PSYCH: Chapter 14

Superego:

-the partly conscious voice of our moral compass (conscience) that forces the ego to consider not only the real but also the ideal. -Focuses on how we ought to behave. Ideal behavior -Strives for perfection, judging actions, and producing positive feelings of pride or negative feelings of guilt.

Ego:

-the partly conscious, "executive" part of personality that mediates among the demands of the id, the superego, and reality. -Operates on the reality principle, satisfying the id's desires in ways that will realistically bring pleasure rather than pain. -Contains perceptions, thoughts, judgments and memories

psychodynamic theories:

-theories that view human behavior as a dynamic interaction between the conscious mind and unconscious mind, and the importance of childhood experiences. -Childhood sexuality and unconscious motivations influence personality

humanistic theories:

-theories that view personality with a focus on the potential for healthy personal growth. -Emphasize the ways people strive for self-determination and self-realization

Latency (6 years to puberty)

A phase of dormant sexual feelings

The ______ are today's "common currency for personality psychology". They are the most widely accepted picture of personality and currently the best approximation of the basic trait dimensions.

Big Five

______ believed there was less of an emphasis on social factors, agreed that the unconscious contains more than our repressed thoughts and feelings

Carl Jung

Collective unconscious

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

Reciprocal determinism

Describes interaction and mutual influence of behavior, internal cognition, and environment

Trait theories

Examine characteristic patterns of behavior

Social-cognitive theories

Explore interaction between traits and social context

Hans Eysenck & Sybil Eysenck reduced many of our normal individual variations (personality) to two dimensions:

Extroversion-introversion Emotional stability-instability

Humanistic approach to personality:

Focus on inner capacities for growth and self-fulfillment

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.

________ described personality in terms of fundamental traits. He was more interested in describing differences rather than trying to explain them.

Gordon Allport

_______ theorists emphasized the ways people strive for healthy personal growth.

Humanistic

Freud described the mind as an _____. The mind is mostly hidden beneath the conscious surface

Iceberg

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.

hierarchy of needs:

Maslow's pyramid of human needs, beginning at the base with physiological needs that must first be satisfied before people can fulfill their higher-level safety needs and then psychological needs.

Denial

Refusing to believe or even perceive painful realities. -ex. A partner denies evidence of his loved one's affai

Regression

Retreating to a more infantile psychosexual stage, where some psychic energy remains fixated.

Displacement

Shifting sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person. -ex. A little girl kicks the family dog after her mother sends her to her room

Reaction formation

Switching unacceptable impulses into their opposites. -ex. Repressing angry feelings, a person displays exaggerated friendliness.

Acceptance

When people are accepting, they offer unconditional positive regard: -A caring, accepting, nonjudgmental attitude, which Carl Rogers believed would help people develop self-awareness and self-acceptance

Empathy

When people are empathic, they share and mirror other's feelings and reflect their meanings.

Genuineness

When people are genuine, they are open with their own feelings, drop their facades, and are transparent and self-disclosing

trait:

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

fixation:

a lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, in which conflicts were unresolved.

projective test:

a personality test, such as the TAT or Rorschach, that provides ambiguous images designed to trigger projection of people's inner dynamics and reveal unconscious motives

Henry Murray and 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 -People view pictures and make up stories -Stories based on one's thoughts and/or goals

Rorschach "inkblot" test:

a projective test that seeks to identify people's inner feelings by analyzing how they interpret 10 inkblots -Dropped ink on a paper, interpret what it is

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. -Test items empirically derived, and tests objectively scored

Self-serving bias:

a readiness to perceive ourselves favorably

unconscious:

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

empirically derived test:

a test (such as the MMPI) created by selecting from a pool of items that discriminate between groups.

terror-management theory:

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

Carl Rogers believed that a growth-promoting social climate provides:

acceptance, genuineness, empathy

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.

Self-transcendence:

according to Maslow, the striving for identity, meaning, and purpose beyond the self.

self-concept:

all our thoughts and feelings about ourselves, in answer to the question, "Who am I?", which humanistic psychologist view as the central feature of personality

personality:

an individual's characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting.

Social-cognitive perspective person

bandura

Trait theorists see personality as a stable and enduring pattern of ________.

behavior

Personality arises from efforts to resolve conflict between ______ impulses and ______ restraints.

biological; social

_______ influences personality. Extroverts and introverts may act differently depending on activity in the _____. Our genes influence the _______ and behavioral style that shape our personality. Differences in _______ nervous system reactivity, differences in frontal lobe activation and neural activity (e.g., dopamine)

biology; brain; temperament; autonomic

Alfred Adler and Karen Horney said that _______ is important. Childhood ______, not sexual, tensions are crucial for personality formation Horney: Childhood ______ triggers our desire for love and security.

childhood; social; anxiety

Oedipus:

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

OCEAN or CANOE

conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness, extraversion

Freud saw _______ as the road to the unconscious. The content of dreams were censored expressions of the dreamer's ______ wishes.

dreams; unconscious

Narcissism:

excessive self-love and self-absorption

Freud observed patients whose disorders had no clear physical explanations. A woman had no ________, but no sensory nerves that would numb the hand and nothing else exists.

feeling in her hand

Gordon Allport described personality in terms of ________. He was more interested in ________ differences rather than trying to explain them.

fundamental traits; describing

self:

in contemporary psychology, assumed to be the center of personality, the organizer of our thoughts, feelings, and actions.

