Use LEFT and RIGHT arrow keys to navigate between flashcards;
Use UP and DOWN arrow keys to flip the card;
H to show hint;
A reads text to speech;
28 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
|
Personality Processes |
Mechanisms that unfold over times to produce the effects of personality traits - Includes perception, thought, motivation, emotion - Understanding these will help us understand someone's personality
|
|
|
Historical Roots of Research Into Personality Processes Learning Social Learning Phenomenology Psychoanalysis Biological Approach Trait Approach |
Learning: But ignoring cognition is too limited Social Learning: Focused on cognitive processes Phenomenology: Emphasizes importance of the way an individual thinks about the world Psychoanalysis: Levels of consciousness and the need for compromise Biological Approach: How representations of the self may be organized in the brain Trait Approach: People have different traits based on different thoughts, feelings, and desires |
|
|
Perception: Priming & Chronic Accessibility |
People are predisposed to perceive the world in different ways
Priming: Activation of a concept or idea by repeatedly perceiving it or thinking about it; usual result is that this concept or idea comes to mind more quickly and easily in new situations
Chronic Accessibility: Tendency of an idea or concept to come easily to mind for a particular individual
- Part of our personalities - May come from evolution, temperament, or experience - Different people have a predisposition to be primed for certain concepts |
|
|
Perception: Rejection Sensitivity |
- Affects interpretation of ambiguous signals - Often creates a self-fulfilling prophecy - Can result in seemingly inconsistent behavior |
|
|
Perception: Aggression |
- Can cause some people to perceive an ambiguous situation as threatening - May come to guide a person's thoughts or actions - Even if certain ideas come quickly to mind and cause problems, it still might be possible to avoid responding to situations in a programmed manner |
|
|
Perception: Perceptual Defense |
Appears to have the ability to screen out information that might make the individual anxious or uncomfortable - Similar to psychoanalytic defense mechanisms - People can have a psychological reaction to emotionally charged words before they are consciously aware of them
|
|
|
Perception: Vigilance and Defense |
Why do some people tend to see exactly what they fear most? - Possibility that defense mechanisms exist for a purpose - Can be overused, but in general they are adaptive functions of the ego that protect the individual from feeling too much anxiety - Also, people vary in the way which they are perceptually vigilant versus defensive of potentially threatening information |
|
|
Thought Consciousness & STM |
- Determines many, but not all, actions - Not all thinking is conscious
Conscientiousness: Whatever the individual has in mind at the moment
Short-term Memory (STM): Stage of information processing in which the person is consciously aware of a small amount of information (about 7 chunks) as long as that information continues to be actively processed *Limited to 7 + 2 chunks |
|
|
Thought: Consciousness STM & Thinking |
- Chunking can work with ideas Funder's Fifth Law: The purpose of education is to assemble new chunks
Consciousness and psychological health Constructs, chunks, and consciousness |
|
|
Thought: Unconscious Thoughts |
People can do things without knowing why, know things without knowing that they know, and have thoughts and feelings they do not understand *Unconscious is important - We can do so many things without thinking - Consciousness is very small and life is more complicated than that |
|
|
Thought: Two Ways of Thinking Dual-Process Models |
- Contrast the roles of conscious and unconscious thought - Conscious thought is slower - Freud's Theory: Rational and irrational thought - Reflective determinants: slow and largely rational - Impulsive determinants: fast, almost automatic, sometimes irrational |
|
|
Thought: Two Ways of Thinking Cognitive-Experiential Self-Theory (CEST) |
- Seeks to explain unconscious processing and the seemingly irrational emotion-drives sectors of the mind - Rational system: an evolutionary recent innovation, includes language, logic, systematized, factual knowledge; resembles Freud's conception of secondary process thinking - Experiential system: evolutionarily older, tied closely to emotion, assumed to be the way other animals think; resembles Freud's conception of primary process thinking
Different systems may generate different decisions *Systems may interact |
|
|
Motivation Goals & Strategies Implicit and Explicit Goals |
What do you want? How will you try to get it?
