Ch 12 Self & Personality

The exact definition of personality is “The characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in an individual over time and across circumstances.” Personally, I believe that personality is partly, but mostly, shaping an individual. I think that it is so important to test and categorize because each person is different than everyone else. The pieces that make up personality are self schema, working self concept, and self esteem. The definition I gathered was the idea of yourself based on your past decisions and experiences. Based on the figure, it says that self schema consists of interrelated knowledge of yourself, so basically, how you think of yourself. I think that is the hardest category to understand because it was so broad. Working self concept is a lot easier to comprehend. The figure helped me, though. I know that when I am in a group of people that are very fit and eat healthy, I always feel very out of shape and bigger. Self esteem, is how you feel about yourself. I completely agree with the sociometer theory. It is so relatable because, like I previously said, when I go out to eat with friends and they all get salads, I feel like I’m going to get rejected because I’m not as “healthy” as them. Therefore, my self-esteem goes down at that point. When I am talking about something I know a lot about, I really feel good about myself because I know they can’t reject what I’m saying, so I have a high self esteem at that point. Since reading this chapter, I understand now that there are multiple parts to a personality. I could never really explain what it was besides maybe, it’s makes someone who they are. That is a very broad explanation and now it’s easier for me to grasp the concept of personality.

The most interesting topic to me, was Sigmund Freud’s psychodynamic theory. The figure of the iceberg was very informative. The outside of the iceberg is the conscious. This is the ego, which is the component of personality that tries to satisfy the wishes of the id while being responsive to the superego. The preconscious is the iceberg in the water closest to the surface. This explains the superego which is the component of personality that reflects the internalization of societal and parental standards of conduct. Last, is the base of the iceberg, which is unconscious. This is the id: the component of personality that is completely submerged in the unconscious and operates according to the pleasure principle. I think the reason it was most interesting is because the picture was a really clever way of explaining the topic to the readers.

The most surprising thing to me was the cross cultural research on personality traits. This is the graph that explained the five factor theory of personality traits. For the most part, North America had some of the highest levels, except for neuroticism. East Asia was almost the complete opposite. They all had very low levels except for neuroticism.

Psychological Terms: personality, self schema, working self concept, self esteem, sociometer theory, psychodynamic theory, conscious, ego, preconscious, id, superego, unconscious, neuroticism

Personality is how a person behaves, thinks and feels. A person’s personality and the way they perceive themselves can be shaped by many factors. These factors are determined by testing and categorizing which is why it’s so important to the study of personality. Without the testing and categorizing of personality, people would have a hard time understanding it. One example of categorizing is the way researchers study personality. These different approaches allow researchers to look at personality in different perspectives each time. Humanistic approaches is one example. With this approach, researchers emphasize self-actualization which is where people seek to fulfill their potential through understanding of themselves. Another common approach researches use is cognitive approaches. With this, they study personality by recognizing that the way we think affects personality. There’s also trait approaches which looks at a person’s traits. By looking at these methods of testing and categorizing, theories are made which help further explain personality. One theory that comes to mind instantly is expectancy theory which implies that behavior is directly associated with personality. Locus of control deals with this theory because it is the idea on whether or not people control the rewards and punishments that they experience. Because of testing and categorizing, many theories and studies are able to take place with personality, so of course they’re rightly important.
Since reading this chapter, I’ve become more understanding of the complex nature that is personality. Before reading this chapter I viewed personality to be how we are. I figured it was something natural and we couldn't control it. But after reading this chapter, I’ve come to realize how much there really is to personality! I already knew about the basic stuff, like self-esteem, ego, and basic tendencies; but I had no clue that there were such things as self-schema, which is an integrated set of memories, beliefs, and ideas of the self, and psychodynamic theory which is the idea that unconscious forces determine behavior. I had a slight concept of those ideas, but I never knew how detailed and important they really were to the idea of personality.
The topic that was most interesting to me was the idea of self-esteem. I have personally struggled with this my whole life. I’ve always had a low self-esteem which has held me back in some of my life adventures. I was curious to see how the book explained it. The discussion of downward and upward comparisons really interested me because I was instantly able to picture people that I knew who compared themselves like the book described. I knew that I would be an example of a person who uses upward comparisons constantly. I always catch myself comparing my looks to those prettier than me. So this section was very interesting to me because I could easily relate to it.
The most memorable thing I learned about was the idea of id, ego, and superego. I really loved the visual the book provided because it helped me understand the concept. Sometimes the book uses words or phrases I’m unfamiliar with and I become confused. As I read the chapter, the definitions of id, ego and superego were put into terms that I barely understood, so seeing this picture of the angel, devil, and man helped me understand the concept better. What’s crazier is that as I noticed the picture to help me out, I was unknowingly partaking in a personality concept, which is defense mechanisms. Because my mind became confused, I looked to something to ease my frustration and distress, which was the picture. Crazy how that stuff works! But I really enjoyed the picture because I cannot count the number of times I’ve seen that concept of the angel and devil conscience on television and in movies. One specific example that I kept thinking of was in The Emperor’s New Groove where Kuzco was debating his choices with a devilish and angelic version of himself on each shoulder. I didn’t know that the “devil” or bad thoughts would be considered an id while the “angel” or good thoughts would be called a superego. But I was aware of what an ego was.
Psychological terms I used were personality, self-schema, self-esteem, downward comparisons, upward comparisons, psychodynamic theory, ego, id, superego, defense mechanisms, humanistic approaches, locus of control, cognitive approaches, trait approaches, and basic tendencies.

Psychology
Chapter 12 blog
11/08/2014

According to the book when you talk about “yourself” in general you are talking about he mental representation of your personal experiences such as memories and perceptions of what is going on at any particular moment. This might also mean your self image or what you see when you look into a mirror and your conscious awareness of what its like to be different then someone else beside you. This is because no two people are exactly the same, in how they, look, believe or act. This is also known as self concept. The book also states for students like us who are enrolled in a college major our sense of self is often looked at with age, gender, and major. Instead of personality and views. Often the way people look at themselves reflects on the behavior they have. For example a child who thinks they are stupid and cant learn anything in school will often act our in stupid behavior and not put in effort into learning new material because all their life they have believed that they are not worth learning because they simply can’t do it. This is not true however because if the child actually believed in their selves they would soon come to realize that they are much smarted then they believe and they can do anything they put their mind to with a little effort and the right help.
According to the book there are three structures of personality. The first called, Id, is the most basic level or completely submerged. The id operates according to the pleasure principle, which pushes us to seek pleasure and avoid pain it is the force that drives the pleasure principle “libido” today it has a very sexual meaning to it. But Freud meant to define it as the energy that promotes pleasure seeking. It acts on impulses and desires. Second is the superego, this act as a brake on the id. This personality structure develops in childhood it is the social standards of behavior. Last but not least s the third personality structure, ego. Ego is defined as the need to satisfy the wishes of the id while being responsive to the rules of the superego. It is often in the middle of the id and the superego.
What I found interesting and surprising about this chapter was that personality is affected by genes and the environment. Research has shown that certain genes can be linked with personality traits. But even if someone does not have a certain link doesn’t mean they cant do certain acts of personality. Such as a person who likes to go out and try to cause trouble will only be a person who is raised in a household that had the same morals.
Terms: id, superego, ego, self concept, self image, personality

According to the textbook personality are the characteristic thoughts, emotions and behaviors that are relatively stable in an individual over time and across circumstances. We often make opinions about other people based on their personalities. Each of us has specific characteristics that best describe us. A person's actions and feeling can vary from his mates or friends' feelings in different life situations. For example, two friends can differently feel themselves on parties or act differently in car accidents. Some of us are call themselves shy and quiet and some of us are sociable and outgoing. For me personality is all factors and characteristics that can best describe us and which make us different from others.
We all have our own sense of self. When we are trying to describe it, we usually use our mental representations of our personal experiences, memories, physical appearance and conscious awareness of being separate from others. In other words it's called self-concept or how we believe who we are. This sense is important in life because it affects how you think and guide your attention to information that is relevant to you. Also so it influences your behavior and has impact on your feelings. An integrated set of memories, beliefs and generalizations about self is called self-schema. In other word is interconnected knowledge about self, it helps us perceive, organize, interpret and use information our self. Eventually self-schema, self-concept and other aspects help to understand our personality.
I think that texting and categorizing is really important in study of personality so we can better understand personality. It is really broad topic and psychologists use testing and categorizing to study personality in depth. Psychology as any science should have evidences. So to understand any phenomenon and aspects related to people lives, they are testing, doing different researchers and studies. There are so many people on the earth with different types of personalities and psychologists cannot categorize all of them as one whole. Studying about personality is so broad and complex topic and at the same time one of the interesting topics in psychology.
The new for me was information about how nature affects our personality throughout our lives. I didn't know that biological factors such as genes, brain structures and neurochemistry play so important role in determining personality. For example one research has shown that certain genes can be linked with some personality traits. A gene that regulates dopamine receptor is associated with novelty seeking. So adventure seekers may have one form of this gene deficient in dopamine. In other words they seek for new adventures. Also one of the interesting parts that I did not know before that childhood temperament may predict behavioral outcomes in early adulthood. Temperament is biologically based tendency to feel or act in certain ways. This sense of a person is broader than personality traits. Life experiences may alter personality traits but temperaments represent the innate biological structures of personality. So based on study where psychologists have predicted adolescent behavior of more than 1000 people based on their temperaments at age 3. For example individuals who were judged as under controlled at age 3 were later more likely to be antisocial or to have alcohol problems.
One of the most interesting parts in this chapter was different approaches that describe our personality, such as humanistic approaches. These approaches emphasize goodness in people. This is way of studying personality that emphasizes self-actualization, where people seek to full-fill their potential through greater self-understanding. For example in person-centered approach there are two issues which are crucial in the development of personality. The first issue is our personal understanding of our lives and the second is how others see us and evaluate us. The interesting part in this approach is that this theory shows how parents can affect our personality development. Most parents provide life and support to their children. The parents love their children on the condition that the children do what the parents wants them to do and live up to the parent’s standards. This condition creates a discrepancy between a child’s self and how parents evaluate him, which leads to development of a personality based on conditions of worth. Thus children’s desires, wishes and feelings will depend on approval from their parents. Children will act and show only those traits that elicit parents’ love and support. For example, children make play on musical instruments only because it makes his parents happy. So it shows how children depend on positive regard from their parents.
One of the most memorable parts was cognitive approaches. This is ways of studying personality highlights the importance of cognition or the way how we think in understanding many aspects of human behavior including personality. For example expectancy theory said that our behaviors are part of our personality. Our behavior is result of thinking about two things. First is expectancies for reinforcements and second one is the values we ascribe to particular reinforces. Expectancy theory proposes that our personalities are based on our locus of control. It means whether people control the reward and punishments that they experience. There are two types of locus of control. People with internal locus of control expect that their own actions influence events and outcomes. People with external locus of control expect that forces outside their control influence events and outcomes in their life. For example, I’m typical example of internal locus of control. I believe that everything depends on you. If you need positive outcomes, you have to put an effort to get it. Everything is under your control.
Terms used: Personality, self-consept, self-schema, mental representations, genes, brain structures, neurochemistry, dopamine, temperament, humanistic approaches, person-centered approach conditions of worth, cognitive approaches, expectancy theory, internal and external locus of control.

Personality has always been something that has been used to combine all of our individual thoughts and internal instincts about how to live our lives and how it makes up our actions towards others and how we make decisions based on our emotions. Our personality is created though our lives and it plays a major part about how we view other people as well as how we act towards certain things with how our unconscious and conscious mind mixes to figure out how we will act in a specific situation. With specific things like our ego, superego, and id helping make our decisions our personality makes a major part of our everyday lives. The id is something that is completely unconscious in our subconscious and it is the one that governs over the seeking of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, that sets up how we act when trying to get pleasure from others or from objects and how we tend to try and earn it, wither through violence or other ways that people use to earn pleasure. The superego is the conscience that we have when thinking with only our id, it is there to gives us our morality when going over problems. Finally the ego plays the part of the mediator between the id and the superego, making sure that the id Is able to find the pleasure that it is searching for as well as making sure that the superegos morals are being followed, this comes out as our everyday actions as well as how we act in different situations. There can be some problems whit the mixing of these factors and many times it causes major personality shifts in one’s life and can extremely change how one can act, luckily though we all have specific defense mechanisms that the ego uses to make sure that we are able to protect ourselves from distress and make sure at the same time to push anger off of ourselves and to other areas of life. These can cause massive problems for some people who have problems with their subconscious because it can cause large shifts in personality in different situations and make it so no one really knows how someone will act.
All of these things are extremely important to how we act in our day to day lives and how we act towards other people. Our personality is something that defines us through our life and it gives people the first impression when we meet them, a good personality is something that will help you though our entire life and make it easier or harder to get along with others.
Terms used: Personality, Id, Superego, Ego, Defensive Mechanisms

In the chapter, it says that personality consists of the typical thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in people over time and across circumstances. My definition of personality is related to this in that your personality is made up of how someone thinks or acts and how the environment affects them. Everyone has a different personality that is unique to his or her self. The testing and categorizing of personalities is so important because it helps psychologists understand why people are the way they are. There are many tests today that help categorize personality. One of the best-known ways to test personality is the Rorschach inkblot test. A person looks at a series of inkblots and describes what they see. This helps release unconscious thoughts and conflicts that people may not want to be told. There is also the Thematic Apperception Test. With this test, a person is shown a picture and is told to tell as story about what they see in the picture. This type of test is meant to reflect a person’s personal motives. My understanding of personality has changed a little bit since reading this chapter. Your self- schema is what really describes yourself as a person and self-schema is something that I had not really heard about. When I look at my own personality now, it helps me look at all the parts of my self-schema. I have always been someone that has had a great personality about a lot of things and I think that anything that I do is going to help other people.
One topic that I found interesting in the chapter was the reciprocal determinism. There are three parts to this theory of personality. The first part of it is the person’s environment. The second part of it is the person’s self-confidence, characteristics, and expectations. The last part of this theory is the person’s behavior itself. I find this theory really interesting because there are so many parts to it and it clearly describes how a person acts.
There was one thing that I found kind of surprisingly in the chapter. I found it surprising that there were three parts to the concept of temperament. One level of temperament is the activity level, which is all the behavior and amount of energy that we exhibit. There is also emotionality in which there is the intensity of our emotional reactions. Then there is the part of sociability, which refers to the tendency to affiliate with others. This is surprising because I thought that temperament was just one thing and that there were no parts to it. When I think of temperament, I think of a little child getting mad over something that he or she wasn’t given. I didn’t know that temperament was just someone’s energy in general.

Terms: personality, temperament, Rorschach inkblot test, Thematic Apperception Test, self-schema, reciprocal determinism

Personality is a set of personal thoughts, emotions and behaviors that make us all unique. Researchers test and categorize personality because it is important for us to know what triggers certain behaviors. Research has shown that behavior is influenced by a mix of personality and situation. A better understanding of personality allows us to better understand human behavior. I believe testing and categorizing is important in the study of personality as it helps to make this complex subject more understandable.
My understanding of personality has greatly increased since reading this chapter. Before reading this chapter I did not know all of the things that have an impact on our personalities. I also had no idea of all of the testing and categorizing that peoples’ personalities were subjected too. I originally thought that your personality was just they way you acted, however I now know personality is a lot more complex.
I found the section on self-esteem very interesting. Self-esteem is simply defined as how we feel about ourselves. From the study detailed in the text, we see that males typically have higher self-esteem than females throughout their entire lives. I found this to be a very interesting fact. I can understand, however, why this is this typically the case. I believe that females feel a lot more pressure throughout their entire lives. Females feel pressure to look a certain way in order to fit in. They also often have an ideal image of how they should look and act. All the pressure created by this can certainly hinder female self-esteem. The chapter also noted that having a very high opinion of oneself has a downside. Bullies, as well as very violent people, often have every high self-esteem. People who have a high self esteem often feel as if they aren’t treated correctly and this leads to them becoming violent and lashing out. I found this section very interesting because I always thought that having high self-esteem was very important. This taught me that while self-esteem is important, too much can sometimes do more harm then good.
The most surprising thing that I read was the Expectancy Theory. In 1954 Julian Rotter developed a theory which stated that our behaviors are a part of our personality. This theory was tied to Locus of Control. Locus of Control is whether or not people control the rewards or punishment. There are two types of locus control; internal and external. People experiencing internal locus of control believe they did well on a test because they studied hard. They believe that their actions created the result that they experience. Those with external locus of control believe their grade on the test was just fate and was determined by their actions.. This was surprising to me because I never thought about how closely our behaviors and personalities are tied. After reading this chapter, the Expectancy Theory made sense to me and I better understand why people believe that they are impacting the results that they are experiencing.

