Psychology of Anxiety and Defense Mechanisms

Anxiety

• Anxiety is an extremely unpleasant emotional state that results from the ego's reaction to the threatening urge of instincts from the id.
• The most overwhelming experience of anxiety is birth trauma, which is the basis of all subsequent anxieties.
• There are three types of anxiety:
  • Moral anxiety: fear of doing something contrary to the superego, thus experiencing guilt.
  • Reality anxiety: caused by real, objective sources of danger in the environment.
  • Neurotic anxiety: unconscious fear of being overpowered by instinctual impulses.

Defense Mechanisms

• Defense mechanisms are unconscious psychological strategies for coping with threatening instinctual urges.
• There are 11 defense mechanisms:
  • Projection: attributing one's own unacceptable thoughts or feelings to others.
  • Introjection: internalization of characteristics of a feared or loved individual.
  • Displacement: diverting emotional feelings from their original source to a substitute target.
  • Rationalization: justification of a provoking thought that may be otherwise anxiety-provoking.
  • Sublimation: modification of unacceptable urges into acceptable urges by changing the object or means of expression into a productive way.
  • Reaction formation: managing unacceptable feelings or impulses by expressing their opposites.
  • Repression: excluding threatening thoughts, memories, emotions, or events from consciousness.
  • Regression: reversion to immature patterns of behavior.
  • Intellectualization: separating normal feelings from an unpleasant situation into logic-tight compartments.
  • Denial: refusal to accept facts or reality.
  • Propium: all traits that a person regards as central to their lives.

Functional Autonomy

• Functional autonomy holds that some human motives are functionally independent from the original motive responsible for a particular behavior.
• There are two types of functional autonomy:
  • Perseverative functional autonomy: the tendency of some basic behavior to continue without reinforcement.
  • Propriate functional autonomy: self-sustaining motives related to propium.

Stages of Development of Self

• There are eight stages of development of self:
  • Bodily sense of self (0-3): sensory information provides an anchor for self-awareness.
  • Ego enhancement or self-esteem (2-3): sense of pride or shame depending on achievement.
  • Ego-extension (3-4 or 4-6): identifying with personal possessions, loved ones, and ideal causes and loyalties.
  • Self-image (4-6): learned expectations of roles we are expected to enact.
  • Rational agent (6-12): engaging in reflective thought and problem-solving.
  • Propriate striving (12+): "ego-involved" behavior, characterized by the unification of personality in pursuit of major life goals.
  • The knower (adult): integration of the previous seven aspects of proprium.

Hayns Eysenck's Biological Typology

• Personality is defined as the stable and enduring organization of a person's character, temperament, intellect, and physique that determines their adjustment to the environment.
• There are four aspects to personality:
  • Character: system of cognitive behavior (will).
  • Temperament: system of affective behavior (emotion).
  • Intellect.
  • Physique: system of bodily configuration and neuroendocrine endowment.
• Personality is governed by three dimensions or universal traits.

Filipino Values

• There are seven Filipino values:
  • Family orientation: the basic and most important unit of Filipino life is the family.
  • Joy and humor: Filipinos have the ability to find humor in everything.
  • Flexibility, adaptability, and creativity: Filipinos are known to have an aversion to following standardized norms or processes.
  • Religious adherence.
  • Ability to survive: Filipinos have evolved a sense of ingenuity or the capacity to live with whatever they have through time.
  • Hard work and industriousness: Filipinos have proven to be a people with an industrious attitude.
  • Hospitality: Filipinos are known for their legendary hospitality.

Types of Families

• There are five types of families:
  • Nuclear family: a family unit consisting of two adults and any number of children living together.
  • Extended family: grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, either all living nearby or within the same household.
  • Reconstituted family: a family where one or both adults have children from previous relationships living with them.
  • Single-parent family: a single parent not living with a partner, who has most of the day-to-day responsibilities for raising the children.
  • Same-sex family: a family where one or both adults are in a same-sex relationship, with or without children.

Filipino Characteristics and Traits

• Filipinos are described as friendly, outgoing, sensitive, easily offended, nosy, garrulous, direct, hospitable, feisty, irreverent, good-natured, clever, witty, gregarious, happy, generous, easy to laugh, gracious, easy to befriend, casual, fun-loving, sensitive, and hospitable.

Personal and Professional Growth Process

• Building self-awareness in intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships is a developing process.
• It involves recognizing one's own strengths and weaknesses and developing the abilities needed to perform a job successfully.

Interactionist/Labelling Perspective

• Labeling theory is a sociological approach to deviance that focuses on how social control agents attach stigmatizing stereotypes to certain groups and how the stigmatized adjust their behavior after being labeled.
• There are formal and informal labels, with formal labels given by people with formal position and the ability to recognize aberrant behavior, and informal labels given by groups of individuals without official power to do so.