Personality Flashcards
(43 cards)
Personality Definition
an individual’s characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behaviour, together with the psychological mechanisms behind those patterns
Strengths of Psychoanalytical approaches to studying personality
- Links childhood to lifelong impacts
- One of the most complete theories to date despite it’s age
Weaknesses of Psychoanalytical approaches to studying personality
- Not really a theory
- Unmeasurable
- Information based on interactions with patients
- Staggering
The ID
- First part of mind
- Instinctive
- Subconscious
- Desires food, sleep and sex – avoids pain, not patient
- No sense of right and wrong
- Present from birth
Superego
- Second part of mind
- All about morality – makes us do the right thing
- Conscience and learns the values from parents/society
- Subconscious but slightly conscious
- Not present at birth (develops around age 4)
Ego
- Third part of mind
- Sensitive to reality
- Compromise between desire and morals
- Conscious mind
- Determines what we actually do
Behavioural Approach (personality) PROS
- Establishing psychology as an objective science that focuses on things that can actually be measured and manipulated
- considering how environmental influences shape our personality
Behavioural Approach CONS
- Can personality really be reduced to just conditioned behaviours?
- overlooks the role of genes in determining behaviour
Behavioural Approach (Personality)
- We are born as blank-slates
- How contingency pairings, rewards, and punishments all shape our personality
- Any amount of training can change you to any sort of person
- Your parents may have also used reinforcement to shape who you are
Childhood experience has personality determinant
Adverse events during a particular stage of development could result in a person’s unconscious mind becoming stuck, or fixated, in that stage
Freudian Slip
Speech mistakes aren’t random but reflect desires or worries in unconscious mind
Dreams
hidden meanings that speak to some desire or concern we’re probably not even aware of
Defense Mechanisms
Ego could respond to psychological distress by employing psychological defense mechanisms
- Denial
- Repression
- Rationalization
- Projection
- Sublimation
Denial
o Refusing to accept information
o Entered conscious awareness
o Problematic
Repression
o Prevents you from consciously processing information (facts, feelings, memories)
o Problematic
Rationalization
o seemingly logical arguments are used to justify behaviour that is really motivated by unsavoury id impulses
o Problematic
Projection
o moves the focus away from you and on to someone else
o Believing someone is worse than you are
o Problematic
Sublimation
o Mature defense mechanism
o an individual find a socially acceptable outlet for desires of the id that would otherwise be problematic.
Cognitive Approach (personality)
- someone doesn’t only learn when their actions are being reinforced – they can also observe the actions of others then we model behaviours
- If you see a behaviour being praised, you’ll be motivated to do the same
Cognitive Approach PROS
Addresses reductionist tendences of behavioural model
Cognitive Approach CONS
Does not account for effects of biological factors on personality
Trait Approach
Personality characteristics that are consistent, stable, and varies from person to person
- Traits exists on a continuum, so people often fall somewhere b/n the two extremes of each trait
Big Five (OCEAN)
Openness
Conscientiousness
Extraversion
Agreeableness
Neuroticism
Openness
Creativity and Adventure
High → Experiences, inquisitiveness, creative endeavours
Low → Traditional, routine, resistant to change
