AP Psychology: Personality Notes
Use these AP Psychology study notes to review what you’ve learned about personality in your AP class. The study of personality focuses on thoughts and behaviors that are shaped over time and that become enduring aspects of people. Keep reading for an overview of some key personality concepts and terms you should know for the AP Psychology exam.
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AP Psychology Personality: Key Takeaways
Review some personality concepts you should know for the AP Psychology exam.
- Psychologists define personality as the unique attitudes, behaviors, and emotions that characterize a person. As you might expect, psychologists from each of the different perspectives have different ideas about how an individual’s personality is created. However, some ideas about personality do not fit neatly into any one school of thought.
- The psychodynamic theory of personality has its roots in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. Freud believed that much of people’s behavior is controlled by unconscious processes. We do not have access to the thoughts in our unconscious. In fact, Freud asserted that we spend tremendous amounts of psychic energy to keep threatening thoughts in the unconscious.
- Humanistic theories of personality view people as innately good and able to determine their own destinies through the exercise of free will. These psychologists stress the importance of people’s subjective experience and feelings. They focus on the importance of a person’s self-concept and self-esteem.
- Trait theorists believe that we can describe people’s personalities by specifying their main characteristics, or traits. These characteristics (for example, honesty, laziness, ambition) are thought to be stable and to motivate behavior in keeping with the trait.
- Many models of personality meld together behaviorists’ emphasis on the importance of the environment with cognitive psychologists’ focus on patterns of thought. Such models are referred to as social-cognitive or cognitive behavioral models.
AP Psychology Personality: Key Terms
Review the following key terms related to personality for the AP exam.
- Conscious: The conscious mind contains everything we are thinking about at any one moment.
- Preconscious: The preconscious mind contains everything that we could potentially summon to conscious awareness with ease.
- Freud’s parts of the mind: Freud posited that the personality consists of three parts: the id, the ego, and the superego. The id is in the unconscious and contains instincts and psychic energy.
- Defense mechanisms: Part of the ego’s job is to protect the conscious mind from the threatening thoughts buried in the unconscious. The ego uses defense mechanisms to help protect the conscious mind. Some of these defense mechanisms are repression, denial, displacement, projection, reaction formation, regression, rationalization, intellectualization, and sublimation
- Projective tests: Psychodynamic theorists may use projective tests to try to delve into the unconscious. These tests involve asking people to interpret ambiguous stimuli. For instance, the Rorschach inkblot test involves showing people a series of inkblots and asking them to describe what they see.
- Big Five: Paul Costa and Robert McCrae have proposed that personality can be described using the Big Five personality traits: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and emotional stability (or neuroticism).
- Self-efficacy: People with high self-efficacy are optimistic about their own ability to get things done, whereas people with low self-efficacy feel a sense of powerlessness.
- Internal locus of control: People with an internal locus of control feel as if they are responsible for what happens to them. For instance, they tend to believe that hard work will lead to success.
- External locus of control: People with an external locus of control generally believe that luck and other forces outside of their own control determine their destinies.
- Personality inventories: Personality inventories are essentially questionnaires that ask people to provide information about themselves.
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