Psychology Test 2
The power of the unconscious: Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory (596-598)
1. The Psychoanalytic Perspective
a. Sigmund Freud: Profound influence on Western culture. He eventually filled 24 volumes
published between 1888 and 1939.
i. Psychoanalytic Theory: the first comprehensive theory of personality which
included ideas about an unconscious region of the mind, psychosexual stages,
and defense mechanisms for holding anxiety at bay.
b. Exploring the Unconscious
i. Free association: a method of exploring the unconscious in which the person
relaxes and says whatever comes to mind, no matter how trivial or
embarrassing
ii. Psychoanalysis: Freud’s theory of personality that attributes thoughts and
actions to unconscious motives and conflicts; the techniques used in treating
psychological disorders by seeking to expose and interpret unconscious tensions
iii. Unconscious: According to Freud, a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts,
wishes, feelings, and memories.
iv. Freud’s Idea of the Mind’s Structure
1. Id: contains a reservoir of unconscious psychic energy that strives to
satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives. The Id operates on the
pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification.
2. Ego: the largely conscious, “executive” part of personality that mediates
among the demands of the id, superego, and reality. The ego operates
on the reality principle, satisfying the id’s desires in ways that will
realistically bring pleasure than pain.
3. Superego: the part of personality that represents internalized ideals and
provides standards for judgment (the conscience) and for future
aspirations.
v. Psychosexual stage
Oral (0-18 months)
Pleasure cents on the mouth- sucking,
biting, chewing
Anal (18-36 months)
Pleasure focuses on bowl and bladder
elimination
Phallic (3-6 years)
Pleasure zone is the genitals; Coping with
incestuous sexual feelings
Latency (6 to puberty)
Dormant sexual feelings
Genital (Puberty on)
Maturation of sexual interests
1. Oedipus complex: (Named after Oedipus) when boys develop sexual
desires for their mother and rival with their father.
2. Identification process: Children’s superegos gain strength as they
incorporate many of their parents’ values.
3. Fixation: a lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier
psychosexual stage, in which conflicts were unresolved.
vi. Defense Mechanisms: tactics that reduce or redirect anxiety by distorting reality
1. Repression: banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts and feelings from
consciousness.
2. Regression: allows us to retreat to an earlier, more infantile stage of
development. Facing the anxious first days of school, a child may
regress to sucking their thumb.
3. Reacting formation: ego unconsciously makes unacceptable impulses
look like their opposites. Thus, people may express feelings that are the
opposite of their anxiety-arousing unconscious feelings.
4. Projection: disguises threatening impulses by attributing them to
others. “The cheater thinks everyone is a cheater”.
5. Rationalization: occurs when we unconsciously generate self-justifying
explanations to hide from ourselves the real reasons for our actions.
Alcoholics drink just to “socialize”.
6. Displacement: diverts sexual or aggressive impulses toward an object or
person that is psychologically more acceptable than the one that
aroused the feelings.
Lecture 2/13/09
Freud’s Theory: Stages of Personality Development
 Phallic stage: third stage occurring from about 3-6 years of age, in which the child discovers
sexual feelings. Supergo develops.
o Conflict: Oedipus Complex
 A boy’s sexual desire for his bother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the
rival father. A girl’s desire for her father is called the Electra complex.
 Castrated Anxiety: boy’s fear of father
o Identification: Children cope with threatening feelings by repressing them and by
identifying with the rival parent. Through this process of identification, their superego
gains strength that incorporate their parent’s values
o Females: “Penis envy”
 Latency: Fourth stage occurring during the school years, in which the sexual feelings of the child
are repressed while the child develops other ways
 Genital: sexual feelings reawaken with appropriate targets
 Neo-Freudians: followers of Freud who developed their own competing theories of
psychoanalysis
o Adler: developed theory on birth order
o Horney: developed a theory based on basic anxiety and rejected the concept of penis
envy
 Modern Psychoanalytical Theory
o
Current research has found support for:
Lecture 2/16/09
Defense Mechanisms: the ego’s protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously
distorting reality.
1. Repression banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness
2. Regression leads an individual faced with anxiety to retreat to a more infantile psychosexual
stage
a) A way to avoid conflict
3. Reaction Formation causes the ego to unconsciously switch unacceptable impulses into their
opposites. People may express feelings of purity when they may be suffering anxiety from
unconscious feelings about sex
a) Overcompensation
4. Projection leads people to disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to
others
5. Rationalization offers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening,
unconscious reasons for one’s actions
6. Displacement shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less
threatening object or person, redirecting anger toward a safer outlet.
a) Taking anger towards boss out on wife
b) Sublimination is close to displacement: Taking those unacceptable Impulses and
channeling them into a socially acceptable area.
