Psychology Test - 4

The correct answer is Self-efficacy.

Key Points

• Self-regulation refers to our ability to organise and monitor our own behaviour.
• People, who are able to change their behaviour according to the demands of the external environment, are high on selfmonitoring.
• We often decide to delay or defer the satisfaction of certain needs.

Learning to delay or defer the gratification of needs is called self-control.

A number of psychological techniques of self-control have also been suggested.

• Observation of own behaviour is one of them.
• This provides us with necessary information that may be used to change, modify, or strengthen certain aspects of self.
• Self-instruction is another important technique.
• We often instruct ourselves to do something and behave the way we want to.
• Such instructions are quite effective in self-regulation.
• Self-reinforcement is the third technique.
• This involves rewarding behaviours that have pleasant outcomes.
• Self-efficacy is another important aspect of our self.
• People differ in the extent to which they believe they themselves control their life outcomes or the outcomes are controlled by luck or fate or other situational factors.
• This is not a method of self-control. 

The correct answer is Self and other.

Key Points

Culture and self 

• Several aspects of self seem to be linked to the characteristic features of the culture in which an individual lives.
• Analysis of self carried out in the Indian cultural context reveals a number of important features that are distinct from those found in the Western cultural context.
• The most important distinction between the Indian and the Western views is the way the boundary is drawn between the self and the other.
• In the Western view, this boundary appears to be relatively fixed.
• The Indian view of self, on the other hand, is characterised by the shifting nature of this boundary. 
• In the Western culture, the self and the group exist as two different entities with clearly defined boundaries.
  • Individual members of the group maintain their individuality.
• In the Indian culture, the self is generally not separated from one’s own group; rather both remain in a state of harmonious co-existence.
• In the Western culture, on the other hand, they often remain at a distance. 
• That is why many Western cultures are characterised as individualistic, whereas many Asian cultures are characterised as collectivistic.

The correct answer is All of the above.

Key Points

Concept of personality. 

• The term ‘personality’ often appears in our day-to-day discussion.
• The literal meaning of personality is derived from the Latin word persona. 
• In psychological terms, personality refers to our characteristic ways of responding to individuals and situations.

Personality is characterised by the following features:

• It has both physical and psychological components.
• Its expression in terms of behaviour is fairly unique in a given individual.
• Its main features do not easily change with time.
• It is dynamic in the sense that some of its features may change due to internal or external situational demands.
• Thus, personality is adaptive to situations. 

The correct answer is the Defence mechanism.

Key Points

• According to Freud, much of human behaviour reflects an attempt to deal with or escape from anxiety.
• Thus, how the ego deals with anxiety largely determines how people behave.
• Freud believed that people avoid anxiety mainly by developing defence mechanisms that try to defend the ego against the awareness of instinctual needs.
• Thus, a defence mechanism is a way of reducing anxiety by distorting reality.
• Although some defence against anxiety is normal and adaptive, people who use these mechanisms to such an extent that reality is truly distorted develop various forms of maladjustment

The correct answer is Carl Jung.

Key Points

Carl Jung has proposed another important typology by grouping people into introverts and extraverts. This is widely recognised.

According to this typology,

• Introverts are people who prefer to be alone, tend to avoid others, withdraw themselves in the face of emotional conflicts, and are shy.
• Extraverts, on the other hand, are sociable, outgoing, drawn to occupations that allow dealing directly with people, and react to stress by trying to lose themselves among people and social activity

The correct answer is 1 only.

Key Points

• Levels of Consciousness Freud’s theory considers the sources and consequences of emotional conflicts and the way people deal with these.

In doing so, it visualises the human mind in terms of three levels of consciousness.

• The first level is conscious, which includes the thoughts, feelings and actions of which people are aware.
• The second level is preconscious, which includes mental activity of which people may become aware only if they attend to it closely.
• The third level is unconscious, which includes mental activity that people are unaware of.
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Additional Information 

• Psychodynamic Approach
• This is a highly popular approach to studying personality.
• This view owes largely to the contributions of Sigmund Freud.
• He was a physician and developed this theory in the course of his clinical practice.
• Early in his career, he used hypnosis to treat people with physical and emotional problems.
• He noted that many of his patients needed to talk about their problems, and have talked about them, they often felt better.
• Freud used free association (a method in which a person is asked to openly share all the thoughts, feelings and ideas that come to her/his mind), dream analysis, and analysis of errors to understand the internal functioning of the mind.

The correct answer is None of the above. 

Key Points

Cultural Approach

• This approach attempts to understand personality in relation to the features of the ecological and cultural environment.
• It proposes that a group’s ‘economic maintenance system’ plays a vital role in the origin of cultural and behavioural variations.
• The climatic conditions, the nature of the terrain of the habitat and the availability of food (flora and fauna) in it determine not only people’s economic activities, but also their settlement patterns, social structures, division of labour, and other features such as childrearing practices.
• Taken together these elements constitute a child’s overall learning environment.

Additional Information

• Trait Approaches: These theories are mainly concerned with the description or characterisation of basic components of personality.
• Behavioural Approach:  This approach does not give importance to the internal dynamics of behaviour. Behaviourists believe in data, which they feel are definable, observable, and measurable. 
• Type Approach: attempts to comprehend human personality by examining certain broad patterns in the observed behavioural characteristics of individuals. 

The correct answer is live in the past or dwell in the future.

Key Points

• The humanistic theorists have indicated that healthy personality lies in not mere adjustment to society.
• It involves a quest to know oneself deeply and to be true to one’s own feelings without disguise, and to be oneself in the here-and-now.

According to them, the healthy people share the following characteristics :

• They become aware of themselves, their feelings, and their limits; accept themselves, and what they make of their lives as their own responsibility; have ‘the courage to be’.
• They experience the “here-and-now”; are not trapped.
• They do not live in the past or dwell in the future through anxious expectations and distorted defences.
• Hence option 1 is the correct answer. 

The correct answer is Morgan and Murray.

Key Points

Assessment of personality.

• To know, understand and describe people is a task in which everybody is involved in day-to-day life. When we meet new people, we often try to understand them and even predict what they may do before we interact with them.
• In our personal lives, we rely on our past experiences, observations, conversations and information obtained from other persons.
• The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) This test was developed by Morgan and Murray.
• The test consists of 30 black and white picture cards and one blank card.
• The cards are presented one at a time.
• The subject is asked to tell a story describing the situation presented in the picture: What led up to the situation, what is happening at the moment, what will happen in the future, and what the characters are feeling and thinking? A standard procedure is available for scoring TAT responses. 

The correct answer is None of the above.

Key Points

• Psychologists have tried to assess personality in various ways.
• The most commonly used techniques are Psychometric Tests, Self-Report Measures, Projective Techniques, and Behavioural Analysis.
• These techniques are rooted in different theoretical orientations; hence they throw light on different aspects of personality.
   

Additional Information

Assessment of personality:

• To know, understand and describe people is a task in which everybody is involved in day-to-day life.
• When we meet new people, we often try to understand them and even predict what they may do before we interact with them.
• In our personal lives, we rely on our past experiences, observations, conversations and information obtained from other persons.
• Assessment refers to the procedures used to evaluate or differentiate people on the basis of certain characteristics.
• The goal of assessment is to understand and predict behaviour with minimum error and maximum accuracy.