Personality Psychology Exam 3 - Vocab Chapter 10

__________ infants very anxious about the mother leaving. They often start crying and protesting vigorously before the mother even gets out of the room. While the mother is gone, these infants are difficult to calm. Upon her return, however, these infants behave ambivalently. Their behavior shows both anger and the desire to be close to the mother; they approach her but then resist by squirming and fighting against being held.

In Hazan and Shaver’s __________, adults are vulnerable and uncertain about relationships. Ambivalent adults become overly dependant and demanding on their partners and friends. They display high levels of neediness in their relationships. They are high maintenance partners in the sense that they need constant reassurance and attention.

Begins in the human infant when he or she develops a preference for people over objects. Then the preference begins to narrow to familiar persons so that the child prefers to see people he or she has seen before, compared to strangers. Finally the preference narrows even further so that the child prefers the mother or primary caretaker over anyone else.

In Hazan and Shaver’s avoidant relationship style, the adult has difficulty learning to trust others. Avoidant adults remain suspicious of the motives of others, and they are afraid of making commitments. They are afraid of depending on others because they anticipate being disappointed, let down, abandoned, or separated.

It is accepted as fact that humans have a constructive memory; that is, memory contributes to or influences in various ways (adds to, subtracts from, etc.) what is recalled. Recalled memories are rarely distortion-free, mirror images of the facts.

The tendency to look only for evidence that confirms a previous hunch, and not to look for evidence that might disconfirm a belief.

In the cognitive view of the unconscious, the content of the unconscious mind is assumed to operate just like thoughts in consciousness. Thoughts are unconscious because they are not in conscious awareness, not because they have been repressed or because they represent unacceptable urges or wishes.

A set of shared standards for many behaviors. It might contain different standards for males and females, such that girls should be ashamed if they engage in promiscuous sex, whereas boys might be proud of such behavior, with it being culturally acceptable for them to even brag about such behavior.

Erikson believed that each stage in personality development represented a conflict, or a developmental crisis, that needed to be resolved before the person advanced to the next stage of development.

Post-Freudian psychoanalysts felt that the ego deserved more attention and that it performed many constructive functions. Erikson emphasized the ego as a powerful and independent part of personality, involved in mastering the environment, achieving one’s goals, and hence in establishing one’s identity. The approach to psychoanalysis started by Erikson was called ego psychology.

According to Erikson there are eight stages of development: trust versus mistrust, autonomy versus shame and doubt, initiative versus guilt, industry versus inferiority, identity versus role confusion, intimacy versus isolation, generativity versus stagnation, and integrity versus despair.

Memories that have been “implanted” by well-meaning therapists or others interrogating a subject about some event.

Horney coined this phrase to highlight a gender difference in response to competition and achievement situations. Many women, she argued, feel that if they succeed, they will lose their friends. Consequently, many women, she thought, harbor an unconscious fear of success. She held that men, on the other hand, feel that they will actually gain friends by being successful and hence are not at all afraid to strive and pursue achievement.

Traits or roles typically associated with being female in a particular culture.

The distinction between gender and sex can be traced back to Horney. Horney stressed the point that, while biology determines sex, cultural norms determine what is acceptable for typical males and females in that culture. Today we use the terms masculine and feminineto refer to traits or roles typically associated with being male or female in a particular culture, and we refer to differences in such culturally ascribed roles and traits as gender differences. Differences that are ascribed to being a man or a woman per se are, however, called sex differences.

Freud’s version of psychoanalysis focused on the id, especially the twin instincts of sex and aggression, and how the ego and superego respond to the demands of the id. Freudian psychoanalysis can thus be called id psychology, to distinguish it from later developments that focused on the functions of the ego.

Erikson’s term refers to the desperation, anxiety, and confusion a person feels when he or she has not developed a strong sense of identity. A period of identity crisis is a common experience during adolescence, but for some people it occurs later in life, or lasts for a longer period. Baumeister suggests that there are two distinct types of identity crises, which he terms identity deficit and identity conflict.

A period when a person does not have a strong sense of who she or he really is in terms of values, careers, relationships, and ideologies.

A person does not emerge from a crisis with a firm sense of commitment to values, relationships, or career but forms an identity without exploring alternatives. An example would be young people who accept the values of their parents or their cultural or religious group without question.

A memory is elaborated upon in the imagination, leading the person to confuse the imagined event with events that actually happened.

In object relations theory, a child will create an unconscious mental representation of his or her mother. This allows the child to have a relationship with this internalized “object” even in the absence of the “real” mother. The relationship object internalized by the child is based on his or her developing relationship with the mother. This image then forms the fundamentals for how children come to view others with whom they develop subsequent relationships.