Terms: Personality, Self-esteem, Expectancy Theory, Internal locus control, external locus control

Personality consists of the typical thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in people over time and across circumstances. I think personality relates back to the idea of social psychology in the way attitudes are shaped and formed. Everyone one is different and so are personalities. A certain impression of a person influences how you may view them. This idea is focused on how you personally see yourself and how others see you. Everyone sees himself or herself in a specific way. One way we organize this is by our self-schema. This includes interrelated knowledge about ourselves. For example, I would say I am athletic, I love being with my family, and I love being outdoors. These are the behaviors that are important to me and are more prominent in my own self-schema. This is one of many ways we categorize personality. The way we do this is important and allows us to go more in depth in all the types of personalities out there. Testing them gives us a chance to break them down and see what they are really all about. In my eyes this is what psychology is. Researchers study personality in different ways, an example would be trait approaches. This is where we look at behavioral tendencies that are generally consistent over time and across most situations. This leads us into the big five or the five-factor theory of personality. Evidence form testing shows this theory emerges across cultures, among adults and children, even when different questionnaires assess the factors. The same five factors appear whether people rate themselves or rated by others. According to this there are five different traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Each individual ranges from a low to high on each certain personality trait. The ultimate reason why we test these sorts of things is so that we gain more knowledge about them. We are able to develop different theories and concepts that make it easier to categorize certain personality traits. I think doing this is extremely important in finding new information about oneself. After reading this I have learned much more about how I view myself in general. Personality is much more than I made it out to be. It’s more complex in the idea that we use different comparisons such as downward and upward, theories like the sociometer and psychodynamic, and concepts on how we see ones self to find out who we really are. One of the most interesting things in this chapter for me was where it discussed temperament. Temperament is the tendency to feel or act in a certain way. You probably know what sort of a temper you had when you were little. My parents said when I was young I wasn’t very active, hardly ever cried, and had a smile on my face most of the time. My younger sister on the other hand was not that way. She ran all over the house and got mad when she didn’t get her way. Researchers have found a way of predicting behavior based on your temperament at an age such as three. I thought the idea of that was extremely interesting! The most memorable thing I read was about self-esteem. For a while I didn’t always think that great about myself. Now I realize I am my own self and no one can change that. Why think negatively about yourself? There is no reason to. Self-esteem is one thing that we are in compete control of. If we maintain a more positive view about oneself life in general will be a much more positive place. The psychological terms I used were personality, social psychology attitude, self-schema, psychology, trait approaches, five-factor theory, upward and downward comparisons, sociometer theory, psychodynamic theory, temperament, self-esteem.

Personality is defined as the characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in an individual over time and across circumstances. Our book states that we are constantly trying to figure out other people-why they behave in certain ways and to predict their behavior.

Testing and categorizing is important because we want to categorize people so they are easier to study. By categorizing people by certain criteria scientists are able to focus on why certain people have those characteristics. This also helps scientists figure out why people act the way that they do. One of the most common methods used to assess personality is called the Rorschach inkblot test. For this test the person looks at an inkblot and describes what they think it is. How the person describes the inkblot is supposed to reveal unconscious conflicts and other problems. Another method that is used to assess personality is the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). In this test the person is shown an image and asked to tell a story about it. The story is scored based on the motivational schemes that emerge. The schemes are assumed to reflect the storyteller’s personal motived. This test is useful in measuring motivational traits-especially those related to achievement, power, and affiliation-and it continues to be used in contemporary research. The TAT test also predicts how interpersonally dependent people are. I believe that testing and categorizing is so important in the study of personality because it helps us understand people more because they are so complex.

My understanding of personality has changed a little since reading this chapter. My understanding has changed a little bit because I did not know all of the things that have such a huge impact on our personality. I used to think that personality was just how we acted day to day but that is incorrect. My understanding also was changed because I had no idea that personality was tested and categorized.

From this reading the topic that was most interesting to me was the five-factor theory. This theory identifies five basic personality traits, which are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The example given in our book of agreeableness reflects the extent to which a person is trusting and helpful. A person high in openness to experience is imaginative and independent. A person low in this trait is down-to-earth and conformist. For each factor, personality may be anywhere from low to high. People’s ‘scores’ on the five-factor theory traits have been shown to predict a wide variety of behaviors. Their scores have also been shown to predict satisfaction with job, marriage, and life generally.

The most memorable thing I learned about in this reading was definitely the topic of personality stability is influenced by biology and the situation. I learned that genetic makeup can predict people to have certain personality traits or characteristics and whether these genes are expressed depends on the unique circumstances that each child faces during development. Childhood temperament may predict behavioral outcomes in early adulthood. Whether personality is fixed or changeable depends largely on how we define the essential features of personality.

The psychological terms I used were personality, behavior, TAT test, Rorschach inkblot test and five-factor theory.

Personality described in the book is the characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in an individual over time and across circumstances. I think personality is how someone acts towards things. How someone acts towards a situation depends on his or her personality. If they have a bad attitude towards a situation that is not supposed to be a big deal, then that somewhat tells you what type of personality they have. Personality is a sense of who we believe we are. It affects how we think, the way we behave, and how you feel.
Testing and categorizing is so important in the study of personality because we now know the working of self-concept, and self-esteem. There is a theory called sociometer theory that argues with that self-esteem is a mechanism for monitoring the likelihood of social exclusion. Without the important study of personality and this theory we would not have found that people have a fundamental, adaptive need to belong, and when we get rejected from a group our self-esteem goes down. Therefore, self-esteem is looked at as a sociometer, which is an internal monitor of social acceptance or rejection.
My understanding of personality has changed since reading this chapter because I now know there is more to it than just thinking personality is the way you act towards things happening around you, and the way you think about them.
The topic I found interesting while reading about personality is when the book talked about self-serving biases, which is the tendency for people to take personal credit for success, but blame failure on external factors. This was interesting to me because it talked about when someone is smart, and they do really good on an exam they keep a positive attitude towards it, and explain to people that it is because of their skills and hard work, rather than when they do bad on an exam they blame their performance on not it not being fair and the obstacles of success, which is being blamed on external factors.
The most surprising thing to me in this chapter was reading about psychodynamic theory, which is Freudian theory that unconscious forces determine behavior. I thought this was surprising to me because he says that a lot of the forces conflicts of drive, we have we are unaware of. An example in the book of something like this would be having the desire to steal something and not knowing why, but having a conflicting behavior of knowing that you would get into huge trouble if you actually did steal that object. This is only a small portion of our brain, according to Freud.
All in all, I found this topic to be very interesting, and fun to learn and read about.

Terms Used: sociometer, self-concept, sociometer theory, self-esteem, self-serving bias, psychodynamic theory,

Chapter 12 was about Self and Personality. Personality is the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual's distinctive character. Every individual has their own personality and has their own sense of who they are. Our sense of self includes memories, experiences, personal characteristics, and physical appearances. Your sense of self influences a person in a lot of ways. It effects how you think, it influences the way we behave, and it influences the way we feel. Our self-esteem plays a big part in our personality. If you have a really low self-esteem then you aren't going to be as happy and your personality is effected a lot. There are many theories about self-esteem and one of them is called reflected appraisal which is based on how we believe others perceive us. I believe in this theory because especially in our society now we are constantly trying to impress other people and we are so focused on our personal image. We look up to people who are famous and want to be just like them that we succumb to peer pressure and are constantly trying to improve ourselves no matter what because we care too much about what other people think about us that we are afraid to actually be ourselves. A topic that I thought was interesting was the psychodynamic theory that unconscious forces determines behavior. In this theory, there are three personality structures: the id, the ego, and the superego. The id is the most basic level, at this level the unconscious operates according to the pleasure principal which means that we seek pleasure and avoid pain. The second structure is the superego, this acts as a break on the id. The superego develops in childhood and is the internalization of parental and societal standards of behavior. This has to do with morality/ conscious. The third structure is the ego. This structure mediates between the id and the superego. The ego operates according to the reality principal which involves rational thought and problem solving. The most memorable thing that I learned was the most common defense mechanisms according to the psychodynamic theory were denial, repression, projections, reaction formation, rationalization, displacement, and sublimation. Defense mechanisms unconscious mental strategies that the mind uses to protect itself from distress. I just thought it was cool that most people use these certain mechanisms and that we all do things to make ourself feel better and that all has to do with our type of personality. Another memorable thing that I learned was on page 431 it had a picture of a guy sitting down with the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other. The purpose of this picture was to show where the id, ego, and superego go. It was really to understand it being put that way. The id represents the devil, the superego represents the angel, and the ego goes in the middle to solve conflicts between the two. Categorizing and testing is so important in the study of personality because categorizing people helps scientists because it makes these categorized people easier to study. By categorizing people by certain criteria scientists are able to focus on why certain people have those characteristics and can come up with an explanation as to why people do certain things. There are many different tests that help scientists categorize people such as the Rorschach inkblot test or the Thematic Apperception Test. My thoughts have changed a little bit after reading this chapter because I never realized that our personalities were so complex. I don't really put much thought into why I do things the way I do, but its all because of my certain personality.
Some psychological terms that I used were personality, sense, self-esteem, reflected appraisal, personal image, peer pressure, psychodynamic theory, pleasure principal, reality principal, id, ego, superego, defense mechanisms, Rorschach inkblot test, and Thematic Apperception test.

Personality is the characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in an individual over time and across circumstances. To me personality is something that can make you unique and be different than others. We categorize and test personalities that way we can study them in more depth.The psychodynamic theory which is personality based on is the unconscious wishes that create a problem between id, ego and superego. The humanistic approach is that personality is base on our tendency to fulfill our potential though personal growth. I think people are always trying to fulfill their needs and live up to standards. Cognitive approach is personality is based on how we think. I think this holds true. If you think about doing something, like working hard in school that will get you good grades to get you a good job. You would have a determined personality. The Trait Approach is that personality can be described by our characteristics. I really agree with this. The type of personality that i have comes out through the things i do. I did not realize how many different aspects there really are to personality. I only touched on a few things. It opened my mind up to other things and taught me more about my own personality. I really find the defense mechanisms interesting. There are so many that i did not even realize. I think denial is a big one that everyone experiences. Denial is refusing to acknowledge source of anxiety. I know for me this is a big one because i have such high anxiety problems. Repression goes hand in hand with denial. Repression is when you exclude the source of anxiety from awareness. You see this a lot on child abuse cases where when they are older they push it away to forget out about it so they don't have to deal with it when in reality it just makes it worse. Something memorable to me was interactionist. That is theorists who believe that behavior is determined jointly by situations and underlying traits. I hadn't heard of this and to me i think there is a lot more that goes on that they acknowledge.
Terms: denial defense mechanisms, emotion response humanistic approach, trait approach, cognitive approach, psychodynamic theory, personality, repression, anxiety, interactionist

What is personality? It refers to an individual with differences in character, feelings, behaviors and the way an individual thinks. When different parts of a person comes together as a whole, then it becomes a personality. It shapes us and helps other people understand who we are as a person. When someone is put in a different environment and the way they react is personality. Is that person shy or social, is part of their personality.
Why is testing or categorizing so important in the study of personality is because when we separate people, we can understand different personality better and can go in depth. Everyone is different and everyone one has a different personality. There are multiple things that makes out personality such as self-schema, working self-concept, self-esteem, and sociometer theory. In self-schema is the way we look at our self. it consists of memories, beliefs, and generalization about our-self. We are more likely to remember things that are about us. In working self-concept, is the way a person thinks about themselves at a certain moment. In self-esteem, how we feel about our personal characteristics. Some has low self-esteem, many has high self-esteem. Having hing self-esteem can lead to happiness, doing good in school and landing a good job, but it could be bad also, people who bully other people they are the ones with high self-esteem, they hurt people with low self-esteem. In sociometer theory, is a mechanism for watching the probability of social exclusion. If you fit in a group with you are more likely to have a high self-esteem and then people who do not.
My understanding has changed a ton, knowing what is personality. I know what that our personality is controlled by our brain, biology and physiology has a lot to do with our personality. There are many factors that contribute and then it becomes a personality. There are many approaches to theory. psychodynamic theory, humanistic approaches, cognitive approaches, and trait approaches. As I was reading I was also thinking about my personality and what is true about me or what category do I fit in when talking about a personality.
The most interesting thing for me was the common defense mechanisms to psychodynamic theory. Defense mechanisms, is when our unconscious mind uses strategies that the mind uses to to protect itself from distress. There are many different types of defense mechanisms such as denial, repression, projection, reaction formation, rationalization, displacement, sublimation. In denial when we refuse to accept the truth. In repression, is when we leave out a source of anxiety form awareness. In projection, when we compare our unacceptable qualities of our self to other people. In reaction formation, warding off an uncomfortable thought by exaggerating its opposite. In rationalization, coming up with a good logical reason for something shameful that you did. In displacement, when we shift our attention of emotions form one object to another, who is a much softer target. In sublimation, is when someone who is doing something that is social unacceptable, but then turns that behavior into something that is very admirable.
The most memorable part for me was how biology and physiology influences our personality. It relays on biological processes that produce our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. It all relays on the dimensions of extravert and introvert. When you are a child your personality will change a little bit, but by the time you become an adult it is very stable. Personality is also impact by the environment that one was raised in. There are two types of personality basic tendencies and characteristic adaptations. In basic personality is greatly determined by biology and is stable over time. In characteristic adaptation, based on the demand of the specific situations.

Psychological terms- self-schema, working self-concept, self-esteem, sociometer theory, denial, repression, projection, reaction formation, rationalization, displacement, sublimation, psychodynamic theory, humanistic approaches, cognitive approaches, and trait approaches, basic tendencies, and characteristic adaptation.

Personality, according to the book definition, consists of typical thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in people and across circumstances. Since everyone has their own personality it is important to test and categorize, for each individual sees themselves differently than what psychologists would consider them to be. A lot of one’s behavior is based on working self-concept and self-esteem. In addition, we naturally try to maintain a positive sense of ourselves. It seems common for someone to not be attracted to someone who does not like himself or herself. However, when judging others what one person thinks, or says about other is based on their self-esteem. If someone has a high self-esteem then it will be a downward comparison, in similar manner if someone has low self-esteem the comparison is upward. My understanding of personality has changed from reading the chapter in a way that I now have a deeper meaning of what personality is,, as well as why people behave in certain ways that others might think is a bit odd, or weird.
From the reading, the topic that was most interesting to me was the section on self-serving bias. Self-serving bias is described as the tendency to credit or blame their success, or failure on different things. For example, if a student does well on an exam he credits his hard work and study habits, but if one does poorly on the exam it is blamed on the way the test is worded, wasn’t talked about in class, etc.
The most surprising thing I read was about the Biological trait theory. The chart really helped to see how personality traits make up a person. It all seemed to work perfectly, for I decided to try it out on a couple of friends who were in my room as I was reading the chapter and just seeing the differences in personality was really interesting to me.
Terms: Personality, self-concept, self-esteem, downward comparison, upward comparison, behavior, psychologists, self-serving bias, biological trait theory.

