Psychology Around Us 3rd Canadian Edition By Ronald- Test Bank

Psychology Around Us 3rd Canadian Edition By Ronald- Test Bank

CHAPTER 12

PERSONALITY

CHAPTER LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. Summarize the main ideas of the psychodynamic view of personality development.
• Personality refers to the unique characteristics that account for enduring patterns of inner experience and outward behaviour.
• Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of personality depended to a large extent on his ideas about the conscious and unconscious mind. Most of the content of our minds, in Freud’s view, is in the unconscious.
• Freud proposed three central forces in personality development: the id, the ego, and the superego.
• In Freud’s view, personality develops as children pass through a series of psychosexual stages. Each stage is characterized by strong conflicts between the id, the ego, and the superego. Failure to resolve these conflicts can result in neuroses.
• Conflicts result in anxiety, and Freud believed that we use unconscious tactics called defence mechanisms to protect ourselves from this anxiety.
• Other psychodynamic theories include those of Alfred Adler, Carl G. Jung, and Karen Horney.

2. Describe the humanistic theories of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers.
• Humanistic theorists, including Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, emphasized people’s basic goodness and their ability to fulfill their potential.
• Maslow proposed that personality arises from people’s striving to meet their needs. Human needs are arranged hierarchically, with self-actualization at the top level.
• Rogers based his theory of personality on his ideas about the importance of self-concept. He believed that children need unconditional positive regard to develop healthy self-concepts.

3. Summarize the leading trait theories, and describe how the five-factor theory has evolved from the work of Gordon Allport and Hans Eysenck.
• Personality traits are tendencies to behave in certain ways that remain relatively constant across situations. Trait theorists such as Gordon Allport and Hans Eysenck first proposed that central traits affect a broad range of behaviour.
• Allport conducted detailed case studies that sought to reveal the unique collection of traits at play for each individual.
• Eysenck, using factor analysis, identified three personality superfactors: extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism.
• Other trait theorists proposed the five-factor theory, which identified five major trait categories: agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and openness to experience.
• Although traits play an important role in behaviour, they can be inconsistent over time and across different situations.

4. Describe and differentiate the situationist and interactionist views of personality.
• Situationism holds that behaviour is governed primarily by the variables in a given situation rather than by internal traits. The behaviourist B. F. Skinner could be said to have viewed personality from this perspective.
• Interactionism focuses on interactions between persons and situations. Albert Bandura’s social-cognitive theory is an example of interactionist theory. In Bandura’s view, the environment, internal mental events, and behaviour all interact to affect behaviour through the process of reciprocal determinism.

5. Describe the two major types of personality tests, and give examples of each.
• Personality inventories are questionnaires that require individuals to respond to a series of true-false or agree–disagree statements designed to measure various aspects of personality.
• Two widely-used personality inventories are the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory 2 (MMPI-2) and the Revised NEO-Personality Inventory (Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness) (NEO-PI-R). The MMPI-2 is typically used to assess abnormal personality characteristics and inclinations. The NEO-PI-R evaluates traits associated with the five-factor theory of personality.
• Projective tests are intended to tap into people’s unconscious minds by having them interpret ambiguous stimuli. In the case of the Rorschach Inkblot Test, the stimuli are inkblots. In the case of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), they are black-and-white drawings.