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20 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
- 3rd side (hint)
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Exploring the Unconscious
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Sigmund Freud’s treatment of emotional disorders led him to believe that they sprang from unconscious dynamics, which he sought to analyze through free associations and dreams. Freud saw personality as composed of pleasure-seeking psychic impulses (the id), a reality-oriented executive (the ego), and an internalized set of ideals (the superego).
Freud believed that children develop through psychosexual stages—the oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital stages. He suggested that our personalities are influenced by how we have resolved conflicts associated with these stages and whether we have remained fixated at any stage. Tensions between demands of the id and superego cause anxiety. The ego copes by using defense mechanisms, of which repression is the most basic. |
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The Neo-Freudian and Psychodynamic Theorists
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Neo-Freudians Alfred Adler and Karen Horney accepted many of Freud’s ideas, as did Carl Jung. But they also argued that we have motives other than sex and aggression, and that the ego’s conscious control is greater than Freud supposed.
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Assessing Unconscious Processes
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Projective tests are tests that attempt to assess personality by presenting ambiguous stimuli that are designed to reveal the unconscious. Although projective tests, such as the Rorschach inkblots, have questionable reliability or validity, some clinicians continue to use them.
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Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective
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Today’s research psychologists find some of Freud’s specific ideas implausible, unvalidated, or contradicted by new research, and they note that his theory offers only after-the-fact explanations. Many researchers now believe that repression rarely, if ever, occurs. Nevertheless, Freud drew psychology’s attention to the unconscious, to the struggle to cope with anxiety and sexuality, and to the conflict between biological impulses and social restraints. His cultural impact has been enormous.
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THE HUMANISTIC PERSPECTIVE
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Humanistic psychologists have sought to turn psychology’s attention from baser motives and environmental conditioning to the growth potential of healthy people, as seen through the individual’s own experiences.
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Abraham Maslow’s Self-Actualizing Person
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Abraham Maslow believed that if basic human needs are fulfilled, people will strive to actualize their highest potential. To describe self-actualization, he studied some exemplary personalities and summarized his impressions of their qualities.
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Carl Rogers’ Person-Centered Perspective
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To nurture growth in others, Carl Rogers advised being genuine, accepting, and empathic. In such a climate, people can develop a deeper self-awareness and a more realistic and positive self-concept.
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Assessing the Self
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Humanistic psychologists assessed personality through questionnaires on which people report their self-concept and in therapy by seeking to understand others’ subjective personal experiences.
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Evaluating the Humanistic Perspective
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Humanistic psychology helped to renew psychology’s interest in the self. Nevertheless, humanistic psychology’s critics complain that its concepts are vague and subjective, its values individualist and self-centered, and its assumptions naively optimistic.
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The Trait Perspective
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Exploring Traits
Rather than explain the hidden aspects of personality, trait researchers describe the predispositions that underlie our actions. For example, through factor analysis, researchers have isolated important dimensions of personality. Assessing Traits Personality inventories (like the MMPI-2) are questionnaires on which people respond to items designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors. Items on the tests are empirically derived, and the tests are objectively scored. Peer reports may, however, provide more trustworthy clues to a person’s behavioral traits. The Big Five Factors Five personality dimensions—stability, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness—offer a reasonably comprehensive picture of personality. Genetic predispositions and other biological factors influence these traits. Evaluating the Trait Perspective Critics of the trait perspective question the consistency with which traits are expressed. Although people’s traits persist over time, human behavior varies widely from situation to situation. Despite these variations, a person’s average behavior across different situations tends to be fairly consistent. Traits matter. |
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The Social-Cognitive Perspective
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Reciprocal Influences
