Personality Vocabulary

4. one’s feelings of high or low self-worth.
6. the perception that you control your own fate.
7. a projective test where people express their inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes.
11. giving priority to one’s own goals over group goals; defining one’s identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identifications.
12. a characteristic pattern of behavior to feel and act; can be assessed by self or by peers.
13. a reservoir of unconscious psychic energy that strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives.
15. the most widely researched and clinically used of all personality tests.
16. a boy’s sexual desires towards his mother and feelings of hatred and jealousy towards the rival father.
21. a caring, accepting, nonjudgmental attitude that would help people to develop self acceptance and self awareness.
22. views behavior as influenced by the interaction between people’s traits and social context.

1. the part of personality that represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgment and for future aspirations.
2. assumed to be the center of personality; the organizer of our thoughts, feelings, and actions.
3. concept of a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species’ history.
5. defense mechanism where people re-channel their unacceptable impulses into socially approved activities.
8. an individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting.
9. defense mechanism that offers self-justifying explanations in the place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one’s actions.
10. a lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, where conflicts were unresolved.
14. a theory of death related anxiety; explores people’s emotional and behavioral responses to reminders of their impending death.
17. the extent where people perceive control over their environment rather than feeling helpless.
18. defense mechanism where the ego unconsciously switches unacceptable impulses into their opposites.
19. therapeutic techniques that attributes thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts.
20. the basic defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness.