientific shortcomings

Rests on few objective observations Parts of it offer few testable hypotheses

Enables the split-brain patient's left hand to carry out an instruction the patient cannot verbalize

Right-hemisphere activity

____ is often incomplete, with repressed urges seeping out in dream symbols and slips of the tongue

Repression

Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory proposed that ____ influence personality

Childhood sexuality and unconscious motivations

Today's researchers view on repression

Acknowledge that we sometimes spare our egos by neglecting information that is threatening Repression, if it ever occurs, is a rare mental response to terrible trauma

In psychoanalysis, a method of exploring the unconscious in which the person relaxes and says whatever comes to mind, no matter how trivial or embarrassing

Free association

Analysis of his patients' histories convinced Freud that personality forms during life's

1st few years

In Freud's view, human personality arises from

A conflict between impulse and restraint—between our aggressive, pleasure-seeking biological urges and our internalized social controls over these urges

Maslow proposed that we are motivated by

A hierarchy of needs

Envision of an id-dominated person

A newborn infant crying out for satisfaction, caring nothing for the outside world's conditions and demand People with a present rather than future time perspective—those who often use tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs, and would sooner party now than sacrifice today's pleasure for future success and happiness

Who is Karen Horney

Agreed with Freud that childhood is important Childhood social, not sexual, tensions are crucial for personality formation Childhood anxiety, caused by the dependent child's sense of helplessness, triggers our desire for love and security Attempted to balance the bias she detected in this masculine view of psychology (he said women envy men)

Who is Alfred Adler

Agreed with Freud that childhood is important Childhood social, not sexual, tensions are crucial for personality formation Proposed idea of the inferiority complex

Result of ego fearing losing control of inner war between the id and superego

Anxiety

Explain the phallic stage

Boys seek genital stimulation Oedipus Girls experienced a parallel Electra complex

A person's characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting

Personality

Freud believed the remembered content of dreams (their manifest content) to be a

Censored expression of the dreamer's unconscious wishes (the dream's latent content)

Carl Jung's concept of a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species' history

Collective unconscious

What values of Freud did his followers accept

Personality structures of id, ego, and superego Ideas of unconscious Ideas of childhood Dynamics of anxiety Defense mechanisms

In psychoanalytic theory, the ego's protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality

Defense mechanisms

Psychoanalytic defense mechanism by which people refuse to believe or even to perceive painful realities

Denial

Dying patients may ____ the gravity of their illness

Deny

Children who fear expressing anger against their parents may ____ it by kicking the family pet

Displace

Psychoanalytic defense mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person, as when redirecting anger toward a safer outlet

Displacement

Students upset over a test may snap at a friend (form of)

Displacement

The largely conscious, "executive" part of personality that, according to Freud, mediates among the demands of the id, superego, and reality. The ego operates on the reality principle, satisfying the id's desires in ways that will realistically bring pleasure rather than pain

Ego

Activate instantly, before conscious analysis

Emotions that activate instantly, before conscious analysis

Freud viewed jokes as

Expressions of repressed sexual and aggressive tendencies, and dreams as the "royal road to the unconscious

Freud believed some things are accidental

Fa;se

True or False: Defense mechanisms are conscious self-presentation tactics

False: They function indirectly and unconsciously, reducing anxiety by disguising some threatening impulse

Criticism of inkblot test

Few are valid Not reliable

1) The inability to see a problem from a new perspective, by employing a different mental set 2) According to Freud, a lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, in which conflicts were unresolved

Fixation

Who is Carl Jung

Freud's disciple-turned-dissenter Less emphasis on social factors and agreed with Freud that the unconscious exerts a powerful influence Unconscious contains more than our repressed thoughts and feelings Collective unconscious

What are neo-Freudians

Freud's followers

Support of inkblot test

Helpful diagnostic tool Source of suggestive leads Icebreaker Revealing interview technique

Freud's theory was his belief that the mind is mostly

Hidden (Conscious awareness visible, beneath our awareness is the larger unconscious mind with its thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories)

More common reality of stress

High stress and associated stress hormones enhance memory

Some researchers believe that extreme, prolonged stress, such as the stress some severely abused children experience, might disrupt memory by damaging the

Hippocampus

A reservoir of unconscious psychic energy that, according to Freud, strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives. The id operates on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification

Id

The process by which, according to Freud, children incorporate their parents' values into their developing superegos

Identification

Operate without conscious recall, even among those with amnesia

Implicit memories

The humanistic approach of personality focused on our

Inner capacities for growth and self-fulfillment

In his dream analyses, Freud searched for patients'

Inner conflicts

What is the most serious problem with Freud's theory

It offers after-the-fact explanations of any characteristic (of one person's smoking, another's fear of horses, another's sexual orientation) yet fails to predict such behaviors and traits.

____ underlies all the other defense mechanisms, each of which disguises threatening impulses and keeps them from reaching consciousness

Repression

In Freud's view, conflicts unresolved during earlier psychosexual stages could surface as ____ in the adult years

Maladaptive behavior

Complex according to Freud, a boy's sexual desires toward his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father

Oedipus

A person who had been either orally overindulged or deprived (perhaps by abrupt, early weaning) might fixate at the

Oral stage

Freud believed personality is the result of

Our efforts to resolve this basic conflict—to express these impulses in ways that bring satisfaction without also bringing guilt or punishment

Of different aspects of vision and thinking

Parallel processing

Orally fixated adult could exhibit

Passive dependence (like that of a nursing infant) or an exaggerated denial of this dependence (by acting tough or uttering biting sarcasm) Might continue to seek oral gratification by smoking or excessive eating

Explain Freud's theory

Patient's free associations, resistances, dreams, and transferences—and the therapist's interpretations of them—released previously repressed feelings, allowing the patient to gain self-insight

The ego contains our partly conscious

Perceptions, thoughts, judgments, and memories

Some unconscious thoughts we store temporarily in a ____ area, from which we can retrieve them into conscious awareness

Preconscious

By stimuli to which we have not consciously attended

Priming

"He doesn't trust me" may be a ____ of the actual feeling "I don't trust him" or "I don't trust myself."