Ie. Aggressive behaviors towards boxing
7. Denial involves the greatest degree of distortion.
- Refusing to accept rejection. “She really likes me, but she is playing hard to get”
8. Intellectualization: acknowledging the situation but detaching the emotional component.
Only deal with the intellectual part of the situation.
-Doctors
Evaluating the Psychoanalytical Perspective
Freud’s psychoanalytic theory rests on the repression of painful experiences into the
unconscious mind
The majority of children, death camp survivors, and battle-scarred veterans are unable to repress painful
experiences into their unconscious mind. (Post-traumatic stress disorder)
Lecture 2/18/09
Modern Psychoanalytic Theory
 Current research has found support for:
o Defense mechanisms
o Concept of an unconscious mind that can influence conscious behavior
 Other concepts cannot be scientifically researched
Accessing Unconscious Processes
 Evaluating personality from an unconscious mind’s perspective would require a psychological
instrument (projective tests) that would reveal the hidden unconscious mind.
 Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
o Developed by Henry Murrary, the TAT is a projective test in which people express their
inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scene
 Must be described by the patient: What is described, what lead up to it, and
how it is going to end
 Psychologist analyzes the hidden themes
 Rorschach Inkblot Test
o The most widely used projective test uses a set of 10 inkblots and was designed by
Hermann Rorschach. It seeks to identify people’s inner feelings by analyzing their
interpretations of the blots.
o Some black and white, some are multi color
 Projective Tests: Criticisms
o Critics argue that projective tests lack both reliability (consistency of results) and validity
(predicting what is supposed to)
o When evaluating the same patient, even trained raters come up with different
interpretations (reliability)
o Projective tests may misdiagnose a normal individual as pathological (validity)
 Evaluating the Psychoanalytical Perspective
o The scientific merits of Freud’s theory have been criticized. Psychoanalysis is meagerly
testable. Most of its concepts arise out of clinical practice, which are the after-the-fact
explanation.
Is Repression a Myth? : Evaluating Freud’s legacy (604-607)
1. Contradictory Evidence from Modern Research
a. We critique Freud from an early twenty-first century perspective
i. Similar to criticizing Henry Ford’s Model T with today’s Mustang
b. Some research contradictions:
i. Today’s developmental psychologists see our development as life-long, not fixed
in childhood
ii. They doubt that infants’ neural networks are mature enough to sustain as much
emotional trauma as Freud assumed.
iii. Some think Freud overestimated parental influence and underestimated peer
influence
iv. They also doubt that conscience and gender identity form as the child resolved
the Oedipus complex at age 5 or 6.
v. We gain our gender identity and become strongly masculine/feminine even
without the same-sex parent present.
2. Is Repression a Myth?
a. Freud’s entire psychoanalytic theory rests on his assumption that the human mind often
represses painful experiences, banishing them into the unconscious until, with the help
of a guide, we somehow uncover them.
b. Repression, if it ever occurs, is a rare mental response to terrible trauma.
i. Study of children who witnessed their parents murdered: Not one repressed the
memory
ii. Nazi death camp survivors remembered
iii. Veterans remember
3. The Modern Unconscious Mind
a. Freud was right about having limited access to all the goes on in our minds.
b. Our capacity for unconscious learning is quite sophisticated.
c. The unconscious also involves
i. The schemas that automatically control our perceptions/interpretations
ii. The priming by stimuli to which we have no consciously attended
iii. The parallel processing of different aspects of vision and thinking
iv. The implicit memories that operate without conscious recall, even among those
with amnesia
v. The emotions that activate instantly, before conscious analysis
vi. The self-concept and stereotypes that automatically and unconsciously
influence how we process information about ourselves and others
d. More than we realize, we fly on “autopilot”
e. Terror-management theory: proposes that faith in one’s worldview and the pursuit of
self-esteem provide protection against a deeply rooted fear of death.
f. False consensus effect: the tendency to overestimate the extent to which others share
our beliefs and behaviors.
i. People who cheat on their taxes tend to think many others do likewise
4. Freud’s Ideas as Scientific Theory
a. The most serious problem with Freud’s theory is it fails to predict such behaviors and
traits.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
“The Big 5”: The trait theory of personality (613-622)
The Trait Perspective
a. Traits: people’s characteristic behaviors and conscious motives
b. Four personality types (by ancient Greeks)
i. Depressed
ii. Cheerful
iii. Unemotional
iv. Choleric
Exploring Traits
a. Factory Analysis: statistical procedure to identify clusters of test items that tap basic
components of intelligence
i. Extraversion: trait labels that can describe our temperament and typical
behaviors
ii. British psychologists believed we can reduce many of our normal individual
variations to two or three dimensions
1. Extraversion- Introversion
2. Emotional Stability- Instability
Biology and personality
a. Brain-activity scans of extraverts add to the growing list of trains and mental states that
have been explored
i. For example: PET scans show that a frontal lobe area involved in behavior
inhibition is less active in extraverts than introverts
b. Our biology influences our personality in other ways as well
i. Genes have much to say about the temperament (our emotional reactivity) and
the behavioral style that help define our personality.
