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Flashcards in Introduction Deck (37)
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1
Q

What are the Basic premises of Freud?

A
  • Most behaviour driven by unconscious forces; motives of which we have limited awareness
  • Much of our psychological energy is taken up suppressing unconscious urges. Unconscious is really powerful
  • Much of our behaviour is shaped by early-life experiences; difficult, perhaps impossible, to change later on. Early life really matters
2
Q

What kinds of consciousness are there? (Freud)

A

conscious, pre-conscious and conscious

3
Q

What is Conscious? (Freud)

A

me being aware of you in the audience, aware of what is going on around you

4
Q

What is Preconscious? (Freud)

A

easily accessible material; my street, my office

5
Q

What is Unconscious? (Freud)

A

thoughts, memories, urges, we are unaware of because they are actively kept in the unconscious (repression). Painful thoughts you don’t think about, can’t be accessed

6
Q

What did Freud believe that dreams showed?

A

Dreams were believed to be a route into the unconscious

7
Q

What is Manifest content?

A

recalled by the dreamer

8
Q

What is Latent content?

A

interpreted by the analyst

9
Q

What are believed to be the Sources of motivation?

A
  • Darwin: evolutionary and natural selection
  • Libido; sexual drives
  • Life-preserving drives: hunger, pain. Acting a certain way in response
  • Death instinct
  • Human motivation is accounted for via these drives
10
Q

What is the id?

A

id: raw, uninhibited, instinctual energy. E.g. ‘I want it now!’, Pleasure principle (achieve pleasure/avoid pain); sex/aggressive drives, greatest interest to Freud

11
Q

What is the ego?

A

-Ego: socialisation during development means the child needs to plan, reason etc to satisfy the needs of the id, reality principle. Helps control the id to not be impulsive.

12
Q

What is the superego?

A

-Superego: latest in development, the ‘conscience’ of the child, believed to be internalisations of parental attitudes and expectations; morality. E.g. is it right to bribe someone?

13
Q

What happens in the Oral stage: birth to 1 year?

A
  • Primary focus is on feeding; satisfying these needs. This is the basic need to satisfy the hunger
  • Baby’s lips, mouth, tongue are all erogenous zones
  • Focus is in achieving basic gratification
  • Failure to meet needs at this stage can lead to a oral personality. Self-oriented, impatient, demanding, may continue to seek oral gratification (especially when stressed): thumb sucking, nail biting, cigarette smoking
14
Q

What happens in the Anal stage: 18 months to 3 years?

A
  • Lower trunk matures; comes under greater physical control, can go to the toilet by themselves, can control bowel movement
  • Sensual pleasure from bowel movements; this becomes the new erogenous zone
  • Focus on the notion of power and control, can come into conflict with caregiver as they are able to do something themselves.
  • Fixation can lead to anal personality: Early/harsh potty training = anal personality – orderly, stingy, stubborn. Liberal potty training = anal-expulsive personality – untidy, disorganised, does not follow rules.
15
Q

What happens in the Phallic stage: 3-5 years?

A
  • Penis becomes erogenous zone
  • Penis envy (girls); castration anxiety (boys)
  • Boys become aware of their mothers as sexual objects; father seen as rival (Oedipal complex).
16
Q

What happens in the Latency stage: around 5- 12 years ?

A
  • Resting stage (for psychosexual development); socio-learning.
  • Genital stage: around 12 to 18 years – Puberty; more mature sexual attachment occurs.
17
Q

What is Intrapsychic conflict?

A
  • id vs ego vs superego. Conflict between the three e.g. going to a party will mean missing a lecture!
  • id: saying to do it
  • Ego: maybe I can sneak out and won’t be noticed
  • Superego: it is wrong to waste tuition fees
  • Consequence = anxiety
18
Q

What is repression?

A

Pushing undesirable things away, not pathological unless taking to extremes

19
Q

What is projection?

A

blaming others for our shortcomings, e.g. blaming the lecturer for a bad exam grade

20
Q

What is rationalisation?

A

post-hoc explanation, e.g. I didn’t want that job anyway

21
Q

Strengths of the Freud model

A
  • Provided provocative theories of human behaviour – led to much research
  • Often very good descriptions of human behaviour
  • Defence mechanisms – helps make ourselves feel better
22
Q

Problems with the Freud model

A
  • Based on evidence from his patients – however, to protect anonymity very few case studies were published. Middle class stay at home mums, can’t be generalised
  • Often revised his ideas – hard to follow the theoretical narrative. Changed his ideas
  • Often vague – hard to devise clear empirical tests of his ideas. Ideas cannot be tested
  • Is it feasible to explain the lionshare of behaviour via sexual and aggressive drives? – Little on social drives etc.
  • Modern evidence does not place overly high importance on early life effects for personality development. – Behaviour genetics (more later on in the course)
  • Good evidence of unconscious processes – Less clear if these processes drive behaviour
23
Q

What study did Pavlov conduct?