Projection

Psychoanalytic defense mechanism by which people disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others

Projection

A personality test, such as the Rorschach or TAT, that provides ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger projection of one's inner dynamics

Projective test

____ aim to provide this "psychological X-ray," by asking test-takers to describe an ambiguous stimulus or tell a story about it

Projective tests

Defense mechanisms are motivated less by the seething impulses that Freud presumed than by our need to

Protect our self-image

Freud's theory of personality and therapeutic technique that attributes thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts

Psychoanalysis

The childhood stages of development (oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital) during which, according to Freud, the id's pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct erogenous zones

Psychosexual stages

Habitual drinkers may say they drink with their friends just to be sociable (form of)

Rationalization

Psychoanalytic defense mechanism that offers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one's actions

Rationalization

Students who fail to study may _____, All work and no play makes Jack a dull person

Rationalize

En route to consciousness, the unacceptable proposition "I hate Dad" becomes "I love him." (form of)

Reaction formation

Psychoanalytic defense mechanism by which the ego unconsciously switches unacceptable impulses into their opposites. Thus, people may express feelings that are the opposite of their anxiety-arousing unconscious feelings

Reaction formation

Facing the anxious first days of school, a child may ____ to the oral comfort of thumb-sucking

Regress

Homesick new college students may long for the security and comfort of home (form of)

Regression

Juvenile monkeys, when anxious, retreat to infantile clinging to their mothers or to one another (form of)

Regression

Psychoanalytic defense mechanism in which an individual faced with anxiety retreats to a more infantile psychosexual stage, where some psychic energy remains fixated

Regression

Freud believed that ____ explains why we do not remember our childhood lust for our parent of the other sex

Repression

In psychoanalytic theory, the basic defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness

Repression

1st requirement clinicians working in the Freudian tradition attempt to assess personality characteristics should have

Road into the unconscious

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

Rorschach inkblot test

Automatically control our perceptions and interpretations

Schemas

The unconscious involves

Schemas Priming Right-hemisphere activity Parallel processing Implicit memories Emotions Self-concept and stereotypes

Today's developmental psychologists view on childhood

See our development as lifelong, not fixed in childhood Doubt that infants' neural networks are mature enough to sustain as much emotional trauma as Freud assumed

Automatically and unconsciously influence how we process information about ourselves and others

Self-concept and stereotypes

Example of storytelling being used to assess achievement motivation

Shown a daydreaming boy, those who imagine he is fantasizing about an achievement are presumed to be projecting their own goals

Leonardo da Vinci's paintings of Madonnas were a ____ of his longing for intimacy with his mother, who was separated from him at an early age

Sublimation

Psychoanalytic defense mechanism by which people re-channel their unacceptable impulses into socially approved activities, socially adaptive and may even be a wellspring for great cultural and artistic achievements

Sublimation

Around age 4 or 5, Freud theorized, a child's ego recognizes the demands of the newly emerging

Superego

The part of personality that, according to Freud, represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgment (the conscience) and for future aspirations, focuses on how we ought to behave, strives for perfection, judging actions and producing positive feelings of pride or negative feelings of guilt.

Superego

How does personality use the 3 systems

Superego's demands often oppose the id's, the ego struggles to reconcile the 2 Personality executive, mediating the impulsive demands of the id, the restraining demands of the superego, and the real-life demands of the external world

Who is Hermann Rorschach

Swiss psychiatrist Creator of Rorschach inkblot test Based it on a childhood game in which he and his friends dripped ink on a paper, folded it, and then said what they saw in the resulting blot

A theory of death-related anxiety; explores people's emotional and behavioral responses to reminders of their impending death

Terror-management theory

Today's personality researchers study

The basic dimensions of personality, the biological roots of these basic dimensions, the interaction of persons and environments, self-esteem, self-serving bias, cultural influences on one's sense of self, and the unconscious mind

To understand the mind's dynamics during the personality conflict, Freud proposed 3 interacting systems:

The id, ego, and superego

A projective test in which people express their inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes

Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

Humanistic psychologists focused on

The ways "healthy" people strive for self-determination and self-realization, studied people through their own self-reported experiences and feelings

What ideas did Freud's followers not share

They placed more emphasis on the conscious mind's role in interpreting experience and in coping with the environment Doubted that sex and aggression were all-consuming motivations (emphasized loftier motives and social interactions)

What did Freud believe about the troublesome feelings and ideas we repress, although we are not consciously aware of them

They powerfully influence us, sometimes gaining expression in disguised forms—the work we choose, the beliefs we hold, our daily habits, our troubling symptoms

Objective assessment tools, such as agree-disagree or true-false questionnaires, would be inadequate into getting into the unconscious because

They would merely tap the conscious surface

According to Freud, a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories. According to contemporary psychologists, information processing of which we are unaware

Unconscious

Thinking about one's mortality provokes

Various terror-management defenses

Someone with an exceptionally strong superego may be

Virtuous yet guilt-ridden

Someone with a weak superego may be

Wantonly self-indulgent and remorseless

Is Freud's theory, "We indeed have limited access to all that goes on in our minds," right

Yes

Who were Freud's followers on his controversial writings

Young, ambitious physicians