Traits or roles typically associated with being male in a particular culture.

The time taken to explore options before making a commitment to an identity. College can be considered a “time out” from life, in which students may explore a variety of roles, relationships, and responsibilities before having to commit to any single life path.

The psychoanalytic idea that information that is unconscious (e.g., a repressed wish) can actually motivate or influence subsequent behavior. This notion was promoted by Freud and formed the basis for his ideas about the unconscious sources of mental disorders and other problems with living. Many psychologists agree with the idea of the unconscious, but there is less agreement today about whether information that is unconscious can have much of an influence on actual behavior.

A style of inflated self admiration and the constant attempt to draw attention to the self and to keep others focused on oneself. Although narcissism can be carried to extremes, narcissistic tendencies can be found in normal range levels.

The fact that, although narcissistic people appear to have high self-esteem, they actually have doubts about their self-worth. While they appear to have a grandiose sense of self-importance, narcissists are nevertheless very fragile and vulnerable to blows to their self-esteem and cannot handle criticism well. They need constant praise, reassurance, and attention from others, whereas a person with truly high self-esteem would not need such constant praise and attention from others.

Identities founded on undersirable social roles, such as “gangstas,” girlfriends of street toughs, or members of street gangs.

Places an emphasis on early childhood relationships. While this theory has several versions that differ from each other in emphasis, all the versions have at their core a set of basic assumptions: that the internal wishes, desires, and urges of the child are not as important as his or her developing relationships with significant external others, particularly parents, and that the others, particularly the mother, become internalized by the child in the form of mental objects.

Technique to make associated material more accessible to conscious awareness than material that is not primed. Research using subliminal primes demonstrates that information can get into the mind, and have some influence on it, without going through conscious experience.

As posited by Erik Erikson, psychosocial conflicts occur throughout a person’s lifetime and contribute to the ongoing development of personality. He defined psychosocial conflicts as the crises of learning to trust our parents, learning to be autonomous from them, and learning from them how to act as an adult.

Some cultures and religions institute a rite of passage ritual, usually around adolescence, which typically is a ceremony that initiates a child into adulthood. After such ceremonies, the adolescent is sometimes given a new name, bestowing a new adult identity.

Securely attached infants in Ainsworth’s strange situation stoically endured the separation and went about exploring the room, waiting patiently, or even approaching the stranger and sometimes wanting to be held by the stranger. When the mother returned, these infants were glad to see her, typically interacted with her for a while, then went back to exploring the new environment. They seemed confident the mother would return. Approximately 66 percent of infants fall into this category.

In Hazan and Shaver’s secure relationship style, the adult has few problems developing satisfying friendships and relationships. Secure people trust others and develop bonds with others.

The common tendency for people to take credit for success yet to deny responsibility for failure.

Children experiencing separation anxiety react negatively to separation from their mother (or primary caretaker), becoming agitated and distressed when their mothers leave. Most primates exhibit separation anxiety.

Horney, in reinterpreting Freud’s concept of penis envy, taught that the penis was a symbol of social power rather than some organ that women actually desired. Horney wrote that girls realize, at an early age, that they are being denied social power because of their gender. She argued that girls did not really have a secret desire to become boys. Rather, she taught, girls desire the social power and preferences given to boys in the culture at that time.

Roediger and McDermott applied the spreading activation model of memory to account for false memories. This model holds that mental elements (like words or images) are stored in memory along with associations to other elements in memory. For example, doctoris associated with nurse in most people’s memories because of the close connection or similarity between these concepts. Consequently, a person recalling some medical event might falsely recall a nurse rather than a doctor doing something.

Implies that people go through stages in a certain order, and that a specific issue characterizes each stage.

Developed by Ainsworth and her colleagues for studying separation anxiety and for identifying differences between children in how they react to separation from their mothers. In this procedure, a mother and her baby come into a laboratory room. The mother sits down and the child is free to explore the room. After a few minutes an unfamiliar though friendly adult enters the room. The mother gets up and leaves the baby alone with this adult. After a few minutes, the mother comes back into the room and the stranger leaves. The mother is alone with the baby for several more minutes. All the while, the infant is being videotaped so that his or her reactions can later be analyzed.

Perception that bypasses conscious awareness, usually achieved through very brief exposure times, typically less than 30 milliseconds.

Early experiences and reactions of the infant to the parents, particularly the mother, become what Bowlby called “working models” for later adult relationships. These working models are internalized in the form of unconscious expectations about relationships.