The social-cognitive perspective applies principles of learning, cognition, and social behavior to personality, with particular emphasis on the ways in which our personality influences and is influenced by our interaction with the environment. It assumes reciprocal determinism—that personal-cognitive factors combine with the environment to influence people’s behavior. Personal Control By studying how people vary in their perceived locus of control and in their experiences of learned helplessness, researchers have found that a sense of personal control helps people to cope with life. Research on learned helplessness has evolved into research on optimism and now into a broader positive psychology movement. Assessing Behavior in Situations Social-cognitive researchers observe how people’s behaviors and beliefs both affect and are affected by their situations. They have found that the best way to predict someone’s behavior in a given situation is to observe that person’s behavior pattern in similar situations. Evaluating the Social-Cognitive Perspective Although faulted for slighting the importance of unconscious dynamics, emotions, and inner traits, the social-cognitive perspective builds on psychology’s well-established concepts of learning and cognition and reminds us of the power of social situations. |
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Exploring the Self
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The Benefits of Self-Esteem
Research on the self has recently expanded to include the concept of possible selves, the visions of ourselves we dream of becoming, and the concept of the spotlight effect, the assumption that we overestimate others noticing and evaluating our appearance, performance, and blunders. But research confirms the importance of high self-esteem and the potency of the self-serving bias. Culture and Self-Esteem People of stigmatized groups do not suffer lower self-esteem as a result of their minority. Self-esteem can be maintained by valuing those areas excelled in, attributing problems to prejudice, and by people comparing themselves to others in the same group. Self-Serving Bias Recent research firmly concludes that we exercise a self-serving bias, a readiness to perceive ourselves favorably. People tend to feel personally responsible for successes, while accepting less responsibility for adversity, and most see themselves as better than average. Scientists suggest that humans function best when the two types of self-esteem, defensive (fragile) self-esteem and secure (less fragile) self-esteem are in balance. |
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CLASSICAL CONDITIONING
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Although learning by association had been discussed for centuries, it remained for Ivan Pavlov to capture the phenomenon in his classic experiments on conditioning.
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Pavlov’s Experiments
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Pavlov repeatedly presented a neutral stimulus (such as a tone) just before an unconditioned stimulus (UCS, food) that triggered an unconditioned response (UCR, salivation). After several repetitions, the tone alone (now the conditioned stimulus, CS) triggered a conditioned response (CR, salivation). Further experiments on acquisition revealed that classical conditioning was usually greatest when the CS was presented just before the UCS, thus preparing the organism for what was coming. Other experiments explored the phenomena of acquisition, extinction, spontaneous recovery, generalization, and discrimination.
Pavlov’s work laid a foundation for John B. Watson’s emerging belief that psychology, to be an objective science, should study only overt behavior, without considering unobservable mental activity. Watson called this position behaviorism. |
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Extending Pavlov’s Understanding
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The behaviorists’ optimism that learning principles would generalize from one response to another and from one species to another has been tempered. Conditioning principles, we now know, are cognitively influenced and biologically constrained. In classical conditioning, animals learn when to "expect" an unconditioned stimulus. Moreover, animals are biologically predisposed to learn associations between, say, a peculiar taste and a drink that will make them sick, which they will then avoid. They don’t, however, learn to avoid a sickening drink announced by a noise.
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Pavlov’s Legacy
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Pavlov taught us that principles of learning apply across species that significant psychological phenomena can be studied objectively, and that conditioning principles have important practical applications.
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Operant Conditioning
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Through operant conditioning, organisms learn to produce behaviors that are followed by reinforcing stimuli and to suppress behaviors that are followed by punishing stimuli.
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Skinner’s Experiments
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Skinner showed that when placed in an operant chamber, rats or pigeons can be shaped to display successively closer approximations of a desired behavior. Researchers have also studied the effects of primary and secondary reinforcers, and of immediate and delayed reinforcers. Partial reinforcement schedules (fixed-ratio, variable-ratio, fixed-interval, and variable-interval) produce slower acquisition of the target behavior than does continuous reinforcement, but they also create more resistance to extinction. Punishment is most effective when it is strong, immediate, and consistent. However, it can have undesirable side effects.
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Extending Skinner’s Understanding
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Skinner’s emphasis on external control of behavior made him both influential and controversial. Many psychologists criticized Skinner (as they did Pavlov) for underestimating the importance of cognitive and biological constraints. For example, research on latent learning and motivation, both intrinsic and extrinsic, further indicates the importance of cognition in learning.
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Skinner’s Legacy
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Skinner’s ideas that operant principles should be used to influence people were extremely controversial. Critics felt he ignored personal freedoms and sought to control people. Today, his techniques are applied in schools, sports, workplaces, and homes. Shaping behavior by reinforcing successes is effective.
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