ACTUAL Exam Questions and CORRECT
Answers
goals of personality psychology - CORRECT ANSWER - describe, explain, understand,
predict
definition of psychology - CORRECT ANSWER - refers to an individual's characteristic
patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior together with the psychological mechanisms (hidden
or not) behind those patterns
six perspectives of personality - CORRECT ANSWER - psychoanalytic, psychoanalytic-
social, trait, learning, cognitive social learning, humanistic
how can personality be described? - CORRECT ANSWER - nomothetic or idiographic
approach
nomothetic - CORRECT ANSWER - groups of people
idiographic - CORRECT ANSWER - focusing on one person
how do we understand personality dynamics? - CORRECT ANSWER - motivation and
adaptation
minnesota multi-phasic personality inventory (MMIP-2) - CORRECT ANSWER -
originally developed in late 1930; has 550 true/false statements
pyschoanalytic perspective: major assumptions - CORRECT ANSWER - personality is
dynamic, personality is determined, personality is organizational, focus is on development
,three levels of consciousness (Freud) - CORRECT ANSWER - conscious mind,
preconscious mind, unconscious mind
unconscious mind - CORRECT ANSWER - the dominant part of your mind (much of our
behavior is due to forces within the unconscious)
preconscious mind - CORRECT ANSWER - includes thoughts that you are not
immediately aware of but can be brought to awareness fairly easily
conscious mind - CORRECT ANSWER - includes what you are aware of at a given point
in time and only a small part of your thoughts/memories are conscious
Freud's dream theory - CORRECT ANSWER - Freud believed that dreams are the single,
best source of information about the unconscious; dreams are highly sufficient, carefully
constructed, and always contain a concealed meaning; dreams are not random
manifest content - CORRECT ANSWER - what you remember from a dream; Freud
believed that what you remembered is very deceptive and you should not take it at face value
latent content - CORRECT ANSWER - the underlying meaning
the id and dreams - CORRECT ANSWER - dreams are part of the primary processing of
the id; the id gains strength while you are alseep
the ego and dreams - CORRECT ANSWER - ego lessens the threat of the id's images
through dream work
dream work - CORRECT ANSWER - the process of modifying and distorting images in
dreams
, mechanisms of dream work - CORRECT ANSWER - condensation, displacement,
censorship, symbolic substitution
symbolic substitution - CORRECT ANSWER - when the ego uses a symbol which
substitutes for something more threatening (because the real thing would be threatening or
inappropriate)
censorship - CORRECT ANSWER - certain parts of a dream are censored, blocked out;
this is why dreams are not alway sequential
displacement - CORRECT ANSWER - involves shifting emphasis so that an important
part of the dream is changed to something unimportant
condensation - CORRECT ANSWER - when the ego combines and compresses separate
thoughts into one thought
process of dream interpretation - CORRECT ANSWER - a person reports the manifest
content of the dream and then makes associations about the dream and the analysis interprets the
latent content of the dream and associations (dream interpretations are alway subjective)
projects - CORRECT ANSWER - refers to a standard set of vague stimuli, called
projectives because the client is supposed to project themselves upon the stimulus and give a
response that reveals something about themselves
categories of projectives - CORRECT ANSWER - association, construction, completion,
expression
projectives used for personality - CORRECT ANSWER - projectives used to be used as
primary sources of personality, now they are used more as secondary