Chapter Concept Check Answers
Concept Check 1
- According to Freud, the ego is the executive of the personality in that it must find acceptable ways within reality (society’s norms) and the constraints of the superego to satisfy the instinctual drives of the id. Finding such ways is not easy, and the ego may not be able to do its job.
- In reaction formation, the ego transforms the unacceptable impulses and behavior into their opposites; in projection they are projected onto other people. For example, consider thoughts of homosexuality in a man. In reaction formation, the man would become just the opposite in his behavior, romantically overly interested in the opposite sex. However, in projection, the homosexual feelings would be projected onto other men. He would see homosexual tendencies in other men and think they were gay, but he would not think this about himself.
- According to Freud, as a child progresses through the first three psychosexual stages (oral, anal, and phallic), he may become fixated in a stage when there is an unresolved conflict in that stage. If fixated, part of the id’s pleasure-seeking energy remains at that erogenous zone and continues throughout a person’s life. Thus, it will show up in the child’s adult personality. For example, anal fixations will lead to the anal retentive or expulsive personality types.
Concept Check 2
- In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, physiological, safety, belonging and love, and esteem needs have to be satisfied before the highest level need for self-actualization can be met.
- Positive regard for a person should be unconditional so that the person is free to develop her true self and thus work toward self-actualization. If our positive regard for a person is conditionalized (we set up conditions of worth for that person), then the person develops a self-concept of what others think she should be. This self may be very different from the person’s true self and thus prevent self-actualization.
- Both self-efficacy and locus of control are cognitive judgments about our effectiveness in dealing with the situations that occur in our lives. Whereas self-efficacy is a person’s judgment of his effectiveness in dealing with particular situations, locus of control is a more global judgment of how much a person controls what happens to him. Both a low general sense of self-efficacy and an external locus of control (i.e., the perception that forces beyond one’s control determine one’s fate) often lead to depression.
Concept Check 3
- There are two major reasons that factor analysis can lead to different numbers of basic personality dimensions. The first concerns the level of abstraction at which a theorist uses the analysis. Some theorists have used a level of analysis in which some of the dimensions are still correlated (Cattell); others (Eysenck) have used higher-order factors that are not correlated. Thus, theorists may use different levels of inclusiveness, with those using more global levels leading to fewer factors. Second, and independent of level of abstraction, is what data are being analyzed. Different theorists have examined different databases. Obviously, varying input will lead to varying results, even with the same type of analysis.
- The test construction method used to develop the MMPI involves only choosing test items that clearly differentiate the responding of two distinct groups. In the case of the MMPI, test items were chosen that were responded to differently by representative samples of people with 1 of 10 different disorders versus normal people. Thus, predictive validity is ensured because only test items that definitely differentiate test takers according to the purpose of the test are chosen. In the case of the MMPI, this means that various clinical personality problems, such as depression or schizophrenia, can be detected by comparing a test taker’s response pattern to those of the disordered groups.