CBSE Class 12 Psychology Revision Notes for Self And Personality of Chapter 2

Class 12 Psychology Quick Revision notes Chapter 2 Self And Personality

FACTS THAT MATTER
• Self refers to the totality of an individuals conscious experiences, ideas thoughts and feelings with regard to her self or him self.
• The study of self and personality help us to understand ourselves as well as others.
• The structure of self can be understood in terms of identity of the intended and the development of personal and social self.
• Personal identity refers to those attributes of a person that make him/her different from others.
• Social identity refers to those aspects of a person that link him/her to a social or cultural group or are derived from it.
Self refers to the totality of an individual’s conscious experiences, ideas, thoughts and feelings with regard to himself or herself.
• Subject:
Who does something (actor).
Self actively engages in the process of knowing itself.
• Object:
Which gets affected (consequence).
Self gets observed and comes to be known.
• Kinds of Self:
(i) Formed as a result of the interaction of the biological self with the physical and sociocultural environment.
(ii) Biological self developed |is a result of our biological needs.
• Personal Self:
Primarily concerned with oneself.
Emphasis comes to be laid on those aspects of life that relate only to the concern the person, such as personal freedom, personal responsibility, personal achievement, or personal comforts.
• Social/Familial/Relational Self
Emerges in relation with others.
Emphasises such aspects of life as co-operation, unity, affiliation, sacrifice, support or sharing. This self values family and social relationship.
• Self-concept is the way perceive ourselves and the ideas we hold about our competencies and attributes. A person’s self-concept can be found out by asking the person about himself herself.
• Self-esteem is the value judgement of a person about himself/herself.
1. Assessment present a variety of statements to a person and ask him/her to indicate the extent to which those statements are true for him or her.
2. By 6 to 7 years, children have formed self-esteem in four areas—academic, social and physical/athletic competence, and physical appearance become more refined with age.
3. Overall self-esteem: It is the capacity to view oneself in terms of stable disposition and combine separate self-evaluations into a general psychological image of oneself.
4. Self-esteem has a strong relationship with our everyday behaviour. Children with low self-esteem in all areas often display anxiety, depression, and increasing anti-social behaviour.
5. Warm and positive parenting helps in development of high self-esteem among children- allows them to know they are accepted as competent and worthwhile.
• Self-efficacy is the extent to which a person believes they themselves control their life outcomes or the outcomes are controlled by luck or fate or other situational factors.
1. A person who believes that he/she has the ability or behaviour required by a particular situation demonstrates high self-efficacy.
2. The notion of self-efficacy is based on Bandura’s social learning theory. He showed that children and adults learned behaviour by observing and imitating others.
3. People’s expectations of achievement also determine the type of behaviour in which they would engage, as also the amount of risk they would undertake.
4. Strong sense of self-efficacy allows people to select, influence, and even construct the circumstances of their own life; also feel less fearful.
5. Society, parents and own positive experiences can help in the development of a strong sense of self-efficacy by presenting positive models during the formative years of children.
• Self-regulation refers to the ability to organize and monitor one’s own behaviour.
1. People who are able to change their behaviour according to the demands of. the environment are high on self-monitoring.
2. Self-control is learning to delay or refer the gratification of needs.
3. Will-power is the ability to respond to situational pressure with resistance and control over ourselves.
4. Self-control plays a key role in the fulfilment of a long-term goal.
5. Indian culture tradition provides certain effective mechanisms (fasting in vrata or roza and non-attachment with worldly things) for developing self-control.
• Techniques of self-control:
1. Observation of own behaviour: provides necessary information that may be used to change, modify or strengthen certain aspects of self.
2. Self-instruction: instructs ourselves to do something and behave the way we want to.
3. Self-reinforcement: rewards behaviours that have pleasant outcomes.
CULTURE AND SELF:
• Indian
Shifting nature of boundary between self and other (individual self and social self).
Does not clear dichotomies.
