Chapter 14 - Personality Overview

Study Notes

Personality

Personality is the distinctive and relatively enduring ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that characterize a person's responses to life situations.
Aspects of personality have three characteristics:
- Seen as components of identity that distinguish that person from other people.
- Behaviours viewed as being caused primarily by internal rather than environmental factors.
- Behaviours seem to fit together in a meaningful fashion, suggesting an inner personality that guides and directs behaviour.

Psychodynamic Perspective: Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory

Freud considered personality to be an energy system, powered by instinctual drives, which constantly presses for either direct or indirect release.
Mental events are divided into three categories:
- Conscious: events that we are presently aware of.
- Preconscious: memories, thoughts, feelings, and images that we are unaware of at the moment, but can be recalled.
- Unconscious: dynamic realm of wishes, feelings, and impulses that lie beyond our awareness.

Structures of Personality

Personality is divided into three separate but interacting structures:
- Id: primitive and unconscious part of the personality that contains the instincts, operating according to the pleasure principle.
- Ego: executive of personality that is partly conscious, operating according to the reality principle.
- Superego: moral arm of personality that internalizes standards and values of society, rewards compliance with pride, and non-compliance with guilt.

Defense Mechanisms

Unconscious processes by which the ego prevents the expression of anxiety-arousing impulses, including:
- Repression: preventing anxiety-arousing memories from entering consciousness.
- Sublimination (displacement): completely masking the sinister underlying impulses through other forms (art, sports, etc.).
- Rationalization: reinterpreting the urge in acceptable terms.
- Projection: seeing one's own urges in others.
- Isolation: memories allowed back into consciousness without motives or emotions.
- Regression: mentally returning to an earlier, safer state.
- Conversion: conflict converted into physical symptom.

Psychosexual Stages

Stages of development in which psychic energy is focused on certain body parts, including:
- Oral (0-2 years old).
- Anal (2-3 years old).
- Phallic (4-6 years old).
- Latency (7 years old until puberty).
- Genital (puberty and onwards).
Deprivation or overindulgences in a stage can result in fixation, in which instincts are focused on a particular theme.

Evaluating Psychoanalytic Theory

Alfred Adler's Psychoanalytic Theory: humans are social beings motivated by social interest (the desire to advance the welfare of others).
Carl Jung's Analytic Psychology: humans possess a personal unconscious of life experiences and a collective unconscious of memories accumulated throughout the history of humanity.
Memories are shared among humans through the collective unconscious.

Description

This quiz provides an overview of Chapter 14 on Personality, focusing on the distinctive ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that characterize individuals' responses to life situations. It covers the components of identity, internal factors influencing behaviors, and the meaningful interconnections within personality traits.