Chapter 7 Key Terms

Chapter 7 Key Terms Introduction to Personality: Toward An Integration 7e 1

Chapter 7 – Key Terms

Anxiety – a state of emotional arousal which may be experienced as a diffuse fear; in Freud’s theory, the result of a struggle between an impulse and an inhibition (p. 142) Blunting – ignoring anxiety-arousing stimuli as a means of coping with them; a style of information processing designed for dealing with stress (p. 151) Cognitive restructuring – therapeutic technique aimed at learning to think about one’s problems more constructively and less irrationally; Albert Ellis’s rational emotive therapy is a form of cognitive restructuring (p. 160) Dream interpretation – a method used in psychoanalysis to better understand the unconscious fears and desires of the patient through an analysis of the patient’s dreams (p. 159) False memories – memories of events that never actually occurred (p. 147) Miller Behavioral Style Scale (MBSS) – measure of monitoring-blunting tendencies (p. 151) Monitoring – a cognitive coping mechanism or style of information processing in which people attend to anxiety-arousing stimuli, often in the hope of controlling them (p. 151) Projective methods – tests (such as the Rorschach or TAT) that present the individual with materials open to a wide variety of interpretations based on the belief that responses reveal important aspects of the respondent’s personality central in psychodynamic assessment (p. 154) Psychoanalysis – a form of psychotherapy developed by Freud that aims at relieving neurotic conflict and anxiety by airing repressed, unconscious impulses over the course of regular meetings between patient and analyst (p. 159) Relational therapy – a therapeutic process that emphasizes the role of early, current, and analyst-patient relationships in the development and resolution of personality problems (p. 162) Repression – according to psychoanalytic theory, an unconscious defense mechanism through which unacceptable (ego-threatening) material is kept from awareness; the repressed motives, ideas, conflicts, memories, etc. continue to influence behavior (p. 143) Repression-sensitization – a dimension of differences in defensive patterns of perception, ranging from avoiding the anxiety-arousing stimuli to approaching them more readily and being extra vigilant or supersensitized (p. 149) Repressors – people who describe themselves as having few problems or difficulties and who do not report themselves as highly sensitive to everyday stress and anxieties (p. 150) Resistance – difficulties in achieving progress in psychotherapy due to unconscious defenses as anxiety-producing material emerges during the treatment (p. 160) Chapter 7 Key Terms Introduction to Personality: Toward An Integration 7e 2

Rorschach test – projective test consisting of 10 symmetrical inkblots to which the person describes his or her reactions, stating what each blot looks like or might be (p. 155) Sensitizers – individuals who are highly sensitive to everyday stress and anxieties (p. 150) Situational test – procedure in which participants are observed performing a task within a lifelike situation; the Harvard Personologists used stressful, lifelike tasks under extremely difficult situations to assess OSS candidates and used their performance to make clinical inferences about each person’s underlying personality (p. 158) Suppression – occurs when one voluntarily and consciously withholds a response or turns attention away from something (see also repression) (p. 143) Tachistoscope – a machine (used in studies of perceptual defense) that projects words onto a screen at different speeds (p. 144) Transference – in psychoanalysis, the patient’s response to the therapist as though the therapist were a parent or some other important figure from childhood; considered and essential aspect of psychoanalytic therapy (p. 161) Traumatic experiences – experiences that abruptly and severely disrupt a person’s life (p. 160) Working through – process that occurs in psychoanalytic therapy when the patient, in the context of the transference relationship, re-examines his or her basic problems until their emotional roots are understood and learns to handle them more appropriately (p. 162)