Personality is the differences between people’s emotions, cognitive thoughts and behavior. Personality makes up a lot of different components. There are more things involved in personality then I ever thought. It is very important to test and categorize personality because everyone in the world is different. We need to be able to understand people and why they do things. We need to be able to understand that very high self-esteem is seen in criminals. It is important to understand the differences in everybody and their self-schemas so that we can do a better job of teaching as well. College students are often related to gender, age, student status, interpersonal style, personal characteristics and body image. These categories are the most important to college students and what they do.
My understanding of personality has changed a lot after reading this chapter. I now know the real meaning of superego. This is like your angel on your shoulder. It is your morals and beliefs that effect the decisions you make. The superego is a part of the three structures of personality. The first part is the id. This is like the devil on your shoulder that wants you to do something exciting to satisfy a desire and avoid pain. Your superego is the second part of this structure. The last part of the structure is your ego. This is the part that resolves the conflict between your id and your superego. I also learned about the three temperaments and how they are genetic. Activity level is the first one, and it is the amount of activity a child has. A child might run around a lot, or they might be much less aggressive. The second one is emotionality, and this is how intense of a reaction a kid has to things. The third one is sociability, and this the amount that a child associates with other people. It says that your temperament has long-term effects. Your personality of your adult hood can be accurately predicted by your temperament as a child.
The most interesting thing from the reading is locus of control. People with an internal locus of control think well about themselves. They believe that the things that get are solely based on the things they worked for. External locus of control is when people think that things higher than them are the reason that something happened to them. They might think that something happened to them because of luck or something like that.
The most memorable thing from the chapter is that personality affects our genes. There are certain genes that directly correlate to your personality. Even though you have genes that effect you personality you still have to live in an environment that bring out those genes. If you are adventurous you have to live in an environment that helps you be more adventurous.
Key terms: emotions, cognitive, thoughts, behavior, personality, self-esteem, self-schema, superego, ego, id, temperaments, aggressive, locus of control, and genes.

Personality is a rather complex concept because every person in the world displays their own unique style of personality. Personality by definition consists of the typical thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in people over time and across circumstances. There are two ways in which we view personality. One is by looking at ourselves and our sense of self. This means that we can define our own personality and learn about ourselves to understand who we really are. Everyone needs to know who they are and what type of person they are. We use self-schema, working self-concept, and self-esteem to help in learning our personality. Self-esteem is a controversial subject in terms of personality because many people in the world struggle with their self-image and how they see themselves. This goes in to part with outside influence on self-concept and how people compare other people’s opinions and critique themselves. Many teens commit suicide due to low self-esteem because they worry too much about how others see them instead of looking at themselves and actually seeing the potential within them and how they can succeed in life and persevere past the negativity. Self-schema is the key factor to these scenarios because it has to do with what you think of yourself. This makes me think about when I hang out with people that I used to talk to in high school and they talk about how they hate school and think school is pointless. I start to debate whether school is for me as well and feel like the outcast in the “cool kids” group. The first month of school was difficult for me because I didn’t believe college was for me but then I realized that being the outcast or being different was better than being like the other people.

The most interesting part of the chapter was Sigmund Freud and his theory on Psychodynamics. Something that really interested me was his use of an iceberg to explain his theory. Is it broken down in to different sections of our personality and thinking. The ice that sticks out of the water is considered the conscious, what is seen and understood. The next is the preconscious is the closest before going above the water’s surface. It has consists of the information and content that is not, at this time, in our awareness but it could be brought to our awareness. The finally section of the structure is the bottom of the iceberg, showing the unconscious portion of our thinking. This is the information that cannot simply be retrieved and located in our minds. It also shows the three other parts of the iceberg: Ego, superego, and ID.

The most surprising section of the chapter was when it discussed personality and how cleanliness creates different relationships between roommates. The reason this was surprising was that I have a roommate that I hate because of his uncleanliness and disgusting habits. I was raised to be a rather clean person who always keeps things neat. His parents must not have cared because he is the complete opposite of me. The surprising part of this section was that at first I didn’t believe that his uncleanliness was going to be a large affect because I thought that I could either shrug it off or that I could compromise with him in order to keep the room clean. The chapter made me realize that there is no way of compromising because his personality makes it so that he cannot follow my instructions in order to maintain a clean environment.

Terminology: Personality, self-schema, working self-concept, self-esteem, psychodynamic theory, conscious, preconscious, unconscious, ego, superego, ID

Personality is defined as the characteristics thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in an individual over time and across circumstances. Personality is the way we describe ourselves, or someone else that we know. I have been told my personality is outgoing, funny, personable, and independent. I think personality depends on who the person is, because no two people are going to have the same opinions or views on everything. It is very important to test and categorize people’s personalities because we can learn a lot from them. I think it’s a good idea that there are a lot of different tests to determine someone’s personality because they can validate what type of person someone is fall under the same category on two different tests. To first be able understand someone else's personality we have to first understand our own, and there are a lot of different elements that determine our personality. Self-schema is an integrated set of memories, beliefs, and generalizations about the self. Our self-schema helps us use and filter information that we are likely to notice thing at are relevant to us, like our names. Working self-concept is how a person thinks of himself in a certain moment. This is different from self-esteem because it only pertains to the amount of personal information that is being processed in that moment of time and self-esteem is how we feel about our personal characteristics. Understanding and categorizing personalities is really important in schools. If you have a couple shy kids who are afraid of trying to make friends teachers can put them in groups and although opposites attract, they may realize they have a lot in common. If the teacher were to put a shy child with a person who was really outgoing the shy child may make upward comparisons, because the outgoing child is comfortable with being able to talk and be itself. From this reading I now understand that our personality is based on more than just how we act. I never knew that self-esteem was involved and there is even some biological affects on personality too.

The most interesting thing I read was the section on how personality can be affected by genes and the environment. My sister are technically half-sisters because we don’t have the same dad, and we are also ten years apart. My mom tells me all the time that when I was growing up she saw so many similarities between the two of us personality wise. We both must have the same basic tendencies. This section just really stood out to me because it was something I could really relate too and find out why people may be saying we act so much alike, even with the age difference. For the interview blog post we did I interviewed both my mom and my sister because my sister would watch my brother and I a lot while my parents were at work. I remember asking her what my temperament was when I was a kid and she said that I always wanted the attention on me and not my brother. When I asked my mom that question she said pretty much the same thing that I would always put on shows, but also too that I reminded her of how my sister was because she wanted to be the center of attention too. Maybe why we are so alike now, is because we had a similar temperament when we were growing up.

The most surprising thing in this chapter was about the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). The reason it is so surprising to me is because I asked my roommate to look at the TAT example given in the book and to tell me what the picture portrays. When I looked at the picture I immediately thought of a girlfriend and boyfriend fighting and the girl is trying to get the man back or get her point across. When my roommate answered she said that it was a nurse talking to a patient with a mental illness and that she is trying to console him. Our answers are completely different, but they reflect exactly what is going on with our lives. I am currently in a fight with my boyfriend and it makes sense why I see the girl trying to get her point across because that’s me. My roommate on the other hand has a little sister who has down syndrome and is having a major surgery next week that she can’t get off her mind. In my psychology class in highschool we were taught that these pictures and what we take from them can be related back to something happening in our lives. Both mine and my roommates answer’s prove this theory.

Terms: Personality, Self-Schema, Working Self-Concept, Self-Esteem, Upward Comparisons, Basic Tendencies, Temperament, Thematic Apperception Test.

“Who am I?” That question concerning me was very easy until I read way I say those things. Personality consists of the typical thoughts, emotional responses and behaviors that are stable in us over time and across circumstances. Theories such as Humanistic, Cognitive and Trait are categories of the study of personality. Without testing and categorizing we would be able to go further in depth about personality. We can pay a lot more attention to how and why traits developed based on the ability to see personality traits and common characteristics. Testing is the same in that while testing it gives us the ability to evaluate ones personality/personalities. If there was a situation in which one aspect of personality had a problem the study could help. The whole topic on sense of self was very interesting in that it gave me terminology to what I kind of knew. “Your sense of self involves your mental representations of your personal experiences”. This was given with an example that when college student ask themselves “Who am I” they typically name their gender age, student status, and body image this all determines or contributes to your sense of self. Working self-concept also caught my attention. Working self-concept reflects how a person thinks of him/herself at a certain moment. An example for this is let’s say a woman is working with a group of all women this make the person answer the question “Who am I”? “I’m a female”. If that same person is in a room with all African Americans they would answer the question by saying “I’m Caucasian. These are both examples of working self-concept. Most surprising to me was that “Self-esteem may be less important than is commonly believed. For example a person that is attractive, has high self-esteem, and consider themselves smarter do not necessarily have better IQ’s than anyone else.
Terms: Personality, Thoughts, Emotional Responses, Behavior, Humanistic, Cognitive, Trait, Sense of Self, Working Self-Concept, Self-esteem

Personality is basically the relatively stable way in which a person thinks and how a person reacts in various situations. While personality can change over time, it is mostly stable. Few people with go from being completely introverted at the age of 37 to being an extrovert at the age of 38. However, small changes are possible. Not only can personality change over time, it can change in the situation. However, personality is mostly stable. This is due to basic tendencies. These personality traits are mostly due to one’s biological makeup and are partly responsible for just how stable a person’s personality is throughout their life.
It is important to categorize and test personality because it is so complex. In order to understand why people act and behave the way that they do, there needs to be some sort of system of analysis to apply to people’s behaviors. Take for example, the psychodynamic theory. This theory states that personality is based on things residing in our unconscious mind. While this theory is widely unaccepted in current day psychology, it set up a system of ideas that psychologists could use to analyze personality. These ideas are that of the id, superego, and ego. These three components of personality, while it is difficult to prove that they are there, are still used today in the study of personality simply because they laid down the groundwork of personality.
My understanding of personality has been altered because I did not realize how many aspects of a person’s life affect his or her personality. For example, I did not realize that an infant’s temperament can be an accurate predictor of how that person will behave late in life. I also did not realize just how stable a person’s personality is. It is strange to think that a person will think the same way for their entire life. Of course there is change, I certainly do not think the same way that I though in sixth grade. However, my character is the same for the most part. That is pretty strange to think about.
Another thing that I found interesting was how self-esteem can affect personality. I have heard things about criminals being highly narcissistic, but it seems strange that people can be so self-confident that they are led to crime. I believe that I have pretty high self-esteem. I now am looking at all aspects of my life and seeing how it has affected me. I do not think that it is to the point where I am narcissistic or aggressive towards people who do not like me, so I would like to think that it is a healthy amount of self-confidence.

Terms: personality, basic tendencies, temperament, introverted, extrovert, psychodynamic theory, id, superego, ego, self-esteem, narcissistic

Personality is defined in the book as “the typical thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in people over time and across circumstances.” Personality to me is how we act, think, and behave. Testing and categorizing is important in the study of personality and I think it should be because it is important to learn how and why we have the personalities that we have. Some traits can be genetic. I find it interesting how much we value ourselves and think of ourselves in positive ways. Projective measures are one way that we test personalities by presenting a picture or situation and having a person describe it. The words they use and the ways the person describes the picture or situation is incorporated to finding out what kind of personality that person has. The way we think about ourselves is our self-schema. I find it hard to describe my personality because I think some of us as humans don’t want people to think we are all about ourselves. I can definitely describe many personality traits that my close friends have but it’s harder to describe my own. My understanding of personality has changed since reading this chapter because I don’t think we incorporate all the different ways we think about ourselves, like the picture of the black man in the groups. His working self-concept of himself when he was with all women was that he was a man. This changed when he was with all white people because then he thought of himself as black. I find it very interesting that we categorize ourselves by our traits when grouped up with different people. The most interesting topic to me in this chapter was the self-serving bias. The self-serving bias explains how people with self-esteem can “take credit for success but blame failure on outside forces”. I find this interesting because it is so true. When we think highly about ourselves or something we have done and something isn’t right, we start to make up stupid scenarios that what went wrong wasn’t our own fault. The most memorable thing I learned in this reading was how much culture influences our personality. There is an example in the book of how some people in other cultures dress alike and that is how they like it and live while in our own culture we like to be independent and different from others.

Terms: personality, projective measures, self-schema, working self-concept, self-serving bias, culture

Personality is defined as the characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in an individual over time and across circumstances. In my own words, I would say personality is the thing that sets us apart from one another. It is made up of characteristics, behaviors, qualities, and other things that help differentiate us from others. I definitely think that testing and categorizing is important in the study of personality because it helps us understand each individual trait on a deeper level. It generally gives us a reason for why we act the way we do. For example, Freud’s psychodynamic theory claims that unconscious forces are what determines our behaviors. Also with this theory, Freud introduces the id, ego, and superego which are the three interacting structures that make up our personality. The id is our unconscious efforts to either maximize pain or avoid pleasure, also called the pleasure principle. The superego is like our conscience. It is also unconscious and develops during our childhood. It is basically our internal set of standards based on how we were raised, and the society we grew up in. Then we have the ego, which balances the id and the superego and uses problem solving and rational thinking to determine the behavior. Freud also identifies the psychosexual stages and talks about how children unconsciously aim to satisfy the libidinal urges because they bring us pleasure. He claims that these stages have a huge impact on our personality because if we become fixated, or stuck, on a certain stage, it will very likely cause us to have a certain trait or behaviors as adults, usually negative. Freud is a huge name in the study of psychology, so although some of his theories may have been altered a bit nowadays, his studies from testing observing were pretty much the basis of personality. I also think that testing and categorizing should continue to be an important aspect of personality studies because it helps us in so many ways. It can help new parents raising a child decide how strict or not to be about certain things, like potty training. Also it is important to understand what causes our behaviors, and personality theories help to do this.
My understanding of personality has not changed necessarily but it has become much clearer than before. A lot of the stuff I read about I had previously heard of but now I understand it on a deeper level. For instance, Freud’s id, ego, and superego. I have studied those before and just now they are starting to actually make sense.
The topic most interesting to me is all of Freud’s theories in this chapter because I studied these in high school and never actually understood it, but now I am starting to which makes it more interesting. Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex is definitely intriguing. The outcome of this theory, young boys identifying more strongly with their father, makes me think about the traditional views of a man being tough and strong and a woman cooking and taking care of everyone. I feel like Freud’s theory leads to this traditional view of a man being mentally tough and not sharing any womanly traits.
The most surprising thing that I read throughout the chapter was the part about a study done on two adopted, not biologically related, siblings. They found that even though the two siblings grew up in the same household, they were not any more alike than two random people you picked from a crowd. I still have doubts in this claim. I always have thought that a person’s upbringing was so important to their overall personality.

Terms: personality, Freud, psychodynamic theory, id, ego, superego, pleasure principle, psychosexual stages, libidinal urges, fixated, theory of the Oedipus complex.

According to this textbook, personality is the characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in an individual over time and across circumstances. In my understanding of the word after reading this chapter, it is how a person acts and thinks the majority of the time. It is important to test and categorize our personalities and other’s personalities because of many different reasons. It lets us know who ourselves are. We use self-schemas to categorize our self, which can really show our interest in things. We also see how we can better benefit our self and others by doing things we enjoy or by not doing things we don’t enjoy. Categorizing and testing our personality is also important because it can show our goals and how we can reach them. It can also help us because it can tell the influence of how people think, which is a study of personality called cognitive approaches. I believe studying personality is beneficial in some aspects. It can really help a student like myself find what kind of a person I am so I know possible job careers I may want to take. If I am calm I would be able to work with people especially children. If I were not a calm person, I would probably be more benefiting if I worked by myself. However, sometimes our personality doesn’t always match up with our interest. People then think differently of themselves, which they shouldn’t because everyone is different.
I always enjoyed taking personality tests to see what ‘color’ I am or what kind of ‘animal’ I am. I know my interest for the most part, but it is fun to see what kind of person I am. When I was younger I always looked at someone and compared myself to them. I made an downward comparison and looked at them lowly so I would feel better about myself. I didn’t know more people did this. Reading it in the book it is such a harsh and mean thing to do to another person and yourself. My personality has changed because I feel more confident about who I am and how I can be better person where I don’t have to upward compare or downward compare myself to anyone.
The most interesting subject I read was about the ego, super ego, and ID. It helped to see a picture of the iceberg picture to think about it. The whole study was based on Freud and he said that unconscious forces determine behaviors, which is called psychodynamic theory. As I already we, we have a conscious, preconscious, and unconscious state of minds. In the conscious state of mind we have our ego. Ego is the component of personality that tries to satisfy the wishes of the id while being responsive to the superego. In the preconscious is the superego. The super ego is the component of personality that reflects the internalization of societal and parental standards to conduct. It helps us make good, moral choices in life and not get too crazy. Then in the unconscious mind is the ID. The ID is the component of personality that is completely submerged in the unconscious and operates according to the pleasure principle. This is for our desires and what we actually really want to do whether it is morally acceptable or not. I now psychologically understand the devil and angel on people’s shoulders now.
The most memorable I learned while reading this chapter was that temperament has three stages. They are activity level, emotionality, and sociability. Activity level is the overall amount of energy and behavior we exhibit. This is when we have a lot of energy so we sing and dance in the car. Emotionality describes the intensity of emotional reactions. Such as if our parents yell at us for doing something we weren’t suppose to and we cry. Sociability is refers to the general tendency to affiliate with others. I have a higher sociability and I like to be with other people.

