Unit+X+-+Personality

//Unit X - Personality// 

=Notes: (p. 479-486):=
 * __Personality: __**
 * Personality: an individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting.
 * o Dan McAdams and Jennifer Pals (2006) suggest that it is “an individual’s unique variation on the general evolutionary design for human nature,” which gets expressed in one’s traits and cultural situation.
 * Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory proposed that childhood sexuality and unconscious motivations influence personality.
 * The humanistic approach focused on our inner capacities for growth and self-fulfillment.
 * __The Psychoanalytic Perspective: __**
 * __Exploring the Unconscious: __**
 * Observing patients led Freud to his “discovery” of the unconscious.
 * o Practiced **free association**, in which in which he told the patient to relax and say whatever came to mind, no matter how embarrassing or trivial.
 * § Believed it would allow him to retrace that line, following a chain of thought leading into the patient’s unconscious, where painful unconscious memories, often from childhood, could be retrieved and released.
 * Freud called his theory of personality and the associated treatment techniques **psychoanalysis**.
 * Central to Freud’s theory was his belief that the mind was mostly hidden. The conscious awareness was on the surface.
 * o Beneath that was the larger **unconscious** mind with its thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories.
 * § <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Some of these thoughts were stored in a **preconscious** area, where we can retrieve them into conscious awareness.
 * o <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">There was also a mass of unacceptable passions and thoughts that we **repress,** or forcibly block from our consciousness because they would be too unsettling to acknowledge.
 * § <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Freud believed that, although we are not consciously aware of them, these troublesome feelings and ideas powerfully influence us, sometimes gaining expression in disguised forms; the work we choose, the beliefs we hold, our daily habits, our troubling symptoms.
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Personality Structure: __**
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Freud believes that human personality arises from a conflict between impulse and restraint, between our aggressive, pleasure-seeking biological urges and our internalized social controls over these urges.
 * o <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Believed personality is the result of our efforts to resolve this basic conflict; to express these impulses in ways that bring satisfaction without also bringing guilt or punishment.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Devised the id, ego, and super ego, three interacting systems
 * o **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Id **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">: unconscious psychic energy constantly strives to satisfy basic drives to survive, reproduce, and aggress.
 * § <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">operates on the pleasure principle: It seeks immediate gratification.
 * o **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Ego **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">: as ego develops, the young child responds to the real world. The ego, operating on the reality principle, seeks to gratify the id’s impulses in realistic ways that will bring long-term pleasure.
 * § <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">contains our partly conscious perceptions, thoughts,judgments, and memories.
 * o **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Superego **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">: the voice of our moral compass that forces the ego to consider not only the real but the ideal.
 * § <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Emerges at around age 4 or 5
 * § <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">strives for perfection, judging actions and producing positive feelings of pride or negative feelings of guilt.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Because the superego’s demands often oppose the id’s, the ego struggles to reconcile the two.
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Personality Development: __**
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Freud concluded that children pass through a series of **psychosexual stages**, during which the id’s pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct pleasure-sensitive areas of the body called **erogenous zones****.**
 * o <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">believed that during the **phallic stage** boys seek genital stimulation, and they develop both unconscious sexual desires for their mother and jealousy and hatred for their father, whom they consider a rival, referred to as the **Oedipus Complex**, or in girls, the Electra complex.
 * o <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Through the **identification** process, children’s superegos gain strength as they incorporate many of their parents’ values.
 * § <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Freud believed that identification with the same-sex parent provides what psychologists now call our gender identity.
 * o <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">conflicts unresolved during earlier psychosexual stages could surface as maladaptive behavior in the adult years.
 * § <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">At any point in the oral, anal, or phallic stages, strong conflict could lock, or **fixate**, the person’s pleasure-seeking energies in that stage.


 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Defense Mechanisms: __**
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Freud proposed that the ego protects itself with **defense mechanisms**: tactics that reduce or redirect anxiety by distorting reality.
 * o **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Repression **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">: the basic defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness.
