Personality

Personality- Characteristic pattern of thinking, acting, and feeling of an individual

Id, Ego, and Superego

• Id- unconsciously tries to meet basic sexual and aggressive drives; operates on the pleasure principle
• Ego- tries to fulfill pleasure principle realistically; controls both ego and id
• Superego- holds all morals and values of an individual; helps make decisions

The 7 Perspectives

• Neuroscience-focus on how the physical body and brain creates our emotions, memories, and sensory experiences

• Evolutionary- Focus on darwinism; we behave the way we do because we inherited those behaviors

• Psychodynamic- behavior comes from unconscious drives

• Behavioral- focus on our observable behaviors; only cares about the behaviors that impair living and attempts to change them

• Cognitive- focuses on how we think (encode information)

• Socialcultural- focuses on how culture affects behavior

• Humanistic- focuses on positive growth; attempts to seek self-actualization

Freud's Psychosexual Stages-

• Oral- pleasure centers around the mouth
• Anal-pleasure centers around bowel and bladder elimination; coping with control demands
• Phallic- pleasure centers around the genitals
• Latency- focuses on dormant sexual feelings
• Genital- centers around maturation of sexual feeling

Defense Mechanisms- ego's methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously manipulating reality

Types of Defense Mechanisms

• Repression- banishes thoughts, feelings, and memories that are causing anxiety from consciousness

• Regression- individual retreats to a more infantile psychosexual stage

• Reaction Formation- ego unconsciously switches unacceptable impulses into the opposites

• Projection- people disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing the unwanted impulses to others

• Rationalization- offers self-justifying explanations 

• Displacement- shifts inappropriate impulses towards a more acceptable object or person

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