10 - Personality

Trait

A characteristic pattern of behavior or a disposition to feel and act, as assessed by self-report inventories and peer reports. Significance: Trait personality theories are more concerned with describing traits than explaining them.

Projective Test

A personality test, such as the Rorschach, that provides ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger projection of one's inner dynamics. Significance: The clinician may presume that any hopes, desires, and fears that people see are projections of their inner feelings or conflicts.

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. Significance: The reliability and validity of this test is considered to be low.

Personality Inventory

A questionnaire on which people respond to items designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors; used to assess selected personality traits. Example: MMPI, Myers-Briggs Type Test.

Self-Serving Bias

A readiness to perceive oneself favorably. (People accept more responsibility for good deeds than for bad, and for successes than failures.) Example: Athletes often credit their victories to their own prowess, and their losses to bad breaks, lousy officiating, or the other team's exceptional performance.

Id

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. Example: An id-dominated person would be a newborn infant crying out for satisfaction, or a drug addict, seeking to satisfy their addiction immediately.

Empirically Derived Test

A test (such as the MMPI) developed by testing a pool of items and then selecting those that discriminate between groups. Example: For the MMPI, the researchers selected items from a large pool that differed from one diagnostic group to another. They then grouped the questions into 10 clinical scales.

Terror-Management Theory

A theory of death-related anxiety; explores people's emotional and behavioral responses to reminders of their impending death. Example: When forced to consider their mortality, subjects experienced death anxiety, which increases contempt for others and esteem for oneself.

Oedipus Complex

According to Freud, a boy's sexual desires toward his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father. Significance: Freud believed that children eventually cope with the threatening feelings, instead imitating their parents, strengthening their superegos through the identification process.

Fixation

According to Freud, a lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, in which conflicts were unresolved. Example: Fixation on the oral stage would result in passive dependence or exaggerated denial of this dependence (by acting tough or being sarcastic), or overeating and smoking in adulthood.

Unconscious

According to Freud, a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories. According to contemporary psychologists, information processing of which we are unaware. Significance: Freud believed that within the unconscious mind were passions and thoughts that we repressed, which then powerfully influenced us without our knowledge.

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. Example: In studying healthy and creative people, Maslow found that they were self-aware, self-accepting, open and spontaneous, loving and caring, and secure in their sense of self.

Unconditional Positive Regard

According to Rogers, an attitude of total acceptance toward another person. Significance: An aspect of acceptance, one of the three required conditions for a growth-promoting climate, the other two being genuineness, and empathy.

Self-Concept

All our thoughts and feelings about ourselves; an answer to the question, "Who am I?" Significance: If our self-concept is positive, we tend to perceive the world positively; if it is negative (falling short of our "ideal self"), we feel dissatisfied and unhappy.

Abraham Maslow

American psychologist and philosopher best known for his self-actualization theory of psychology, which argued that the primary goal of psychotherapy should be the integration of the self. Influenced by existentialist philosophers and literary figures, Maslow was an important contributor in the United States to humanistic psychology, which is sometimes called the "third force."

Paul Costa

American psychologist associated with the Five Factor Model, and best known for work on the Revised NEO Personality Inventory along with Robert McCrae.

Carl Rogers

American psychologist who originated the nondirective, or client-centered, approach to psychotherapy, emphasizing a person-to-person relationship between the therapist and the client (formerly known as the patient), who determines the course, speed, and duration of treatment. Central to Rogers' personality theory is the notion of self or self-concept. This is defined as "the organized, consistent set of perceptions and beliefs about oneself."

Martin Seligman

American psychologist, educator, and author of self-help books. Since the late 1990s, Seligman has been an avid promoter within the scientific community for the field of positive psychology. His theory of learned helplessness is popular among scientific and clinical psychologists.

Personality

An individual's characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. Significance: There are various influences on one's personality, including biology, and personal development and upbringing.

Self

Assumed to be the center of personality, the organizer or our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Example: Your dream self - the rich, successful, admired self, and the self you fear becoming - the unemployed, lonely, failed self.

Alfred Adler

Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology whose influential system of individual psychology introduced the term inferiority feeling, later widely and often inaccurately called inferiority complex. He developed a flexible, supportive psychotherapy to direct those emotionally disabled by inferiority feelings toward maturity, common sense, and social usefulness.

Sigmund Freud

Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis, developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association, and formulated the Oedipus complex as the central tenet of psychoanalytical theory. His analysis of dreams as wish-fulfillments provided him with models for the clinical analysis of symptom formation and the underlying mechanisms of repression. On this basis Freud elaborated his theory of the unconscious and went on to develop a model of psychic structure comprising id, ego and super-ego.

Albert Bandura

Bandura's Social Learning Theory posits that people learn from one another, via observation, imitation, and modeling. The theory has often been called a bridge between behaviorist and cognitive learning theories because it encompasses attention, memory, and motivation.

Collective Unconscious

Carl Jung's concept of a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species' history. Significance: Jung believed that this explained why people in different cultures share certain myths and images, such as mother as a symbol of nurturance.

