Chapter 12: Psychology gets "Personality": Allport, Maslow, and the Broadening Field Flashcards

Question

What is the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire?

Answer 1

an easily administered multiple-choice test for measuring these factors, which has undergone several successful revisions.

Answer 2

Eysenck argued that by far the most powerful information one can have about an individual personality is his or her relative standing on these three general dimensions -- often said to constitute the PEN model of personality (based on their initial letters).

Answer 3

The debate was started by Walter, a Stanford University psychologist who had previously been Allport's junior colleague at Harvard, in his 1968 Textbook Personality and Assessment.

Answer 4

as it became known, addressed the question of whether a person's behavior in a given situation is more strongly determined by his or her pre-existing personality traits or dispositions, or by the demands of the particular circumstances.

Answer 5

Gradually a consensus arose in favour of five as the ideal number of personality factors, and the model that gained considerable support was called the Big Five.

Answer 6

Openness (versus narrowness or shallowness), conscientiousness (versus carelessness or carefreeness), extroversion (versus introversion), agreeableness (versus coldness or quarrelsomeness), and neuroticism (versus calmness and stability).

Answer 7

was born into a wealthy New York family and led a privileged early life. Earned a Ph.D. in Biochemistry.

Answer 8

a younger married woman with whom he would continue to collaborate asa the two carried on an extramarital love affair that lasted until Morgan's death.

Answer 9

the ideal goal of a case study should be to elucidate all three of these domains, he believed, using as wide a variety of tests, interviews, and other methods as possible. This approach, later to be extended to the study of women as well as men, came to be referred to by both Murray and his followers as personology.

Answer 10

a series of 32 black-and-white pictures or photographs depicting ambiguous but potentially dramatic scenes (for example, one with a young boy gazing pensively at a violin; another of a young woman with an older hooded woman looking over her shoulder; another depicting a man and woman in the midst of some sort of dramatic interaction).

Answer 11

They published Explorations in Personality in 1938, a ground breaking book detailing their procedures and including a complete reproduction of the case material on one of the studied subjects.

Answer 12

the book also described a conceptual scheme in which individuals were seen as motivated, often unconsciously, by twenty-seven psychogenic needs, which become aroused in various ways by environmental "presses."

Answer 13

Achievement (to overcome obstacles in the service of attaining personally important goals), for Affiliation (to have frequent and positive contact with others), for power (having control or domination over others), and for Autonomy (the ability to be independent of others).

Answer 14

This concept of motivational needs was subsequently pursued in a more nomothetic direction by DM.

Answer 15

This group established guidelines for the responsible writing of psychobiography - the use of psychoanalytic and other psychological personality theories to interpret and illuminate an individual's life story.

Answer 16

Explorations in Personality

Answer 17

"What psychobiographers Might Learn from Personality Psychology" by the Northwestern University personologist Dan McAdams, argues that an individual life can be most profitably approached and conceptualized at three separate but complementary levels.

Answer 18

is a religious attachment adopted largely for self-aggrandizing reasons; it is unreflective, literal-minded, bigoted, and intolerant of other beliefs or ambiguity.

Answer 19

by contrast, is belief in a spiritual reality while simultaneously accepting an inevitable unknowableness and mystery regarding ultimate questions.

Answer 20

Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and one of its earliest presidents.

Answer 21

with colleagues from the psychology, sociology, and anthropology departments at Harvard to create a new Department of Social Relations, in which students were encouraged to pursue interdisciplinary and social relevant approached to their research.

Answer 22

Came to study prejudice with Allport in the mid-1950s, accompanying him on a field trip to South Africa and later becoming a full Harvard colleague and one of the leading experts on black-white race relations in the US and elsewhere.

Answer 23

Came to Harvard in 1946 as one of Allport's first graduate students in social relations.

Answer 24

a Handbook of Social Psychology

Answer 25

the status of personality psychology by co-authoring, with his former teacher Calvin Hall, the important textbook Theories of Personality.

Answer 26

it began with chapters on Freud and Jung and proceeding to describe the approaches of some dozen others, including Lewin, Cattell, Eysenck, the learning theorists, Murray, and Allport himself.

Answer 27

was the firstborn child of jewish immigrants to New York City from Russia. And the future founder of a "positive psychology," known for his genial and kindly personality, always recalled his childhood as miserably unhappy.

Answer 28

it demonstrated the fact that psychological theories linking childhood unhappiness to future negativity are valid only in a statistical sense, and that there will always be individual variations.

Answer 29

More directly important for Maslow were two younger psychologists just beginning their careers. William Sheldon was developing an approach combining behaviorist methodology with theory about physical body types, which he classified as being predominantly ectomorphic (thin an lightly muscled), endomorphic (relatively high in body fat), or mesomorphic (muscular).

Answer 30

In 1930, just as Maslow was accepted into Wisconsin's graduate program, a new Stanford Ph.D. named Harry Harlow joined its faculty.

