Psychology Ch. 15: Personality
Terms
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- Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
- projective test in which people express their inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes
- external locus of control
- perception that chance or outside forces beyond one's personal control determine one's fate
- identification
- process by which, according to Freud, children incorporate their parents' value into their developing superegos
- social-cognitive perspective
- views behavior as influenced by the interaction between persons (and their thinking) and their social context
- fixation
- according to Freud, a lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, in which conflicts were unresolved
- unconditional positive regard
- according to Roger's, an attitude of toal acceptance toward another person
- projection
- defense mechanism by which people disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others
- displacement
- defense mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impluses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person
- self-actualization
- according to Maslow, ultimate psychological need that arises after basic physical and psychological needs are met and self-esteem is achieved; the motivation to fulfill one's potential
- Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)
- most widely researched and clinically used of all personality tests
- personality inventory
- questionnaire (often with true-false or agree-disagree) on which people respond to items designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors
- id
- contains reservoir of unconscious psychic energy that, according to Freud, strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives
- learned helplessness
- hopelessness and passive resignation an animal or human learns when unable to avoid repeated aversive events
- ego
- conscious "executive" part of personality that, according to Freud, mediates among the demands of the id, superego, and reality
- regression
- defense mechanism in which an individual faced with anxiety retreats to a more infantile psychosexual stage, where some psychic energy remains fixated
- empirically derived test
- a test (such as the MMPI) developed by testing a pool of items and then selecting those that discriminate between groups
- Oedipus
- according to Freud, a boy's sexual desires toward his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father
- psychosexual stages
- the childhood stages of development (oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital) during which, according to Freud, the id's pleasure-seeking energies focused on distinct erogenous zones
- reaction formation
- defense mechanism by which the ego unconsciously switches unacceptable impulses into their opposites; "I hate him" becomes "I love him"
- self-serving bias
- readiness to perceive oneself favorably
- self-concept
- all our thoughts and feelings about ourselves, in answer to the question, "Who am I?"
- repression
- basic defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness
- projective test
- personality test, such as the Rorschach or TAT, that provides ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger projection of one's inner dynamics
- personality
- individual's characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting
- Rorschach inkblot test
- most widely used projective test, set of 10 inkblots, seeks to identify people's inner feelings by analyzing their interpretation of the blots
- psychoanalysis
- Freud's thory of personality that attributes thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts
- terror-management theory
- proposes that faith in one's worldview and the pursuit of self-esteem provide protection against a deeply rooted fear of death
- personal control
- our sense of controlling our environment rather than feeling helpless
- defense mechanism
- in psychoanalytic theory, the ego's protective method of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distoring reality
- 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
- reciprocal determinism
- interacting influences between personality and environmental factors
- self-esteem
- one's feeling of high or low self-worth
- trait
- characteristic pattern of behavior or a disposition to feel and act, as assessed by self-report inventories and peer reports
- unconscious
- according to Freud, a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories
- rationalization
- defense mechanism that offers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one's actions
- collective unconscious
- Carl Jung's concept of a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species' history
- superego
- part of the personality that, according to Freud, represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgement and for future aspirations
- internal locus of control
- perception that one control's one's own fate
- spotlight effect
- overestimating others' noticing and evaluating our appearance, performance, and blunders