Psychology 1000 Lecture Notes - C. Robert Cloninger, Unconditional Positive Regard, Puberty

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Erica Lawson

Document Summary

Personality: a distinctive and relatively enduring way of thinking, feeling and acting that characterize a person"s responses to life situations. Only modest stability is found from childhood to adulthood but consistency becomes greater as we enter adulthood. Recall that a theory is scientifically useful to the extent that it: provides a framework for which known facts can be incorporated, allows us to predict future events, stimulates the discovery of new knowledge. Freud studied patients with hysteria (blindness, paralysis) and when they recalled their repressed aggressive/sexual past experiences, they felt better psychoanalysis (free association = talking with no restrictions). Inspired by the hydraulic models of the 19th-century, freud coined the term psychic energy: what powers the mind and constantly presses for either direct or indirect release. When the ego confronts impulses that threaten to get out of control or is faced with dangers from the environment, anxiety results.