 * o **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Regression: **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> individual faced with anxiety retreats to a more infantile psychosexual stage, where some psychic energy remains fixated.
 * o **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Reaction Formation **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">: the ego unconsciously switches unacceptable impulses into their opposites. Thus, people may express feelings that are the opposite of their anxiety-arousing unconscious feelings.
 * o **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Projection **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">: people disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others.
 * o **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Displacemen **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">t: psychoanalytic defense mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person, as when redirecting anger toward a safer outlet.
 * o **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Sublimation **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">: people re-channel their unacceptable impulses into socially approved activities.
 * o **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Denial: **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">protects the person from real events that are painful to accept, either by rejecting a fact or its seriousness.
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">The Neo-Freudian and Psychodynamic Theorists: __**
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Pioneering psychoanalysts who followed Freud, called neo-Freudians, accepted Freud’s basic ideas: the personality structures of id, ego, and superego; the importance of the unconscious; the shaping of personality in childhood; and the dynamics of anxiety and the defense mechanisms.
 * o <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">They diverged on:
 * § <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">placed more emphasis on the conscious mind’s role in interpreting experience and in coping with the environment.
 * § <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">doubted that sex and aggression were all-consuming motivations.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Instead, they tended to emphasize loftier motives and social interactions.
 * o <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Alfred Adler and Karen Horneyagreed with Freud that childhood is important.
 * § <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">But they believed that childhood social, not sexual, tensions are crucial for personality formation.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Horney countered Freud’s assumptions that women have weak superegos and suffer “penis envy, ” and she attempted to balance the bias she detected in this masculine view of psychology.
 * o <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Carl Jung placed less emphasis on social factors and agreed with Freud that the unconscious exerts a powerful influence.
 * § <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">To Jung, the unconscious contains more than our repressed thoughts and feelings.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">He believed we also have a **collective unconscious**, a common reservoir of images derived from our species’ universal experiences.
 * o <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">the collective unconscious explains why, for many people, spiritual concerns are deeply rooted and why people in different cultures share certain myths and images, such as mother as a symbol of nurturance.

=__**Notes: (p. 487-492):**__=
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Assessing Unconscious Process: __**
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Personality assessment tools are useful to those who study personality or provide therapy. Requirements include:
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">some sort of a road into the unconscious, to track down residue from early childhood experiences; something to move beyond surface pretensions and reveal hidden conflicts and impulses.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Objective assessment tools, such as true-false questionnaires would be ineffective because they only tap into conscious surface.
 * **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Projective tests **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> aim to provide this “psychological X-ray, ” by asking test-takers to describe an ambiguous stimulus or tell a story about it.
 * o **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Ex): ****<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">, in which people view ambiguous pictures and then make up stories about them.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Most widely used is the ** Rorschach inkblot test ** <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">, <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> in which people describe what they see in a series of inkblots.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach (pronounced ROAR-shock) based it on a childhood game in which he and his friends dripped ink on a paper, folded it, and then said what they saw in the resulting blot.
 * o <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Some clinicians cherish the Rorschach, offering Rorschach-based assessments of criminals’ violence potential for judges
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Others view it as a helpful diagnostic tool, a source of suggestive leads, or an icebreaker and a revealing interview technique.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">The Society for Personality Assessment (2005) commends “its responsible use” (which would not include inferring past child sexual abuse).
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Those who insist that the Rorschach is no emotional MRI, argue that only a few of the many Rorschach-derived scores, such as ones for hostility and anxiety, are valid.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">They say, moreover, that these tests are not reliable—inkblot assessments diagnose many normal adults as pathological.
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective: __**
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Contradictory Evidence from Modern Research: __**
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Today, we critique Freud’s work from a 21st century perspective, which itself will be under revision. Freud did not have access to neurotransmitter or DNA studies.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Today’s developmental psychologists see our development as lifelong, not fixed in childhood.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">They doubt that infants’ neural networks are mature enough to sustain as much emotional trauma as Freud assumed.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Some think Freud overestimated parental influence and underestimated child abuse and peer influence.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">They also doubt that conscience and gender identity form as the child resolves the Oedipus complex at age 5 or 6.
