Self and Personality Test - 1

Central to a psychoanalytic approach is the concept of unconscious mental processes –the idea that unconscious motivations and needs have a role in determining our behaviour. This approach also emphasizes the irrational aspects of human behaviour and portrays aggressive and sexual needs as having a major impact on personality. Freud developed a number of hypothetical models to show how the mind (or what he called the psyche) works:

• a topographic model of the psyche –or how the mind is organized;
• a structural model of the psyche –or how personality works; and
• a psychogenetic model of development –or how personality develops.

Fixation at the oral stage, and not the other stages, may lead to adults who are sarcastic, critical, overeat and bite their nails.

To examine how individuals view the world, George Kelly (1905 –67) developed personal construct theory. In contrast to the psychoanalytic emphasis on the person as a victim of unconscious desires and impulses, this humanistic theory portrays people as active hypothesis-generators. Personal construct theory treats the individual as her own personal scientist, one who is actively aware of how her own psychological world is constructed and construed.
By understanding how the individual perceives the world, we can anticipate how they will behave within it and understand their reactions to events. According to Kelly, trait theories try to locate the individual on the personality theorists ’dimensions, whereas personal construct theory looks at how people see and align events according to their own personal dimensions. Kelly basically took the view that we are all scientists –so each individual is continually categorizing, interpreting, labelling and judging himself and his world. Each of us generates constructs and hypotheses, which then help us to anticipate and control events in our lives.

Traits –or descriptors used to label personality –have their origins in the ways we describe personality in everyday language. In the early years of personality theory, many theorists used the term types to describe differences between people. Sheldon (1954), for example, categorized people according to three body types (ectomorphic, mesomorphic and endomorphic) and related these physical differences to differences in personality.
It is unlikely that personality can be mapped to body type, but the idea that all people can be allocated to a small number of categories is challenged by modern trait theories. Modern theorists view traits as continuous rather than discrete entities. So, rather than being divided into categories, people are placed on a trait continuum representing how high or low each individual is on any particular dimension. According to trait theorists, categorizing people into separate groups of ‘sociable ’versus ‘unsociable ’is considered to be meaningless. Instead, it is considered more useful by trait theorists to determine the amount of sociability each person exhibits.

Anxiety is not one of the traits in the five-factor theory of personality.

Self-regulation has the ability to organize and monitor one 's own behavior, change behavior according to external demands, and resist situational pressures. It is the overarching concept that encompasses these abilities.

Source traits: The source traits are stable and are considered as the building blocks of personality. Source traits are less visible to other people and appear to underlie several different aspects of behavior.

A stable, global attributional style indicates that people view causes of events as persisting over time and affecting many aspects of our lives. This type of attributional style would best explain the persistent depressed mood of a student who failed an exam. The other types of attributional styles given do not explain a persistent depressed mood after failing an exam.

The dimension of extraversion-introversion has been shown to predict differences in people ’s preferences for work-related preferences and behaviors. Extraverts prefer open study areas, take more breaks and perform worse on long vigilance tasks compared to introverts. The alternative answers given do not predict these differences.

According to research, optimists and defensive pessimists perform similarly in terms of academic performance because they both cope with life in adaptive ways, just very differently.