Psych 202 Exam 1 Study Guide Lectures 1 6 Key Terms Personality the characteristic thoughts emotional responses and behaviors that are relatively stable in an individual over time and across circumstances Personality Trait a characteristic a dispositional tendency to act in a certain way over time and across circumstances Psychodynamic Theory Freudian theory that unconscious forces wishes desires and hidden memories determine behavior Id in psychodynamic theory the component of personality that is completely submerged in the unconscious and operates according to the pleasure principle o Baby crying because he she is hungry Superego the internalization of societal and parental standards of conduct acts as a brake on the id Ego the component that tries to satisfy the wishes of the id while being responsive to the dictates of the superego o Reality principle Defense mechanisms unconscious mental strategies that the mind uses to protect itself from distress Five Factor Theory the idea that personality can be described using 5 factors o Openness to experience o Conscientiousness o Extraversion o Agreeableness o Neuroticism Idiographic Approaches person centered approaches to studying personality they focus on individual lives and how various characteristics are integrated into unique persons o Uses a different metric for each person Nomothetic Approaches focus on how common characteristics vary from person to person o Uses same metric to compare all people o Ex Five Factor theory Projective Measures personality tests that examine unconscious processes by having people interpret ambiguous stimuli Objective Measures relatively direct assessments of personality usually based on info gathered through self report questionnaires or observer ratings Temperaments biologically based tendencies to feel or act in certain ways o Broader than personality traits o Activity level sociability emotionality o Very good predictor of later behaviors Self Serving Bias the tendency for people to take personal credit for success but blame failure on external factors Self concept everything you know about yourself o Ex Age gender student status interpersonal style personal characteristics o Self awareness the sense of self as the object of attention The I thinks about the me The objectified self Self schema each person processes info about themselves deeply thoroughly and automatically Self esteem the evaluative aspect of the self concept o Contemplates personal characteristics Terror Management Theory says self esteem gives meaning to people s lives o In this way self esteem protects people from the horror associated with knowing they eventually will die Self efficacy the extent to which people believe they can achieve specific outcomes Stress a pattern of behavioral psychological and physiological responses to events when the events match or exceed the organism s ability to respond in a healthy way Stressor an environmental event or stimulus that threatens an organism Coping response any response organism makes to avoid escape from or minimize an aversive stimulus Hypothalamic Pituitary Adrenal HPA Axis the biological system responsible for the stress response Fight or Flight Response the physiological preparedness of animals to deal with danger Tens and Befriend Response females tendency to protect and care for their offspring and form social alliances rather than flee or fight in response to threat Oxytocin a hormone that is important for mothers in bonding to newborns and may encourage affiliation during social stress Immune System the body s mechanism for dealing with invading microorganisms such as allergens bacteria and viruses General Adaptation Syndrome a consistent pattern of responses to stress that consists of 3 stages o Alarm an emergency reaction that prepares the body to fight or flee Release of cortisol and epinephrine aimed to boost physical abilities while reducing activities that make the organism vulnerable to infection after injury Body most likely to be exposed to infection and disease so the immune system kicks in and the body begins fighting back o Resistance the defenses prepare for a longer sustained attack against the stressor Immunity to infection and disease increases somewhat as the body maximizes its defenses o Exhaustion a variety of physiological and immune systems fail Body organs that were already weak before the stress are the first to fail Primary Appraisals part of coping process that involves making decisions about whether a stimulus is stressful benign not harmful or irrelevant Secondary Appraisals part of coping process during which people evaluate their response options and choose coping behaviors Emotion focused coping a type of coping in which people try to prevent having an emotional response to a stressor Problem focused coping people take direct steps to confront or minimize a stressor Oxytocin plays a role in the tend and befriend response o Secreted during trusting encounters and is involved in infant parent attachments and love relationships Selye general adaptation syndrome o Steps in which body responds to stress Initial response Alarm Resistance If the stressor continues the final response is exhaustion Memory involves 3 phases o Encoding Processing of info so that it can be stored o Storage The retention of encoded information o Retrieval The recall of previously encoded and stored info Chunking reduces info into units that are easier to remember o Working memory may be limited to as few as four chunks of information Confabulation honest lying is associated with some form of brain damage Things to Know Freud s Topographical Iceberg Model Defense Mechanisms and examples o Denial repression excluding source of anxiety from awareness person fails to remember an unpleasant event projection reaction formation rationalization displacement shifting the attention of emotion from one object to another sublimation channeling socially unacceptable impulses into constructive even admirable behaviorsadist becomes a surgeon or dentist Personality Tests o LOT R Test Dispositional optimism Standardization of items and conditions of measurement questions same for every person taking test Development of quantitative norms mean standard deviation Numerical associations Reliability Validity 1 SD is 68 of people o Attributional Style Questionnaire Make judgments Test of optimism and pessimism How you think about good and bad events that happen to you o Defensive Pessimism