Exam 4 Study GuideIncludes Personality, Emotion & Motivation, Psychological Disorders, and Treatment. (This exam is just like the others, and isn’t cumulative)This information is taken from class lectures, notes, and the textbook. I’ve come to class every day and read the textbook. Good luck!Personality1. What is personality? What do personality psychologists seek to do?a. Personality : people’s typical ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. Made up of enduring predispositions that influence our behavior across many situations.b. People respond differently to the same event, so personality psychologists seek to:i. Describe psychologically meaningful and stable differences among peopleii. Explain and predict behavior.2. (From textbook) Be able to define and differentiate between two methods personalitypsychologists use to study personality (idiographic approach and nomothetic approach).a. Nomothetic approach : approach to personality that focuses on identifying general laws that govern the behavior or all individualsb. Idiographic approach: approach to personality that focuses on identifying the unique configuration of characteristics and life history experiences within a person3. What are three things behavior-genetics methods try to disentangle? What two typesof studies are often used? What did the finding of these studies show?a. Genetic factors , the genes you get from your parentsb. Shared environmental factors: experiences that make family members more alike, such as living in the same place and knowing the same peoplec. Non-shared environmental factors : experiences that make family members less alike, an example of this is birth orderd. The studies often used are twin studies and adoption studies. These studies look for how similar the twins are in personality. These correlations show thatidentical twins are not only closer genetically than fraternal, but they are also further correlated in many other aspects, such as aggression, and advancement orientation. This implies that genetics could play a role in thesepersonality factors.e. Adoption studies are used to separate genetics from the environment. In these studies, the correlations were mostly the same, inferring that genetics definitely does play a role, but shared environment does not. Because the correlations are less than 100%, it probably means that some of this comes from our non-shared environment.f. Results suggest strong genetic component for personality, and almost no effect of shared environment. Adoption studies show the same things.4. According to Freud, what are the three parts of personality? Be able to define and differentiate between them.a. Id : reservoir of primitive impulses, unconscious desires that are driving force of behaviori. Sex, aggressionii. Pleasure principle : seek immediate gratificationb. Superego : sense of morality, most of it is unconscious, but some of its conscious.i. Sense of right and wrong internalized from society, parentsc. Ego : decision makeri. interact with the real worldii. Resolve demands of the id and superegoiii. Reality principle: delay gratification until appropriate outlet5. (From textbook). What are defense mechanisms? Know four of the defense mechanisms (repression, reaction-formation, projection, displacement) and be able to give an example of each.a. Repression : motivated forgetting of emotionally threatening memories or impulses. Example: a person who witnesses a traumatic combat scene finds himself unable to remember it.b. Reaction-formation : transformation of an anxiety-provoking emotion into its opposite. Example: a married woman whose sexually attracted to a coworkerexperiences hatred and revulsion toward him.c. Projection: unconscious attribution of our negative characteristics to others. Example: a married man with powerful unconscious sexual impulses toward females complains that other women are always “after him”d. Displacement: directing an impulse from a socially unacceptable target onto asafer and more socially acceptable target. Example: a golfer angrily throws his club into the woods after he misses an easy putt.6. What are three problems with Freud’s theory of personality (as discussed in class)?a. Difficult to falsify his theories, hard to test if the id does or does not exist.b. Evidence against defense mechanismsc. Used case studies, typically of upper-class Viennese women, which is a very specific group, making his theories impossible to generalize to everyone.7. (From textbook). What do social learning theories of personality focus on? What do they think is important to personality? What is reciprocal determinism? What is locusof control? What is the difference between an internal and external locus of control?a. Social learning theories of personality focus on thinking as a cause of personality. Observational learning is believed to be the most important to personality.b. Reciprocal determinism : tendency for people to mutually influence each other’s behaviorc. Locus of control: extent to which people believe that reinforcers and punishers lie inside or outside of their control. d. Someone with more of an internal locus of control believes they have more control over their environment, and think if something happens to them, it’s their fault, good or bad. Someone with more of an external locus of controlbelieves most of the control over their environment is out of their hands, whether they attributed it to fate or someone else, etc. People with internal loci of control tend to be better adjusted.8. What are traits? What is the lexical approach to coming up with traits? What is factoranalysis?a. Trait theories of personality are concerned with describing and understanding structure of personalityb. Traits: the enduring predispositions that influence our behavior across many situations. Personality is composed of many different traits.c. Lexical approach : crucial features of personality are embedded in our language. Search dictionaries that one might use to describe people, found thousands of words and had to narrow it down to general traitsd. Factor analysis : statistical procedure that identifies clusters of related items (factors) by looking at correlations. The goal of this is to find the smallest number that still adequately reflects the complexity of human personality.9. What are the Big Five traits? What do they predict?a. This theory states that all
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