ii. Personality differences among different animals are also prevalent
Assessing Traits
a. Personality inventories: longer questionnaires covering a wide range of feelings and
behaviors, designed to assess several traits at once
i. Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory: (the most extensively researched
personality inventory) assesses “abnormal” personality tendencies rather than
normal personality traits; the MMPI illustrates a good way of developing a
personality inventory.
1. Empirically derived: a test developed by testing a pool of items and
then selecting those that discriminate between groups
2. True/False questions like “I get all the sympathy I should”
The Big Five Factors
a. A test that specifies where you are on the five dimensions
Trait Dimension
Conscientiousness
Agreeableness
Neuroticism
Openness
Extraversion
Endpoints of the dimension
Organized, Careful, Disciplined
Disorganized, Careless, Impulsive
Soft-Hearted, Trusting, Helpful
Ruthless, Suspicious,
Calm, Secure, Self-satisfied
Anxious, Insecure, Self-pitying
Imaginative, Preference, Independent Practical, Pref. for routine, conforming
Sociable, fun-loving, affectionate
Retiring, sober, reserved
b. The Person-Situation Controversy
 Our behavior is influenced by the interaction of our inner disposition with our environment.
 When we explore this person-situation controversy we look for genuine personality traits that
persist over time and across situations.
Stopped at pg. 621
Lecture 2/23/09
Questions about the Big Five
1. How stable are these traits?
 Quite stable in adulthood, however, they change over development.
2. How heritable are they?
 Fifty percent or so for each trait
3. How about other cultures?
 These traits are common across cultures
4. Can they predict other personal attributes?
 Yes
Assessing Traits
Personality inventories are questionnaires (often with true-false or agree-disagree items) designed to
gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors assessing several traits at once
 NEO-PI (Neuroticism Extroversion Openness Personality Inventory): Based on the five-factor
model. Tests normal personality.
 Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: based on Jung’s theory of personality types (used more so in
business) Tests normal personality.
The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is the most widely researched and clinically
used of all personality tests. It was originally developed to identify emotional disorders. Detects
abnormal personality.
 The MMPI was developed by empirically testing a pool of items and then selecting those that
discriminated between diagnostic groups
o 10 clinical scales
 Each correspond with a diagnostic category
 Hypochondriac
 Depression


Hysteria
Psychopathic Deviance (psychopath: no remorse, no envy, don’t care
about anyone but themselves)
Masculinity/Femininity (assesses homosexuality)
Paranoia
Psychosthenia (constantly worry, somewhat nervous, fearful)
Schizophrenia
Mania
Social Introversion
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o 4 Validity scales
 Answering questions about themselves
 L (Lie Scale): projects a saintly image, denying anything negative
 K
 F
 MMPI-2 revised version in 1989
Lecture 2/25/09
Evaluating the Trait Perspective
The Person-Situation Controversy
Walter Mischel (1968, 1984, 2004) points out that traits may be enduring, but the resulting behavior in
various situations is different. Therefore, traits are not good predictors of behavior.
 Are you the same in all situations? From one situation to another, people can be very different
 The student in the front row who got good grades, facebook page showed something different.
 Cross Situational Consistency: Varying from one situation to the other. Temporal consistency
shows over time there is some consistency in behavior.
Reciprocal Influences
Bandura called the process of interacting with our environment reciprocal determinism.
 Our personality influences our environment
 Our situations shape our behavior
Individuals and Environments Different people choose different environments
o Music is based on different dispositions
 Our personalities shape how we react to events
o Anxious people react to situations differently than calm people
o Teacher did a study where he exposed women to beautiful models, looked at the
women’s big 5 personality traits. The effects of the images are based on neuroticism.
High levels of neuroticism felt really bad after viewing the images.
 Our personalities shape situations
o How we view and treat people influence how they treat us
Personal Control
Social-cognitive psychologists emphasize our sense of personal control, whether we control the
environment controls us.
External locus of control refers to the perception that chance or outside forces beyond our personal
control determine our fate
Internal locus of control refers to the perception that we can control our own fate
Learned Helplessness
When unable to avoid repeated adverse events an animal or human learns helplessness
 Dog example in book
Self-Efficacy:
Self-Esteem: Correlated with a variety of positive outcomes (grades, etc)