Personality Flashcards
(47 cards)
Traits
durable dispositions to behave in a particular way across a variety of situations
- 100s of traits
- core traits: 5-10 traits identified with self
Personality
person’s unique constellation of consistent behavioural traits
Temperment
physiological dispositions in response to the environment
- infants differ in temperament
- Reactivity, soothability, positive and negative emotionality
- Not due to prenatal influences (nutrition, drugs, pregnancy)
- Stable over time
Mental illness
unexpected sexual and aggressive urges in the unconscious
Personality results from
- Early childhood experiences
- Unconscious motives and conflicts
- Coping strategies (to deal with anxiety)
Behaviour
interactions among three components of the mind: Id, Ego, superego
Id (and its principles and process thinking)
primitive instinctive component
- pleasure principle: immediate gratification of biological urges (going pee, chocolate)
- primary process thinking; irrational and fantasy oriented
- unaware of negative consequences
Ego (and its principles and process thinking)
decision making component
- reality principle: delay gratification until appropriate outlet and situation located
- secondary process thinking: rational and realistic; considers norms and rules in society
- Both id and ego want to maximize gratification; ego wants to avoid negative consequences
superego
morality component (3 to 5 years)
- Internalization of norms and rules
What are the levels of awareness
- conscious
- preconscious
- unconscious
Conscious (level of awareness)
content we are aware of
- current train of thought
- content of working memory
Preconscious
content beneath awareness, easy to access
- current physiological state
- long term memory storage
Unconscious
content well beneath awareness, difficult to access
- dangerous thoughts, memories and desires
“evidence” for the unconscious
Freudian slips: reveals a person’s true feelings
- Dreams express hidden desires
- Psychoanalysis revealed previously unknown conflicts
Anxiety
conflicts building up in the unconscious begin to appear in the preconscious/conscious
(conflicts between the id and the ego/superego)
Conflicts about sexual and aggressive urges are powerful because they are thwarted more regularly
Defence mechanisms
unconscious reactions that protect a person from unpleasant emotions such as anxiety and guilt
see slide 8 for examples
Fixation (psychosexual development)
failure to progress to later stages
- Excessive gratification of sexual urges
- Excessive frustration of sexual urges
- Affect adult personality (determined by age 5)
Psychosexual development
Developmental periods with a characteristic sexual focus that influences adult personality
- sexual urges (physical pleasure) shift as children progress through early life (ex. eating, hug)
Psychosexual stages and personality
- Oral stage (0-1 years): fixation can lead to obsessive eating or smoking as adult
- Anal stage (2-3 years): punitive training can lead to hostility toward the trainer and generalized to others later ; tendency towards neatness, organization and detail
- Phallic stage (4-5 years): Oedipal complex; erotic desire for opposite sex parent and hostility towards same-sex parent
- Resolution of oedipal complex: purge desire for opposite sex parent and identify with same-sex parent (formation of superego)
- Failure to resolve complex leads to personaility disturbances (psychopaths; no morals)
Carl Jung
Felt freud was too dogmatic
- Analytical psychology: unconscious composed of two layers
Alfred Adler
Felt freud too obsessed with sexual urges
- Individual psychology: people strive for superiority
Jung’s Analytical psychology
- unconscious determines personality
- Personal unconscious: thoughts, memory and desires that have been repressed or forgotten
- Collective unconscious: storehouse of latent memory traces inherited from people’s ancestral past
- Archetypes; emotionally charged images and thought forms that have universal meaning
- First to describe extroverted and introverted personality types
Adler’s individual psychology
- Striving for superiority: universal drive to adapt, improve oneself and master life’s challenges “best version of yourself”
– Not dominance over others
– Derives from childhood inferiority - Compensation: effort to overcome real or imagined inferiority thought self-improvement
– Inferiority complex: exaggerated feelings of inferiority resulting from parental pampering or neglect
– Overcompensation: attempts to hide feelings of inferiority from self and others (attain material goods and flaunt achievements) - First to suggest that birth order affected personality (bc they live in different environments)
Criticism to psychodynamic perspecitves
- Poor testibility: too vague and subjective to test empirically
- Inadequate evidence: based primarily on case studies
- Retrospective accounts require memory, which is fallible
- sexist: tend to be male oriented