Goals: Ends that one desires - Drive behavior by influencing what you attend to, think about, and do
Strategies: Means the individual uses to achieve his goals
Explicit Goals: Those that people can talk about and willingly describe
Implicit Goals: While important, people may not realize they have
|
|
|
Motivation: Goals Short-term and Long-term Idiographic Goals |
Depends on what you want and how long it will take you to get there
Idiographic Goals: Those that are unique to the individuals who pursue them
Current Concerns: Ongoing motivation that persists in the mind until the goal is either attained of abandoned
Personal Projects: What people do; made up of efforts people put into such goals
Personal Strivings: Long-term goals that can organize broad ideas of a person's life
Properties of Ideographic Goals - Conscious at least some of the time - Describe thoughts and behaviors that are aimed at a fairly specific outcome - Can change over time - Goals function independently of each other
Limitations - Goals are not theoretically organized |
|
|
Motivation: Goals Nomothetic Goals |
Refers to a relatively small number of essential motivations that almost everyone pursues - Number of goals |
|
|
Nomothetic Goals McClelland's 3 Primary Motivations |
Needs for achievement Affiliation Power |
|
|
Nomothetic Goals Emmon's Five |
Enjoyment Self-Assertion Esteem Interpersonal success Avoidance of negative affect |
|
|
Nomothetic Goals Two |
Work Social Interaction |
|
|
Nomothetic Goals Goals Circumplex |
Used for seeing the similarities and differences among goals |
|
|
Nomothetic Goals Judgement Goals & Development Goals |
- Can change over time and across situations - Lead to different outcomes: mastery orientation and helplessness - Entity theories: Belief that personal qualities such as intelligence and ability are unchangeable, leading them to respond helplessly to any indication that they do not have what it takes - Incremental theories: Belief that intelligence and ability can change with time and experience; their goals involve not only proving their competence but increasing it - Can be influenced by the person himself/herself or by the eternal situation |
|
|
Motivation: Goals Across the Life Span |
- Young: Preparation for the future - Old (70+): Emotional well-being |
|
|
Motivation: Strategies & Traits |
Traits can produce characteristic adaptations, or generalized scripts - Same strategy can result in different behavior patterns - Different traits can lead to the same strategies |
|
|
Motivation: Strategies Defensive Pessimism (vs. Optimism) |
- Coping, performance, and success are similar to optimists - Find relief when the worst outcome doesn't happen - Some consistency - Advantages and disadvantages to both strategies |
|
|
Emotion |
Type of procedural knowledge (cannot be learned or fully expressed through words, but only through action and experience) - A set of mental and physical procedures |
|
|
Emotion: Experience |
Basic Stages: appraisal, physical responses, facial expressions, nonverbal behavior, motives - Stages can happen at the same time or in a different order - Complex mixture of thought, physical sensations and motivations - Possible sources: immediate stimuli, classical conditioning, memories, and thoughts |
|
|
Emotion: Varieties of Emotion |
Core Emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust - Some emotions may be universal because they were evolutionarily advantageous - May be advantageous to be able to perceive these emotions accurately in others - Circumplex figure |
|
|
Emotion: Individual Differences in Emotional Life |
- Core aspects of personality - Emotional experience - Affect intensity *Risk factor for bad outcomes - Rate of change - Emotional intelligence *Related to emotional expressiveness, quality of personal relationships, and level of optimism |
|
|
Emotion: Happiness |
Three components 1 Overall satisfaction with life 2 Satisfaction with particular life domains 3 Generally high levels of positive emotion and low levels of negative emotion
*Conception can very with age
Three sources: 1 Individual set point 2 Objective life circumstances 3 What the individual does (intentional activity)
*May also be a cause of important outcomes Happiness may have a dark side Related to effective functioning and broad areas |