Collectivistic culture: Self is generally not separated from one’s own group; rather both remain in a state of harmonious co-existence.
• Western
Boundary is relatively fixed.
Holds clear dichotomies between self and other, man and nature, subjective and objective.
Individualistic Culture: Self and the group exist as two different entities with clearly defined boundaries; individual members of the group maintain their individuality.
CONCEPT OF PERSONALITY
• Personality refers to unique and relatively stable qualities that characterized an individual’s behaviour across different situation over a period of time.
1. Derived from persona (Latin), the mask used by actors in Roman theatre for changing their facial make-up.
2. Once we are able to characterize someone’s personality, we can predict how that person will probably behave in a variety of circumstances.
3. An understanding of personality allows us to deal with people in realistic and acceptable ways.
Features of Personality:
1. Personality has both physical and psychological components.
2. Its expression in terms of behaviour is fairly unique in a given individual.
3. Its main features do not easily change with time.
4. It is dynamic in the sense that some of its features may change due to internal or external situational demands; adaptive to situations.
APPROACHES TO STUDY PERSONALITY
• TYPE APPROACHES
1. Hippocrates (Greek Physician)
(i) Proposed a typology of personality based on fluid or humour.
(ii) Classified people into four types (i.e., sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic and choleric); characterised by specific behavioural features.
2. Charak Samhita (Treatise on Ayurveda)
(i) Classifies people into the categories of vata, pitta and kapha on the basis of three humoural elements called tridosha.
(ii) Each refers to a type of temperament, called prakriti (basic nature) of a person.
3. Typology of personality based on the trigunas, i.e. , sattva, rajas, and tamas.
— Sattva guna—cleaniness, truthfulness, dutifulness, detachment, discipline.
— Rajas guna—intensive activity, desire for sense gratification, dissatisfaction,envy, materialism.
— Tamas guna—anger, arrogance, depression, laziness, helplessness
All the three gunas are present in every person in different degrees—the dominance of . any guna leads to a particular type of behaviour.
4. Sheldon
Using body built and temperament as the main basis for classification:
(i) Endomorphic (fat, soft and round)—relaxed and sociable.
(ii) Mesomorphic (strong musculature, rectangular, strong body build)—energetic and courageous.
(iii) Ectomorphic (thin, long, fragile)—brainy, artistic and introverted.
— Limited use in predicting behaviour—simple and similar to stereotypes.
5. Jung
Grouped people into two types, widely recognized.
(i) Introverts: People who prefer to be alone, tend to avoid others, withdraw themselves in the face of emotional conflicts, and are shy.
(ii) Extraverts: Sociable, outgoing, drawn to occupations that allow dealing directly with people, and react to stress by trying to lose themselves among people and social activity.
6. Friedman and Roesenman
Tried to identify psycho-social risk factors and discovered types.
(i) Type-A (susceptible to hypertension and coronary heart disease): Highly motivated, impatience, feel short of time, be in a great hurry, and feel like being always burdened with work. Such people find it difficult to slow down and relax,
(ii) Type-B The absence of Type-A traits.
Moris continued this research and identified:
(iii) Type-C (prone to cancer): Co-operative, unassertive patient, suppress negative emotion, show compliance to authority.
(iv) Type-D (prone to depression).
Personality typologies are usually too simplistic as human behaviour is highly complex and variable. Assigning people to a particular personality type is difficult. People do not fit into such simple categorization schemes so neatly.
TRAIT APPROACHES
A trait is considered as a relatively enduring attribute or quality on which one individual differ another. They are:
Relatively Stable over Time
— Generally consistent across situations.
— Their strengths and combination vary across individuals leading to individual differences in personality.
1. Allport’s Trait Theory (Gordon Allport)
(i) Individuals possess a number of traits—dynamic in nature and determine behaviour.
(ii) Analysed words people use to describe themselves—provided a basic for understanding human personality—and categorized them into—
— Cardinal Traits: highly generalized disposition, indicates the goal around . which a person’s entire life revolves, e.g., Hitler’s Nazism.
