Chapter 15Personality

Personality is an individual’s ___________________________________________ of thinking, feeling, and acting (unique & consistent).

Part I: The Psychodynamic Perspective

In his clinical practice, ___________________________ encountered patients suffering from nervous disorders. Their complaints could not be explained in terms of purely physical causes.

Freud’s clinical experience led him to develop the first comprehensive theory of personality. Psychological problems are the result of ___________________________. Bringing unpleasant unconscious thoughts into to consciousness, produces catharsis.

- The unconscious mind is a reservoir of ______________________________________ thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories. Freud asked patients to participate in ________________________________ - say whatever came to their minds – while he looked for links or themes that allowed him to tap the unconscious.

▪ The mind is like an iceberg. It is mostly hidden, and below the surface lies the unconscious mind. The preconscious stores temporary memories.

▪ Personality develops as a result of our efforts to __________________________ between our biological impulses (____) and social restraints (________________).

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Psychosexual Stages

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- Freud believed that personality formed during the first few years of life which were

divided into psychosexual stages. During these stages the id’s pleasure-seeking

energies focus on pleasure sensitive body areas (____________________________)

that move around the body as we develop. Freud believed that people can become

_______________ (stuck) in one of these psychosexual stages depending on their

childhood experiences.

- Latency – sexuality is hidden. Children exist in _______________________________. Boys identify with their father and girls with their mother. The “cooties stage” begins sometime around the age of six and ends when puberty starts. Freud believed that in this phase the Oedipus complex was dissolved and set free, resulting in a relatively conflict-free period of development that focuses on learning new tasks.

- Genital – Post puberty energy is not focused on your own genitals (like in the phallic

stage) but on other people’s genitals. Fixation in earlier stages may hinder this stage.

___________________________ are the ego’s protective methods of ________________________ by unconsciously distorting reality. In other words, it’s how our personality deals with unpleasant emotions and thoughts.

1. ___________________ banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness – motivated/unconscious forgetting. (“I don’t wanna think about it.” A

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child who is molested, may suppress the traumatic event so that they have no memory of it.)

2. ___________________ leads an individual faced with anxiety to retreat to a more infantile or immature stage. (“Fine, I don’t want to do it…you do it.” Soldiers crying for “mommy” or fighting couples acting immature.)

3. _____________________________ causes the ego to unconsciously switch unacceptable impulses into their opposites - acting the opposite of the way you feel. (People may express feelings of purity when they may be suffering anxiety from unconscious feelings about sex. Homophobia expressed by people afraid that they are homosexual.)

4. ___________________ leads people to disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others. (“All these people think I am worthless” may = “I think that I am worthless.” Your partner tells you how selfish you are, when they are in fact selfish.)

5. __________________________ offers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one’s actions. (A person who engages in risky behavior because “everybody is doing it.” You hit a person with your car and tell yourself “I’m sure he would have died soon anyway.” You steal and say, “Well, I spend a lot of money at this store!”)

6. _________________________ shifts impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person, redirecting anger toward a safer outlet – negative! (Mr. Edelstein tends to break remote controls when the Badgers are losing. After being grilled by your boss, you go home & yell at your partner or the dog/cat. Peeing on neighbor’s car after he yelled at you for driving too fast.)

7. __________________________ occurs when a distressing event is dealt with as an interesting event (a man who is rejected by a potential love interest states “love is unpredictable”)

8. _________________________ occurs when a repressed impulse is expressed in the form of a socially acceptable or admired behavior – unacceptable to acceptable. (A man who has hostile impulses becomes an investigative reporter who ruins careers with his stories. Aggressive impulses are transformed into

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the urge to engage in competitive sports.)

9. _______________ is the refusal to accept or acknowledge anxiety-arousing aspects of the environment. May involve the emotions or the event itself. (“I’m not upset,” “I didn’t lose,” “I don’t have a drinking problem.”)

The NeoFreudians

____________________ believed in the ___________________________________________, which contained a shared common reservoir of experiences (memories & ideas) derived from our ancestors’ past. This is why many cultures share certain myths and such as the mother being a symbol of nurturance.

Like Freud, _________________________ believed in childhood tensions. However, these tensions were social in nature and not sexual. A child struggles with an ________________________________ (physical, intellectual, & social inadequacies) during growth and strives for superiority and power (altruistic, creative, aware, cooperative…). He was the first to study the influence of _________________________.