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">We gain our gender identity earlier and become strongly masculine or feminine even without a same-sex parent present
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">They note that Freud’s ideas about childhood sexuality arose from his skepticism of stories of childhood sexual abuse told by his female patients; stories that some scholars believe he attributed to their own childhood sexual wishes and conflicts


 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Is Repression a Myth? __**
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Freud’s entire psychoanalytic theory rests on his assumption that the human mind often represses offending wishes, banishing them into the unconscious until they resurface.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Recover and resolve childhood’s conflicted wishes, and emotional healing should follow.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Freud’s followers extended repression to explain apparently lost and recovered memories of childhood traumas.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Today’s researchers acknowledge that we sometimes spare our egos by neglecting information that is threatening <span class="apple-converted-space" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Many contend that repression, if it ever occurs, is a rare mental response to terrible trauma.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Some researchers believe that extreme, prolonged stress, such as the stress some severely abused children experience, might disrupt memory by damaging the hippocampus.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">the far more common reality is that high stress and associated stress hormones enhance memory.
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">The Modern Unconscious Mind: __**
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Freud was right about at least one thing: We indeed have limited access to all that goes on in our minds
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">In experiments, people have learned to anticipate the computer screen quadrant in which a character will appear next, even before being able to articulate the underlying rule
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">The “iceberg” notion of today’s psychologists differs from that of Freud’s:
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">the schemas that automatically control our perceptions and interpretations.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">the priming by stimuli to which we have not consciously attended.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">the right-hemisphere activity that enables the split-brain patient’s left hand to carry out an instruction the patient cannot verbalize.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">the parallel processing of different aspects of vision and thinking.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">the implicit memories that operate without conscious recall, even among those with amnesia.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">the emotions that activate instantly, before conscious analysis
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">the self-concept and stereotypes that automatically and unconsciously influence how we process information about ourselves and others.
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Our lives are guided by off-screen, out-of-sight, unconscious information processing.
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Recent research has also provided some support for Freud’s idea of defense mechanisms (even if they don’t work exactly as Freud supposed)
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Roy Baumeister and his colleagues (1998) found that people tend to see their attitudes in others, a phenomenon that Freud called projection and that today’s researchers call the **false consensus** **effect**, the tendency to overestimate the extent to which others share our beliefs and behaviors.
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Recent history has supported Freud’s idea that we defend ourselves against anxiety, but the contemporary idea differs from Freud’s.
 * o **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Terror-management theory **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">: <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">a theory of death-related anxiety; explores people’s emotional and behavioral responses to reminders of their impending death.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Faced with a threatening world, people act not only to enhance their self-esteem but also to adhere more strongly to worldviews that answer questions about life’s meaning.
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Freud’s Ideas as Scientific Theory: __**
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Psychologists also criticize Freud’s theory for its scientific shortcomings.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Freud’s theory rests on few objective observations, and parts of it offer few testable hypotheses.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">It offers after-the-fact explanations of any characteristic (of one person’s smoking, another’s fear of horses, another’s sexual orientation) yet fails to predict such behaviors and traits.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Critics of Freud share the viewpoint that his theories are based on childhood sexuality, repression, dream analysis, and after-the-fact speculation.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Supporters also note that some of Freud’s ideas are enduring.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">It was Freud who drew our attention to the unconscious and the irrational, to our self-protective defenses, to the importance of human sexuality, and to the tension between our biological impulses and our social well-being.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">It was Freud who challenged our self-righteousness, punctured our pretensions, and reminded us of our potential for evil.
