psych exam

• Personality

  People's typical ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving
• Trait

  A relatively enduring predisposition that influences our behaviour across many situations
• Traits

  • conscientiousness
  • extroversion
  • openness
  • agreeableness
• Significance of age 30, age 50
• Formal measures of personality

  Typically used for
• Informal measures of personality

  What are some
• Goal of studying personality

  • Explain both commonalities and differences among people
• Nomothetic approaches

  Identify general principles that govern the behaviour of all individuals
• Idiographic approaches

  Identify the unique characteristics and experiences within a person
• Causes of Personality

  • Genetic factors
  • Shared environmental factors
  • Non-shared environmental factors
• Twin studies and adoption studies

  Central to disentangling the effects of causes of personality
• Numerous personality traits are influenced by genetics
• All personality trait correlations are below 1.0
• Correlations for identical twins reared apart are similar to identical twins reared together
• Genes

  Code for proteins that influence functioning of neurotransmitter systems
• Neurotransmitters

  Associated with certain personality traits
• Neurotransmitters and personality traits

  • Low serotonin and impulsivity and aggression
  • Dopamine activity and novelty seeking
• Major personality theories

  • Psychoanalytic theory
  • Behavioural and social learning theories
  • Humanistic theories
  • Trait models
• Psychoanalytic theory

  Developed by Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, based on case studies
• Assumptions of psychoanalytic theory

  • Psychic determinism
  • Symbolic meaning
  • Unconscious motivation
• ID

  Primitive impulses, sex drive libido, aggressive drive, operates by means of the pleasure principle
• SUPEREGO

  Moral standards, internalizations of right and wrong that we learn, causes guilt
• EGO

  The mediator, resolves competing demands of superego and id, governed by the reality principle
• Conflict between the ID, SUPEREGO, and EGO causes psychological distress
• Levels of awareness

  • Conscious
  • Preconscious
  • Unconscious
• Stanford Marshmallow Experiment

  Study on delayed gratification, children who waited longer at 4 were more successful later in life
• Freud's defence mechanisms

  • Repression
  • Denial
  • Reaction-Formation
  • Projection
  • Displacement
  • Sublimation
• Oral stage

  Birth to 18 months, infants receive pleasure by sucking and drinking
• Anal stage

  18 months to 3 years, child wants to alleviate tension and experience pleasure by moving their bowels
• Phallic stage

  3 to 6 years, focuses on genitals, Oedipus/Electra complex, superego develops
• Latency stage

  6 to puberty, sexual impulses are repressed, sexual energy redirected
• Genital stage

  Puberty to adulthood, sexual impulses awaken, romantic attraction emerges
• Major criticisms of Freud's theory

  • Unfalsifiable
  • Failed predictions
  • Reliance on unrepresentative samples
  • Gender-biased/sexist
  • Questionable conception of unconscious
• Primed stereotypes can influence behaviour, like the elderly schema example
• Neo-Freudians


  Differ from Freud in decreased emphasis on sexuality and increased emphasis on social drives, more optimistic about personality growth
• Alfred Adler


  Human motivation is striving for superiority, goal is to better ourselves through style of life
• Carl Jung


  Proposed personal unconscious and collective unconscious, archetypes
• Behavioural perspective


  How the external environment/learning impacts behaviour
• Skinner's view


  Personality is a collection of response tendencies tied to stimulus situations (operant conditioning)
• Bandura's social cognitive theory


  Personality exists between a person and their environment, reciprocal determinism, observational learning