— Central Traits: less pervasive in effect, but still quite generalized disposition. e.g., sincere.
— Secondary trai least generalized characteristics of a person, e.g., likes mangoes.
(iii) The way an individual reacts to a situation depends on his/her traits.
(iv) People sharing the same traits might express them in different ways.
2. Personality Factors (Raymond Cattell)
(i) Identified primary traits from descriptive adjectives found in language.
(ii) Applied factor analysis, a statistical technique to discover the common structure on which people differ from each other.
— Source or Primary Traits (16): stable, building blocks of personality— described in terms of opposing tendencies.
— Surface Traits: result out of the interaction of source traits.
(iii) Developed Sixteen Personality Factor (16PF) Questionnaire for the assessment of personality.
3. Eysenck’s Theory (H.J. Eysenck)
(i) Reduced personality into, two broad dimensions which are biologically and genetically based and subsume a number of specific traits.
— Neuroticism (anxious, moody, touchy, restless) us. Emotional stability (calm, even tempered, reliable)—the degree to which people have control over their feelings.
— Extraversion (active, gregarious, impulsive, thrill seeking) vs. Introversion (passive, quiet, caution, reserved)—the degree to which people are socially outgoing or socially withdrawn.
(ii) Later proposed a third dimension, Psychoticism (hostile, electric, and antisocial) vs. Sociability, considered to interact with the other two dimensions.
(iii) Developed Eysenck Personality Questionnaires to study dimensions of personality.

(iv) Useful in understanding the personality profile of people across cultures
(v) Consistent with the analysis of personality traits found in different languages and methods
• Psycho-dynamic Approach (Sigmund Freud)
A Levels of Conciousness
1. Conscious—thoughts, feelings and action of which people are aware.
2. Preconscious-—mental activity which people may become aware only if they attend to it closely.
3. Unconscious—mental activity that people are aware of.
(i) A reservoir of instinctive or animal drives—stores all ideas and .wishes that arise from sexual desires.
(ii) Cannot be expressed openly and therefore are repressed or concealed from conscious awareness.
(iii) Constant struggle to find a socially acceptable way to express unconscious awareness.
(iv) Unsuccessful resolution of conflicts results in abnormal behaviour Approaches to the Unconscious
1. Free Association—a method in which a person is asked to openly share all the thoughts, feelings and ideas that come to his/her mind.
2. Dream Analysis.
3. Analysis of Errors—mispronunciations, forgetting.
Psycho-analysis is a therapeutic procedure, the basic goal which is to bring repressed unconscious material to consciousness, thereby helping people to live in a more self-aware and integrated manner.
B Structure of Personality
1. Freud gave an imaginary division of mind it believed in internal dynamics which can be inferred from the ways people behave.
2. Three competing forces—i.e. id, ego and superego influence behaviour relative strength of each structure determines a person’s stability.
• Id:
1. Source of a person’s instinctual energy—deals with immediate gratification of primitive needs, sexual desires and aggressive impulses.
2. Works on the pleasure principle, which assumes that people seek pleasure and try to avoid pain.
3. Demanding, unrealistic and does not care for moral values, society, or other individuals.
4. Energised by instinctual forces, life (sexual) instinct (libido) and death instinct.
• Ego:
1. Seeks to satisfy an individual’s instinctual needs in accordance with reality.
2. Works on the reality principle, and directs the id towards more appropriate ways of behaving.
3. Patient and reasonable.
• Superego:
1. Moral branch of mental functioning.
2. Tells the id and ego whether gratification in a particular instance is ethical
3. Controls the id by internalising the parental authority the process of socialisation. According to Freud personality is Biological determined. It is instinctive. Life instinct and death instinct determine behaviour.
• Life instinct is dominant in human behaviour.
