Unit 10: Personality

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 Mechanism

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

Gordon Allport

One of the first psychologists to focus on the study of the personality, and is often referred to as one of the founding figures of personality psychology. He contributed to the formation of Values Scales and rejected both a psychoanalytic approach to personality, which he thought often went too deep, and a behavioral approach, which he thought often did not go deep enough.

Self-Esteem

One's feeling of high or low self-worth.

Spotlight Effect

Overestimating others' noticing and evaluating our appearance, performance, and blunders.

Sybil Eysenck

Personality psychologist and the widow of noted personality psychologist Hans Eysenck, with whom she collaborated.

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 impulses 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.

Hermann Rorschach

Swiss Freudian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, best known for developing the Rorschach test. This test was reportedly designed to reflect unconscious parts of the personality that "project" onto the stimuli.

Carl Jung

Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. His work has been influential not only in psychiatry but also in anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy and religious studies.

Psychosexual Stages

The childhood stages of development during which, according to Freud, the id's pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct erogenous zones.

Personal Control

The extend to which people perceive control over their environment rather than feeling helpless.

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. Operates on the reality principle, satisfying the id's desires in ways that will realistically bring pleasure rather than pain.

Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory

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

Rorschach Inkblot Test

The most widely used projective test, a set of 10 inkblots, designed by Herman 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 and for future aspirations.

External Locus of Control

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

Internal Locus of Control

The perception that you control your own fate.

Identification

The process by which, according to Freud, children incorporate their parents' 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.

Social-Cognitive Perspective

Views behavior as influenced by the interaction between people's traits and their social context.

Carl Rogers

Widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of psychotherapy research and was honored for his pioneering research with the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions by the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1956.

Unconditional Positive Regard

A caring, accepting, nonjudgmental attitude, which Carl Rogers believed would help clients to develop self-awareness and self-acceptance.

Trait

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

Projective Test

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

Thematic Apperception Test

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 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.

Empirically Derived Test

A test 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 stage, 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.

Self-Concept

All our thoughts and feelings about ourselves, in an answer to the question, "Who am I?"

Abraham Maslow

American psychologist who was best known for creating Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualization.

Isabel Briggs Myers

An American author and co-creator of a personality inventory known as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Briggs Myers created the MBTI with her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs.

Personality

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

Sigmund Freud

Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst.

Collective Unconscious

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

Katharine Briggs

Co-creator, with her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, of an inventory of personality type known as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).

Alfred Adler

Founder of the school of individual psychology. His emphasis on the importance of feelings of inferiority—the inferiority complex—is recognized as an isolating element which plays a key role in personality development.

Psychoanalysis

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

Karen Horney

German psychoanalyst who practiced in the United States during her later career. Her theories questioned some traditional Freudian views.

Hans Eysenck

German-born psychologist who spent his professional career in Great Britain. He is best remembered for his work on intelligence and personality, though he worked in a wide range of areas within psychology.

Collectivism

Giving priority to goals of one's group and defining one's identity accordingly.

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.

Albert Bandura

He is known as the originator of social learning theory and the theoretical construct of self-efficacy, and is also responsible for the influential 1961 Bobo doll experiment.