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Questions and Answers
Which of the following traits is NOT associated with agreeableness in personality?
Which of the following traits is NOT associated with agreeableness in personality?
Freud believed that childhood experiences have little impact on adult personality.
Freud believed that childhood experiences have little impact on adult personality.
False
Name the three components of Freud's structure of personality.
Name the three components of Freud's structure of personality.
The id, the ego, and the superego.
The id operates according to the __________ principle.
The id operates according to the __________ principle.
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Match the following personality traits with their corresponding characteristics:
Match the following personality traits with their corresponding characteristics:
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What are the main components of classical conditioning as described by Pavlov?
What are the main components of classical conditioning as described by Pavlov?
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Behaviourists emphasize internal personality structures over observable behaviors.
Behaviourists emphasize internal personality structures over observable behaviors.
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What term does Pavlov use to describe the learned reflex established through conditioning?
What term does Pavlov use to describe the learned reflex established through conditioning?
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The stimulus that evokes an unconditioned response without previous conditioning is called an ______.
The stimulus that evokes an unconditioned response without previous conditioning is called an ______.
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Match the following terms with their correct descriptions:
Match the following terms with their correct descriptions:
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What type of self-efficacy is influenced by general feelings of self-efficacy?
What type of self-efficacy is influenced by general feelings of self-efficacy?
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According to self-efficacy theory, failure decreases a person's motivation to try again.
According to self-efficacy theory, failure decreases a person's motivation to try again.
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What is the purpose of the Self-Efficacy Scale by Sherer et al.?
What is the purpose of the Self-Efficacy Scale by Sherer et al.?
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Bandura's theory supports the idea that people learn through __________.
Bandura's theory supports the idea that people learn through __________.
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Match the theorist to their primary contribution:
Match the theorist to their primary contribution:
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Which of the following statements reflects a high level of self-efficacy on the Self-Efficacy Scale?
Which of the following statements reflects a high level of self-efficacy on the Self-Efficacy Scale?
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Self-efficacy perceptions are valid only in specific situations.
Self-efficacy perceptions are valid only in specific situations.
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What is operant conditioning primarily influenced by?
What is operant conditioning primarily influenced by?
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Operant conditioning governs a smaller share of human behavior compared to classical conditioning.
Operant conditioning governs a smaller share of human behavior compared to classical conditioning.
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Who is most well-known for studying operant conditioning?
Who is most well-known for studying operant conditioning?
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Positive reinforcement occurs when a response is __________ because it is followed by the arrival of a pleasant stimulus.
Positive reinforcement occurs when a response is __________ because it is followed by the arrival of a pleasant stimulus.
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What is the primary effect of negative reinforcement?
What is the primary effect of negative reinforcement?
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Match the following terms with their definitions:
Match the following terms with their definitions:
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Extinction in operant conditioning refers to the immediate cessation of a response.
Extinction in operant conditioning refers to the immediate cessation of a response.
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What happens to a response when it no longer produces positive consequences?
What happens to a response when it no longer produces positive consequences?
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Study Notes
Theories of Personality
- Personality is a fairly consistent tendency to behave in a specific way in various situations.
- Distinctiveness is also central to the concept. Each person has a unique set of personality traits.
Lesson Outline
- The nature of personality
- Psychodynamic perspectives
- Behavioural perspectives
- Humanistic perspectives
- Biological perspectives
The Nature of Personality: Defining Personality
- Optimistic personality: A consistent tendency to behave in a cheerful, hopeful, and enthusiastic way across various situations.
- Consistency: Across situations, people demonstrate consistent behaviour.
- Distinctiveness: Each person has unique personality traits.
The Nature of Personality
- Personality explains stability in behaviour over time and in different situations (consistency) and behavioural differences between people reacting to the same conditions (distinctiveness).
- Personality is defined as an individual's unique pattern of consistent behavioural traits.
Personality Traits
- Personality traits are durable dispositions to behave in a particular way across diverse situations.
- Adjectives describing dispositions, like "honest," "dependable," "moody," "impulsive," and "suspicious," represent personality traits.
- Some traits are considered more basic than others; fundamental traits determine more superficial ones. Examples include "impulsive," "restless," "irritable," and "impatient" possibly stemming from a basic "excitable" tendency.
Personality Traits (Big Five)
- Extraversion: Outgoing, sociable, cheerful, friendly, and assertive (positive emotionality).
- Neuroticism: Anxious, hostile, self-conscious, insecure, and vulnerable (negative emotionality).
- Openness: Curious, flexible, vivid fantasy, imaginative, artistic sensitivity, and unconventional attitudes.
- Agreeableness: Sympathetic, trusting, cooperative, modest, and straightforward.
- Conscientiousness: Diligent, disciplined, well-organised, punctual, and dependable.