Key Terms: Personality, self-schema, cognitive approaches, upward comparison, downward comparison, psychodynamic theory, ego, ID, and superego, and temperament.

In this chapter it was all about self and personality. The subject of personality has always interested me because I wonder what makes a person they way they are, like why are some nice, why are some egotistical, and why are some shy while others are loud and outgoing? After reading this chapter, I have a slightly better understanding as to what makes us tick and what makes us the way we are. Personality is really the characteristic of thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in an individual over time and across circumstances. It’s the way we act not only externally but internally as well. When it comes to the subject of personality, testing and categorizing are so important because it’s so broad it there are so many subcategories and information when it comes down to it. For humans it’s easier when stuff is neatly organized, we don’t deal with chaos well. We’re always to trying to make sense of what makes us, us and we always want to know more. So by making all these categorizes and with all the testing we hope to make sense of who we are. I think by making categories it’s easier to break down everything, but I don’t think that they should be as important as they are. Personally, I love to know and learn as much as possible, but I don’t need to make sense of everything around me and by having tests and categorizing everything we’re just organizing chaos and I just say let chaos be chaos and not change it.
After reading this chapter there was many things that I found to be quite interesting. One section was the section over the different theories. One theory was the psychodynamic theory which was the Freudian theory that unconscious forces determine behavior. There are three factors to this theory which is the conscious, preconscious, and the unconscious. When it comes to the conscious level it the mental activity that we are aware of, which is also our ego. With the preconscious level its material that we aren’t currently aware of but can be brought to our awareness which is our superego. And finally the unconscious which contains material that our mind cannot easily retrieve such as memories, wishes, desires, and motives which also includes id. Another theory is the expectancy theory which is that our behaviors are a part of our personality. This theory lead to propose that people’s personalities are based on their locus of control which means that whether people control the rewards and the punishments that they experience. The third theory was the reciprocal determinism. In this theory, there are three factors that influence how a person acts. The first is the person’s environment. The second is a multitude of person factors such as the person’s characteristics, self-confidence, and expectation. And the third and final factor is the behavior itself. When all three of these factors interact with each other, the result is your personality. And the final theory was the big five, or the five-factor theory. With this theory the five factors are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism and with each factor on may be anywhere on a continuum from low to high. This one seems to have the most evidence because it shows across, adults and children, cultures, and in different parts of the world.
Terms: personality, psychodynamic theory, unconscious, preconscious, conscious, ego, superego, id, expectancy theory, locus of control, reciprocal determinism, five-factor theory

Cassandra Rutledge
Chapter 12 Blog
11/10/2014

Personalities are the characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in an individual over time and across. The reason for testing and categorizing personality is for the ability to be able to find out what kind of person you are, and match you with people who are different from yourself. The match up with someone different is to make sure to minimize the amount of fight if you both are competitive or even neat freaks. This is important and is needed to make life easier and less stressful. This chapter was easy for me to understand because have taken a psychology class that we learned about personality, so some of the information is new while other stuff is new.
Surprising to me, but I really like reading about all of the theories that are on psychology. The many theories or approaches that are mentioned in the chapter. The theory that caught my attention is the psycho-dynamic theory which is Freudian theory that unconscious forces determine behavior. This can be related to lucid dreaming in a sense because when you are unconscious you still have the control of your dreams. This allows your behaviors you would not show in reality to come out. In the unconscious stage you have parts of your ID and Superego start to show through your behaviors. ID is the component of personality that is completely submerged in the unconscious and operates according to the pleasure principle.
The approaches that are mentioned in this chapter are humanistic approach, cognitive approach, and trait approach. The first one, humanistic approach, is when personality is based on our unconscious wishes that create conflict between the Id, ego, and superego.This is related to whether you are conscious or unconscious. The next one is cognitive approach which is based on how we think. This is related to when in college and knowing if you work hard you will earn good scores. The last one is trait approach, which is when personality can be described by our characteristics. This approach relates to how one is in the world through their personality and actions they take during reality.
Terms: personality, psychology, behaviors, characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, theories, approaches, Psycho-dynamic theory, humanistic approaches, cognitive approaches, trait approaches, unconscious forces, reality, lucid dreaming, ID, superego, pleasure principle, conscious,

Your personality would be your own characteristic emotional, responses, thoughts, and behaviors that are usually constant over different circumstances or stable. Testing and categorizing for personality is because there are so many types of personality. Everyone’s personalities are different, but there are some way the personally may be the same too. Although I do not think we should have tests for personality. Projective measures tests the unconscious stuff from cloudy stimulus. To me we really should try to figure out what’s in the unconscious, only because you could create something that’s not really true. If it’s in the unconscious, then they aren’t bothered from it, so why go looking for it. If they bothered from it, then you can probably find a way by being distracted and eventually forgetting about it. Even without measuring the unconscious with objective measure, I still don’t think it’s a good idea. Asking you to basically rate yourself for personally is unreliable. When someone thinks there a 5 for being shy, to someone else it could be totally different, it’s all how they think of it as. Also we tend to score better then what we really are because we don’t have to objective standards to rate ourselves against. My understanding of personality hasn’t changed that much sense reading this chapter only because I realized that personality who you are and everything that goes with it, which over all it basically what the chapter is saying with all the different sections. The most interesting section for me was about how personality are changed by genes and environment. The most obvious is that personally is changed by genes. You can tell this by your family, or other families, some families are more hot headed and others are so sweet you can’t handle it. What you may not realize it that the environment is involved too. You could be adopted into a family like the sweet family and be super sweet like them too, because of the environment you grew up in was always friendly. What was memorable in this chapter was an image of the man with the devil on one side and the angel on the other. This really helped me understand the three of them, mostly because I’m a visual learner. In the learning tip picture on page 431, the devil on the left is shown as the id. This is saying how id is the wants and desire for pleasure, but stay away from pain. It the devil because this is what you want, which is not always the right thing to do. In the middle is ego. On the right is an angel witch it for superego because it’s what you should do because it is morally right or is socially acceptable. Ego is in the middle because I involves both id and superego and resolves the conflict between the two.

Terms: projective measures, objective measure, id, ego, superego

In the beginning of the chapter I it talked about how many people decide to take psychology classes in order to see what it is that makes people tick. I have been interested in why people do the things that they do, and what could be going through their heads at the time while they’re doing it. An important factor of doing this is determining what the personality of that person is. Personality consist of the typical thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in people over time and across circumstances. Self-concept is a big part of our personality it can affect you thoughts, behaviors, and feelings. Working self-concept is the immediate experience of the self in the here and now. For example if you think of your as a shy person when put into a group setting you are more likely to act shy because that is what you believe that you are. Self-esteem is how we feel or evaluate are personal characteristic. These evaluations can be either good or bad. Those who are confident in themselves and tend to look at themselves in a good light most of the time can be said to have a high self-esteem.These people will tend to use downward comparisons when comparing themselves to other people. A downward comparison is when you compare yourself to someone who is inferior to you. By doing this we tend to make ourselves feel better and gain more self-esteem. Those who are not confident in themselves can be considered to have low self-esteem. Those who have low self-esteem will use upward comparison which is when you tend to compare yourself to those that are superior to them. There is no real definition of what personality is, but there are a few theories to it. There is Freud’s theory in which it is in three parts. In this the id, is the unconscious push to seek pleasure and avoid pain. The superego is your unconscious it is the brake on your id, and is largely influenced by society. Lastly there is the ego which is the mediation between the two and is ultimately what your personality is personified as. There are more such as the expectancy theory and reciprocal determinism. A big describer of personality is the personality traits. A common approach to this is the five-factor theory which states that the traits can be separated into five categories: Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Ultimately I do think it is important that we study the personality of people. By doing this we can better understand what shapes personality and the common characteristics of personality as well as being better able to distinguish people who may have personality disorders. The thing that I found to be interesting is that online dating is the second most popular form of meeting someone. The most memorable thing in the chapter is how some personality traits can be biological, that’s memorable to me because you don’t really think of someone’s personality as being genetic and being passed down through their parents.

Psychological Terms: Personality, Self-Concept, Self-Esteem, downward comparison, upward comparison, id, superego, ego, expectancy theory, reciprocal determinism, five-factor theory

Personality is described as the characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relativity stable in an individual over time and across circumstances. But to me, personality is how an individual acts in their every day life. Are they mostly optimistic or pessimistic? Shy or friendly? These are the questions you should even as yourself to figure out who you really are. Self-schemas are a way to evaluate yourself based on your memories, beliefs, and generalization of you. For example, I am a brunette, a daughter and a sister, a student, an athlete, short, and outgoing. Self-schemas are an important way to look at yourself to find out who you are and if that’s who you want to be. Looking into personalities is important because it affects our own self-esteem, or how we see ourselves whether it is good or bad. One way self-esteem can be measured is by using a sociometer, which is an internal monitor of social acceptance or rejection. Although self-esteem isn’t the most important thing in the world, it is something that relates to our everyday lives and affects how we live and act towards others.
A topic that was interesting to me was Freud’s structures of personality theory. In this, Freud states that there are three structures of how your personality is organized. The first structure, Id, deals with your unconscious thinking and focuses on the pleasure principle, which pushes oneself to seek pleasure and avoid pain. The second structure is the superego, which acts as a break on the Id. The superego is largely submerged in your unconscious mind and acts as your conscience, reminding you of what is right and wrong. The third and final structure is the ego, which acts as the mediator between the id and the superego. The ego tries to balance out the needs of the id, while also thinking of the superego. This is one thing that made sense to me out of all of Freud’s theories.
Something that was memorable to me was topic focusing on the three aspects of temperaments in babies. Temperament is described as the general tendency to feel or act in certain ways. One aspect is the activity level, which is the amount of energy and behaviors the child shows. Some can be bouncing of the walls while others can be quite calm. The second aspect is emotionality, which describes the intensity of emotional reactions. While some children cry easily, others can be angered, or become happy very easily. The last aspect is sociability, which is the tendency to interact with others. Some may like to play on their own, while others need to be occupied with many others to play with. I knew that all babies don’t act the same and temperament can explain why, and how the main personality traits are based on the child’s genes.
The psychological terms I used were: personality, optimistic, pessimistic, self-schemas, self-esteem, sociometer, Freud’s structures of personality, Id, pleasure principle, superego, unconscious mind, conscience, ego, temperament, activity level, emotionality, sociability

Personality is the characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in an individual over time and across circumstances. It is important for us to test and categorize them because ever single of us has a different variation of a personality, but we have to categorize them so we can study each one and learn more and more about it. Every individual has a different view on their own self-schema, their working self-concept, and we all have different levels of self esteem. Some people might be way more self confident and are able to get over their mistakes easily, while others might struggle greatly to view themselves as anything but bad and never forgive themselves from mistakes. Two very different personalities, but why? This is why we need to test and categorize personalities.

Before reading this chapter I thought of personality of basically just how an individual acts. There is so much more to personality to that! Our personality has a lot to do with how we feel about ourselves and our past choices. Which explains a lot of the personalities you see; two easy examples cocky people vs humble people. I also thought personality was not something you could change. I viewed it as something that you were “born like” and that’s how it was going to be for the rest of your life. Personality is something we most definitely have control over however. For example we can stop comparing ourselves to others, a lot easier said than done, but it would help one’s personality I think. There are downward comparisons and upward comparisons, while downward comparisons protects one’s self esteem because they are better off than the person they are comparing their self too it is still downgrading someone else and that says a lot about your personality.

The most surprising thing to me in chapter 12 was reading about the id, ego, and superego. The id is the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain. The superego is the conscience for what is socially acceptable and moral. The ego resolves the conflict between the id and the superego. I thought this was just a pretend thing in movies!! I would have never guessed we actually had this going on in our brains. Sometimes we do have to choose wether to do something that will be fun, but most likely have consequences, or choose to stay home and watch a movie or something less rebellious. It was interesting to look at Freud’s psychodynamic theory of personality. Often we are unconsciously making our ID choices, and more conscious when we are making our superego choices… which was pretty obvious.

The most interesting thing to me in chapter 12 was the simple personality test where you looked at a picture and told what you were seeing. The picture was just a black blob, but I saw a butterfly in it. The book told the things most people saw when the looked at it; an angry fox, the body parts of a person, or a butterfly. I feel like this is an odd way to test someone’s personality, and probably not the most accurate. It just surprised me that something so simple was used to test such a complex idea like personality.

Words I used: personality, self-schema, working self-concept, self esteem, downward comparisons, upward comparisons, ID, ego, superego, conscious, unconscious

According to chapter 12 in the book that I just read, personality is the characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in an individual over time and across circumstances. Before reading this chapter I would describe personality as a term that determines a certain type of person. For example if a person that smile all the time seem to be approachable I would consider that person has an awesome personality, friendly and happy would be the traits of that person personality. As a human being, out personality developed as we grows and it will become stable around our 20’s. Basically if you have all the good traits in your personality, people will like you more. In my opinion, I think testing and categorizing is very important in study of personality, because by doing testing it allow you to gather a lot more information and put those information into an accurate category if we can see the similarities from all of the different types of characteristics among people then it is going to be more easy for us to focus on that one group and learn all about the cause and effect of that one group and add more to it as you do more research. It’s an effective and organized way for the study of personality, and we could dig deeper to get out all of the information that we could. After reading this chapter my understanding did not change much, I just learned some new vocabularies such as working self-concept which means it reflect on how a person think about themselves at a certain moment. For example when you drop a vase to the ground and it breaks into small pieces, you will feel clumsy for not hold on to it tight enough. I have a really low self-esteem. I always find myself into an upward comparison where I would compare myself to someone that is sitting next to me and judging myself for not looking as decent as the person sitting next to me. From the reading of chapter 12 the most interesting topic to me was the personality is affected by genes and the environment when they show a research of 2 pair of twins, one is identical one is fraternal. The identical ones tend to be similar in personality than the fraternal. I always thought that twins are supposed to have similar personality. The most memorable thing I have learned about this reading was Our Temperaments are Innate and the three aspects of temperaments such as activity level which is how we act when we have a lot of energy inside, emotionality is means we over reacting to a certain situation, and sociability is type of people who prefer to be in a group instead of spending time alone.
Terms: personality, working self-concept, self-esteem, upward comparison, temperaments

Personality is a variety of many things. It ranges from our thoughts to emotions to behaviors. Our personality is who we consistently are. It is our sense of self, if we think of ourselves in a certain way; we are influenced to be that way. It is natural that the way that we view ourselves is generally the way others view us. This is why self-esteem plays a huge role in our mind and in whom and what we enjoy to be around. Another major idea in the realm of personality is our self-concept. How we identify ourselves is a key factor in every aspect of our lives. We identify ourselves differently based on the situations we are put into. It is no surprise that culture plays a role on how we view ourselves. We often compare ourselves to other people, whether it is to celebrities or our neighbors, and this alters our sense of self. Having a positive outlook on our sense of self is crucial to success, so this trend in culture can be very destructive. There are many theories to personality, but one of the most popular is Freud’s Psychodynamic Theory of Personality. It ties in our conscious, preconscious, and unconscious states together to create who we are. Personality is literally who we are. This makes it a really important factor, so there are many tests available to assess different personalities and traits. You can measure using projective measures, which includes measuring personality based off of different people’s interpretations or objective measures, which include self-surveys or questionnaires. I think that personality tests are interesting, but I do not think the use of them in everyday life is crucial; however, I think in certain settings they can be helpful. For example, we recently took the Meyer-Briggs personality test in one of my classes. My professor wanted us to see what our strengths and weaknesses are before we worked on a large project. If you are aware, you can overcome these disadvantages. I thought that it was interesting looking at the results. The test was very accurate and helpful. I think that when you are testing personality it is important that you use multiple types of testing methods and situations because of situationism. One situation that I think personality testing is important in is when you are finding roommate. I read in this chapter that it if you are similar to your roommate you get along better, and I think that roommate situations are really important. In college especially, your relationship with your roommate lays down a foundation for your college experience. I can say this from experience. My roommate and I have very similar personalities, and she has become one of my best friends. I honestly did not know that there were so many factors that went into personality before reading this chapter. I thought that the most interesting thing in this chapter was self-esteem and how big of a role it plays in who you are. I did not realize that what you think about yourself genuinely lays down the foundation to who you are. The most memorable thing from this chapter was humanistic approaches. I thought it was interesting how conditions of worth played a role in the long run. Overall, I thought that this chapter was interesting and I feel like I took a lot of things away that I can apply to my own life.