C Ego Defence Mechanisms
1. A defence mechanism is a way of reducing anxiety by distorting reality unconsciously.
2. It defends the ego against the awareness of the instinctual reality.
3. It is normal and adaptive; people who use mechanism are often unaware of doing so.
(i) Repression: Anxiety provoking behaviours or thoughts are totally dismissed by the unconscious. ‘
(ii) Projection: People attributes their own traits to others.
(iii) Denial: A person totally refuses to accept reality.
(iv) Reaction Formation: A person defends against anxiety by adopting behaviours opposite to his/her true feelings.
(v) Rationalisation: A person tries to make unreasonable feelings or behaviour seem reasonable and acceptable.
D Stages of Personality/Psychosexual Development (Five Stage Theory of Personality)
1. The core aspects of personality are established early, remain stable throughout life, and can be changed only with great difficulty.
2. Problems encountered at any stage may arrest development, and have long-term effect on a person’s life.

• Oedipus Complex (Male)
Love for mother, hostility towards the father, and fear of punishment or castration by the father.
Accepts his father’s relationship with his mother and models his own behaviour after his father.
• Electra Complex (Female)
Attaches her love to the father and tries to symbolically marry him and raise a family.
Identifies with her mother and copies her behaviour as a means of getting (or sharing in) her father’s affection.
Resolution of Complex
1. Identification with same sex parent.
2. Giving up sexual feeling for sex parent.
Failure of a child to pass successfully through a stage leads to fixation to that stage. The child’s development gets arrested at an earlier stage.
Regression occurs when a person’s resolution of problems at any stage of development is less than adequate. People display behaviours typing of a less mature stage of development.
• Post-Freudian Approach Neo-analytic or Post-Freudian View
(i) Less prominent role to sexual and aggressive tendencies of the Id.
(ii) Expansion of the concept ego.
(iii) Emphasis on human qualities of creativity, competence, and problem-solving.
1. Carl Jung: Aims and Aspirations are the source of energy
(i) Saw human being as guided by aims and aspirations.
(ii) Analytical Psychology; personality consists of competing forces and structures within the individual (that must be balanced) rather than between the individual and the demand of society, or between the individual and reality.
(iii) Collective unconscious consisting of archetypes or primordial images; not individually acquired, but are inherited—found in myths, dreams and arts of all mankind.
(iv) The self-strive for unity and oneness; for achieving which, a person must become increasingly aware of the wisdom available in one’s personal and collective unconscious, and must learn to live harmony with it.
2. Karen Horney: Optimism
(i) Optimistic view of human life with emphasis on human growth and self actualisation
(ii) Challenge to Freud’s treatment of women as inferior—each sex has attributes to be admire by the other, and neither sex can be viewed as superior or inferior; countered that women were more likely to be affected by social and cultural factors than by biological factors.
(iii) Psychological disorders were caused by disturbed interpersonal relationship during childhood.
(iv) When parent’s behaviour toward a child is indifferent, discouraging and erratic, the child feels insecure and a feeling called basic anxiety results—deep resentment toward parents or basic hostility occur due to this anxiety.
3. Alfred Adler: Lifestyle and Social Interest source of energy-attainment of personal goals.
(i) Individual Psychology: human behaviour is purposeful and goal directed.
(ii) Each one of us has the capacity to choose and create.
(iii) Personal goals, goals that provide us with security and help us in overcoming the feelings of inadequacy, are the sources of our motivation.
(iv) Every individual suffers from the feeling of inadequacy and guilt, i.e., inferiority complex, which arise from childhood.
4. Erich Fromm: The Human Concerns
(i) Social orientation viewed human beings as social beings who could be understood in terms of their relationship with others.
(ii) Character traits (personality) develop from our experiences with their individuals.
(iii) Psychological qualities such as growth from our experiences of potentials resulted from A desire for freedom. And striving for justice and truth.
(iv) People’s dominant character traits in a given work as forces in shaping the social processes and the culture itself
5. Erik Erikson: Search for Identity
(i) Rational, conscious ego processes in personality development.