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">The Humanistic Perspective: __**
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">By the 1960’s some personality psychologists discontent with the <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">negativity of Freudian theory and the mechanistic psychology of B. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">F. Skinner’s behaviorism, resulting in the emergence of humanistic psychologists who strive for self-determination and self-realization.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">studied people through their own self-reported experiences and feelings.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Two pioneers: Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) and Carl Rogers(1902–1987)
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Abraham Maslow’s Self-Actualizing Person: __**
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Maslow proposed that we are motivated by a hierarchy of needs.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">If our physiological needs are met, we become concerned with personal safety; if we achieve a sense of security, we then seek to love, to be loved, and to love ourselves; with our love needs satisfied, we seek self-esteem.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Once we reach self-esteem, we seek **self-actualization** (the process of fulfilling our potential) and **self-transcendence** (meaning, purpose, and communion beyond the self).
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Maslow (1970) developed his ideas by studying healthy, creative people rather than troubled clinical cases.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">based his description of self-actualization on a study of those who seemed notable for their rich and productive lives
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">reported that these people shared certain characteristics: They were self-aware and self-accepting, open and spontaneous, loving and caring, and not paralyzed by others’ opinions.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Secure in their sense of who they were, their interests were problem-centered rather than self-centered.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">They focused their energies on a particular task, one they often regarded as their mission in life.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Most enjoyed a few deep relationships rather than many superficial ones.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Many had been moved by spiritual or personal peak experiences that surpassed ordinary consciousness.
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Carl Rogers’ Person-Centered Perspective: __**
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Carl Rogers agreed with much of Maslow’s thinking, believing that people are basically good and endowed with self-actualizing tendencies.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Rogers (1980) believed that a growth-promoting climate required three conditions: genuineness, acceptance, and empathy.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">People nurture our growth by being genuine; by being open with their own feelings, dropping their facades, and being transparent and self-disclosing.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">People also nurture our growth by being accepting; by offering us what Rogers called **unconditional positive regard**<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Unconditional positive regard: a caring, accepting, nonjudgmental attitude, which Carl Rogers believed would help clients to develop self-awareness and self-acceptance.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">people nurture our growth by being empathic; by sharing and mirroring our feelings and reflecting our meanings.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Maslow and Rogers believed that a central feature of personality is one’s **self-concept**: <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">all the thoughts and feelings we have in response to the question, <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Who am I?”
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">If our self-concept is positive, we tend to act and perceive the world positively.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">If it is negative, if in our own eyes we fall far short of our ideal self, said Rogers, we feel dissatisfied and unhappy.

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=__**Notes: (p. 493-503):**__=
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">The Trait Perspective: __**
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Rather than focusing on unconscious forces and <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">thwarted growth opportunities, some researchers attempt to define personality in terms of stable and enduring behavior patterns.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Sam Gamgee’s loyalty and optimism: can be traced back to Gordon Allport, who unlike Freud describes personality in terms of fundamental **traits**, people’s characteristic behaviors and conscious motives.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">He was concerned less with explaining individual traits than with describing them.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Isabel Briggs Myers (1987) and her mother, Katharine Briggs, also wanted to describe important personality differences.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">attempted to sort people according to Carl Jung’s personality types, based on their responses to 126 questions.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">The **Myers-Briggs Type Indicator** (MBTI), available in 21 languages, is taken by more than 2 million people a year, mostly for counseling, leadership training, and work-team development.
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> It offers choices, such as “Do you usually value sentiment more than logic, or value logic more than sentiment?” Then it counts the test-taker’s preferences, labels them as indicating, say, a “feeling type,” or “thinking type,” and feeds them back to the person in complimentary terms.
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Most people agree with their announced type profile, which mirrors their declared preferences.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">They may also accept their label as a basis for being matched with work partners and tasks that supposedly suit their temperaments.
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Exploring Traits: __**
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Classifying people as one or another distinct personality type fails to capture their full individuality.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> By placing people on several trait dimensions simultaneously, psychologists can describe countless individual personality variations.
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Factor Analysis: __**
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">One way has been to propose traits, such as anxiety, that some theory regards as basic.
 * o **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">factor analysis **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">: a statistical procedure that identifies clusters of correlated test items that tap basic components of intelligence (such as spatial ability or verbal skill).
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">British psychologists Hans Eysenck and Sybil Eysenck believed that we can reduce many of our normal individual variations to two or three dimensions,including extraversion–introversion and emotional stability–instability.