Terms: Personality, Sense of Self, Self-Esteem, Self-Concept, Culture, Positive Sense of Self, Freud’s Psychodynamic Theory of Personality, Conscious, Preconscious, Unconscious, Projective, Objective, Situationsim, Humanistic Approaches, Conditions of Worth

Personality, according to the book, consists of the typical thoughts, emotional responses, and and behaviors that are relatively stable in people over time and across circumstances. Several different parts make up personality and how we act towards others and ourselves. Some of these concepts include self-schema, working self-concept, and self-esteem. Self-schema is when people process information about themselves entirely, deeply, and automatically. Working self concept is the immediate experience. Self esteem is the affective aspect of people’s sense of self. I think it’s important testings are done about personality because everyone is different is affected by other’s personalities in different ways. Throughout the chapter I learned the several different parts that make up our personality and what types of situations can affect our personality. For example, I learned more about how our sense of self can be extremely influenced by cultural factors, how the environment has a big impact on our personality, how thoughts affect personality, different theories and more. One interesting section I thought was interesting was the section talking about the psychodynamic theory. The psychodynamic states a person’s wishes, desires, and hidden memories determine their behavior. This theory, however, doesn’t have enough evidence to back it up. This theory has three different levels. The first level is the conscious level. This level consists of the thoughts which we are aware of. The second level is the preconscious level. This level consists of content that is not recently in our awareness but they, however, could be brought to our awareness. This could be considered our long term memory. The third and last one is the unconscious level. This level has the information that the mind has a hard time retrieving. The hidden feelings are most of the time in conflict. Sometimes these hidden feelings can leak into the conscious level. Freud believed this is what happens when you say one word when you meant to say another. Another part that goes along with Freud’s theory is id, superego, and ego. Id is what pushes us to get pleasure and avoid pain. The Id belongs to the unconscious level. The superego is like the brake to the desires given off by the id. The superego belongs to the preconscious level. Ego mediates between both the id and superego. The ego tries to please both of these. The ego is then a part of the conscious level. Another interesting topic in this chapter was how personality is affected by our genes and the environment. In this section it states identical twins are more alike than fraternal twins. One memorable fact from this section was if two siblings were not related but raised in the same household are no more alike in their personality traits than random strangers. This is because their environment still differ from one another.

Terms- Personality, self esteem, self concept, self schema, conscious level, preconscious level, unconscious level, long term memory, Ego, Superego, id

The book defines personality as, “the characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors of an individual over time and across circumstances”. Our personality is basically what makes us individuals socially, emotionally, and psychologically, but its more complex than that. Our personalities are connected to our self-perception as well as how we interact with our environment and the people in it. It reaches across many scientific concepts and approaches. The book discusses four main approaches to understanding personality, which highlight how our personalities are influenced by unconscious thoughts, sought for personal full potential, conscious thoughts, and traits/characteristics. Our personalities are strongly connected to our self-esteem and our constant working self-concept. According to the book, our self-esteem is strongly connected to our likelihood of social acceptance, which I find sad. How we perceive ourselves is generally projected into our behavior and is reflective on life outcomes, because of this we generally try to maintain a positive sense of self, which can lead to self-serving tendencies.

Not all researchers agree on the best method of studying personality. From what I found in my reading I could gather that it’s relatively difficult to determine concepts of individual personalities, because people are so much more complex than one simple method can determine. Testing and categorizing can be used as tools for better understanding individuals and the human condition, a researcher can test or observe aspects of a person to determine what personality category they may fit into best. There is a fine line between categorizing and stereotyping.

After reading this chapter I feel I have a better scientific understanding of personality. It opened my eyes to more theories on personality that I wasn’t aware of before as well as improving my knowledge on ones I was initially vaguely familiar with. One theory in particular that I had some previous basic knowledge of was the five-factor theory. As I read the section I developed a more in depth understanding on approaches to personality that deal with traits. I found the Biological trait theory to be interesting and slightly confusing as to the broad division of the different traits.

What I found to be most interesting was the section on the theory of situationism vs. personality, the debate between whether or not behavior is more situational or related to our personalities. This debate has come to an agreement that has led to many trait researchers being interactionists. They believe that behavior is influenced jointly by both personality and the situation. What I found to be most memorable was the last section on how the five basic traits are culturally universal, but there are still some minor differences between cultures. I found this section memorable because I was surprised that research has indeed proven that there are slivers of truth behind some gender trait stereotypes.

Psychology terms: personality, self-esteem, working self-concept, five-factor theory, biological-trait theory, situationism, interactionists, stereotypes

Personality or how we act like, a more specific answer would be our responses to the environment via how we feel, our thoughts and our emotional
reply to actions and scenarios all while keeping consistent to past choices over time and similar decisions to different scenarios. I think personality
is more for the individual then for everyone to witness as we choose who we want to be and it's not uncommon to see people change their personalities when they
enter a different environment. While it is true no two people are the same I believe that testing personality and each category and can be beneficial but I would think
it would be quite difficult to do so. You may get a general idea about what a person is like but only they truly know who they are when it comes to tests like this people
change their answers all the time even if they do not mean to. Self esteem, self schema and having a working self concept all make up a person's personality. Self schema makes up
a set long stable memories that outline a persons beliefs, experiences and other behaviors that make up their self. Self-esteem on the other hand is how a person views their worth to them-self the best way to put it is how a person judges them-self whether they think high of them-self or lowly. Finally we arrive at a working self concept which is in a lot of ways like self-esteem but it is how a person views them-self at a certain moment. Reading about personality in this chapter helped shed light on how a person acts the way he does and why some people
might be more willing to do certain things than others.

Topics that interested me the most was learning about all the different theories first you have the Sociometer theory which is "The theory that argues that self-esteem is a mechanism for
monitoring the likelihood of social exclusion." after that we arrive at the Psycho-dynamic theory which I found to be interesting because it involves Sigmund Freud the theory is that
"unconscious mental activity can result in conflict between the three personality structures the id, ego and the superego." basically a conflict between these three structures which led me into learning
more about the two different types of egos. Ego which I already knew about is "The component of personality that tries to satisfy the wishes of the id while being responsive to the superego."
the Superego however is "The component of personality that reflects the internalization of societal and parental standards of conflict." The id is the first structure of the three which serves as the pleasure principle
its what makes us want to seek out pleasure for ourselves. finally I learned more about defense mechanisms, which is the unconscious mental strategies that the mind uses to protect itself from distress.

Terms Used: Personality, Self esteem, self schema, working self concept, Sociometer Theory, id, superego, ego, defense mechanisms, psycho-dynamic theory

Personality is “the characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in an individual over time and across circumstances”. I feel that personality is a trait that everyone carries and expresses naturally. Personality to me is developed by environment, such as work, interests, family and friends. There are so many different aspects of personality, studying a person’s personality is effective and not effective because there are broad aspects of a personality that people can study in an individual but when trying to characterize a person’s entire personality with others I feel is impossible. When reading this chapter I was very interested in our sense of self. Everyone has a representation of who we think we are. This develops as we develop a better understanding of ourselves, such as our bodies, experiences, memories and appearances. In an overview the concept of how we perceive ourselves is called self-concept. This part of the chapter really made me think of who I am, how I’d like to change myself, and the things I truly do like about myself. The concept of self-esteem in the chapter is interesting because there is much more to it than I ever imagined. I always perceived the concept of self-esteem as people either having a high self-esteem, meaning a person is confident, and may think highly of themselves. A person with a low self-esteem is one that thinks low of themselves such as a young teenage female who is not confident in her looks or body. I saw this as being the only factor to self-esteem but the book states that a person who has a high self-esteem usually makes a downward comparisons, meaning that they contrast themselves with people inferior to themselves in the characteristic they are evaluating. People with a low self-esteem usually makes a general judgment of upward comparisons, meaning they contrast themselves with people superior to them. When I read about the psychodynamic theory it was interesting to read that we have a conscious, preconscious, and unconscious mind. Ego falls into the conscious, superego is in the preconscious, and ID is in the unconscious. ID is the desire for pleasure and avoidance of pain, superego is the conscience for what is socially acceptable and moral and ego resolves the conflict between the id and superego. I personally feel that superego can be put on stand-by when a person is inebriated such as being drunk. The desire for what a person wants appears to rise, the ID appears to become more present and the superego seems to be less and can be nonexistence.
Personality- your sense of self- self-concept- psychodynamic theory- ID-ego-superego-self-esteem

I think personality affects our life greatly. Personality influences in various aspects in our life, such as how we behave in a specific situation, how we interact with people and how we resolve problems, etc. In our textbook, personality is defined that personality consists of the typical thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in people over time and across circumstances. We need to test and categorize personality because each person have unique own personality and thoughts. Therefore, it is very important because we can know ourselves well, we can understand how people behave in specific circumstance and we can predict person’s thoughts and behaviors by categorizing personality. It enables people to adapt well and interact with people in the complex structure of society. Our personality is formed from self-schema, working self-concept, and self-esteem. Our self-schema consists of an integrated set of memories, beliefs, and generalizations about ourselves, thus it affects each of us to perceive, organize, interpret and use information about our self. Secondly, working self-concept is reflecting how we think of ourselves at a certain moment. It will influence our behavior in various circumstances. For example, if I think of myself as intelligent, I participate in actively in the discussion. In contrast, if I think of myself as fun-loving, I can excitingly play in the party to act in ways that show I am fun. That is, the working self-concept guides specific behavior. Finally, self-esteem is the affective aspect of our sense of self. We evaluate how we feel about our personal characteristics. And according to sociometer theory, our self-esteem is greatly affected by people’s perception, such as acceptance or rejection. After reading this chapter, I can understand well about the basic concept of personality and realize which factors affect the forming of the personality.
The most interesting to me in this chapter is that our sense of self is influenced by cultural factors. When at first I go to class after coming to America, I was so surprised that students in class express their opinion freely and talk with professor easily. Also, each person has their unique styles like pink hair. In contrast, in my country, South Korea, talking with professor and expressing my opinion during class is very rare because we don’t like to stand out in class. As well as, most people wear similar style clothes. That is, my country belongs to the collective cultures with China, Japan, etc. Collectivist cultures emphasize connections to family, social groups, and ethnic groups; conformity to societal norms; and group cohesiveness. In contrast, individualist cultures that I am experiencing now emphasize rights and freedoms, self-expression and diversity. While staying in America, everything that I experience every day is new and fresh for me. Until going back to my country, I wish to feel freedom more and express my individuality freely while I don’t mind people’s eyes.
Terms: self-schema, working self-concept, self-esteem, sociometer theory, Collectivist cultures, individualist cultures

Personality is the characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in an individual over time and across circumstances. In the study of personality, the testing and categorizing is so important to keep order.
Personality can be different depending on the situation you're in or the people and things you're surrounded by. Self Esteem also is a contributing factor. When looking at yourself in a judging manner you are viewing your self- schema. This can always be different because of the working self-concept. It can change a persons self-schema at any given moment depending on surroundings or situation. When around others we tend to use Upward and downward comparisons. These are wen we tend to compare ourselves to others that we see to be better than us or worse off than us. Other factors than can change our personality are relationships or traumatic events. These things can alter the way we think and ultimately change our personalities.
I do believe that the testing and categorizing should be important to keep order of different things. More statistics and test results can be used when everything is organized. Information is also more likely to be realistic.
After reading this chapter my understanding of personality has changed. I never realized all of the different ways our personality can be effected or how much we use our personality on a day to day basis. It is the reason we like the people we like and so the things we do. We are our personalities.
The most interesting topic in this chapter to me was the three structures of personality; Id, ego, and superego. The id of a person is the most basic level of structure. It is the level that pushes for us to seek pleasure and avoid pain. The second level is the superego. The superego is a brake for the id. It helps us to realize the social standards so we don't take our pleasure seeking too far. The third structure, the ego, helps balance the id and superego. It satisfies our needs within the social limits. To me this was the most interesting topic in the chapter.
The most surprising or memorable thing I will take from this chapter is defense mechanisms. This is how our bodies cope with anxiety. They are unconscious mental strategies that help protect our mind from distress. These are what cause us to blame certain situations for making us feel a certain way or find excuses to keep us from feeling guilty, or bad. I will remember this because as a young teen I faced many problems with anxiety and my sister and father still do to this day. I was able to overcome it as I am a very mentally strong person. I think differently from a lot of people, my thoughts are organized, and I put my trust in God. This is why defense mechanisms really stuck out to me.
I really enjoyed this chapter, there is a lot to say about personalities because everyone is different.

Terms Used: Personality, Self-esteem, Self-schema, Working self-concept, Upward comparisons, Downward comparisons, Id, Ego, Superego, Defense mechanisms

The book defines personality as “the characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in an individual over time and across circumstances”. To me, a person’s personality is the way that they carry themselves through the usages of emotions, attitudes, verbal and non-verbal communication and outlooks. With these things combined, they create the aspect of human life that makes everyone different through their own sense of self (what is experiences, memories, characteristics and appearances that give you the sense of who you are). Without personalities, humans would be very dull, boring and have low self-esteems. Since personalities are so important in our world, I feel like it is needed to study personalities through social psychology to show how people interact with them.

Testing and categorizing is so important in the study of personality because, you need to look into each of these aspects in psychology very closely. If we are able to go in depth with our studies in the psychological science world, then it will lead to a better understanding of human nature and how and why humans act and interact with certain things or people.

When we look into the study of personalities, we find that there are a few different ways to approach it (through theories). The theories are the psychodynamic theory (where our personalities are based off of our unconscious wishes), the humanistic approach (where it’s based off of our tendency to fulfill our potential through personal growth), the cognitive approach (our personalities are based on how we think), and finally the trait approach (which is that our personalities are described by our characteristics). With the knowledge of these traits, we are more than likely able to help a person who with themselves mentally when dealing with either their own or someone else’s personality. These could really help when dealing with one’s superego, ego or defense mechanisms. It’s also very important to study the fact that our personalities are affected by our genes and the environment as well. With the understanding of that influence, we can understand one’s temperament, basic tendencies (personality traits that are influenced by biology and are stable for a long time), and characteristic adaptions (the changes of behavior expression based on specific situations with certain demands).

My perception of personality has changed in a sense of me questioning where I get my own personality from. It makes me wonder what influenced me more when I was growing up. It also makes me wonder what my personality and life would be like if I was influenced differently when growing up. It also makes me change my perception of how people act. This chapter made it clear to me that their personalities are strongly influenced by third party factors.

The topic that was the most interesting to me was the page about if personalities matter in roommate relationships. With the page about the roommate, I felt that it was very interesting because I could connect them to my own life. I looked at the level of cleanliness scale and I compared my answers to what my past roommate would say. I felt that we were very compatible as roommates. When I think back to when she was my roommate, I feel like our personalities were what made us get along so well. I also think back to my friends and their first roommates, they absolutely hated them. There personalities did not mesh at all. That’s why I am glad that the university does have a program that you can select your own roommate and get to know them beforehand.

I found this to be surprising because it said that every 1 out of 5 couples have met online. To me, it would be hard to get a personal connection with someone over the internet via questions. I feel like I would need to get to know the person in a very different situation before I could commit.

TERMS: Personality, emotions, verbal communication, nonverbal communication, perception, sense of self, low self-esteems, social psychology, psychology, psychological, theories, psychodynamic theory, humanistic approach, cognitive approach, trait approach, tendency, personal growth, temperament, ego, superego, defense mechanisms, genes, environment, basic tendencies, and characteristic adaptions.

Well, if we're to go by the definition provided in the book, then personality 'really' is the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that are relatively consistent across one's range of experiences and lifespan. Personally I believe the fact that there is a substantial number of theories as to how personality works, is very telling of the need to test and categorize various factors, as well it should. I firmly believe that having a grasp on the inner workings of various personality traits is essential to things such as... how to tell if someone is a potential psychotic. I can certainly say I learned quite a bit in this chapter. A psychology course I took in High School had already enlightened me Sigmund Freud's Psychodynamic theory, as well as a dip into the concept of the Oedipus Complex. Beyond that, it was pretty much new territory. In fact, I was rather surprised to discover that most people's personalities wound remain consistent over the years. In stuck out to me, as I've grown up constantly exposed to the sentiment 'People change.”

