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

Review of some basic concepts present in psychological science

Hindsight bias is also known as the ‘I knew it all along phenomenon.’  Once we know an outcome, we feel more confident that we knew what would happen.  Overconfidence can cause us to see what we want to see, therefore skewing results

A scientific attitude includes critical thinking, or not accepting conclusions blindly, but asking lots of questions and being investigative

Theory: explanation using an integrated set of principles that organizes and predicts observations, educated guess based on fact

Hypothesis: testable prediction

Operational definition – statement of procedures used to define research variables.  Allows others to replicate experiment

Case study: study of one individual in great depth. Strengths: intensive studies are sometimes very revealing. Weaknesses: individuals may be atypical, lead to false conclusions about a population

Survey: looks at many cases in less depth. Asks people to report behavior.  Strengths: lots of things can be inferred about a population.  Cons: wording affects results, samples are rarely perfectly representative, overgeneralizing/jumping to conclusions

Naturalistic observation: watching and recording the behavior of organisms in their environment.  Strengths: theoretically, no outside stimuli to skew results.  Cons: does not explain behavior, simply describes it

Correlation: concepts which are linked together, but which do not necessarily cause or influence one another

Measures of central tendency: mean (average score), median (middle score), mode (most common score)

Measures of variation: range (range of scores), standard deviation (measure of the standard distance of the normal distribution of scores from the mean)

Evolutionary psychology: study of how natural selection favored behavioral tendencies that contributed to the survival and spread of our ancestors genes

Behavior genetics: study of relative power and limits of genetic and environmental influences on behavior

Molecular genetics: the subfield of biology that studies the molecular structure and function of genes.

Fluid intelligence: ability to reason abstractly and with speed, declines in late adulthood

Crystallized intelligence: accumulated knowledge, verbal skills, grows with time