PSY 111 1st Edition Exam 4 Study Guide Lectures 33 41 Lecture 33 April 8 Personality a pattern of behaviors thoughts and emotions How is personality measured o Projection tests Stimuli are unstructured and ambiguous with no right or wrong answers The assumption is that people will project their personalities onto the stimuli The interpretations must be read by a trained expert TAT Test Stimuli ambiguous picture Task tell a story about the picture Rorschach Ink Blot Test Stimuli ambiguous inkblots Task What do you see Analysis how did the participant use color and content o Did they describe the picture holistically or did they focus on certain parts of the picture Limitations Highly subjective tests It is difficult to standardize the results for a large population o Self Report Measures The stimuli are usually short and ambiguous descriptions The task is to determine how closely the description relates to yourself Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory MMPI Often used to diagnose personality disorders There are 567 items with numerous other subscales to account for inflation in responses California Personality Inventory CPI Another personality test that has 30 subsets that look at personality traits Limitations Are people actually accurate when assessing themselves o Are they overly optimistic o Concerns with personality measurements We want whatever method we choose to be reliable and valid Psychodynamic Approach o Emphasizes the unconscious and instincts aggression and sex o Conflicts between the constructs of the mind Id driven by instinct Pleasure principle Immediate gratification No regard for consequence Superego driven by moral and civilized principles Your conscious This is irrational because it assumes that you must always do the right thing Ego this is the decision making part of the conscious Follows the reality principle This is the only rational construct of the mind o Freud s Stages of Development Oral Stage birth to 18 months Libido is focused on the mouth Oral gratification Chewing and breast feeding Fixation o Chewing pencils smoking o Infantile traits Anal Stage 18 months to 3 years Libido energy moves to anus Fixation o Anal explosive lazy overly generous o Anal retentive rigid loves rules Phallic stage 3 years to 5 years Libido moves to genitals Oedipus complex boys become sexually attracted to their mothers o Fear anger towards father o castration anxiety Electra complex girls become sexually attracted to their fathers o Fear anger towards mother o penis envy Latency stage 6 years to puberty Libido is dormant Same sex friendships Genital stage puberty on Libido returns to genitals Can form healthy sexual relationships Lecture 34 April 9 Defense Mechanisms o Repression pushing undesirable thought below conscious awareness o Displacement redirecting unwanted impulses towards non threatening targets o Projection projecting your undesirable thoughts impulses on someone else o Reaction Formation transforming an unwanted desire to its opposite o Sublimation redirecting energy onto something socially acceptable o Denial simply denying or ignoring reality Problems with Freud s Theory o His findings only came from case studies of people with sever mental disabilities o There was no experimental research done to prove his theories o There is large inherent sexism o Falsifiability it is difficult to measure defense mechanisms like denial and repression o Parsimony there are other simpler explanations out there that require fewer assumptions Positive Aspects of Freud o Freud s work emphasized the role of childhood in development o He was the first to attempt to create a generalized theory o He emphasized the unconscious processes even though they are different from what he originally thought o He forced people to confront sexuality in a time where that was a taboo topic o Freud s theory proved to be a good example of a bad theory Behaviorist Approach to Personality o This was formed partially as a reaction to Freud They focused on behavior and more objective observations o According to this approach personality is a person s history of reinforcers and punishers o Limitations Missing important aspects thoughts and emotions People respond differently to the same reinforcers and punishers People are born with certain traits Trait Approach to Personality o Traits attributes along which people differ Assumed that traits are relatively stable Describe the patterns of thoughts emotions and behavior o Eysenck s Two Factor Model Claimed 4500 traits could be boiled down to two traits Extraversion introversion Emotional stability instability There are subordinate traits that are subsumed among the two traits They all inter correlate o Big Five Created in reaction to the Two Factor Model Five factors include Openness Consciousness Extaversion Agreeableness Neuroticism o Myers Briggs Type Indicator 4 dimensions extraversion introversion sensing intuitive thinking feeling judging perceiving Barnum Effect the tendency people have to interpret meaningless data as specific to them o People are likely to believe positive things about themselves Lecture 34 April 14 Social psychology the scientific study of the influence of social situations on the individual The Self each person s awareness of and ideas about their own individual characteristic and existence Explaining Behavior o Attribution External factors the situation or circumstance Internal factors characteristic of the person you are More ambiguous situations show more bias Errors people make Fundamental attribution error tendency to attribute internal causes to others when external causes could be the explanation Actor Observer bias when you re the actor you attribute external factors to situations and when you re the observer you are more likely to attribute internal factors Self Serving bias people are more likely to attribute success to internal factors and failure to external factors o Only when talking about yourself o More common in western societies Just World belief believing that the world is a just and fair place o People get what they deserve o Leads to victim blaming Positive Illusions overly positive but this may lead to well being o Uncritical self evaluations o Illusions of control overestimate how much control you have in a situation Generally overly optimistic Lecture 35 April 15 Explaining Behavior continued o Attraction Positive assortment the tendency to like people who are similar in many ways to