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Biology and Personality: __**
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Brain-activity scans of extraverts add to the growing list of traits and mental states that have been explored with brain-imaging procedures.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">includes intelligence, impulsivity, addictive cravings, lying, sexual attraction, aggressiveness, empathy, spiritual experience, and even racial and political attitudes
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Such studies indicate that extraverts seek stimulation because their normal brain arousal is relatively low.
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Our biology influences our personality in other ways as well. Our genes have much to say about the temperament and behavioral style that help define our personality.
 * o <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Jerome Kagan <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">has attributed differences in children’s shyness and inhibition to their <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> autonomic nervous system reactivity.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Given a reactive autonomic nervous system, we respond to stress with greater anxiety and inhibition.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Samuel Gosling and his colleagues report that personality differences among dogs (in energy, affection, reactivity, and curious intelligence) are as evident, and as consistently judged, as personality differences among humans.
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Assessing Traits: __**
 * **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Personality inventories **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">, longer questionnaires covering a wide range of feelings and behaviors, are designed to assess several traits at once.
 * o **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> assesses “abnormal” personality tendencies rather than normal personality traits.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> illustrates a good way of developing a personality inventory.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Starke Hathaway, one of its creators, compared his effort to that of Alfred Binet, who eveloped the first intelligence test by selecting items that identified children who would probably have trouble progressing normally in French schools.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">MMPI items were **empirically derived**, or from a large pool of items.
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">It was then grouped the questions into 10 clinical scales, including scales that assess depressive tendencies, masculinity–femininity, and introversion–extraversion.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">In contrast to the subjectivity of most projective tests, personality inventories are scored objectively—so objectively that a computer can administer and score them.
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Objectivity does not, however, guarantee validity, i.e. MMPI test takers can give socially accepted responses in order to create a desired, socially- accepted response.
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">The Big Five Factors: __**
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">A test of encompassing five factors, dubbed the Big Five, tests a person’s position on five dimensions <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">(conscientiousness, <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">agreeableness, neuroticism, openness, and extraversion) and it has said much of what there is to say about your personality.
 * o **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">How stable are these traits? **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> In adulthood, the Big Five traits are quite stable.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Some tendencies—neuroticism (emotional instability),extraversion, and openness—wane a bit during early and middle adulthood, and others (agreeableness and conscientiousness) rise
 * o **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">How heritable are they? **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Heritability (the extent to which individual differences are attributable to genes) varies with the diversity of people studied.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">it generally runs 50 percent or a tad more for each dimension, and genetic influences are similar in different nations
 * o **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Do the Big Five traits predict other personal attributes? **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Yes, and EX: Highly conscientious people earn better high school and university grades
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Evaluating the Trait Perspective: __**
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">The Person-Situation Controversy: __**
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">When we explore person-situation controversy, we look for genuine personality traits that persist over time and across situations.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Personality trait scores are positively correlated with scores obtained seven years later, and that as people grow older their personality stabilizes.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Interests, careers, relationships may change
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Traits are socially significant:
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">They influence our health, our thinking, and our job performance
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Studies that follow lives through time show that personality traits rival socioeconomic status and cognitive ability as predictors of mortality, divorce, and occupational attainment
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Although our personality traits may be both stable and potent, the consistency of our specific behaviors from one situation to the next is another matter.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">people do not act with predictable consistency ;
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Walter Mischel’s studies of college students’ conscientiousness revealed but a modest relationship between a student’s being conscientious on one occasion (say, showing up for class on time) and being similarly conscientious on another occasion (say, turning in assignments on time).
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">people’s average outgoingness, happiness, or carelessness over many situations is predictable
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">When rating someone’s shyness or agreeableness, this consistency enables people who know someone well to agree on their ratings
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">We have genetically influenced personality traits ;
 * o **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">music preferences ****<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">. **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Classical, jazz, blues, and folk music lovers tend to be open to experience and verbally intelligent; country, pop, and religious music lovers tend to be cheerful, outgoing, and conscientious
 * o **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">bedrooms and offices **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">. Our personal spaces display our identity and leave a behavioral residue (in our scattered laundry or neat desktop).
