Part 2 – Personality OrganizationChapter 8 – How the Parts of Personality Fit

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Part 3, Chapter 8 - Vocabulary

These flashcards have been designed as a study tool to assist in your mastery of each chapter’s vocabulary and accompanying concepts.

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For use in conjunction with: Personality: A Systems Approach, By John D. Mayer

Copyright © 2007 Allyn & Bacon  Mayer’s Personality: A Systems ApproachFlashcards by Rebecca Disbrow

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Personality Structure The relatively enduring, distinct

major areas of the personality system, and their interrelations and interconnections. These different areas of personality can be distinguished according to their different contents, functions, or other characteristics.

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Hierarchical Structure of Traits

This is a structural conception or theory about traits in which there are said to be big traits or super traits that can be divided into a larger number of lower-level, specific traits.

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Big or Super Traits These are very general, broad,

thematic expressions of mental life that are relatively consistent within the individual, and that can be subdivided into more specific traits.

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Big Two Supertraits This is a specific, hierarchical

structural model of traits, proposed by Hans Eysenck, in which two traits: Extraversion-Introversion and Neuroticism-Stability, are divisible into more specific traits. Collectively, the two supertraits and their subdivisions are said to describe much of personality.

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Big Three Supertraits This is a later modification of the

Big Two Supertrait model by Eysenck in which a third supertrait, Psychoticism-Tender Mindedness, was added.

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Big Five Model This is a hierarchical structural model

of traits, developed by a number of researchers, in which five broad traits are used to describe personality. The five are: Neuroticism-Stability, Extraversion-Introversion, Openness-Closedness, Agreeableness-Disagreeableness, and Conscientiousness-Carelessness.

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Lexical Hypothesis The hypothesis that the most

important personality traits are those that can be found in the language people use to describe one another.

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Consciousness A subjective experience of

attention and awareness, and the capacity to reflect on that awareness.

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Declarative Memory or Preconscious

Declarative memory includes all the information in memory that could be consciously retrieved if necessary. The preconscious was Freud’s earlier term for this aspect of memory.

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Unconscious A part of the mind that cannot or

does not readily enter awareness.

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No-Access Unconscious or Unconscious Proper

Portions of neural activity that take place with no connection to consciousness, such as the firing of individual nerve pathways or the elementary processing of psychological information.

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Implicit (automatic) Unconscious

A type of mental bias or process that can be determined from experimental measures of memory but of which the person is unaware.

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False Fame Effect An effect in which familiarity with a

name leads a person to falsely believe the name is of a famous person.

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Unnoticed Unconscious

A type of mental process that consists of influences that could be known if the person paid attention or if the person was taught about the influence, that that goes unnoticed for many or most people.

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Dynamic Unconscious Material that is made unconscious

through the redirection of attention, because the material is too painful or unpleasant to think about or feel.

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Defense Mechanisms Mental processes that divert

attention from painful or unpleasant things to think about. Defense mechanisms help keep material dynamically unconscious.

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Functional Models Divisions of personality based on

the idea that different parts of the system carry out different forms of work (e.g., meeting the organisms needs [motivation] versus solving complex problems [cognition]).

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Id Latin for the “it”. One part of

Freud’s structural division of mind (the other parts are the ego and superego). The id contains sexual and aggressive instincts, and wishes and fantasies related to those instincts.

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Ego Latin for the “self”, a part of

Freud’s structural division of mind that involves rational thought and the control of the person’s actions in the world.

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Superego Latin for “above the self”, the

superego is a part of Freud’s structural division of the mind that involves internalized social rules of conduct and a sense of the ideal one would like to become.

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Trilogy of Mind This structural model of personality

divides the system into three different functional areas: conation (motivation), affect (emotion), and cognition (thought).

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Faculty Psychology An eighteenth-century movement,

predating modern personality psychology, to divide the mind into separate intellectual functions called faculties, which include such broad areas as motivation, emotion, and cognition. Each functional area is, in turn, divided into more specific functions. For example, cognition is subdivided into

specific faculties of memory, judgment, evaluation, and the like.

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Quaternity of Mind An expanded version of the trilogy

of mind that adds consciousness to the traditional areas of motivation, emotion, and cognition.

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Triune Brain A structural model of the human

brain that divides its physical areas according to whether the structures resemble those found in reptiles, or whether the brain structures evolved at a later time and resemble those of early mammals, or of more recently evolved mammals.

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Reptilian Brain The oldest part of the brain and

the part of the “Triune Brain” structural model that includes such early-evolved, inner structures of the brain as the brain stem, pons, and the cerebellum, and portions of the thalamus and hypothalamus.

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Paleo (Old-) Mammalian Brain

A newer-evolved portion of the brain, shared in common among many mammals, that includes limbic system structures.

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Limbic System A group of brain structures

including the hypothalamus, amygdala, and hippocampus, that together regulate motives, emotions, memory, and physiological processes.

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Neo (New-) Mammalian Brain

The newest-evolved portion of the brain, shared in common among primates and including the thick outer later of the cerebral cortex.

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Cerebral Cortex The outer surface of the brain

including massive inter-associations among neurons; most responsible for higher mental processes and reasoning.

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Body Homunculus A band of areas in the cerebral

cortex, where each area corresponds to a part of the body, in order, such as toes, foot, lower leg, and so forth.

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Systems Set A structural model of personality

that emphasizes four functional areas: the energy lattice (motivation and emotion), the knowledge works (mental models and intelligence), the social actor (procedural knowledge for behavior), and the executive consciousness (self-awareness and control).

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Connective Structural Models

Models that illustrate the relationship between personality and its surrounding environment.

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Cognitive-Affective Personality System

(CAPS) A structural division of personality

proposed by Walter Mischel and his colleagues which divides personality into cognitive structures such as expectancies and beliefs, and into affects (emotions).

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Life Space The systems, including biological

underpinnings, social settings, interactive situations, and group memberships, which surround the individual and in which the individual operates.

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Personality Dynamics Broadly speaking, the influence of

one part of personality on another.