Unit 7 - Motivation, Emotion, and Personality

Intellectual Disability

(formerly referred to as mental retardation) a condition of limited mental ability, indicated by an intelligence score of 70 or below and difficulty in adapting to the demands of life; varies from mild to profound.

Collective Unconscious

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

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.

Type A

Friedman and Rosenman's term for competitive, hard-driving, impatient, verbally aggressive, and anger-prone people.

Type B

Friedman and Rosenman's term for easygoing, relaxed people.

Hierarchy of Needs

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

General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS)

Selye's concept of the body's adaptive response to stress in three phases - alarm, resistance, exhaustion.

Savant Syndrome

a condition in which a person otherwise limited in mental ability has an exceptional specific skill, such as in computation or drawing.

Down Syndrome

a condition of intellectual disability and associated physical disorders caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21.

General Intelligence (g)

a general intelligence factor that, according to Spearman and others, underlies specific mental abilities and is therefore measured by every task on an intelligence test.

Polygraph

a machine, commonly used in attempts to detect lies, that measure several of the physiological responses accompanying emotion (such as perspiration and cardiovascular and breathing changes).

Mental Age

a measure of intelligence test performance devised by Binet; the chronological age that most typically corresponds to a given level of performance. Thus, a child who does as well as the average 8-year-old is said to have a mental age of 8.

Intelligence Test

a method of assessing an individual's mental aptitudes and comparing them with those of others, using numerical scores.

Motivation

a need or desire that energizes and directs behavior.

Projective Test

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

Incentive

a positive or negative environment stimulus that motivates behavior

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.

Personality Inventory

a questionnaire (often 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.

Self-serving Bias

a readiness to perceive oneself favorably.

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.

Emotion

a response of the whole organism, involving (1) physiological arousal, (2) expressive behaviors, and (3) conscious experience.

Refractory Period

a resting period after orgasm, during which a man cannot achieve another orgasm.

Stereotype Threat

a self-confirming concern that one will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype.

Factor Analysis

a statistical procedure that identifies clusters of related items (called factors) on a test; used to identify different dimensions of performance that underlie a person's total score.

Health Psychology

a subfield of psychology that provides psychology's contribution to behavioral medicine.

Normal Curve

a symmetrical, bell-shaped curve that describes the distribution of many physical and psychological attributes. Most scores fall near the average, and fewer and fewer scores lie near the extremes.

Homeostasis

a tendency to maintain a balanced or constant internal state; the regulation of any aspect of body chemistry, such as blood glucose, around a particular level.

Empirically Derived Test

a test (such as the MMPI) developed by testing a pool of items and then selecting those 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.

Oedipus Complex

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

Fixation

according to Freud, a lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual state, in which conflicts were unresolved.

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.

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?"

Bulimia Nervosa

an eating disorder characterized by episodes of overeating, usually high-calorie foods, followed by vomiting, laxative use, fasting, or excessive exercise.

Anorexia Nervosa

an eating disorder in which a person (usually an adolescent female) diets and becomes significantly (15 percent or more) underweight, yet, still feeling fat, continues to starve.

Sexual Orientation

an enduring sexual attraction toward members of either one's own sex (homosexual orientation) or the other sex (heterosexual orientation).

Personality

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

Behavioral Medicine

an interdisciplinary field that integrates behavior and medical knowledge and applies that knowledge to health and disease..

Intelligence Quotient (IQ)

defined originally as the ratio of mental age (ma) to chronological age (ca) multiplied by 100 (thus, IQ=ma/ca X 100). On contemporary intelligence tests, the average performance for a given age is assigned a score of 100.

Standardization

defining meaningful scores by comparison with the performance of a pretested group.

Catharsis

emotional release. The catharsis hypothesis maintains that "releasing' aggressive energy (through action or fantasy) relieves aggressive urges.

Individualism

giving priority to one's own goals to over group goals and defining one's identity in terms of personal attributes rather than 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.

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.

Repression

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

Defense Mechanisms

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

Psychophysiological Illness

literally, "mind-body" illness; any stress-related physical illness, such as hypertension and some headaches.

Intelligence

mental quality consisting of the ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use knowledge to adapt to new situations.

Self-esteem

one's feelings of high or low self-worth.

Adaptation-level Phenomenon

our tendency to form judgments (of sounds, of lights, of income) relative to a neutral level defined by our prior experience.