What really interested me in this chapter is the sizable chunk devoted to Self-Esteem. Anyone who's gone to public schools has had the importance of self-esteem drilled into their heads from year one, so the book kinda surprised me when it revealed just how little I knew about the concept. In particular I was amused at the notion that having a high self-esteem isn't necessarily a good thing, with it being commonly attributed to people with histories of violence, and bullying. I guess one could say I enjoyed it since it sort of flips a school's idealized notion of self-esteem on it's head. Self-serving bias is also a curious concept. To think, we're predisposed to having this egotistical self-view that plays up our successes, no matter how trivial, and disowns our failures, chalking them up to external factors. It seems very telling of our species.

The most memorable part of this chapter was probably Eysenck's Biological Trait Theory of personality. The book mentions that it's one of the theories with the greatest amount of evidence backing it up, and out of all the theories mentioned in this chapter, it was this one that I felt was the most relatable. I wager this is because I personally describe myself as an introvert. I feel I match most of the criteria and this theory does a great deal to validate my position on the matter. Incidentally, according to the chart, I seem to fall more into the stable end of the spectrum, or at least somewhere close to the middle. I found this to be amusing and slightly comforting.

The keywords are: personality, psychodynamic theory, Oedipus complex, self-esteem, self-serving bias, Biological Trait Theory, and introvert.

After reading this chapter I believe that personality has a lot of different of things to take account in what makes you. Personality is actually defined as the characteristic thoughts, emotional responses and behaviors that are relatively stable in an individual over time and across circumstances. In my personal opinion I believe that self esteem takes a huge role in your personality. Self esteem is the affective aspect of life. So I think that if a person has high self esteem they are a more outgoing person. Also working self concept plays a pretty big role in personality. It reflects how a person thinks of herself at a certain moment. Figure 12.4 did a very good job at explaining this subject I think. In 12.4 A: There is a guy at his desk it says, “who am I?” And then there is a little thought bubble that says I am male. Which is what he defines himself as. Then in figure 12.4 B the same question is answered but this time the thought bubble says “I am black”. The example that they gave is that he is working with a group of white people, so his work self concept might focus on the awareness that he is black.
My understanding of personality has changed since reading this chapter because, now I understand there are way more concepts that affect your personality. Before being aware I guess I just thought that you had a certain personality and thats the way you were. Which is not the case at all. There are so many factors that affect your personality.
Somethings in this chapter that I found interesting would be downward comparisons. Which is defined as comparing oneself to another person who is less competent or in a worse situation, which tends to protect a person's high self esteem. Which is so true lately when I am having a bad a thing, “ could things get much worse?”. I will go on twitter and see Amanda Bynes tweeting up a storm and I realize I don’t have it as bad as some people. Upward comparisons is another topic in this chapter that I found very interesting. Which is comparing oneself to another person who is more competent or in a better situation which will often confirm a person's low self esteem.
A really important part of this chapter I think would be the psychodynamic theory which is defined as Freudian theory that unconscious forces determine behavior. Also in figure 12.5 Rotter says personality is influenced by expectations which can lead to having internal locus of control or an external locus of control.
Temperaments are aspects of the personality that are more determined by biology. There are three temperaments, which are based on the degree of a child's activity level, emotional level, sociability level.

personality, working self concept, self esteem, downward comparisons, psychodynamic theory,temperaments,

The book definition of personality is the characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in an individual over time and across circumstances. However, I feel that it’s a set of qualities that make a person distinct from another. Personality is made up of self-schema, working self-concept, and self-esteem. It’s important to test and categorize personalities because each person is different from anyone else. We categorize types of personalities so that we can study them more in depth. When we are able to see common characteristics and personality traits within human groups, then we can focus our attention on why and how these traits develop. The same goes for testing, if we are able to come up with evaluation assessments of people’s personalities, we will be able to understand that person’s personality and therefore give them more effective advice for how they should handle that type of personality.
The most interesting part of this chapter was the different approaches that describe our personality, such as humanistic approaches. These approaches emphasize the goodness in people. This way of studying personalities that emphasizes self-actualization, where people seek to full-fill their potential through greater self-understanding. For example, in the person-centered approach there are two issues which are crucial in the development of personality. The first issue is our personal understanding of our lives and the second is how others see us and evaluate us. The interesting part about this approach is that this theory shows how parents can affect our personality development. Most parents provide life and support to their children. Parents’ love their children on the condition that the children do what the parents wants them to do and live up to the parents’ standards. This condition creates a discrepancy between a child’s self and how parents evaluate him/her, which leads to development of a personality based on conditions of worth. Thus, children’s desires, wishes, and feelings will depend on approval from their parents. Children will act and show only those traits that elicit parents’ love and support. Children make play on musical instruments only because it makes his parents happy. It shows how children depend on positive regard from their parents.
The most surprising thing that I read about was the Expectancy Theory. In 1954, Julian Rotter developed a theory which stated that our behaviors are a part of our personality. This theory was tied to Locus of Control. Locus of Control is whether or not people control the rewards or punishment. There are two types of locus control; internal and external. People experiencing internal locus of control believe they did well on a test because they studied hard. They believe that their actions created the result that they experience. Those with external locus of control believe their grade on the test was just fate and was determined by their actions. This was surprising to me because I never thought about how closely our behaviors and personalities are tied. The Expectancy Theory made a lot of sense to me and now I have a better understanding of why people believe that they are impacting the results that they are experiencing.
Key Terms: Personality, Self-Schema, Working Self-Concept, Self-Esteem, Locus of Control, Humanistic Approach, Self-Actualization

Personality can be defined as the typical thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in people over time and across circumstances. In other words, our personality is who we personally are and how we see ourselves. How we react in situations, how our mind usually thinks and works, and what our behavior is like on a day to day basis. Self-Schema is your knowledge about yourself and how personally you relate it to yourself. Certain concepts are more closely related to one's identity of himself or herself than others, these are the primary concepts that shape your self-schema. Our immediate experience of self in the here and now is described as working self-concept. This is our limited amount of experience that is being processed at one time, so depending on the situation we may see ourselves differently and therefore act differently. Self-esteem is the affective aspect of our sense of self. We evaluate how we feel about ourselves and our personal characteristics. You can either have a high or low self-esteem, based on your view of yourself. Also, your self-esteem may be based on what others think of you, this is known as rejected appraisal. The sociometer theory describes our likelihood of social exclusion and how it is related to our self-esteem. Our personality is based on biological factors as well. It is very important for scientists to test personality so that we can understand what makes us “us”. If we know who we are then maybe we can help somebody else understand himself or herself better. My understanding for personality has grown quite a bit from reading this chapter. I was not near as knowledgeable before this.
The reading that I found to be the most interesting was the section on the three structures of personality. The three structures consist of id, ego, and superego. ID is the most basic level, it is completely submerged in the unconscious. It operates according to the pleasure principle, this pushes us to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. Freud described it as acting upon impulses and desires. The superego is second. It acts as a break or a barrier to the id. It is the rigid structure of morality or conscience. It stops us from completely giving in to our id. Lastly is the ego. Ego mediates between id and superego. It tries to please the id while following the rules of the superego. It can be classified as operating according to the reality principle. This means it uses rational thought and problem solving to mediate between id and superego. Conflicts between the id and superego can lead to anxiety. The ego deals with this through defense mechanisms, such as blaming the situation that you were in. I found this interesting because I now understand the whole devil and angel sitting on your shoulder idea.
What I found surprising or memorable was the topic on projective measures. Projective measures explore the unconscious by having people describe or tell stories about stimulus items that are ambiguous. In other words, they will project their mental ideas on an item, in turn revealing hidden aspects of personality. These can be motives, wishes and unconscious conflicts.
Key Terms: Personality, Working Self-Concept, Self-Esteem, Sociometer Theory, id, Ego, Superego, Reality Principle, Defense Mechanism, Projective Measures

By definition personality is the characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in an individual over time and across circumstances. Although personality includes all of these, generally most people usually think of behaviors as a persons personality. We usually do not consider everything that could be affecting their behavior and we typically just generalize that as their personality. For example, someone could be having a horrible day the first time you meet them and they are being short and blunt with you. Even though we had only met them once if someone was to ask us if we knew that person we would say the response we got for them when we met them, which in this case could be that they were a little rude. Most people would give this type of generalization because we based it on their behavior that day but perhaps they aren’t a rude person they were just having a terrible day. I believe many times a person's true personality shows through in children. I believe this because this is when they are not old enough to have big influences from others. Yes, their parents impact them to a certain extent while they are growing up, but each child still grows its own personality through the years from childhood to adulthood.

Testing and categorizing are so important in the study of personality because personality is a broad concept that can vary, therefore testing and categorizing are key in understanding it. As stated before, behavior is a big aspect of personality. Behavior is said to be determined by unconscious forces according to the psychodynamic theory that was developed by Sigmund Freud. It is said that there are three structures of personality. The first structure is id. Id is the component of personality that is completely submerged in the unconscious and operates according to the pleasure principle. The id is like an infant, crying to be fed whenever hungry. The second structure in the psychodynamic theory is superego. Superego is the component of personality that reflects the internalization of societal or parental standards of conduct. The third structure is the ego. The ego is the component of personality that tries to satisfy the wishes of the id while being responsive to the superego. According to the psychodynamic theory, unique interactions of the id, superego, and ego produce individual difference in personality (p.430). Cognitive approaches are also studied to figure out how thoughts shape personality. cognitive approaches are ways of studying personality that recognize the influence of how people think. One main theory of cognitive approaches is the expectancy theory. The expectancy theory proposes that people’s personalities are based on their locus of control. Locus of control is the idea that personality is based on a person’s perception of whether she controls the rewards and punishments she experiences or does not control them. A person with an internal locus of control believe that they themselves influence outcomes. A person with an external locus of control believe that outcomes result from forces beyond their control.

My understanding of personality have changed after reading this chapter in the fact that i think more of a person’s personality comes from genes than I believed before. before reading this chapter I knew that the environment affected a person’s personality because the way people are raised influences personality which deals with the environment they grew up in. I also knew that I acted a great deal like both of my parents but I always figured it was just because of the fact that they raised me and it was just the influences they have had on me. Although that concept is true, I didn’t know that genes had such a big impact on personality. This chapter showed me that personality stability is influenced by biology and situation. Basic tendencies are personality traits that are largely determined by biology and are stable over time. Characteristic adaptations are changes in behavioral expression of basic tendencies based on the demands of specific situations. For example, someone could be a very daring person which would be a basic tendency but getting old causes him to change that things that he is allowed to do which would be a characteristic adaptation.

The section on genes influencing personality was also the part that was most interesting thing to me because I didn’t know your genes had a big influence on personality. I knew that genes influenced what people looked like but I didn’t even imagine them affecting my characteristics that still stick with me everyday.

I found the three aspects of temperament to be memorable to me. First off temperament is the biologically based tendency to feel or act in certain ways. The three aspects of temperament are activity level which if the overall amount of energy and behavior we exhibit. The second aspect is emotionality which describes the intensity of emotional reactions. The third aspect is sociability which refers to the general tendency to affiliate with others. I found these memorable because they really clicked in my brain which helped me to understand why we feel and act in certain ways.

Psychological terms used: characteristic adaptations, basic tendencies, genes, id, superego, ego, locus of control, external locus of control, internal locus of control, behaviors, expectancy theory, psychodynamic theory, personality, sociability, emotionality, activity level

Personality is one of the most important, if not the most important features about a person. Personality is the balance between emotions, behaviors and thoughts. Personality is something that we cannot see or measure though; it is just something we can experience by being around others and ourselves. Everything we do and experience shapes our personality even though we might not recognize that. Social personality has to do with how we present ourselves to others through what we say, our actions, and our mannerisms. Self-schema is a very important part of our personality. This has to do with our knowledge and beliefs about ourselves. How we understand ourselves deals with how we present ourselves, which is in turn our personality. Our self-esteem is also tied closely with our personality. This is how we feel about ourselves. If a person feels good about himself or herself you will see it in their personality and view about life, same for a person with a bad self-esteem.
Testing and categorizing so important in the study of personality because everybody is different, no two people have the same personality. But because there are so many different people with different personality it is nice to be able to group them into categories. If we know what type of personality we have and want to look into it we can, and by researching it we can understand ourselves a little better. I think that it is important to test and categorize personality because of this. It allows those who are researching to understand different personality types and those types of people, but it also allows people to understand relationships between people based on their personality types.
My knowledge of personality has really changed after reading this chapter. I before thought personality was just how we presented ourselves to other, and crazy Type A people. But after reading this chapter I learned about everything that makes up ones personality. How everything we do is driven by our personality and shapes our personality. I learned that our personality is the core to who we are and what we do.
The most interesting thing from the chapter was the scale and Five-Factor Theory. This is a theory that is based on a scale of 5 personality traits. The traits can be ranging from low to high and can help determine the type of person you are. The traits are openness o experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Behaviors can be predicted based on how a person in ranked for each trait.
The most memorable thing from the chapter was the aspect of our personality and the argument of nature vs. nurture. How do we get our personality, is it genetic or is it something that we develop as we live, or a combination of both? In the chapter we learned that identical twins show more common personality traits than fraternal twins showing that biology, nature, has an impact. But we also learned in the book that our everyday actions affect our personality. I know from experience that I have many common personality traits as my mom, dad and brothers but are those something I have genetically inherited or is it something that I have learned and developed from spending so much quality time with them?

Self-schema, Self-esteem, Social personality, Type A personality, Five Factor Theory, Behavior, nature vs. nurture, genetically inherited

Personality is, the characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in an individual over time and across circumstances. My interpretation of this definition is, individuals develop their own way of acting and responding to social situations but also in a more private setting. Your personality helps define you and how others, including you as well, view yourself. There are tests and studies done on personality for the same reason people research anything else. Researchers want to know more about it and how it relates to psychology. I think that our personality is a huge part of who we are and has a huge effect on our social psychology. I support the tests and research done on personality because I only see it as furthering our knowledge about each individual. My knowledge on personality has changed in the sense that I know all of our life leading up to where we are now has influenced our personality.
The most interesting section was on self-schema. Each of us has multiple positions or roles to uphold. For example, I am a daughter, sister, student, etc. All of these roles influence who I am as a person and what personality I’ve developed over the years. Our self-schema helps us relate all aspects and concepts of ourselves to show who we are. Know who we are helps us decide which factors we let influence us and to what depth. I don’t know how many people actually take the time to create their own self-schema to evaluate their personality, but I think it would be very helpful. This could help people identify who they are versus whom they want to become. On top of that, it doesn’t hurt to be able to pinpoint which roles you should fulfill and which are more of a top priority.
The most memorable section was on Eysenck’s Biological Trait Theory of Personality. He was able to create three dimensions of personality traits, them being: extraversion/introversion, unstable/stable, and high constraint/low constraint. His theory allowed researchers to categorize personalities and study them further. It also allowed individuals to have some type of separation from one another. Everyone wasn’t grouped together, and there were definite “lines” between people. Even after Eysenck’s theory came out, more theories were developed on top of it to help describe the separation between personalities and personality traits. His diagram can be easily read so anyone could find which personality traits they obtain the most. There are many tests on personality and the type of person you are, but this is a very simple “test” if you will to give you the idea of who you are.

