Ch. 13 Topics

1. Psychodynamic theories of personality.
     Psychodynamic theory of personality, developed by Sigmund Freud, consists of unconscious forces that influence behavior. Freud referred to these forces as instincts, which usually led to behavior that promoted survival and pleasure.
2. Positive psychology.
     Started by Martin Seligman, positive psychology is the study of such qualities as faith, values creativity, courage, and hope, to determine their effects on people. Correlations have been found with these positive qualities and success and well-being of not only individual people, but also countries.
3. Idiographic approach to personality as distinguished from a nomothetic approach.
      Idiographic approaches are the personalities characterized by individual lives and various personal characteristics. Nomothetic approaches focus more on the common types of labeled personalities among which individuals vary.
4. Projective and objective measures of personality.
       Projective measures use meaningless, or ambiguous stimulus items to elicit "unconscious conflicts and wishes" in order to determine hidden aspects of personality. The Rorschach inkblot test is a projective measure. The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) is another projective measure that reliably predicts how interpersonally dependent people are.
       Objective measures focus only on what raters believe or observe. the objective tests, such as the NEO Personality Inventory, require people to make subjective judgments. Self-reports can be affected by desired to avoid looking bad and by biases in self-perception.
5. Temperament. 
        Temperaments are general tendencies to feel or act in certain ways. Temperaments represent the innate biological structures of personality, caused by gene influence. Temperaments are best measured in infants, because personality differences very early in life likely indicate the actions of biological mechanisms before life experiences may alter them.