Spotlight Effect

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

Feel-Good Do-Good Phenomenon

people's tendency to be helpful when already in a good mood.

Projection

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

Sublimation

psychoanalytic defense mechanism by which people re-channel their unacceptable impulses into socially approved activities.

Denial

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

Reaction Formation

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

Regression

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

Rationalization

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

Displacement

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.

Well-being

self-perceived happiness or satisfaction with life. Used along with measures of objective well-being (for example, physical and economic indicators) to evaluate people's quality of life.

Estrogens

sex hormones, such as estradiol, secreted in greater amount by females than males and contributing to female sex characteristics. In nonhuman female mammals, estrogen levels peak during ovulation, promoting sexual receptivity.

Binge-eating Disorder

significant binge-eating episodes, followed by distress, disgust, or guilt, but without the compensatory purging, fasting, or excessive exercise that marks bulimia nervosa.

Achievement Tests

tests designed to assess what a person has learned.

Aptitude Tests

tests designed to predict a person's future performance; aptitude is the capacity to learn.

Two-factor Theory

the Schachter-Singer theory that to experience emotion one must (1) be physically aroused and (2) cognitively label the arousal.

Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS)

the WAIS is the most widely used intelligence test; contains verbal and performance (nonverbal) subtests.

Emotional Intelligence

the ability to perceive, understand, manage, and use emotions.

Basal Metabolic Rate

the body's resting rate of energy expenditure.

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.

Coronary Heart Disease

the clogging of the vessels that nourish the heart muscle; the leading cause of death in North America.

Facial Feedback

the effect of facial expressions on experienced emotions, as when a facial expression of anger or happiness intensifies feelings of anger or happiness.

Validity

the extent to which a test measures or predicts what it is supposed to.

Content Validity

the extent to which a test samples the behavior that is of interest.

Reliability

the extent to which a test yields consistent results, as assessed by the consistency of scores on two halves of the test, or on retesting.

Personal Control

the extent to which people perceive control over their environment rather than feeling helpless.

Glucose

the form of sugar that circulates in the blood and provides the major source of energy for body tissues. When its level is low, we feel hunger.

Sexual Response Cycle

the four stages of sexual responding described by Masters and Johnson - excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution.

Drive-reduction Theory

the idea that a physiological need creates an aroused tension state (a drive) that motivates an organism to satisfy the need.

Reciprocal Determinism

the interacting influences of behavior, internal cognition, and environment.

Ego

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.

Testosterone

the most important of the male sex hormones. Both males and females have it, but the additional testosterone in males stimulates the growth of the male sex organs in the fetus and the development of the male sex characteristics during puberty.

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.

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.

Superego

the part of personality that, according to Freud, represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgment (the conscience) and for future aspirations.

External Locus of Control

the perception that chance or outside forces beyond your personal control determine your fate.

Relative Deprivation

the perception that we are worse off relative to those with whom we compare ourselves.

Internal Locus of Control

the perception that you control your own fate.

Set Point

the point at which an individual's "weight thermostat" is supposedly set. When the body falls below this weight, an increase in hunger and a lowered metabolic rate may act to restore the lost weight.

Stress

the process by which we perceive and respond to certain events, called stressors, that we appraise as threatening or challenging.

Identification

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

Positive Psychology

the scientific study of optimal human functioning; aims to discover and promote strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive.

Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI)

the study of how psychological, neural, and endocrine processes together affect the immune system and resulting health.

Predictive Validity

the success with which a test predicts the behavior it is designed to predict; it is assessed by computing the correlation between test scores and the criterion behavior (also called criterion-related validity).

Cannon-Bard Theory

the theory that an emotion-arousing stimulus simultaneously triggers (1) physiological responses and (2) the subjective experience of emotion.

James-Lange Theory

the theory that our experience of emotion is our awareness of our physiological responses to emotion-arousing stimuli.

Lymphocytes

the two types of white blood cells that are part of the body's immune system; B lymphocytes form in the bone marrow and release antibodies that fight bacterial infections; T lymphocytes form in the thymus and other lymphatic tissue and attack cancer cells, viruses, and foreign substances.

Stanford-Binet

the widely used American revision (by Terman at Stanford University) of Binet's original intelligence test.

Social-cognitive Perspective

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

Trait

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

Instinct

a complex behavior that is rigidly patterned throughout a species and is unlearned.