Psychodynamic Perspectives
- Psychodynamic theories explore unconscious mental forces influencing behaviour.
- Sigmund Freud, a neurologist, developed psychoanalysis focusing on verbal interactions to probe deeply into patients' lives and treat mental disorders.
Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory
- Critics questioned Freud's theory due to three main concerns:
- Unconscious forces governing behaviour
- Childhood experiences determining adult personality
- Personality shaped by sexual urges.
Freud's Structure of Personality
- Id, Ego, Superego
- Id: Primitive, instinctive component operating on the pleasure principle (immediate gratification).
- Ego: Decision-making component balancing the id's desires and social expectations (reality principle).
- Superego: Moral component internalizing societal standards (right and wrong).
The Id
- Primitive, instinctive component. Operates according to the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification of all urges.
- Involves primary process thinking – primitive, illogical, irrational, and fantasy-oriented.
The Ego
- Decision-making component. Operates according to the reality principle, balancing the id's impulses with societal expectations.
- Uses secondary process thinking – relatively rational, realistic, and problem-solving oriented.
The Superego
- Moral component. Internalizes societal standards of right and wrong.
- Develops during early childhood, based on training about acceptable behaviour. High superego standards can trigger excessive guilt.
Freud's Three Levels of Mind
- Conscious: Awareness in the present.
- Preconscious: Contents accessible with effort (e.g., memories).
- Unconscious: Thoughts, feelings, memories, and desires outside awareness, influencing behavior.
Freud's Conflict and Defence Mechanisms
- Behaviour results from ongoing internal conflicts (id, ego, superego).
- Anxiety arises from conflicts among these parts of the personality.
- Defence mechanisms protect individuals from painful emotions (anxiety, guilt) through self-deception, mental exercises.
Defence Mechanisms
- Rationalisation: Creating believable excuses for unacceptable behavior.
- Repression: Burying distressing thoughts, anxious feelings, and painful memories into the unconscious.
- Projection: Attributing one's own unacceptable thoughts, feelings, and motives to another person.
- Displacement: Shifting emotional responses from the source of the anxiety to a less-threatening target.
- Regression: Reverting to immature behavioural patterns to cope with stress.
- Identification: Bolstering self-esteem by associating with a person or group.
Freud's Theory of Development: Psychosexual Stages
- Personality's foundation is laid by age 5, through psychosexual stages.
- Sexual urges shift in focus during different developmental periods.
- Fixation can occur if needs at a stage are either overgratified or frustrated, influencing adult personality.
Psychosexual Stages
- Oral (0-2): Oral gratification through feeding, thumb-sucking, babbling.
- Anal (2-3): Child learns to respond to societal demands (bowel and bladder control).
- Phallic (3-7): Child realizes gender differences, becomes aware of sexuality.
- Latency (7-11): Development continues but sexual urges remain relatively quiet.
- Genital (11+): Adolescent becomes ready to maturely deal with opposite sex.
Evaluating Psychodynamic Perspectives
- Provided far-reaching personality theories.
- Unconscious forces, internal conflict, early childhood experiences, and defense mechanisms are key concepts.
- However, criticisms relate to poor testability (vague concepts impossible to measure), inadequate evidence (mostly case studies not large-scale) and methodological issues. Additionally the approach has been criticised as sexist.
Behavioural Perspectives
- Emphasis on observable behaviour.
- Abandoned focusing on the mind in favor of overt (obvious/unconcealed) behavior.
- Little interest in internal personality structures (id, ego, superego).
- Views personality in terms of response tendencies; tied to stimuli and situation.
- Focus on how personality develops through learning (conditioning).
Classical Conditioning
- Learning where a neutral stimulus develops the ability to cause a response that another stimulus caused.
- Pavlov's experiment using dogs – pairing a neutral stimulus (tone) with an unconditioned stimulus (food) resulted in the neutral stimulus eliciting the same response (salivation) as the unconditioned stimulus.
- This demonstrates how learned reflexes are acquired.
Classical Conditioning in Everyday Life
- Crucial for acquiring emotional responses (fears, anxieties).
- Classical conditioning is responsible for many irrational fears
- Accounts for more realistic anxieties, such as a fear of going to work.
Classical Conditioning: Extinction
- Weakening or disappearance of a conditioned response, usually through consistent presentation of the conditioned stimulus without the unconditioned stimulus.
- Extinguishing responses varies in length depending on the strength of the conditioned bond when extinction begins.
Skinner's Operant Conditioning
- Learning where behavior is influenced and controlled by its consequences. Examples:
- In operant conditioning, the subject learns connections between actions and consequences.
- Operant responses are emitted; not elicited like in classical conditioning.
