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Saturday, November 6, 2010

Psychoanalytic Psychology - Basic concepts Study Guide

  • Unconscious – preconscious area which is more readily available to the conscious and those thoughts and wishes we repressed; the thoughts, wishes, feelings and memories we are not aware of
  • Psychoanalysis – getting at the unconscious through free association which uncovers the link btwn present problems and one’s unconscious
  • Free association – (saying whatever comes to mind) assumed that present problems were related to past events and this link btwn the two were hidden
  • Psychoanalytic perspective – freud – personality is shaped by aggressive, pleasure-seeking biological impulses and internalized social restraints against them
    • Id: immediate gratification (pleasure principle)
    • Superego: how one ought to behave (the conscience)
    • Ego: conscious thoughts, judgments, moderator between the id and superego
  • Freud’s Psychosexual Stages:
    • Oral (0-18 months): pleasure centers on the mouth – sucking, biting, chewing
    • Anal (18-36 months): pleasure focuses on bowel and bladder elimination; coping with demands for control
    • Phallic (3-6 years): pleasure zone is genitals; coping with incestuous sexual feelings
    • Latency (6 to puberty): dormant sexual feelings
    • Genital (puberty on): maturation of sexual interests
  • Defense Mechanisms – methods to protect the ego and reduce anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality; emerge when ego cannot control the id and superego
    • Repression – removing anxiety-arousing thoughts and feelings from conscious
    • Regression – retreating to an earlier stage
    • Reaction formation – ego unconsciously transforms unacceptable impulses to their opposites
    • Projection – disguising threatening impulses by attributing them to others
    • Displacement – diverting sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person
  • Humanistic Perspective (Maslow) – people motivated by hierarchy of needs (psychological needs, safety needs, love needs, esteem needs, self-actualization)
    • Self-actualization – ultimate psychological need that arises after basic physical and psychological needs are met and self-esteem is achieved; the motivation to fulfill one’s potential
    • Carl Rogers: Three Components of a Good Environment – lead to self-actualization
      • Genuineness – open and sincere with their feelings to us
      • Acceptance – unconditional positive regard; people value us even with our shortcomings
      • Empathy – people share and understand our feelings
  • Trait perspective – trait researchers search for identifiable patterns of behavior or conscious motives that describe basic dimensions of personality; stable/enduring traits (big 5 are stable in adulthood)
    • Trait – characteristic behaviors and conscious motives of a person or a disposition to feel and act
    • Eysenck Personality Questionnaire – has shown that extraversion-introversion and emotional stability-instability are basic personality dimensions
    • Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) – originally designed to identify abnormal personality tendencies (emotional disorders); today used as a screening test to identify abnormal and normal personalities
    • Big 5 factors – of personality – emotional stability, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness
  • Social Cognitive Perspective – views behavior as influenced by the interaction between persons (and their thinking) and their social context
  • Reciprocal determinism – the interacting influences between personality and environmental factors
  • External locus of control – the perception that chance or outside forces beyond one’s personal control determine one’s fate
  • Spotlight effect – overestimate others noticing our defects
  • Individualism – giving priority to one’s own goals over group goals and defining one’s identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identification
  • Personal control – our sense of controlling our environment rather than feeling helpless
  • Internal locus of control – we control our fate
  • Learned helplessness – the hopelessness and passive resignation in animal or human learns when unable to avoid repeated aversive events; feel like they can’t do anything, so they just give up
  • Self-esteem – one’s feelings of high or low self worth
  • Collectivism – giving priority to the goals of one’s group and defining one’s identity accordingly
  • Self-serving bias – a readiness to perceive one’s self favorably

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