Psych 202Exam # 1 Study Guide Lectures: 1 - 6Key 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 principleoBaby 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 superegooReality 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 factorsoOpenness to experienceoConscientiousnessoExtraversionoAgreeablenessoNeuroticism-Idiographic Approaches: person-centered approaches to studying personality; they focus on individual lives and how various characteristics are integrated into unique personsoUses a different metric for each person-Nomothetic Approaches: focus on how common characteristics vary from person to personoUses same metric to compare all peopleoEx. 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 waysoBroader than personality traitsoActivity level, sociability, emotionalityoVery 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 yourselfoEx. Age, gender, student status, interpersonal style, personal characteristicsoSelf-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-conceptoContemplates personal characteristics-Terror-Management Theory: says self-esteem gives meaning to people's livesoIn 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 stagesoAlarm: 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 backoResistance: the defenses prepare for a longer, sustained attack against the stressor-Immunity to infection and disease increases somewhat as the body maximizes its defensesoExhaustion: 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 responseoSecreted during trusting encounters and is involved in infant/parent attachments and love relationships-Selye: general adaptation syndromeoSteps in which body responds to stress-Initial response-Alarm-Resistance-If the stressor continues, the final response is exhaustion-Memory involves 3 phasesoEncoding-Processing of info so that it can be storedoStorage-The retention of encoded informationoRetrieval-The recall of previously encoded and stored info-Chunking reduces info into units that are easier to rememberoWorking 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 examplesoDenial, 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, behavior-sadist becomes a surgeon or dentist)-Personality TestsoLOT-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 peopleoAttributional Style Questionnaire-Make judgments-Test of optimism and pessimism-How you think about good