 * o **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">personal Web sites ****<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">. **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Is a personal Web site or a Facebook profile also a canvas for self-expression? Or is it an opportunity for people to present themselves in false or misleading ways?
 * o **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">E- **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">mail. You can detect a person’s voice through their e-mail.
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">In unfamiliar, formal situations—perhaps as a guest in the home of a person from another culture—our traits remain hidden as we carefully attend to social cues.
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">In familiar, informal situations—just hanging out with friends—we feel less constrained, allowing our traits to emerge
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Our expressive styles—our animation, manner of speaking, and gestures—are impressively consistent.
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Some people are naturally expressive (and therefore talented at pantomime and charades); others are less expressive (and therefore better poker players).
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Even our conversational word use expresses our personality.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Overall, we can say that at any moment the immediate situation powerfully influences a person’s behavior, especially when the situation makes clear demands.

=**__Notes: (p.503-510):__**=
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">The Social-Cognitive Perspective: __**
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">The **social-cognitive perspective** on personality proposed by Albert Bandura emphasizes the interaction of our traits with our situations.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">believe we learn many of our behaviors either through conditioning or by observing others and modeling our behavior after theirs.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">emphasize the importance of mental processes: What we think about our situations affects our behavior.
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Reciprocal Influences: __**
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Banduraviews the person-environment interaction as **reciprocal determinism** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">:
 * o <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">the interacting influences of behavior, internal cognition, and environment.
 * § **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Different people choose different environments **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">.
 * § **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Our personalities shape how we interpret and react to events **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">.
 * § **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Our personalities help create situations to which we react **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Behavior emerges from the interplay of external and internal influences.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">At every moment, our behavior is influenced by our biology, our social and cultural experiences, and our cognition and dispositions.
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Personal Control: __**
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">In studying how we interact with our environment, social-cognitive psychologists emphasize our sense of **personal control**; whether we learn to see ourselves as controlling, or as controlled by, our environment.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">C//orrelate// <span class="apple-converted-space" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> people’s feelings of control with their behaviors and achievements.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">E//xperiment,// <span class="apple-converted-space" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> by raising or lowering people’s sense of control and noting the effects.
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Internal Versus External Locus of Control: __**
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">One side of the perceptions of control is <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">hat psychologist Julian Rotter called an <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">**external locus of control**: the perception that chance or outside forces determine their fate.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">The other is an **internal locus of control**, those who believe that they control their own destiny.
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Depleting and Strengthening Self-control: __**
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Self-control, the ability to control impulses and delay gratification, predicts good adjustment, better grades, and social success.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Roy Baumeister and Julia Exline (2000): like a muscle,self-control temporarily weakens after an exertion, replenishes with rest, and becomes stronger with exercise.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Exercising willpower can deplete your mental energy and even deplete the blood sugar and neural activity associated with mental focus
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">In the long run, self-control requires attention and energy.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">People who practice self-regulation through physical exercise and time-managed study programs can develop their self-regulation capacity.
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Benefits of Personal Control: __**
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">P <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">eople who feel helpless and oppressed often perceive control as external and may develop <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">//learned helplessness.//
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">This perception may then deepen their feelings of resignation
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Part of the shock we feel in an unfamiliar culture comes from a diminished sense of control when we are unsure how people in the new environment will respond
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Similarly, people given little control over their world in prisons, factories, schools, and nursing homes experience lower morale and increased stress.
 * o <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Measures that increase control; i.e. allowing prisoners to move chairs, control room lights and tv, noticeably improve health and morale.
 * § <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">I <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">n one famous study of nursing home patients, <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">93 percent of those encouraged to exert more control became more alert, active, and happy
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Some freedom and control is better than none, notes Barry Schwartz (2000, 2004).
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">But “excess of freedom” in today’s Western cultures contributes to decreasing life satisfaction, increased depression, and sometimes paralysis.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Increased consumer choices, as when buying a car or phone, are not an unmixed blessing.
