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40 Cards in this Set

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Structured personality testing
Personality tests attempt to measure personality traits, states, types, and other aspects of personalities. Most try to assign personality types based on measurements of one's personality traits. Subjects are usually asked to respond to an objective, written statement that is designed to minimize anbiguity. There are two approaches: deductive and empirical. The MMPI is one such test which uses the empirical approach.
MMPI
The most used personality test in the world.
MMPI stands for Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. The MMPI consists of true-false questions intended to measure certain personality dimensions and clinical conditions such as depression. It was originally developed in 1940's and has 550 items. The MMPI was based empirically (based on evidence rather than theory). The MMPI tested for many psychological disorders including depression, paranoia, schizophrenia, and OCD (among others). There is also an MMPI-A for adolescents. Has built in faker-detectors.
Type A behavior pattern
Chronic Sense of time urgency. Competitive achieving. Sense of personal mission. Many self-imposed deadlines. HIgh pace in mental and physical activities. Aggression and hostility. Found in ~50% of college freshmen and ~85% of corporate executives. Can be diagnosed using stress interview or interactive gaming. Type A;s achieve more than Type B's. Grudge-bearing, bitter Type A's are 2-6 times as likely to have a heart attack than the average person.
Catell's personality research
Took Alport's list of adjectives and reduced them down to 16 personality factors using factor analysis.
Projective testing with rationale
Having a patient project themselves along with all their problems on someone else such as a "friend." Projective techniques are designed to encourage people to project their personality characteristics onto ambiguous stimuli. Two such projective techniques are the Rorschach inkblot test and the Thematic Apperception Test.
Rorschach inkblot procedure
The Rorschach technique consists of 10 ambiguous cards, 5 black and white and 5 colored. Psychologists hand a card to the patient and ask the patient what it might be then how it relates to the person. The psychologist then attempts to interpret what the answers provided might mean. There are many problems with this test.
TAT
The Thematic Apperception Test consists of pictures that patients are asked to make up a story for describing what events led up to the scene depicted, what is happening in the scene depicted, and what will happen in the future. It is used to measure people's need for achievement, power, and affiliation.
Trait theories
Hans Eysenck: two personality dimensions: [extroversion vs. introversion] & [neurotocism vs. stability]-- can be related back to Hypocrates 4 types. Norman's big five traits: conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness to experience, extroversion
situationism vs. trait consistency
Situationism is the belief that personality is more influenced by external factors than by internal traits or motivations.
Trait consistency is the belief that the traits a person possesses are stable and unchanging.
interactionism
Interactionism is a theory in sociology which looks at the meaning of our actions
psychodynamic personality theories
A psychodynamic theory relates personality to the interplay of conflicting forces within the individual, including unconscious ones. In laymen's terms, you think about both sides of an issue in your head and come up with your opinion. These opinions are your personality.
psychoanalysis
The method of psychological therapy originated by Sigmund Freud in which free association, dream interpretation, and analysis of resistance and transference are used to expolore repressed or unconscious impulses, anxieties, and internal conflicts, in order to free psychic energy for mature love and work.
catharsis
A release of pent-up emotional stress.
the unconscious
The unsconscious is the repository of memories, emotions, and thoughts, many of them illogical, which affect our behavior even though we cannot talk about them.
stages of psychosexual development
5 stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital.
psychosexual development: oral stage
The oral stage: the infant derives intense psychosexual pleasure from stimulation of the mouth, particularly while sucking at the mother's breast. Those who become fixated at this stage receive great pleasure from eating, drinking, and smoking, and may have lasting concerns with dependence and alcohol.
psychosexual development: anal stage
At about 2 years old, children get psychosexual pleasure from the sensations of bowel movements and controlling them. Someone fixated at this stage (anal retentive) goes through life "holding things back"- being orderly, stingy, and stubborn- or the opposite (anal expulsive) may become extremely messy and wasteful.
