Unit 7: Motivation, Emotion, and Personality

• personality: an individual's characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting.
• free association: in psychoanalysis, a method of exploring the unconscious in which the person relaxes and says whatever comes to mind, no matter how trivial or embarrassing.
• psychoanalysis: Freud's theory of personality and therapeutic technique that attributes thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts.
• unconscious: according to Freud, a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories. According to contemporary psychologists, information processing of which we are unaware.
• id: contains a reservoir of unconscious psychic energy that, according to Freud, strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives.
• superego: the part of personality that, according to Freud, represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgment (the conscience) and for future aspirations.
• fixation: according to Freud, a lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage in which conflicts were unresolved.
• identification: the process by which, according to Freud, children incorporate their parents' values into their developing superegos after realizing they cannot be with their opposite sex parent.
• Oedipus complex: according to Freud, a boy's sexual desires toward his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father.
• defense mechanisms: in psychoanalytic theory, the ego's protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality.
• displacement: psychoanalytic defense mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person, as when redirecting anger toward a safer outlet.
• projection: psychoanalytic defense mechanism by which people disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others
• rationalization: defense mechanism that offers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one's actions.
• reaction formation: psychoanalytic defense mechanism by which the ego unconsciously switches unacceptable impulses into their opposites. Thus, people may express feelings that are the opposite of their anxiety-arousing unconscious feelings.
• regression: defense mechanism in which an individual faced with anxiety retreats to a more infantile psychosexual stage, where some psychic energy remains fixated.
• repression: in psychoanalytic theory, the basic defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness.
• collective unconscious: Carl Jung's concept of a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species' history.
• projective test: a personality test, such as the Rorschach or TAT, that provides ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger projection of one's inner dynamics.
• Inkblot test: the most widely used projective test, designed by Hermann Rorschach
• Thematic Apperception Test (TAT): a projective test in which people express their inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes.
• self-actualization: according to Maslow, the ultimate psychological need that arises after basic physical and psychological needs are met and self-esteem is achieved; the motivation to fulfill one's potential.
• self-concept: (1) a sense of one's identity and personal worth. (2) all our thoughts and feelings about ourselves, in answer to the question, "Who am I?"
• unconditional positive regard: according to Rogers, an attitude of total acceptance toward another person.
• personality inventory: a questionnaire (often with true-false or agree-disagree items) on which people respond to items designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors; used to assess selected personality traits.
• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI): the most widely researched and clinically used of all personality tests. Originally developed to identify emotional disorders (still considered its most appropriate use), this test is now used for many other screening purposes.
• empirically derived test: a test (such as the MMPI) developed by testing a pool of items and then selecting those that discriminate between groups (find a relationship)
• reciprocal determinism: the interacting influences between personality and environmental factors.
• external locus of control: the perception that chance or outside forces beyond one's personal control determine one's fate.
• internal locus of control: the perception that one controls one's own fate.
• personal control: our sense of controlling our environment rather than feeling helpless.
• positive psychology: the scientific study of optimal human functioning; aims to discover and promote strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive.
• self-esteem: one's feelings of high or low self-worth.
• spotlight effect: overestimating others' noticing and evaluating our appearance, performance, and blunders (as if we presume a spotlight shines on us).
• oral stage: Psychosexual stage (0-18m) Pleasure centers on the mouth - sucking, biting, chewing
• anal stage: Psychosexual stage (18-36m) Pleasure focuses on bowel and bladder elimination; coping with demands for control
• latency stage: Psychosexual stage (6-puberty) Dormant sexual feelings
• genital stage: Psychosexual stage (puberty on) Maturation of sexual interests
• Carl Jung: Theorist who believed in the collective unconscious and archetypes (universal themes)
• archetypes: ideas and images of the accumulated experience of all human beings
• Alfred Adler: Theorist who developed the inferiority complex, overcoming childhood feelings of inferiority