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">After choosing among 30 brands of jam or chocolate, people express less satisfaction than those choosing among a half-dozen options
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">This **tyranny of choice** brings information overload and a greater likelihood that we will feel regret over some of the unchosen options.

**__<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Assessing Behavior in Situations: __**
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Optimism Versus Pessimism: __**
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">One measure of how helpless or effective you feel is where you stand on optimism-pessimism.
 * o **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Optimism and Health **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">: Health, too, benefits from a basic optimism.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">a depressed hopelessness dampens the body’s disease-fighting immune system.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">When dating couples wrestle with conflicts, optimists and their partners see each other as engaging constructively.
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">They tend then to feel more supported and satisfied with the resolution and with their relationship.
 * **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Excessive Optimism: **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> If positive thinking in the face of adversity pays dividends, so, too, can a dash of realism.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Self-disparaging explanations of past failures can depress ambition, but realistic anxiety over possible //future//failures can fuel energetic efforts to avoid the dreaded fate
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Success requires enough optimism to provide hope and enough pessimism to prevent complacency.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Excessive optimism can blind us to real risks
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Neil Weinstein has shown how our natural positive-thinking bias can promote “an unrealistic optimism about future life events.”
 * **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Blindness to One’s Own ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">: P <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">eople often are most overconfident when most incompetent.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Justin Kruger and David Dunning found that most students scoring at the low end of grammar and logic tests believed they had scored in the top half.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">This “ignorance of one’s own incompetence” phenomenon has a parallel in hard-of-hearing people’s difficulty recognizing their own hearing loss.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">The difficulty in recognizing one’s own incompetence helps explain why so many low-scoring students are dumbfounded after doing badly on a test.
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">To judge one’s competence and predict one’s future performance, it often pays to invite others’ assessments.
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Social-cognitive psychologists explore how people interact with situations. To predict behavior, they often observe behavior in realistic situations.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Ex: U. S. Army’s World War II strategy for assessing candidates for spy missions.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Rather than using paper-and-pencil tests, Army psychologists subjected the candidates to simulated undercover conditions. They tested their ability to handle stress, solve problems, maintain leadership, and withstand intense interrogation without blowing their cover.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Student teachers are observed and evaluated several times.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">These procedures show a person’s past behavior patterns in similar situations.

Notes: (p. 510-518):
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Evaluating the Social-Cognitive Perspective: __**
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">The social-cognitive perspective on personality sensitizes researchers to how situations affect, and are affected by, individuals.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">builds from psychological research on learning and cognition.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Critics accuse the social-cognitive perspective of focusing too much on the situation that it fails to appreciate the person’s inner traits.
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Exploring the self: __**
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Psychology’s emphasis on people’s <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">sense of self dates back at least to William James, <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">who devoted more than 100 pages of his 1890 Principles of Psychology to the topic.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">1943- Gordon Allport lamented that the self had become “lost to view ”
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Every year, new studies emerge on self-esteem, self-disclosure, self-awareness, self-schemas, self-monitoring, and so forth
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Underlying this research is an assumption that the **self**, as organizer of our thoughts, feelings, and actions, is the center of personality.
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">The concept of concept of **possible selves** put forth by Hazel Markus and her colleagues
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Your possible selves include your visions of the self you dream of becoming—the rich self, the successful self, the loved and admired self. They also include the self you fear becoming—the unemployed self, the lonely self, the academically failed self.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">such possible selves motivate us by laying out specific goals and calling forth the energy to work toward them.
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Our self-focused perspective may motivate us, but it can also lead us to presume too readily that others are noticing and evaluating us.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Thomas Gilovich (1996) - **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">spotlight effect **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">: overestimating others’ noticing and evaluating our appearance, performance, and blunders (as if we presume a spotlight shines on us).