(ii) Development is viewed as a lifelong process, and ego identity is granted a central place in this process.
(iii) Identity crisis at the adolescent age—young people must generate for themselves a central perspective and a direction that can give them a meaningful sense of unity and purpose.
• Criticism to Psychodynamic Theories 
1. The theories are largely based on case studies; they lack a rigorous scientific basis.
2. They use small and a typical individual as samples for advancing generalisations.
3. The concepts are not properly defined, and it is difficult to submit them to scientific testing.
4. Freud has used males as the prototype of all human personality development and overlooked female experiences and perspectives.
• Behavioural Approach 
1. Focus on learning of stimulus—response connection and their reinforcement.
2. Personality is the response of an individual as sample for advancing generalization.
3. The concepts are not properly defined, and it is difficult to submit them to scientific testing.
4. Freud has used males as the prototype of all human personality development and overlooked females experiences and perspective.
• Cultural Approach
1. Considers personality as an adaptation of individuals or group to the demand of their ecology and culture.
2. A group’s economic maintenance system plays a vital role in the origin of cultural and behavioural variations.
3. The climatic conditions, the nature of terrain of the habitat and the availability of food determine people’s settlement patterns, social structures, division of labour, and other features such as child-rearing practices. Economic maintenance system.
4. These elements constitute a child’s overall learning environment—skills, abilities, behavioural styles, and value priorities are viewed as strongly linked to these features.
• Humanistic Approach Carl Rogers
1. Fully functioning individual—fulfilment is the motivating force for personality development (people try to express their capabilities, potentials and talents to the fullest extent possible).
2. Assumptions about human behaviour:
(i) It is goal-oriented and worthwhile.
(ii) People (who are innately good) will almost always choose adaptive, self-actualising behaviour.
3. People are constantly engaged in the process of actualising their true self.
4. Ideal self is the self that a person would like to be—correspondence between ideal and real self = happiness, discrepancy = dissatisfaction.
5. People have tendency to maximize self-concept through self-actualisation.
6. Personality development is a continuous process.
7. Role of social influences in the development of self-concept—positive social conditions lead to a high self-concept and self-esteem, generally flexible and open to new experiences.
8. An atmosphere of unconditional positive regard must be created in order to ensure enhancement of people’s self-concept.
9. Client-centered therapy that Rogers developed basically attempts to create this condition.
• Abraham Maslow
1. Attainment of self-actualisation, a state in which people have reached their own fullest potential.
2. Optimistic and positive view of man who has the potentialities for love, joy and to do creative work.
3. Human beings are considered free to shape their lives and to self-actualisation.
4. Self-actualisation becomes possible by analysing the motivations that govern our life.
• Characteristics of Healthy Person
1. Healthy become aware of themselves, their feelings, and their limits; accept themselves, and what they make of their own responsibility; have ‘the courage to be’.
2. They experience the ‘here-and-now’; are not trapped.
3. They do not live in the past or dwell in the future through anxious expectation and distorted defences.
• Assessment of Personality
A formal effort aimed at understanding personality of an individual is termed as personality assessment.
Assessment refers to the procedures used to evaluate or differentiate people on the basis of certain characteristics.
The goal of assessment is to understand and predict behaviour with minimum error and maximum accuracy.
Besides promoting our understanding, assessment is also useful for diagnosis, training, placement, counselling, and other purposes.

Self-Report Measures:
• It was Allport who suggested that the best method to assess a person is by asking her/him about herself himself.
• Fairly structured measures, based on theory that require subjects to give verbal responses using some kind of rating scale.
• The method requires the subject to objectively report her/his own feeling with respect to various items. Responses are accepted at face value, scored in quantative terms and interpreted on basis of norms for the test.
• eg. MMPI, EPQ, 16 PF —> Direct technique
Projective Techniques:
• Direct methods of personality assessment cannot uncover the unconscious part of our behaviour.