Narcissism

Excessive self-love and self-absorption. Connection: After tracking self-importance across the last several decades, psychologist Jean Twenge found that Generation Me (1980s and 1990s) is expressing more narcissism by agreeing more often with statements such as, "I think I a special person."

Psychoanalysis

Freud's theory of personality that attributes thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts; the techniques used in treating psychological disorders by seeking to expose and interpret unconscious tensions. Significance: Psychoanalysis required interpretation of the different parts of the consciousness, including the unconscious mind, preconscious mind, and conscious mind.

Karen Horney

German-born American psychoanalyst who, departing from some of the basic principles of Sigmund Freud, suggested an environmental and social basis for the personality and its disorders. She forthrightly rejected notions such as penis envy and other manifestations of male bias in psychoanalytic theory. She argued instead that the source of much female psychiatric disturbance is located in the very male-dominated culture that had produced Freudian theory. She introduced the concept of womb envy, suggesting that male envy of pregnancy, nursing, and motherhood—of women's primary role in creating and sustaining life—led men to claim their superiority in other fields.

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. Example: Individualists (often people from North America, Western Europe, Australia, or New Zealand) often give relatively greater priority to personal goals and define their identity in terms of personal attributes.

Collectivism

Giving priority to the goals of one's group (often one's extended family or work group) and defining one's identify accordingly. Example: Alaska Natives demonstrate respect for tribal elders, and their identity springs largely from their group affiliations.

Behavioral Approach

In personality theory, this perspective focuses on the effects of learning on our personality development. Example: A child with a very controlling parent may learn to follow orders rather than think independently.

Free Association

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. Significance: Freud used this method after unsuccessful trials with hypnosis. He believed that free association would allow him to access the painful memories of childhood.

Repression

In psychoanalytic theory, the ego's protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality. Example: A child who is abused by a parent later has no recollection of the events, but has trouble forming relationships.

Defense Mechanisms

In psychoanalytic theory, the ego's protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality. Example: Regression entails retreating to a more infantile psychosexual stage, like a little boy sucking his thumb on the first day of school.

Psychodynamic Theories

Modern-day approaches that view personality with a focus on the unconscious and the important of childhood experiences. Example: Psychodynamic theorists include Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, and Karen Horney.

Self-Esteem

One's feelings of high or low self-worth. Example: Deflating people's self-image (say, by disparaging their personality) and they will be more likely to disparage others or to express heightened racial prejudice.

Self-Efficacy

One's sense of competence and effectiveness. Example: People who feel good about themselves have fewer sleepless nights, succumb less easily to pressures to conform, are more persistent at difficult tasks, and are less shy, anxious, and lonely.

Spotlight Effect

Overestimating others' noticing and evaluating our appearance, performance, and blunders (as if we presume a spotlight shines on us). Example: Cornell students who walked into class wearing a Barry Manilow shirt thought that nearly half of their peers would notice, when in reality, only 23-percent did.

Robert McCrae

Personality psychologist associated with the Five Factor Theory of personality. He has spent his career studying the stability of personality across age and culture. Along with Paul Costa, he is a co-author of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory. McCrae believes that personality is a biological trait, first and foremost.

Carl Jung

Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist who founded analytic psychology, in some aspects a response to Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. Jung proposed and developed the concepts of the extraverted and the introverted personality, archetypes, and the collective unconscious. His work has been influential in psychiatry and in the study of religion, literature, and related fields.

Psychosexual Stages

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. Example: In the oral stage, pleasure centers on the mouth - sucking, biting, chewing.

Reciprocal Determinism

The interacting influences of behavior, internal cognition, and environment. Example: Children's TV-viewing habits (past behavior) influence their viewing preferences (internal factor), which influence how television (environmental factor) affects our current behavior.

Ego

The largely unconscious, "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. Significance: The ego contains our partly conscious perceptions, thoughts, judgments, and memories.

Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)

The most widely researched and clinically used of all personality tests. Originally developed to identify emotional disorders, this test is now used for many other screening purposes. Significance: The test assesses 10 clinical scales, including depressive tendencies, masculinity-femininity, and introversion-extroversion.

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. Significance: Some clinicians believe wholeheartedly in the test, others simply see it as a useful initial diagnostic tool.

Superego

The part of personality that, according to Freud, represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgment (the conscience) and for future aspirations. Example: Someone with a strong superego may be virtuous yet guilt-ridden; another with a weak superego may be wantonly self-indulgent and remorseless.

Identification

The process by which, according to Freud, children incorporate their parents' values into their developing superegos. Significance: Freud believed that identification with the same-sex parent provides one's gender identity.

Positive Psychology

The scientific study of optimal human functioning; aims to discover and promote strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive. Significance: Positive psychology explores well-being, health, neuroscience, and education.

False Consensus Effect

The tendency to overestimate the extent to which others share our beliefs and our behaviors. Example: People who cheat on their taxes or break speed limits tend to think many others do likewise.

Humanistic Theories

View personality with a focus on the potential for healthy personal growth. Examples: Pioneering theorists include Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers.

Social-Cognitive Perspective

Views behavior as influenced by the interaction between people's traits (including their thinking) and their social context. Connection: Albert Bandura proposed this perspective.