Like Adler, _____________________________ believed in the social aspects of childhood growth and

development. She said we developed “____________________________.” She countered Freud’s assumption that women have weak superegos and suffer from “penis envy” during the Phallic stage. She proposed that men suffer from “______________________.”

Projective Tests

Evaluating personality from an unconscious mind’s perspective would require a psychological instrument that would _______________ the hidden unconscious mind. ______________________________ use manifest content to reveal latent content.

▪ The ____________________________________________ (TAT) is a projective test in which people express their inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ____________________ scenes

▪ The ____________________________________________ (Inkblot) The most widely used projective test. It uses a set of 10 inkblots designed by Hermann Rorschach. It seeks to identify people’s inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of the __________.

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- Critics argue that projective tests lack both ________________ (consistency of results) and _________________ (predicting what it is supposed to).

Part II: The Humanistic Perspective

By the 1960s, psychologists became discontent with Freud’s negativity. Psychologists wanted to focus on “healthy” people and how to help them strive to “be all that they can be.” Freud studied the ill, while humanists studied the well.

_____________________________ proposed that we as individuals are motivated by a ____________________________________. Beginning with physiological needs, we try to reach the state of _________________________ - fulfilling our potential (realistic attitude, self-awareness, democratic, independent, & have a problem-centered, rather than self, approach). Choices may lead us away from realization of this goal.

___________________________ also believed in the self, an individual's organized and consistent set of beliefs & perceptions about themself. We all seek ___________________________________________________________, a genuine acceptance and love from other’s independent of our behavior.

- When positive regard is not unconditional, conditions of worth dictate behaviors that cause us to approve or disapprove of ourselves. The difference between our

_______________ (the way we actually are) and our ________________ (what we think society wants) is called _________________________- To become fully functioning (self-actualized) we must learn to accept ourselves (unconditional positive regard) and unite the two.

Part III: The Trait Perspective (Psychometrics)

_____________ are an individual’s unique ________________________ of long-lasting moods and consistent ways of behaving that makes up his or her personality. Traits are often more situational rather than permanent.

_________________________________/Self Reports/Objective Tests are ____________________ designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors assessing several traits at once (often rely on honesty with true-false or agree-disagree items). They are used by humanists and others and are more common than the projective tests used by psychoanalysts.

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- ___________________________ is a statistical approach used to see the clusters and describe/relate personality traits (it is used for scoring). ________________________ used this approach to develop a ________________________________________ (16PF) inventory from Allport & Odbert’s 18,000 traits.

- __________________________________________________ (MBTI) created _________ pairs of “preferences” with 16 possible combinations

http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics /

World – Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I)

Information – Sensing (S) or Intuition (N)

Decisions – Thinking (T) or Feeling (F)Structure – Judging (J) or Perceiving (P)

- ___________________________________ suggested that personality could be reduced down to __________________ biological dimensions (related to the Para-Sympathetic /Sympathetic NS): extraversion-introversion &

emotional stability-instability .

- The

_________________________________________________ (MMPI) is the most widely researched and clinically used of all personality tests. It was originally developed to identify emotional disorders. It uses a long (500) series of __________________________________.

Part IV: The Socio-Cultural Perspective

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Chapter 15Personality

_____________________________ believes that personality is the result of an _______________________ that takes place between a person and their social context (i.e. environment). He called this ____________________________________. The three factors of behavior, cognition, and environment, are interlocking determinants and influence each other.

- Trait theories do NOT take into account the importance of the situation. Behaviorists say personality changes according to the _______________________ (reinforcers/

punishment). If you change the environment then you change the personality.

Social-cognitive psychologists emphasize our sense of personal control, whether we control the environment or the environment controls us.

- ____________________________________________ refers to the perception that chance or _____________________ beyond our personal control determine our fate (it’s just fate or luck).

- ____________________________________________ refers to the perception that _______________ control our own fate (hard work and good deeds are rewarded).

When unable to avoid repeated negative events an animal or human ____________________________________.

Martin Seligman’s Learned Helplessness

• Thought dogs would learn to avoid shock• Dogs placed in harness and given shocks• Even when able to avoid the shocks, the dogs

cowered in the box• Dogs learned that they couldn’t control or avoid the

shocks, so ______________________________________ to avoid them

• Significant in the study of depression in humans

An optimistic or pessimistic ________________________ style is your way of explaining positive or negative events.

People maintain their _______________________ even with a low status by valuing things they achieve and comparing themselves to people with similar positions.

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