Answer 31

Although he did not particularly like the interview research or agree with the critique, Thorndike added that Maslow had achieved some of the highest scores ever recorded on the aptitude tests he took at the beginning of his fellowship and declared: "I'll assume that if I give you your head, it'll be the best for you and for me - and for the world."

Answer 32

through him the couple got to know several other anthropologists, including RB, who particularly impressed Maslow with both her personal and her professional qualities.

Answer 33

Patterns of Culture, in which she promoted the idea that culture - a term that previously had a restricted, technical use within anthropology - could be thought of as analogous to the idea of personality within psychology: "personality writ large," as the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead put it in the book's Preface.

Answer 34

An "Appolonian" culture promoted behaviour that was generally rational and restrained; "Dionysian" societies were exuberant, emotional, and relatively unrestrained; and members of "Paranoid" cultures tended to be distrustful and antagonistic.

Answer 35

it was called "Personality and Patterns of Culture."

Answer 36

the interrelated notions that (1) cultural factors set important conditions within which specific personality traits are more or less likely to occur, and (2) all people share a basic humanity and basic needs that can and sometimes do override their cultural differences.

Answer 37

A trained Freudian analyst, that had also been exposed to the Neo-Marxist social theories prevalent at the University of Frankfurt's Institute for Social Research, where he worked prior to emigrating to New York.

Answer 38

Escape from Freedom, published in 1941.

Answer 39

Maslow would rather refer to these as peak experiences an attempt to study them systematically.

Answer 40

For Maslow, self-actualization was the tendency of psychologically healthy people to fulfill their potential.

Answer 41

His brilliantly simple solution was the hierarchy of needs. He began his argument by noting that under conditions of extreme deprivation, the motives of hunger and thirst are unquestionably paramount.

Answer 42

The most elemental ones, including food and shelter, whose lack of satisfaction is physically catastrophic for the individual and which dominate every other concern if unmet, are the physiological needs.

Answer 43

The requirement to be protected from threats by predators, criminals, extremes of climate and temperature, or other hazardous environmental circumstances.

Answer 44

Once physiological and safety needs have been satisfied, the belonging and love needs become prominent - strong desires for affection, friendship, and a sense of belonging within a social group.

Answer 45

if these needs have been satisfied, however, what Maslow called esteem needs rise to the surface. These needs involve the "desire for a stable, firmly based, (usually) high evaluation of themselves, for self-respect, or self-esteem, and for the esteem of others... (T)hwarting of these needs produces feelings of inferiority, of weakness and of helplessness."

Answer 46

Self-actualization - Living to full potential, achieving personal dreams and aspirations; Esteem - Good self-opinion, accomplishments, reputation; Belonging and love - Acceptance, friendship; Safety - security, protection, freedom from threats; Physiological - Hunger, thirst, warmth, air, sleep.

Answer 47

They collaborated in a broad movement to establish a new third force in psychology (after behaviourism and psychoanalysis) that came to be called humanistic psychology.

Answer 48

had preceded him at Wisconsin where he studied agriculture and religion before finally obtaining a counselling degree from Columbia Teachers College.

Answer 49

and described it fully in a 1951 book. Traditionally, the therapist would periodically interrupt the patient's free associations or other accounts to interject interpretations of the material based on the therapist's own theoretical system. A Freudian, for instance, would interpret in terms of repressed childhood sexuality, an Adlerian in terms of perceived inferiorities, and so on. Rogers, by contrast, believed that the validity of any particular insights should be determined not by their conformity with the therapist's pre-existing views but by his clients themselves. Rogers deliberately chose the word "client" instead of "patient" to indicate a greater sense of equality in the therapeutic relationship.

Answer 50

consistent with this perspective, Rogers developed a "non-directive" counselling approach characterized by a technique he called reflection - the mirroring back to the client the substance of what he or she just said using different words. The reflection is intended to demonstrate that the therapist is genuinely listening and trying to understand what is being said, while encouraging further exploration of the issue under discussion.

Answer 51

An American psychologist and therapist promoted a slightly different but complementary point of view to that of Rogers and Maslow.

Answer 52

After recovering he obtained a clinical psychology degree from Columbia, an went on the develop an existential psychotherapy that emphasized the quest for meaning in life as the paramount issue for modern humanity .

Answer 53

an utopian society eupsychia, he tried to imagine institutions that would encourage maximum freedom for people to realize their full potential.

Answer 54

Some distinctly Maslovian ideas have moved very much into the mainstream with the recent movement officially called positive psychology, promoted by Martin and his associates.

Answer 55

Learned Optimism: How to Change your mind and your life.

Answer 56

a Positive Psychology Center, described on its website as promoting "the scientific study of the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive."

Chapter 12: Psychology gets "Personality": Allport, Maslow, and the Broadening Field Flashcards

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