What is personality?
A pattern of enduring and distinctive thoughts, emotions, and behaviours that characterize the way an individual adapts to the world.
What does the psychodynamic perspective say about personality?
Personality is primarily unconscious (beyond awareness).
Behaviour is surface level
Childhood experiences shapes adult personality.
What are Freud’s three structures of personality?
ID: Pleasure principle that seeks immediate gratification. Unconscious drives; the individual’s reservoir of sexual energy.
EGO: Reality principle. Tries to get what the id wants within societal norms. Higher mental functions. Mediator between id and superego.
SUPEREGO: Our conscience that evaluates the morality of our behaviour.
What is a defence mechanism?
The Freudian term for tactics the ego uses to reduce anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality.
What is the repression defence mechanism?
The ego pushes unacceptable impulses out of awareness into the unconscious mind.
An individual forgets an event to protect themselves from psychological stress
What is the rationalization defence mechanism?
The ego creates a comfortable, reassuring explanation to deal with stressful experiences, distorting facts.
What is the displacement defence mechanism?
The ego takes pushes feelings towards an unacceptable object to another
What is the sublimation defence mechanism?
The ego replaces an unacceptable impulse with a socially acceptable one.
EX: A man with strong sexual urges ends up painting nudes instead
What is the projection defence mechanism?
The ego projects personal problems to criticizing others
What is the reaction formation defence mechanism?
The ego copes with negative experiences by focusing on the opposite.
What is the denial defence mechanism?
The ego denies that a situation happens and refuses to acknowledge reality to cope with stress
What is the regression defence mechanism?
The ego seeks the security of an earlier developmental period to cope with stresses
What are Freud’s psychosexual stages of personality development?
Oral stage (18 months): Infant’s pleasure relies on their mouths – relieves tension the most
Anal stage (18-36 months): greatest pleasure involves their anus and urethra and their functions – controlling their execratory functions and their parents.
Phallic stage (3-6 years old): pleasure is focused on genitals.s
Latency period (6 years - puberty): A child sets aside all interests in sexuality.
Genital stage (12+): Sexual re-awakening. Individuals become capable of love and work, but are subject to conflict as the id will always press for expression and they must face unconscious conflicts during previous stages.
According to Freud, what are the 3 types of fixations that occur when individuals are overdisciplined or overindulged during developmental stages?
Oral: smoking, eating, kissing - uses sublimation to be a food critic, uses reaction formation to develop a dislike for milk.
Anal: interest in bowel movements, messiness/cleanliness, stubborness –> uses sublimation to paint/sculpt, uses reaction formation to be disgusted by feces, dirt, irritable.
Phallic: masturbation, flirting –> uses sublimation to take interest in love, poetry, success, uses reaction formation to reject sex on moral grounds
What was Carl Jung’s analytical theory on personality?
What was Adler’s individual psychology view on personality?
What are the stages of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs?
1) Physiological - food, air, water
2) Safety – employment, health, personal security
3) Love and Belonging - companionship
4) Esteem – (self)respect, status
5) Self-Actualization – the desire to optimize yourself
What is the Allport’s trait theory?
What are the big five factors of personality?
The five broad traits that are thought to describe the main dimensions of personality:
OCEAN
What is HEXACO?
A six-factor trait model of personality that updates and expands on the five factor model with 4 corresponding facets.
What are the personological and life story perspectives?
Theoretical views describing that the way to understand a person is to focus on their life history and life story.
personology is the concept that personality is determined by experiences and can change.
What is Murray’s Thematic Apperception Test?
A person must look at an ambiguous picture and write about what is going on. Their answers are analyzed, and out of the 22 unconscious needs, the 3 most important are:
- Need for achievement
- Need for affiliation
- Need for power
What is Bandura’s Social Learning theory and reciprocal determinism?
Reciprocal determinism describes the way behavioural, environmental, and personal factors interact to create personality.
What is self-efficacy?