A
  • Used classical conditioning to train dogs
  • Unconditioned response for a dog to salivate at a bowl of food
  • Ringing a bell is a neutral stimulus
  • Show the dog the food and the bell to pair them to create the conditioned response of the dog salivating at the bell
24
Q

What did Watson do?

A
  • Looked at human behaviour
  • Developed and popularized this approach in the US
  • Rejected psychoanalysis as unscientific
  • Argued for a move towards observable constructs, and a move away from studying the unconscious. Founding figure of the school of behaviourism
  • Cannot study anything that cannot be physically observed
  • Application to humans: Linking desired outcome (reading) with a pleasurable activity (mother’s warmth)
25
Q

What did BF Skinner look into?

A
  • Argued that classical conditioning is too simple to explain most behaviour
  • Developed operant conditioning
  • Based upon the notion that humans are motivated to achieve pleasure and avoid pain, i.e. humans ‘operate’ on the environment to achieve their goal state
26
Q

What is the pigeon example?

A
  • Used a Skinner box
  • Pecked on a key and food would come out
  • Wanted to teach them the difference between red and green lights
27
Q

What did Skinner think about personality?

A
  • In contrast to, say, Freud (and many others) he argued that there are no ‘structures in the head/mind’
  • In fact, he de-emphasised the notion of personality: He didn’t believe in personality per se, nor that his ideas were a personality theory.
  • Believed that conditioning could account for what we otherwise thought of as personality: i.e. behaviour is simply the set of responses we have acquired to deal with common stimuli
28
Q

What did Skinner think about psychopathology?

A
  • No such thing as a ‘sick personality’, outside world is responsible
  • Rather, a failure to respond appropriately to stimuli
  • e.g. social anxiety = faulty reinforcement histories in which social skills were not developed, not a result of a specific parenting style in a specific developmental stage (Freud)
29
Q

What are the strengths of the learning theory?

A
  • Committed to systematic hypothesis testing, rigorous and careful tests need to be done
  • Clear recognition of the importance of external factors as shapers of behaviour
  • Pragmatic approach; has led to much treatment-oriented development i.e. clear steps can be taken to alleviate, say, behaviour problems such as aversion therapy
30
Q

What are the problems with learning theory?

A
  • Lacks a serious discussion of any genetic influence – Skinner did acknowledge these possibilities, but downplayed them.
  • Studies superficial behaviour, not useful in humans daily life
  • Fails to acknowledge the rich mental lives we possess – These constructs are deemed beyond science and so not examined. – But gravity is unobservable; didn’t stop Einstein making progress – For this, we must await the cognitive revolution…
  • Difficult to perform such work with humans – Bandura and Rotter; some success. Mainly focused on animal studies
  • Lacks a single unified theory; a collection of techniques and processes
31
Q

What did Maslow believe?

A

-Humanistic (human potential movement)
-Basic premises:
– Psychoanalytic and learning theories were dominant in the early 20th century
– Maslow and similar others – humanistic psychologists – were inspired by existential philosophy • How do we find meaning for our existence? • So-called “third-force” approach
– Personal growth; free-will; responsibility
– Maslow found the negative views of humanity from psychoanalysis uninspiring
– Wanted to show that humans were capable of great things • Started exploring high achievers
Human

32
Q

What are “Deficiency motives”?

A

Hunger, thirst, need to be safe, need to be loved

33
Q

What are “Growth motives” (or “being motives”)?

A

Developing skills; giving love

34
Q

What are the hierachy of needs?

A
  • Self-actualisation – you are living to the highest of your potential
  • Esteem – you’ve acquired the skills that lead to honour and recognition
  • Love and belonging – achieving deeper, more meaningful relationships
  • Safety – feeling safe
  • Physiological needs – food, water and sleep
  • Dispute how they should be ordered
35
Q

What is self-actualisation?

A
  • Highest level
  • Once basic needs are met we can focus on what we want from life – Indeed, one might be rich and professionally successful but unfulfilled and unhappy
  • Not all get to this stage
  • Maslows’ examples of self-actualisers: – Albert Einstein; William James; Thomas Jefferson – Bill Gates? Mark Zuckerberg?
36
Q

What are peak experiences?

A
  • Totally absorbed by the activity.
  • Challenging and requiring full attention, but not so difficult that progress cannot be made.
  • The individual feels in control.
  • Personally engrossing; does not think about the self.
  • All sense of time is lost.
37
Q

What are the problems with Maslows model?

A
  • Reasonable enough model, but rather simplified – No biology mentioned (we will come to this later in the course)
  • Limited evidence base – Selected specific individuals who were perceived as self-actualisers; inconsistent measurement
  • Concepts hard to define precisely; impossible to formally test
  • The basic needs are arbitrarily picked and presumably there are others to be included as well.
  • No exact mention of how to self-actualize. – Although does provide some guide; e.g. student-centred learning
  • Focused on growth; doesn’t really offer much about mental illness