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">The Benefits of Self-Esteem: __**
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">High **self-esteem**, a feeling of self-worth, pays dividends.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">People who feel good about themselves, have fewer sleepless nights; succumb less easily to pressures to conform; are more persistent at difficult tasks; are less shy, anxious, and lonely; and are just plain happier
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Although children’s academic self-concept—their confidence that they can do well in a subject—predicts school achievement, general self-image does not
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Experiments do reveal an effect of low self-esteem.
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Temporarily deflate people’s self-image (say, by telling them they did poorly on an aptitude test or by disparaging their personality) and they will be more likely to disparage others or to express heightened racial prejudice
 * o <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Those who are negative about themselves also tend to be thin-skinned and judgmental
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">In experiments, people made to feel insecure often become excessively critical, as if to impress others with their own brilliance
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Self-Serving Bias: __**
 * **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Self-Serving Bias **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">: a readiness to perceive oneself favorably.
 * o **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">People accept more responsibility for good deeds than for bad, and for successes than for failures **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">.
 * o **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Most people see themselves as better than average **<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">.
 * § <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Ironically, people even see themselves as more immune than others to self-serving bias
 * <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">“All of us have inferiority complexes, ” wrote John Powell (1989, p. 15). “Those who seem not to have such a complex are only pretending.”
 * o We remember and justify our past actions in self-enhancing ways.
 * We exhibit an inflated confidence in our beliefs and judgments
 * we overestimate how desirably we would act in situations where most people behave less than admirably
 * we often seek out favorable, self-enhancing information
 * we are quicker to believe flattering descriptions of ourselves than unflattering ones, and we are impressed with psychology tests that make us look good.
 * we shore up our self-image by overestimating the commonality of our foibles and by under estimating the commonality of our strengths
 * we see ourselves as making better-than-average contributions to our groups
 * we exhibit group pride
 * § Self-serving perceptions underlie conflicts ranging from blaming one’s spouse for marital discord to arrogantly promoting one’s own ethnic superiority.
 * § Finding their self-esteem threatened, people with large egos may do more than put others down; they may react violently.
 * i.e. Aryans and Holocaust
 * it can be dangerous to puncture a person’s ego à cause them to react violently
 * The effects of two types of self-esteem :
 * o // Defensive self-esteem // is fragile. It focuses on sustaining itself, which makes failures and criticism feel threatening.
 * § Such egotism exposes one to perceived threats, which feed anger and disorder, note Jennifer Crocker and Lora Park
 * § Thus, like low self-esteem, defensive self-esteem correlates with aggressive and antisocial behavior
 * o // Secure self-esteem // is less fragile, because it is less contingent on external evaluations.
 * § To feel accepted for who we are, and not for our looks, wealth, or acclaim, relieves pressures to succeed and enables us to focus beyond ourselves
 * § By losing ourselves in relationships and purposes larger than self, we may achieve a more secure self-esteem and greater quality of life.
 * __ Culture and the Self: __**
 * Cultures vary in the extent to which they give priority to the nurturing and expression of personal identity or group identity
 * o ** Individualism ** : giving priority to one’s own goals over group goals and defining one’s identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identifications.
 * § If you pride yourself on your individualism, a great deal of your identity would remain intact, the very core of your being, the sense of “me,” the awareness of your personal convictions and values.
 * § Individualists share the human need to belong. They join groups. But they are less focused on group harmony and doing their duty to the group
 * More mobile, can leave or join social groups easily
 * o **Collectivism:**giving priority to goals of one’s group (often one’s extended family or work group) and defining one’s identity accordingly.
 * § If set adrift in a foreign land as a collectivist, you might experience a greater loss of identity.
 * Cut off from family, groups, and loyal friends, you would lose the connections that have defined who you are.
 * § In a collectivist culture, group identifications provide a sense of belonging, a set of values, a network of caring individuals, an assurance of security.
 * o Westerners tend to place higher emphasis on self as opposed to places such as Japan.
 * o Individualism’s benefits can come at the cost of more loneliness, more divorce, more homicide, and more stress-related disease
 * § People in individualist cultures demand more romance and personal fulfillment in marriage, subjecting the relationship to more pressure