Psychology Terms: Personality, emotional responses, behavior, social psychology, self-schema, extraversion, introversion, unstable, stable, high constraint, low constraint, separation, personality traits

Chapter 12

Reading this chapter gave me a much deeper understanding of personality. Personality is defined as the characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in an individual over time and across circumstances. What we think about our self can be seen with a self-schema. A self-schema is basically a combined set of memories, beliefs, and generalizations about one’s self. Categorizing while studying personality is important when using this type of thing. We are subconsciously aware of when something in our schema is heard or seen. This can be shown like if we hear our name called in the middle of a crowed, noisy room. An interesting topic I learned about in this chapter was about self-esteem and the sense of self. I enjoyed reading about this because the topic of self-esteem has always interested me and I never truly understood it. Some theories about self-esteem relate it to how we believe other people view us, while another theory is that self-esteem is more like a mechanism that monitors the probability of being excluded. Honestly, I think either of these theories makes sense. Being appraised by others that we value, are influential in the way we think about ourselves, and this explains the reflected appraisal. While the theory of the mechanism makes a lot of sense too. It explains how the self-esteem is a ‘sociometer’ which shows how if we feel that we will get rejected then we will have a lower sense of self-esteem, while if we feel we will be accepted our self-esteem will be much higher. Something that surprised me was that although we think that high self-esteem is the key to being successful, psychology shows that it is less important than we believe. Studies have shown that some people who have high self-esteem are not thought of in the way they think about themselves by others. You could also either have high self-esteem and get good grades because of it, or gain self-esteem due to your good grades. But even if you have lower self-esteem, that does not mean you cannot have a successful life. People can succeed whether or not they high self-esteem.
Key Terms: personality, self-schema, high self-esteem, low self-esteem

Personality is basically combinations of many characteristics/qualities like typical thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that form a person’s own way to be therefore no one’s personality is exactly the same. Testing and categorizing is important in the study of personality because it’s more organized and grouped separately especially since there’s three categories that are different. The first being id which is at the bottom (basic level) and means unconscious and makes us look for pleasure and avoid pain. The second is superego which develops during consciousness. The third one is called ego and this component of personality tries to satisfy the wishes of the id while still being responsive and superego. Should it be categorized? Honestly, for me it isn’t such a big deal if it is or not just because it isn’t such a big deal for me if it’s categorized or not. But I do think having it categorized makes it better to understand and more organized. My understanding of personality after reading this chapter has made me realize that personality is a lot more than just how a person is and acts and or how they behave. It is so much more than that. The most interesting and memorable thing I got out of this chapter was the part about three aspects of temperament. The first being called the activity level and this is where the overall amount of energy and behavior we exhibit. Second is called emotionality which is the intensity of emotional reactions. The third aspect is called sociability which refers to the tendency to affiliate and just be with each other. Temperament is the general likelihood to feel or act in certain ways.
Personality, id, unconscious, superego, ego, activity level, emotionality, sociability, temperament.

Chapter 12 Blog Post

This chapter was so interesting because of all the different views and ideas on personality. By our book’s definition personality is “The characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in an individual over time and across circumstances” (418). I interpreted this as the way someone may interact with him/herself and other people consciously and unconsciously. In school and in conversations we talk about personality traits quite a bit, and I have discovered while reading through the chapter that personality has much more to do with than just, traits. I thought it was interesting that the book addressed the never-ending question of “Who Am I?” I feel like this is a question that people ask their self-everyday and no one actually knows. I did like how the book said that the self is difficult to define. I agree with that completely and it was nice to see that in writing. The one question I had during this reading in the beginning of the chapter is if our sense of self is how we act and behave unconsciously or how we act and want to be portrayed as. The book than touches on this idea of Self Schema, Working-Self Conflict, and Self-Esteem, and than I start to understand the concept of “sense of self” a little better. Self-Schema was something that I have heard before and is basically general ideas that you have about yourself. We talk about self-schema in my writing class often and it was nice to see some of my classes overlapping in content. The next idea that the book talked about was working self-concept. Working self-concept is the idea of how a person thinks about him/herself at any that moment in time. At first I confused working self-concept and self-schema because they are similar but after I read further I understood that working self-concept is a more directed term that is usually used to describe a certain part of the self in a certain moment in life. Self-Esteem was also talked about and I think it was almost funny to read about this topic in a psychology textbook. Self-esteem is the evaluation of how we feel about our character. I also really liked the idea of the sociometer and how self esteem plays into that. I never looked at self-esteem in terms of rejection, but I can recall times where I felt down on myself because of a certain social interaction that may have made me feel rejected.
Testing personality and categorizing is sort of controversial for me. Sometimes I think putting labels on different types of personalities puts people in a “box” and sometimes doesn’t allow people to change and grow as people. This is my thought from a perspective from a test such as Strengths Quest. I do love strengths quest a lot but when people discuss it, they limit theirs selves to their top 10 traits and maybe forget about the traits in their life that may be beneficial or harmful. While I was reading the methods of assessing personality I found myself really interested in the projective measure. I like the idea of exploring someone’s unconscious processes because it might say something about a person that they are unaware of. I am not sure about the validity of showing ambiguous pictures to people to fully test their unconscious processes, but I think it would be a good start to understanding the way you interact with yourself and others. The thing that I was unsure about was the objective measures. I think the self-reporting personality quizzes that are credible are great and do say something about the person’s personality, but I can relate it back to the Working Self-concept by saying that the personality quiz may only reflect how the person is feeling that particular instance. I do ultimately see the importance of studying and categorizing personalities because when people better understand their self, they can find what they like in other people. For example, if I understand that way that my personality fits in with my co-workers, our jobs will be easier since we understand each other better. I think the assessment of personality is great, but I do wish there were more concrete and credible ways to do it.

My understanding of personality has changed in a few ways. When I thought of personality I never remembered to relate it back to biology as well and I think that is one of the ways my thinking has changed on personality. I found the section of temperament really interesting. Temperament is the idea that we all have an innate sense to feel and act in a certain way and this is related to our biology. It is interesting because personality can be affected by our environment and different events over time, but when you think about a baby, they seem to have a way that they act without experiencing much of anything. That is why I thought this section was so interesting, and it was new to me. It is a different type of biological personality that I am not used to thinking about.
I was interested in most of this chapter because I really like thinking about the “human experience” and what the sense of self is. The idea that I found most interesting during the chapter was the idea of the psychosexual stages. The stages are the Oral Stage, Anal Stage, Phallic Stage, Latency Stage, and the Genital Stage. I have never heard of this before and it was interesting to think about the idea of pleasure and how to fulfill that beginning at birth. This is the idea that also spurs the conversation about the Oedipus complex and that is always interesting to hear about. I think it is interesting that children at the age of 3-5 would focus their libidinal energies without sexual intent. It is just a weird concept that I am still having troubles wrapping my mind around, but I think it was still interesting and in some sense the psychosexual stages all makes a lot of sense.
The idea that I found to be the most important of memorable to me was the subchapter on humanistic approaches. The idea of studying personality that focuses on the self is really neat. As I said earlier in the blog that I really like studying the idea of the “human experience” and this goes hand in hand together. I think personality is so interesting, but you have to be able to understand it for yourself to make it a really fulfilling experience. The idea of Cognitive approaches also goes well with the humanistic approach. I feel like these two ideas are synonymous in ways and I like that and think they were a very important part of the chapter.

Terms: personality, self, self-schema, working self-concept, self esteem, sociometer, psychosexual stages, oral stage, anal stage, phallic stage, latency stage, genital stage, humanistic approach, cognitive approach.

According to the text book, personality isn’t just simply defined as how someone acts but is actually made up of three interacting structures proposed by Sigmund Freud. The first structure, the id, which exist at the most basic level: completely submerged in the unconscious. The id operates according to the pleasure principle which wants us to seek pleasure and reject pain. The second structure is the superego, which acts as a brake for the id. It is the personality that reflects the societal and parental standards of conduct. Your superego also acts as a conscience or a structure of morality. The third and final structure is the ego, the personality that tries to satisfy the wishes of the id while being responsive to superego. Your ego operates according to the reality principle which uses rational thought and problem solving. According to the psychodynamic theory unique interactions of the id, superego, and ego can produce individual differences in personality.
The reason why testing and categorizing is so important to the study of personality is because it helps us to start to understand it. I think that testing people’s personalities is important because it helps us make decisions such as picking roommates. For example Carli and colleagues in a 1991 study examined the correlation between personality similarity and relationship satisfaction among 30 college students. What they found was that the closer in personality the better the relationship satisfaction was at the end of six months of living together. Most colleges have you fill out a questionnaire to determine who would best fit your living style and personality. My roommate and I really lucked out on this because neither of us filled one out. It just so happened that my roommate and I were in the same tour group, on the same day, at the same time. It’s funny because when picking a roommate or filling out a questionnaire it can feel like you are on eHarmony looking for a potential lifelong partner. In a way it is because you have to live with this person for a year and you don’t want to dread coming back from class to your room.
After reading this chapter my understanding of personality shifted a bit. I used to think that personality was just how a person acted around certain people and it is but it is also much more than that. Personality is how we perceive ourselves and other, how we make decisions, how we live and interact with others. Personality is a wide variety of different structures that come together to make up one whole to help us understand personality.
Terms: id, superego, ego, morality, conscience, reality principle, pleasure principle, rational thought, problem solving, personality

Personality is the thoughts, emotional problems, and behaviors that a person continually repeats over time. It may also be described as how you perceive, and how people around, perceive you. There are many ways to evaluate personality. The internet has many options just within itself, but the most common form of evaluation is the personality test. Psychologists use personality tests to help the client, but to also further the understanding of it for themselves, as well as the field of psychology in general.

Psychologists must diagnose personalities and behaviors in order to understand and help heal the ones that may be hurt. Negative diseases and behaviors may keep someone from reaching their full potential, so the help of the psychologist is needed. Although the study of personality may not be important to some, the fact that it is beneficial to others in making themselves better people seem to outweigh the reluctance. Although you may think you understand yourself as a person, the person next to you might not and could use guidance to start becoming the person they want to, and should, be.

After reading through this chapter, I was surprised at the complexity of the personality and self. There are many influencing factors that determine how we act, and who we are a person. The way in which you were raised greatly factors how you may feel about yourself in terms of self-esteem. I was also surprised when I read about self-schema (An integrated set of memories, beliefs, and generalizations about the self) and how biased people are towards their actions, and the actions and behaviors of others. In other words, my understanding of personality was quite enhanced after the reading of this chapter.

The most interesting portion of the reading to me seemed to be the section about social comparisons. I thought it was odd how natural it is for humans to compare themselves with those around them. The result from the comparison would then have a direct effect on the self esteem of the comparer. I think it is odd and interesting how we do this, regardless of the negative effects it may have. Whether it’s an upwards or downwards comparison, I don’t know if it is healthy for people to always think twice about themselves. Because your personality and uniqueness make you who you are.

Psychological Terms: Personality, Thoughts, Behavior, Psychologists, Psychology, Client, Complex, Self-esteem, Self-Schema, Social Comparisons

Personality is generally who we are on a normal day, how a person normally thinks, feels and acts. I think it is important to study because it varies because no two people are quite the same and it can reveal answers to why a person acts the way they do which can make it interesting to study, or how personalities change throughout the generations to see whether it can connect to what is going on in the world or the environment. My understanding has changed because I did not realize how much went into personality or how it affected other traits people have.
I think the self traits were most interesting because we all act that without always realizing it, then after reading over it, I realized moments in my life where it applies. I think self-schema plays a big part in personality and makes us who we are. We all have different memories, beliefs and thoughts about ourselves causing us to think the way we do and have different opinions on situations. It is something that makes us all unique, personal experiences have a big role in those actions and thoughts. I’ve always just found that interesting, you are surrounded by people with way different life experiences and opinions yet can still get a long and have your personalities line up. It is also weird how you can see yourself full of negativity, feel worthless but have people think you’re an amazing person who deserves the best in life. I feel like working self concept goes a lot with self-esteem, if you have a lower self-esteem the thoughts about yourself will be more negative toward yourself, same with higher self-esteem gives you more positive feelings about yourself, which could be perceived as having an ego to some people.
I think the section “How we assess personality” was most memorable, especially the section on roommates, the majority of college students are all dealing with that. I think it is a very important factor. I have learned in the last few months, that I am one of those people who can’t always get along with someone who is exactly like me all that well so I do think it is important to factor that you need compatible personalities to make life easier. Which changed the idea of what my personality is.
I also liked the section where they stated behavior is influenced by personality and situations. I personally agree with situationism because if someone is having an off day and snaps on somebody, that doesn’t necessarily say they are a bad person, it is just whatever they are dealing with in life. I’ve had people think I was mean when I snap just because I am not in the mood to handle a situation or just having an off day, that doesn’t have much to do with my personality most of the time. People tend to react to things in different ways and have different behaviors causing multiple theories like the chapter stated.
I personally find it all interesting and relatable since personality is a big part of who we are and how people see us as. I think it is an important part of psychology that needs to be studied and is probably one of the few things that won’t change when it comes to people, personalities will probably always be a factor in who someone is throughout the generations.
Terms used- self-schema, working self-concept, self-esteem, situationism, personality

Personality is the behaviors and attitude that stays constant in a person’s life; it can be influenced by personal biological make up and the surrounding environment that the person grew up in and lives in daily. Something that I noticed from reading the chapter this week is that personality has a lot to do with perceptions. Our sense of self is based off of how we perceive ourselves and how other people perceive us. From those perceptions stems a person’s self-schema, self-esteem, and how we interact with the world. A self-schema is all the memories and beliefs that a person has about himself. That information gives him an insight to what he will enjoy or what tasks will be hard for him. The schema can also help in building up self-esteem or breaking it down. Self-esteem is how we feel about our behaviors and attitudes. If someone does not feel comfortable climbing latters she will probably have a low self-esteem in believing she can go bungee jumping. Both self-schema and self-esteem impact how a person decides how to live in the world. Based on personal information from the past a person will know what or what not to do in the day while self-esteem will also determine if someone would do something or not.
What was most surprising was how Freud was accredited as a psychologist for so many years with all his weird theories that normally have to do with sex. It was disturbing to read that children grow up wanting to fight their same sex parent for the love of the father or mother. It also did not make any sense. However, I could understand see that there could be unconscious forces trying to determine behavior. In the previous chapter it talked about stereotypes and in another chapter it talked about schemas. The information accumulated by both can be recognized in the unconscious mind and a person can quickly act out a behavior without even thinking about it because of the information from stereotypes or schemas. The interesting part of the chapter was how we don’t know for sure if humans can change personality.
Terms used: personality, self-schema, self-esteem, behaviors, attitudes, unconscious, stereotypes

Personality is how we come to know ourselves through typical thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors. In all people the categories in our personalities are for the most part pretty stable or consistent throughout our lives. In my cornerstone class last year we did a short test over our personalities. This was important to the class, but I think it is also important in general for the same reasons. The main reason for the test was to choose groups for a project, but why was the test necessary? The test was necessary to put people of different personality types into a group to make sure we worked well together and so we did not have more than one person who had the same personality type in a group to keep away from potential risks. Because of this I do think that testing and categorizing should be important. This way you can know your employees better and know whom they would work well with or around. My understanding of personality has changed some but not dramatically. I did not know that the emotions had a role in the personality of someone. The fact that emotions do play a role in someone’s personality is clearer and I understand why it is now. I found the topic on the three structures of personality to me the most interesting to me. The three structures of personality are ID, superego and ego. The first structure is ID, which is in our unconscious thoughts. The book says that ID operates according to the pleasure principle, which is what makes us seek pleasure or pain. Sigmund Freud said that what drives the pleasure principle is the libido. The libido is the energy that makes us look for pleasure and acts on impulses and desires. The superego is also in our unconscious thoughts or behaviors. The superego is developed in our childhoods and is developed by the standards of society and our parents. The superego in other words knows what society and our parents expect from us, which is why we cannot always do what we want. Our ego tries to make both our ID’s and out superego happy. Our Ego tries to make us happy or pleasured but at the same time has to understand the superego and the standards of society and our parents. Ego also reacts on the reality principle, which is rational thought and problem solving. What I found very interesting however was that they used an ice burg to show the conscious and unconscious of the ego, id, and superego. I do not know why they used an ice burg but it made me think of and relate it to the Titanic. Everyone saw the iceberg, just like how everyone sees who you are. But you do not know what their personality is like until you run into them multiple times and get to know them. Like the iceberg, they just saw the top, or outside of it, but what the people and captain of the titanic did not know, was that there was much more to the iceberg then what they could see.