The Power of Reinforcement
- Positive reinforcement: Strengthening response by introducing a pleasant stimulus. Example: studying hard for a good grade.
- Negative reinforcement: Strengthening response by removing an unpleasant stimulus. Example: removing a curfew for good behaviour.
- This kind of learning controls a vast share of human behavior because the responses are voluntary.
Punishment
- Weakening response by introducing an unpleasant stimulus. Example: a child who misbehaves receives a punishment.
- Punishment is a different event than negative reinforcement.
Evaluating Behavioural Perspectives
- Well-grounded in empirical research.
- Explains how conditioning influences emotional responses/personality.
- Shows how personality development is shaped by consequences.
- Identifies some inconsistencies in how people behave in different situations.
Disadvantages of the Behavioural Approach
- Neglected cognitive processes (thinking/feelings).
- Over-reliance on animal research; indiscriminately generalizing animal behaviour to humans.
Humanistic Perspectives
- Emphasizes human qualities (free will, growth potential), an optimistic view of human nature.
- Criticizes psychodynamic/behavioral viewpoints as dehumanizing (reducing people's behaviours to animalistic or environmental factors).
- Recognises that human behaviour is influenced by free will
- Focuses on the subjective experience (self-concept) of the individual.
Rogers' Person-Centred Theory
- Focus on personal growth through sensitivity training, encounter groups, others, aiming to connect with one's true self in therapy.
- Emphasises a person's subjective view in his personality theory.
- Rogers called this approach "person-centered theory".
The Self and its Development
- Self-concept: Self-perception of one's nature, qualities, and behavior.
- Incongruence: Disparity between self-concept and actual experience.
- Congruence: Accurate match between self-concept and experience.
Personality Development
- Rogers connects childhood experiences with the development of congruence or incongruence in personality.
- Emphasised conditional/unconditional affection from parents – believing affection from parents depends on their child's actions is a critical factor in personality development.
Anxiety
- Incongruence between self-concept and reality causes threat and anxiety.
- Anxiety results when people fear being unable to meet societal standards
Maslow's Theory of Self-Actualisation
- Outlines a hierarchy of needs, organised as a pyramid (from basic physiological needs to self-actualisation) with an innate drive for personal growth.
- Growth needs include knowledge, understanding, order, and aesthetic beauty.
- Maslow investigated and described the characteristics of individuals with exceptionally healthy personalities; they are seen as self-actualising individuals
The Hierarchy of Needs
- Physiological needs: Basic like food, water, etc
- Safety needs: Need for security, stability
- Belongingness and love needs: Affiliation and acceptance
- Esteem needs: Confidence, achievement
- Cognitive needs: Knowledge, understanding
- Aesthetic needs: Order, beauty
- Self-actualisation needs: Realisation of one's full potential
Evaluating Humanistic Perspectives
- Added a fresh perspective on understanding personality, focusing on subjective experience.
- Acknowledged the importance of personal factors, though criticised for overly optimistic view.
- Valuable for understanding self-concept and subjective reality; but viewed by some as lacking adequate research/testable hypotheses.
Biological Perspectives
- Examines how heredity influences personality, especially with identical twins' similar behaviours and characteristics.
- Eysenck's theory links personality traits (extraversion/introversion) to inherited differences in physiological functioning and conditioning.
- Twin studies showing greater similarity between identical twins than fraternal twins on personality traits supports the role of genetic inheritance.
Recent Research in Behavioural Genetics
- Twin studies support the role of heredity in influencing personality.
- Findings in identical twins have helped assess relative impact of inherited and environment factors.
- Heritability ratios estimate the proportion of trait variability explainable by genetic variance, varying by trait.
Nature-Nurture Debate
- Twin studies investigate whether environmental or hereditary factors influence personality traits more.
- Twin studies show individuals who share the same genes, raised apart, showed more similarities in personality, suggesting underlying genetic influences.
The Evolutionary Approach to Personality
- Examines personality in terms of adaptive value for species over many generations, with a focus on reproductive success.
- Behaviour traits/abilities have likely contributed to reproductive fitness in ancestral humans.
Evaluating Biological Perspectives
- Useful for understanding the biological underpinnings of personality and the role of genetics.
- Eysenck highlights specific links between personality traits and inherited physiological differences.
- Weakness of biological perspectives includes lack of complete theory, reliance on case studies, and difficulties measuring hereditary and environmental contributions to personality.
Theoretical Diversity
- Different theories focus on different aspects of behaviour, often emphasizing different points of view.
- Multiple aspects of personality are usually influenced by several theories or perspectives.
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Description
Test your knowledge on personality traits, Freud's theories, and classical conditioning. This quiz covers critical concepts such as agreeableness, self-efficacy, and Pavlov's studies. Challenge yourself and see how well you understand these foundational psychological principles.