• Techniques based on assumption that a less structured or unstructured stimulus or situation will allow the individual to project her/his feelings, desires and needs on to that situation. These projections are interpreted by experts.
• E.G. RORSCHACH Inkblot test, thematic apperception test, sentence completion test, Draw-a-person test.
—> Indirect technique
Besides promoting our understanding assessment is also useful for diagnosis, training, placement, counselling and other purposes.
MINNESOTA MULTIPHASIC PERSONALITY INVENTORY
—> Developed by HATHAWAY and McKINLEY
—> Effective in identifying varieties of psychopathology
—> Revised version is MMPI-2
—> Consists of 567 statements. The subject has to judge each statement as ‘true’ or ‘false’.
—> The test is divided into 10 sub scales which seek to diagnose hypochondriasis, depression, hysteria, psychopathic deviant, masculinity-feminity, paranoia, psychasthenia, schizophrenia, mania and social introversion.
—>In India, Mallick and Joshi have developed Jodhpur Muitiphasic Personality Inventory. (JMPI)
EYSENCK PERSONALITY QUESTIONNAIRE
—> Developed by Eysenck
—> Initially assessed 2 dimensions of personality: hitroversion-Extraversion and emotionally stable-emotionally unstable. Emotional stability instability.
—>These dimensions are characterised by 32 personality traits.
—> Later on, Eysenck added a third dimension, called psychoticism. It is linked to psychopathology-sociability.
—> It represents a lack of feeling for others, a tough manner of interacting with people, and a tendency to defy social conventions. A person scoring high on this dimension tends to be hostile, egocentric and antisocial.
WORDS THAT MATTER
• Alienation: The feeling of not being part of society or a group.
• Anal stage: The second of Freud’s psycho-sexual stages, which occurs during the child’s second year. Pleasure is focused on the anus and on retention and expulsion of faeces.
• Antisocial Personality: A behavioural disorder characteristics by truancy, delinquency, promiscuity, theft, vandalism, fighting, violation of common social rules, poor work record, impulsiveness, irrationality, aggressiveness, reckless behaviour, and inability to plan ahead. The particular pattern of behaviour varies from individual to individual.
• Archetypes: Jung’s term for the contents of the collective unconscious; images or symbols
expressing the inherited patterns for the organization of experience. ”
• Cardinal Trait: According to All port, a single trait that dominates an individual’s entire personality.
• Central Traits: The major trait considered in forming an impression of others.
• Client centred therapy: The theraphentic approach developed by Carl Rogers in which therapist helps clients to clarify their true feelings and come to value who they are.
• Collective Unconscious: Inherited portion of the unconscious, as postulated by Carl Jung. The unconscious shared by all human beings.
• Defence Mechanisms: According to Freud, ways in which the ego unconsciously tries
to cope with unacceptable id impulses, as in repression, projection, reaction formation, sublimation, rationalisation, etc.
• Deinstitutionalisation: The transfer of former mental patients from institution into the community.
• Ego: The part of the personality that provides a buffer between the id and the outside.
• Evolution apprehension: The fear of being evaluated negatively by others who are present (an audience).
• Extraversion: One of the dimensions of personality in which interests are directed outward to nature and other people rather than inwards to the thoughts and feelings of self (introvert).
• Humanistic Approach: The theory that people are basically good and tend to grow to higher levels of functioning.
• Id: According to Freud, the impulsive and unconscious part of the psyche that operates through the pleasure principle toward the gratification of instinctual drives. The Id is conceived as the true unconscious, or the deepest part of the psyche.
• Ideal Self: The kind of person we would like to be. Also called ego-ideal/idealized self-image.
• Identity: The distinguishing character of the individual—who each of us is, what our roles are, and what we are capable of.
• Inferiority Complex: According to Adler, a complex developed by adults who have not been able to overcome the feelings of inferiority they developed as children, when they were small and limited in their knowledge about the world.
• Interview: Verbal interaction between a respondent and a researcher to gather information about the respondent.
• Introversion: One of the dimensions of personality in which interests are directed inwards
rather than outwards (extrovert).
• Latency Period: In Freud’s theory of psycho-sexual stages, the period between the phallic stage and the mature genital stage (period from age 4 to 5 to about 12) during which interest in sex is sublimated.
• Libido: Freud introduced this term. In Freud’s treatment, libido was quite simply a direct or indirect sexual expression.
• Meta needs: In the hierarchy of needs, those at the top, such as self-actualisation, self-esteem, aesthetic needs, and the like, which can only be satisfied when lower order needs are satisfied.
• Observational Method: A method in which researcher observes phenomenon that occurs naturally without being able to manipulate.
• Oedipus Complex: The Freudian concept in which the young child develops an intense desire to replace the parent of the same sex and enjoy that affection of the opposite sex parent.
• Personal Identity: Awareness of oneself as a separate, distinct being.
• Phallic Stage: Third of Freud’s psycho-sexual stages (at about age five) when pleasure is focused on the genitals and both males and females experience the ‘Oedipus complex’.
• Projection: A defence mechanism; the process of unwittingly attributing one’s own traits, attitudes, or subjective processes to others.
• Projective Techniques: The utilization of vague, ambiguous, unstructured stimulus objects or situation in order to elicit the individual’s characteristic modes of perceiving his/ her world or of behaving in it.
• Psycho-dynamic Approach: Approach that strives for explanation in terms of motives, or drives.
• Psycho-dynamic Therapy: First suggested by Freud; therapy based on the premise that the primary sources of abnormal behaviour are resolved past conflicts and the possibility that unacceptable unconscious impulses will enter consciousness.
• Rationalisation: A defence mechanism that occurs when one attempts to explain failure or shortcoming by attributing them to more acceptable causes.
• Reaction Formation: A defence mechanism in which a person denies a disapproved motive through giving strong expression to its opposite.
• Regression: A defence mechanism that involves a return to behaviours characterized of an earlier stage in life. The term is also used in statistics, in which with the help of correlation prediction is made.
• Repression: A defence mechanism by which people push unacceptable, anxiety provoking thoughts and impulses into the unconscious to avoid confronting them directly. In short it is unconscious forgetting.
• Repression: A defence mechanism by which people push unacceptable, anxiety-provoking thoughts and impulses into the unconscious to avoid confronting them directly. [Unconscious forgetting]
• Self-actualization: A state of self-fulfillment in which people realise their highest potential in their own unique way.
• Self-efficacy: Bandura’s term for the individual’s beliefs about his or her own effectiveness; the exception that one can master a situation and produce positive outcomes.
• Self-esteem: The individual’s personal judgment of his or her own worth; one’s attitude toward oneself along a positive-negative dimension.
• Self-regulation: It refers to our ability to organise and monitor our own behaviour.
• Social Identity: A person’s definition of who he or she is; includes personal attributes (self¬concept) along with membership in various groups.
• Super Ego: According to Freud, superego is the final personality structure to develop; it represents society’s standards of right and wrong as handed down by person’s parents, teachers, and other important figures.
• Surface Traits: R.B. Cattell’s term for clusters of observable trait elements (response) that seems to go together. Factor analysis of the correlations reveals source traits.
• Trait: A relatively persistent and consistent behaviour pattern manifested in a wide range of circumstances.
• Trait Approach: An approach to personality that seeks to identify the basic traits necessary to describe personality.
• Type Approach: Explanation of personality based on broad categories which are mostly determined by body constitution and temperament.
• Typology: Ways of categorising individuals into discrete categories or types e.g., Type-A personality.
• Unconscious: In psychoanalytic theory, characterising any activity or mental structure which a person is not aware of.
• Values: Enduring beliefs about ideal modes of behaviour or end-state of existence; attitudes that have a strong evaluative and ‘ought’ aspect.