Terms: Pleasure Principle, Id, Ego, superego, reality principle, personalities, behaviors,

Personality is three things. There is what we think, how we respond to a situation, how we usually behave. What we think is our self-esteem. Your self-esteem is a big part on what you think. Self-esteem affects what you think about yourself. It is not what you think about other people. Reflected appraisal is when you let your self-esteem be affected by what other people think. This is what makes self-esteem so strange. It does not affect what you think about other people, but it is affected by what other people think. Comparing to other people can also affect what we think. I know that when I go to Ultimate practice I thought I was not that good. It was a big change from high school because I thought I was pretty good in high school. The reason I though I was not good because I was comparing. I had an upward comparison. I was comparing me to some of the people who have more college experience than me. Comparing also affects how we respond. When I felt like I was not good at practice I was thinking what happened. I was kind of thinking what was going on. Then I realized that there is more to Ultimate than just what was in high school. How we behave can be affected by our biology. The book talks about the biological trait theory. This talks about how our biology affects if we are introverted or extraverted. It also talks about how it affects how stable or unstable we are. This makes sense to me because when I was growing up I was an introvert and I was kind of told that I was an introvert.

We need to test people’s personality so they know what they are like. This is important for me because I am not good at telling things about myself. This is good for me so I can know what I am. It should be important so people can know what they are like.

What I think about personality changed. I am not sure what I thought about it. It makes it easier to understand when you think about it in parts. I understand also why people usually do not change.

This most interesting thing that I read was about comparing and the bias. These were interesting to me because it made sense to me. I did these things. I will blame what happens on other things.

The thing that surprised me was that you could tell what someone is going to be like when they are really young. We usually do not change. That is surprising that you can do this.

Personality, self-esteem, reflected appraisal, upward comparison, biological trait theory, introverted, extraverted, stable, and unstable

The book defines personality as “what is consists of the typical thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in people over time and across circumstances.” I believe testing and categorizing is important to the study of personality in psychology because it allows psychologists and researchers to have a basis in which to begin their studies from. Otherwise there would be a much too broad, extensive, and nonspecific answer for any question regarding personality or the self. No one would be able to achieve a more clear answer about other people if there were no categories or tests. Sure, we could imagine how and why a certain person might or might not do something, or why the act the way they do, but we would have nowhere to go with it. I think that it definitely be a part of this study because it allows for psychologists to get a pretty accurate insight into someone’s personality without directly asking someone about it. This is important because people have their own biases about themselves, and can lie about certain aspects of themselves to be more presentable in their minds. By using for example, the TAT or Thematic Apperception Test, psychologists can find out who someone is clearly without any influence. My understanding of personality has changed after reading the chapter though extending what I already believed about certain aspects of the topic. I knew a few more in depth things about personality, but the chapter really expanded on all of them, and included things that I’ve never really thought about before. I was always really interested in the psychological tests because I have had a few friends ask me questions, or they would ask me to describe a series of things. Through that they would be able to psychoanalyze me, which was always really cool and freaky at the same time. I was excited to read about some of those tests because I could finally see how they work, and what’s behind them. The tests were definitely the most interesting thing to me because you can find out so much about a person by asking them peripheral style questions, which often give you a better answer than if you would have just asked them something straightforward. The most surprising thing that I read in the chapter was about common defense mechanisms according to Psychodynamic Theory. I was surprised to learn about how many different ways people react to uncomfortable situations.
Terms: Defense Mechanisms, Psychodynamic Theory, Psychoanalyze, Thematic Apperception Test, Personality.

Chapter twelve taught me a lot about personality. Personality consists of many different things. I did not realize how many different things there were that tied into our personality. Some of the things that the book talk about are emotional responses, personal thoughts, self-concept, self-schemas, and temperament. Our emotional responses to situations give a lot away about our personality. Our different emotions towards different things can help identify specific tendencies in our personalities. If a person is shyer and embarrassed all of the time, their self-confidence is probably pretty low. Having little confidence, or even a lot of confidence in oneself, can be a huge factor in personality and self-perception. Our personal thoughts sort of play into our emotional responses as well. Our perceptions of what goes on around us come from personal experiences and memories. If our memories are of good experiences before, we are more likely to do these things again and interact with the same people, but if we remember an uncomfortable situation, where maybe people weren’t very friendly towards us, we are less likely to partake in the experience again. Acceptance is a huge contributor to confidence and self-esteem. As humans we seek pleasure. We have three structures of personality, and the first is id, which is the part that operates according to the pleasure principle. The second structure is the superego. The superego is kind of what keeps our id in check. It doesn’t allow us to make crazy decisions. The third structure is our ego. Our ego is kind of defined as a need to be satisfied. It tries to satisfy our wishes in a way that still follows what the superego allows us to do.
I found the part about libido to be the most interesting part of personality. I always imagined libido as a sort of sexual term. It can be used in a sexual meaning, but that is not the only thing. Libido in general, describes the energy that we have for pleasure seeking. Libido is what drives us to do a lot of things. It can be a major motivator because it helps boost our egos, and raise our self-esteem by giving us goals to drive at. When we reach those goals, our overall well-being improves.

Terms: Temperament, self-concept, self-schema, emotional responses, id, ego, superego, self-esteem, libido

This chapter was about what self and personality actually means and how you can be defined by it. Personality consists of the typical thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in people over time. Understanding your personality is difficult because people are so complex and different. There are three aspects that make up our self, self-schema, working self- concept, and self-esteem. Our self-schema consists of an integrated set of memories, beliefs, and generalizations about ourselves. Our working self-concept is limited to the amount of personal information that is being processed at one moment in time. These self descriptions depends on which memories you retrieve, which situation you are in, which people you are with, and your role in the situation. Self-esteem is the affective aspect of our sense of self. We can objectively believe good things about ourselves and still have low self esteem. The most interesting part of this chapter was how Freud developed the psychodynamic theory of personality. It is interesting how that theory says our personality is based on our unconscious wishes that create conflict between the id, ego, and superego.
Terms: Personality, self, self-schema, working self-concept, self esteem, memories, psychodynamic theory, low self-esteem, Id, ego, superego, unconscious.

From this chapter we learn that personality is the characteristic thoughts, emotions, responses and behaviours that we consistently express over time. This chapter spoke a lot about our self and self-esteem. Testing and categorizing is important because it allows scientists to find an understanding of why people are the way they are. It helps to figure out why people are the way they are.

While I feel that this chapter really just enforced my understanding of personality, I did not truly realise the extent, the number of factors in personality. To me personally, I feel like my personality changes a lot, I know the way I would want myself to react in a situation but that doesn't mean I act that way. I believe that is due to the fact that I am trying to change, I know that I can be a dick sometimes, but the problem is I don't realise when its happening. Because of this I make an effort to be aware of my actions and their consequences. I took the big five personality test and got RACUI. This means, reserved, accommodating, calm, unstructured, and inquisitive. While these are not really the traits I would use to describe myself, I would not say that they are incorrect. Most of these traits are not things I would even focus on. This shows me that the trait approach may be helpful for understanding yourself but it may not reflect the way you see yourself.

The most interesting thing to me was the study of self-esteem and the problems you can have with both low, and high esteem. I found it interesting that there seem to be more serious problems with high self-esteem, such as narcissism, which worsens your relationships with other people and makes you manipulative. Though low self-esteem can lead to depression which can lead to suicide (though most likely other factors would need to come into play), people with lower self esteem tend to want to make other people happy more.

Terms: Personality, self-esteem, trait approach, narcissism, depression

Personality is defined by the text as typical thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively in people over time and across different circumstances. I think that personality is very broad and can sometimes be difficult to describe. The reason that I feel this way is because the idea of ones self is so circumstantial and difficult to pin point. I think that categorizing and addressing different personality types is important because I think that knowing ones personality is important to understanding who you really are and what drives your behavior.
I also think that it is important when it comes to helping understand mental disorders like depression or anxiety. I know this because I have been diagnosed with anxiety disorder since I have been very young and I have found that understanding my personality type has a lot to do with understanding how it affects my behavior and my anxiety.

The most memorable thing in this chapter was the topic of Sociometer Theory. This theory is a mechanism for monitoring the likelihood of social exclusion. This theory depicts the likelihood of self esteem lowering when rejection is present. It states that when rejection is present self esteem will lower. AN example of this would be picking out a pair of pants that you think are too small and them putting them on and they are indeed too small.

The most interesting thing for this chapter was the concept of how self esteem affects life outcomes. In western culture it would seem that self esteem would make for positive outcomes in life but studies have shown that this is actually not the case and even though people have shown to be happier when they have a higher self esteem it does not mean they have any more of successful lives.

psychological terms: self esteem sociometer theory, personality, anxiety, depression,

Personality in chapter 12 is defined as the characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in an individual over time and across circumstances. I agree and disagree with bits and pieces of that definition. Your personality is who you are, and who you’ve become throughout your life. It’s how we have shaped ourselves as individuals. We have events in our life and we learn things that affect and can change our personality. Not a single person in this world has the same personality as you, we all shape and change our personality differently from one another.
Testing and categorizing is important in the study of personality because of how different everyone is from one another. If we can study and break people down into groups on how they act, think, and their personality overall, than maybe we can discover something that we once did not know. In our own minds, we use self-schema and working self-concept to determine ourselves in our own minds. I think that it should be as important as it is right now, if not more. We really don’t have a full grasp of knowledge on how peoples personality work, and people have been trying and trying to figure that out. If we can figure out more about this, than who knows all the things we can discover not only with personality, but with the overall study of the brain and psychology.
My understanding of personality changed right away while reading chapter 12. I thought I knew what personality meant, but I was only partially right. The definition really helped me grow in the knowledge of learning who I am, and how I got to where I am today. Learning about psychodynamic theory really changed my understanding the most personally. The definition says, Freudian theory that unconscious forces determine behavior. These things such as wishes, desires, and hidden memories determine our behavior. I never knew that and thought that was so cool!
The topic that was most interesting to me was the section on how our temperaments are innate. Temperament is a biologically based tendency to feel or act in certain ways. There are 3 levels of temperament, which are activity level, such as our amount of energy, and behavior we show. Our Emotionality level, which is the intensity of our emotional reactions, and finally our sociability level.
The most surprising and memorable thing I read from this chapter overall, was mainly just how my full understanding of personality and what it really is changed so much. Learning of how we change overall, and why and how we do it.

Terms: Personality, Self-Schema, Working Self-Concept, Psychodynamic Theory, Temperament, Activity Level, Emotionality Level, Sociability Level,

Personality is “The characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in an individual over time and across circumstances”. It is what sets us apart from other humans; it is our ‘soul’. Everything from eating habits to mating ritual has to do with personality; it is what makes us thrive as a species. Testing and categorizing a personality helps psychologists better understand what drives certain actions, or find if one may carry a higher risk for violent actions and things such as that. After reading the chapter I now wonder what personality traits caused me to become friends of some of my buddies. It also makes me want to take a look at how our personalities have changed together and if that explains why we are all so similar and have the same humor. It seems all it took was the similar self-schema of not really caring about being in a ‘group’ or something of the sort, we are our own group.
I found the most interesting part of reading to be the part on Sigmund Freud and his theory on psychodynamics. He used an iceberg to explain it, and I realized that I have seen this comparison everywhere. He came up with Ego, Superego, and ID. The topic that surprised me the most was that on the two adopted children who grew up in the same house most all their lives, but ended up completely different people who did not even seem to be related. This shows that a lot of personality is actually biological, and less formed by the environment, but still effected nevertheless.
The personality test was extremely accurate and explained things I would not have noticed before about my personality. It was very interesting and worth the 5 or so minutes to sort out what button was for what line.
Words: Personality, emotional response, behavior, psychologists, self-schema, Sigmund Freud, theory, psychodynamics, Ego, Superego, ID, biological, personality test.

According to the text book personality are the characteristic of thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in an individual overtime throughout circumstances. We often make opinions about other people based on their personalities. Trying to figure out and understand other peoples personalities is an everyday task for people. This is because each person has their own and very unique different personalities. For example some people can be quite and to themselves while others love attention and people around them and can be very loud. When observing a person in a group you can figure out peoples personalities very easily because they usually surround themselves with people that are like them. But that makes sense because why would a shy and quite person want to be around people that are loud and talk about themselves a lot? That does not make sense, they would have not very much in common. For me personality is all factors and characteristic that can best describe us and how we differ from all others around of us.
We all have our own sense of self, or other wise know as self-schema. This self-schema helps us understand our own personalities and integrates knowledge about ourselves to do that. We also usually use mental representation of our self-schema from our experiences, appearance, memories and conscious awareness. All of this is important because it helps us understand ourselves by helping organize, interpret and perceive and use information on our self. It shows us why we act like we do and how we differ from everyone around us.
Another part of personality is how we understand it. There are quite a few approaches in the second section of the chapter that explain how psychologist approach it. One big one is the humanistic approach. The humanistic approach is considered the person central approach, it involves our sense of self and how others precieve and evaluate us. This main humanistic approach is also considered the person centered approach. It usually emphasizes the unique goodness in a person, the growth and self understanding of all influences of personality. The other approach is the cognitive approach, this goes along with the expectancy theory. The expectancy theory states that our behavior is apart of our personality, you decide if the rewards and punishments are worth it and that shapes your personality. The last approach it talks about was the trait approach, this deals with the theory of the big five theory. It says that personality is affect by openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism
Testing and categorizing is important in the study of personality because knowing someones personality can help predict their behavior and thoughts, there are several ways to predict someone's to measure personality. One way to is projective, there are personality test that examine our unconscious process by having people interpret stimuli. Another way is objective, with is more or less a direct assessment of personality usually based on info gathered thorough self- report questionnaire or observer rating. Due to these and a few more types of testing we are now able to categorize personality. I think that testing and categorizing is important in the study of personality but only to a certain extent. Yest were do have lots of similarities to why people behaving the way they do but in each situation you never really know how exactly they are going to act because they effect people differently. This is knows as the situationism theory, which as my example above shows, behavior is effected by situation more than personality traits at times.
Before reading I never actually realized how complex our personality traits were and how much actually affected them, I found this to be very intresting. It talked about the the five basic personality traits everyone possesses, but on different scales. They are: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Its crazy that those fixe things we all possess but we are all so different because we show different amounts of them. I was able to asses what I had with each of these and it came out how I thought it would. My understanding of personality has changed since reading this chapter because now I know there is more that goes into it than just the way you act towards things around you.

Personality, Sense of Self, Self-Schema, Humanistic Approach, Person-Centered Approach, Cognitive Approach, Expectancy Theory,

This episode of This American Life gave me mixed feelings about the whole situation of the children getting switched at birth. The episode made me feel sad, upset, and many more feelings. It also gave me quite a bit of confusion. This episode really shocked me because Prairie Du Chien is significant in my life. I grew up in northeast Iowa about thirty minutes from Prairie Du Chien and I was even born in the hospital there. I was mainly shocked because I think of switching children at birth to be a very unusual thing but I feel like it would’ve been broadcasted more than it was. With that being said I think that people from around my area would’ve heard more about it. It also really makes me think because I am assuming both of the girls that got switched at birth were also born in the same hospital I was born in. It makes it very strange to think about. I think about what these two families had to have gone through dealing with their children being switched. The confusion was brought on by thinking about how shocking and weird the news had to have been to both of the girls. It also made me mad and frustrated about how the mother who knew all along dealt with the situation.
According to what I know about the scientific aspects of nature and nurture I believe they both were influential in this situation. Although, I believe both were influential I believe that nature was the most influential in this situation. One of the reasons I believe that nature is the most influential because I believe that nature has to do with the genes that each child had. Nature is influential in different factors such as: what the girls look like, how they act, and other things like that are influenced by nature. Although I do think that nature was the most influential I also believe that nurture had an impact too. I believe that the impact nurture had on the two girls had to deal with the traits that the girls learned from their families that raised them even though they were not biological. I believe that the psychodynamic theory which deals with the unconscious forces that determine behavior deals with both nurture and nature. I think that personality would be the part that is influenced greatly by nature and nurture.
These people’s personalities were greatly affected by this switch. Obviously in this situation I think anyone’s personalities would change. I think a main reason that things changed was because of the shock and changes that all of the sudden had to have been thrown at these people. Between both of the families they had to have underwent. Personality is influenced by situation and I believe that this situation would’ve had a great impact on people’s personalities. Not only did this switch have a drastic influence on people’s personalities but it also altered their behaviors. Personality is greatly influenced by many things but psychology is can have a big influence on personality.
This episode of This American Life is gave me multiple feelings and it made me think greatly about everything that would come with the switching of children at birth. It was just a very interesting episode to me and was astonishing and intriguing to listen to.
Psychology terms used: personality, behavior, psychodynamic theory, nature, nurture