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.

defense mechanisms

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

Defense mechanisms always operate ______ and _______. Just as the body unconsciously defends itself against disease, so also does the ego unconsciously defend itself against anxiety.

indirectly; unconsciously

Genital (puberty on)

maturation of sexual interests

self-esteem:

our feelings of high or low self-worth.

self-efficacy:

our sense of competence and effectiveness.

spotlight effect:

overestimating others' noticing and evaluating our appearance, performance, and blunders (as if we presume a spotlight shines on us).

The best predictor of future behavior is the person's _____ behavior patterns in similar situations.

past

Positive self-concept= _______ Negative self-concept= _______

perceive world positively; feel dissatisfied and unhappy

Psychosexual Stages: Oral (0-18 months)

pleasure centers on the mouth- sucking, biting, chewing

Psychosexual Stages: Anal (18-36 months)

pleasure focuses on bowel and bladder elimination; coping with demands for control

The Id operates on the ____: It seeks immediate gratification.

pleasure principle

Phallic (3-6 years)

pleasure zone is the genitals; coping with incestuous sexual feelings

ASSESSING THE SELF -Humanistic psychologists sometimes assessed personality using ______ -Some rejected any standardized assessments and relied on interviews and ______.

questionnaires; conversations

The ego operates on the ______, satisfying the id's desires in ways that will realistically bring pleasure rather than pain

reality principle

Big Five factors (five-factor model):

researchers identified five factors--openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism--that describe personality. CANOE or OCEAN

Free association: Freud assumed that a line of mental dominoes had fallen from his patients' distant past to their troubled present. Free association, he believed, would allow him to __________ that line, following a chain of thought leading into the patient's ________. There, painful unconscious memories, often from childhood, could be retrieved, reviewed, and released.

retrace; unconscious

______ occurs in those who are self-aware and selfaccepting, found their calling, and are not paralyzed by the opinions of others

self-actualization

Researchers use ______ inventories and peer reports to assess and score the Big Five personality factors.

self-report

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.

identification:

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

Freud thought of the woman that it must be unacceptable _________, hidden away in the unconscious mind, that caused this hand to lose feeling. He speculated that the lost feeling in the women's hand was caused by ______. (Blindness or deafness might be caused by not wanting to see or hear something anxiety provoking.)

thoughts and feelings; fear of touching one's genitals

Freud was the first to focus clinical attention on our _________. He searched for a cause of disorders that had no neurological cause. Psychological cause?

unconscious mind

repression:

underlies all other defense mechanisms; the basic defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness

Factor analysis:

-A statistical procedure that identifies clusters (factors) of test items that type basic components of a trait -Ex. outgoing, like excitement, and dislike quiet activities= extraversion

Modern Research Contradicts Many of Freud's Ideas

-Development as lifelong, not fixed in childhood -Doubt that infants' neural networks are mature enough to sustain as much emotional trauma as Freud assumed -Some think Freud overestimated parental influence and underestimated peer influence. -These critics also doubt that conscience and gender identity form as the child resolves the Oedipus (or Electra) complex at age 5 or 6. We gain our gender identity earlier, and those who become strongly masculine or feminine do so even without a same-sex parent present. -History has failed to support the idea that suppressed sexuality cause psychological disorders

Interaction of individuals and environments:

-Different people choose different environments. -Personalities shape how people interpret and react to events. -Personalities help create situations to which people react

Projection

-Disguising one's own threatening impulses by attributing them to others -Ex. saying others look worried for the exam when you are

The Costs of Self-Esteem

-Excessive Optimism -Blindness to One's Own Incompetence -Self-Serving Bias

Neo-freudians: accepted Freud's basic ideas but differed in 2 ways

-More emphasis on conscious mind's role in interpreting experience and in coping with the environment and on social motives than sexual or aggression related ones -Doubted that sex and aggression were all-consuming motivations

Rationalization

-Offering self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening unconscious reasons for one's actions. -ex. A habitual drinker says she drinks with her friends "just to be sociable."

Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI):

-Originally developed to identify emotional disorders, this test is now used for many other screening purposes. -the most widely researched and clinically used of all personality tests.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: Isabel Briggs Myers and Katharine Briggs

-Sorts people according to personality types -"Identifies" people's "feeling type" or "thinking type" -Used for counseling, leadership training, and work-team development

Critics of humanistic perspective say

-Too vague and subjective -Disagrees with his only question that matters -Am I living in a way which is deeply satisfying to me, and which truly expresses me? -Make people selfish -Naive, fails to appreciate the reality of our human capacity for evil

Social-cognitive perspective

-Views behavior as influenced by the interaction between people's traits and their social context -Emphasizes interaction of our traits with our situations -Believe we learn many behaviors through conditioning or observing and imitating others

Id:

-entirely unconscious psychic energy that constantly strives to satisfy basic drives to survive, reproduce, and aggress. -Operates on the pleasure principle: It seeks immediate gratification. -Live in present, not thinking about future