| personality | A pattern of enduring, distinctive thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that characterize the way an individual adapts to the world.
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| psychodynamic perspectives | Theoretical views emphasizing that personality is primarily unconscious (beyond awareness).
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| id | The part of the person that Freud called the "it," consisting of unconscious drives; the individual's reservoir of sexual energy.
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| ego | The Freudian structure of personality that deals with the demands of reality.
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| superego | The Freudian structure of personality that serves as the harsh internal judge of our behavior; what we often call conscience.
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| defense mechanisms | Tactics the ego uses to reduce anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality.
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| Oedipus complex | According to Freud, a boy's intense desire to replace his father and enjoy the affections of his mother.
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| collective unconscious | Jung's term for the impersonal, deepest layer of the unconscious mind, shared by all human beings because of their common ancestral past.
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| archetypes | Jung's term for emotionally laden ideas and images in the collective unconscious that have rich and symbolic meaning for all people.
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| individual psychology | Adler's view that people are motivated by purposes and goals and that perfection, not pleasure, is thus the key motivator in human life.
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| humanistic perspectives | Theoretical views stressing a person's capacity for personal growth and positive human qualities.
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| unconditional positive regard | Rogers's construct referring to the individual's need to be accepted, valued, and treated positively regardless of his or her behavior.
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| conditions of worth | The standards that the individual must live up to in order to receive positive regard from others.
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| trait theories | Theoretical views stressing that personality consists of broad, enduring dispositions (traits) that tend to lead to characteristic responses.
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| big five factors of personality | The five broad traits that are thought to describe the main dimensions of personality: neuroticism (emotional instability), extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.
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| personological and life story perspectives | Theoretical views stressing that the way to understand the person is to focus on his or her life history and life story.
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| social cognitive perspectives | Theoretical views emphasizing conscious awareness, beliefs, expectations, and goals.
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| self-efficacy | The belief that one can master a situation and produce positive change.
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| cognitive affective processing systems (CAPS) | Mischel's theoretical model for describing that our thoughts and emotions about ourselves and the world affect our behavior and become linked in ways that matter to behavior.
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| behavioral genetics | The study of the inherited underpinnings of behavioral characteristics.
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| self-report test | Also called an objective test or an inventory, a method of measuring personality characteristics that directly asks people whether specific items describe their personality traits.
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| empirically keyed test | A type of self-report test that presents many questionnaire items to two groups that are known to be different in some central way.
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| Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) | The most widely used and researched empirically keyed self-report personality test.
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| face validity | The extent to which a test item appears to be a good fit to the characteristic it measures.
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| projective test | A personality assessment test that presents individuals with an ambiguous stimulus and asks them to describe it or tell a story about it—to project their own meaning onto the stimulus.
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| Rorschach inkblot test | A famous projective test that uses an individual's perception of inkblots to determine his or her personality.
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| Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) | A projective test that is designed to elicit stories that reveal something about an individual's personality.
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| Type A behavior pattern | A cluster of characteristics—such as being excessively competitive, hard-driven, impatient, and hostile—related to the incidence of heart disease.
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| Type B behavior pattern | A cluster of characteristics—such as being relaxed and easygoing— related to good health.
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| subjective well-being | A person's assessment of his or her own level of positive affect relative to negative affect, and the individual's evaluation of his or her life in general.
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