psychosexual development: phallic stage
At about 3 years old, children play with their genitals. Freud believed they became sexually attracted to the opposite sex parent and he said boys are afraid of being castrated and girls develop "penis envy."
psychosexual development: latency period
From about ages 5 or 6 in adolescence, children suppress their psychosexual interest. They mostly plaly with children of the same sex. This does not appear in all societies.
psychosexual development: genital period
Beginning at puberty, people take a strong sexual interest in other people. According to Freud, anyone who has fixated at any earlier stage will have less libido left for this stage.
components of personality
The id- consists of all our biological drives, such as sex and hunger, that demand instant gratification
The ego- the rational, decision-making aspect of the personality
The superego- contains the memory of the rules and prohibitions we learned from our parents and the rest of society.
Defense Mechanisms (know types)
Defense mechanisms are how the ego defends itself against conflicts and anxieties by relegating unpleasant thoughts and impulses to the unconscious. The eight defense mechanisms are:
1)Repression: motivated forgetting. You reject unacceptable thoughts, desires, and memories by banishing them to the unconscious.
2) Denial: the refusal to believe information that provokes anxiety.
3)Rationalization: When we attempt to prove that our actions are rational and justifiable and thus worthy of approval
4) Displacement: diverting a behavior or thought away from its natural target toward a less threatening target
5) Regression: a return to a more immature level of functioning
6) Projection: the attribution of one's own undesirable characteristics to other people
7)Reaction formation: when we present ourselves as the opposite of what we really are to hide the unpleasant truth either from ourselves or others
8) Sublimation: the transformation of sexual or aggressive energies into culturally acceptable, even admirable behavior (i.e. someone becomes a surgeon to sublimate aggressive impulses)
Overall evidence on validity
There is very little evidence of validity of Freud's claims. All of it is mostly Freud's projections which are hard to test so have not been disprocen
Jung's collective unconscious and archetypes
Karl Jung worked with Freud but broke off to work on his own. Jung believed that every person has not only a conscious mind and a "personal unconscious" but also a collective unconscious that could influence many aspects of personality. The collective unconscious represents the cumulative experience of preceding generations because humans share common archetypes:
FIRST IMPRESSION: All things being equal, the first information we learn about someone influences us more than later information does. First impressions form with amazing speed.
SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECIES: expectations that change one's own behavior in such a way as to increase the probability of the predicted event.
Methods of assessing prejudice
STEREOTYPES: summary impressions when all members of a group share common traits and/or beliefs.
ATTITUDE: a relatively enduring opinion including both cognitive and emotional components.
PREJUDICE: unfavorable attitude towards a group of people
Results of implicit association test
Implicit association test measures your reactions to combinations of two categories (e.g. how fast you press a button when you see a flower and the word pleasant).The results of the test showed that people are racist.
Internal vs. external attributions
We rely on three types of information in deciding how to make an internal or external attribution:
1) Consensus information: how the person's behavior compares with other people's behavior
2) Consistency information: how the person's behavior varies from one time to the next.
3) Distinctiveness: how the person's behavior varies from one time to the next.
"fundamental attribution error" and culture
A common error is to make internal attributions for people's behavior even when we see evidence for an external influence on behavior. This is also known as the correspondence bias (a tendency to assume a strong similarity between someone's current actions and his or her disposition.) The fundamental attribution error actually relates to culture and the way thoughts are sought out. People from the western cultures rely more on internal personality attributions, whereas people in China and other Asian countries tend to rely more on external (situational) attributions.
Actor-observer effects
The actor-observer effect is related to the fundamental attribution error bias. People are more likely to make internal attributions for other people's behavior and more likely to make external attributions for their own. You are an actor when you try to explain the causes of your own behavior based on circumstance and you are an observer when you try to explain someone else's behavior based on who they innately are.
Self-serving attributional bias
Self-serving attributional biases are attributions that we adopt to maximize our credit for our success and minimize our blame for our failure. Self-serving biases are robust. Usually people that even learn them think the biases apply to other people more than themselves.
self-handicapping strategies
People use self-handicapping strategies to protect their reputation or self-esteem by attributing their successes to skill and their failures to an outside source (a handicap). In laymen's terms they intentionally put themselves at a disadvantage to provide an excuse for a possible failure.
factors affecting persuasiveness of messages
- central and peripheral routes of attitude change the persuasiveness of a message.
- We form our attitudes by pondering at a subject and its evidence carefully, but some of our attitudes have only a superficial basis.
- When people take a decision seriously, they invest the necessary time and effort to evaluate the evidence and logic behind each message (central route to persuasion).
- When people listen to a message on a topic they consider unimportant, they attend to such factors as the speaker's appearance and reputation or the sheer number of arguments presented, regardless of their quality (peripheral route to persuasion).
- Minority Influence: Although a minority may have little influence at first, it can, through persistent repetition of its message, eventually persuade the majority to adopt its position or consider other alternatives.
- Influence of group endorsement: People tend to accept a position endorsed by a political party or other group they favor, even if they would ordinarily doubt that position.
salesmanship techniques
"Foot-in-the-door" techniques- A modest request is made, the person then accepts it, and then a larger request follows it.
"Door-in-the-face" technique- someone follows an outrageous initial request with a more reasonable second one, implying that if you refused the first request, you should agree to the second.
Bait-and-Switch technique- something offered at an extremely favorable deal, that person gets the other person to commit to the deal, and following that, additional demands are offered.
That's-not-all technique- someone makes an offer and then improves the offer before you have a chance to reply to the first offer that was made.
cognitive dissonance
A state of unpleasant tension that people experience when they hold contradictory attitudes or when their behavior is inconsistent with their attitudes, especially if they are distressed about the inconsistency. Occurs when an attitude and behavior conflict, which motivates us to make the two consistent. When people's behavior doesn't match their attitudes, they try to eliminate the inconsistency by changing either their behavior or their attitudes.
factors promoting friendship
PROXIMITY (closeness): We are all most likely to become friends with people who live or work in close proximity and become familiar to us.
MERE EXPOSURE EFFECT: the principle that the more often people come in contact with someone or something, the more they tend to like that person or object. People generally choose friends and romantic partners who live near them and resemble them. Relationships are most likely to thrive if each person believes that he or she is getting about as good a deal as the other person is.
Biology and physical attractiveness
In many nonhuman species, physical attractiveness is a reliable cue to the individual's health and therefore desirability as a mate. However, the relationship to genetics is unclear. In humans, attractiveness is a powerful determinant of mate choice but only a weak predictor of health.
basic setup of prisoners dilemma and use
The prisoner's dilemma is a situation where people choose between a cooperative act and a competitive act that benefits themselves but hurts others.
Milgram obedience study and results
The Milgram obedience study was inspired by reports of the atrocities committed in the Nazi concentration camps during World War Two. The hypothesis was when an authority figure gives normal people instructions to do something that might hurt another person, some of them will obey. The experiment was set up like this: two adult male participants, one would be the teacher and would be the learner; the teacher would read a list of words through a microphone then test the learner's memory of the words. Whenever the learner made a mistake, a shock was delivered by the teacher. The results were that out of 40 participants, 25 delivered shocks all the way to 450 volts. Milgram's experiment prompted psychology researchers to establish clear rules about what an experimenter can ethically ask someone to do.
Factors promoting obedience
Obedience is when someone following orders from an authority. These are the factors promoting obedience:
-Diffusion of Responsibility
-"foot-in-the-door" technique or skinner's shaping strategy
-lack of proximity
-groupthink
-conformity
Kohlberg's view of moral development
Kohlberg's view concentrated on moral reasoning, not behavior. Researchers believe that people usually act first, then suggest moral reasons to justify their behavior. Consequently moral reasoning, as evaluated by Kohlberg, correlates poorly with actual behavior.