Temperament, Resilience, and Personality Flashcards
What is temperament and reactivity?
Temperament: refers to inborn characteristics including sensitivity to the environment, intensity of emotional response, baseline global mood, regularity of biological cycles, and attraction to or withdrawal from novel situations
Reactivity: characteristics of the individual’s responsivity to changes in the environment
Describe the easy child.
Regular, adaptable, easy to comfort, respond positively to new experiences, happy babies
Describe the slow to warm up child.
Slow to adapt to new experiences/change, rarely show strong negative or positive moods and often low intensity negative reaction, withdrawal tendencies toward novel stimuli, shy and stand-offish at first but warm up.
These children do best with clear routines and being prepared for changes and transitions.
Describe the difficult child.
Irregular pattern of eating, sleeping, elimination, and general activity level. Moody, frequent negative emotional expressions of high intensity, react negatively to new situations, stimulate criticism and negative reaction from caregivers.
Difficult children require soothing activity and help learning to calm themselves down.
Many difficult children develop behavior disorders. Those that didn’t probably had parents who used good parenting skills to help the child compensate with their temperament.
What is the difference between inhibited and uninhibited children?
Inhibited children: shy with strangers, timid with unfamiliar toys, physiologically more aroused (higher HR, larger pupillary diameters, greater motor tension)–they have impaired recall following stress, unusual fears and phobias, greater cortical activation in right frontal area, and atopic allergies
Uninhibited children: outgoing and sociable with strangers, curious and explorative with unfamiliar toys, physiologically less aroused (slower and more variable HR, normal pupillary diameters, no differences in motor tension)
How do inhibited children change over time?
As they age they become more shy and timid and as adults, they have more active amygdala’s when exposed to an unfamiliar stimuli.
Does parent focused intervention for inhibited children benefit them in the long run?
Yes–they showed lower frequency and severity of anxiety disorders, lower levels of anxiety symptoms, but no significant differences in level of inhibition. It can possibly later the trajectory of anxiety and related disorders in inhibited children.
What is goodness of fit and poorness of fit with respect to resiliency and vulnerability?
Parents and children interact in a reciprocal fashion
- Goodness of fit results when the functioning of the parents or others in the environment with respect to their expectations or demand of the child are in consonance with the child’s temperament characteristics and capabilities.
- Poorness of fit involves discrepancies between environmental opportunities and demands on the one hand and child’s capacities and temperament characteristics on the other–distorted and maladaptive functioning can occur
What is resiliency? Vulnerability?
Resiliency: associated with easy temperament, reduces the impact of the adverse effects of ineffective, insufficient, and/or dysfunctional parenting. They are cognitively capable, affectively expressive, good feelings about themselves, show insight into interpersonal situations, and demonstrate flexibility.
Vulnerability: results when the interaction between the child and the environment results in new limitations or difficulties, new threats to homeostasis and integration, new obstacles to learning, and increased difficulties in mastering anxiety or negative experiences. They tend to be cognitively delayed, affectively labile, have negative feelings about themselves, show poor insight into interpersonal situations, and demonstrate inflexibility.
What genetic basis is there for the relationship between stressful life events and depression
There is a functional polymorphism in the serotonin promoter region that has a moderate influence on stressful life events and depression. The genotype doesn’t matter much in individuals who have had 1 or no stressful life events but being homozygous for the short arm of the polymorphism dramatically increases depression symptoms, episodes, and suicide attempts as compared with the heterozygote and homozygote for the long arm of the polymorphism.
The serotonin transporter gene moderates onset of emotional problems among children following bullying victimization.
What is personality? What theories attempt to describe it?
Personality is an individual’s unique and relatively consistent patterns of thinking, feeling, and behavior.
Theories: psychoanalytic, humanistic, social cognitive perspective, trait
Describe the psychoanalytic perspective on personality.
Personality and behavior result from a constant interplay between conflicting physiological forces that operate at three different levels of awareness
Conscious level: thoughts, feelings, and sensations that you are aware of
Preconscious level: information of which you’re not currently aware but can recall
Unconscious level: not directly aware of these thoughts, feelings, and wishes, and drives but they exert an enormous influence on our conscious thoughts and behaviors
Ego defense mechanisms: reaction patterns which serve the purpose of protecting the individual from anxiety, guilt, and unacceptable impulses, internal conflicts or other threats to sense of self.
What are the functions of defense mechanisms? What are the ego defense mechanisms?
- Keep emotions within bearable limits
- Restore emotional balance by channeling biological drives
- Handle unresolvable conflicts with others
- Survive conflicts with conscience
Ego defense mechanims
- Repression: unconscious forgetting
- Displacement: impulses are redirected to a substitute object or person
How are defenses classified according to the psychoanalytics?
Psychotic defenses: delusional projection, denial, distortion
Immature defenses: projection, schizoid fantasy, hypochondriasis, passive-aggressive behavior, acting out
Neurotic defenses: intellectualization, repression, displacement, reaction formation, dissociation
Mature defenses: altruism, humor, suppression, anticipation, sublimation
Describe the humanistic perspective on personality.
The humanistic perspective contends that the most important factor in personality is the individual’s conscious, subjective perception of his or her self. It deals with the hierarchy of needs and self-actualization (Maslow) and the idea of self-concept (Carl Rogers).
Represents an optimistic look at human nature, emphasizing the self and the fulfillment of a person’s unique potential–“positive psychology”
Consistent experiences of unconditional positive regard lead to one becoming a fulfilled functional actualized person.
