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| Chapter 16: Personality Processes: Perception, Thought, Motivation, and Emotion |
- The major personality processes include perception, thought, motivation, and emotion.
- Modern research on personality processes has historical roots in the learning and phenomenological theories, but also includes elements of the psychodynamic and trait approaches.
- Concepts may readily come to mind because they have been primed through experience or because of one's temperament, personality, or biology.
- Patterns of priming are relevant to behavioral patterns such as rejection sensitivity and aggression, and to the flexible worldviews of bicultural individuals.
- Experimental demonstrations of perceptual defense indicate that people can screen potentially embarrassing or disturbing stimuli out of awareness.
- Some people, such as those who are shy, may be over-vigilant in certain domains of their lives because their systems of perceptual defense do not work well enough.
- Consciousness can be equated with short-term memory (STM), and has a capacity of seven chunks of information, plus or minus two.
- The limited capacity of consciousness implies that richer chunks will enhance thinking, that consciously attending to constructive thoughts is important, and that much of thinking occurs outside conscious awareness.
- Epstein's cognitive experiential self-theory (CEST) is a dual-process model that contrasts slow, deliberate, and rational conscious thought with fast, uncontrolled, and intuitive thought that may not be conscious. Each system has advantages and disadvantages, and ideally they work in coordination.
- Motivation can be studied by examining goals and strategies.
- Goals can be short-term or long-term, and they can be arranged hierarchically. Ideally one should be able to shift flexibly between the two kinds of goals.
- Idiographic goals are unique to each individual and may include current concerns (Klinger), personal projects (Little), and personal strivings (Emmons).
- Nomothetic goals are common to all people; several studies have proposed different sets of these, including one with three primary goals (achievement, affiliation and power), one with five goals, and one supporting Freud's big two (love and work).
- Nomothetic goals can also be compared with each other on circumplex models such as one that describes the degree to which goals are extrinsic vs. intrinsic, and related to the physical self vs. self-transcendent.
- Dweck's theory of motivation says that entity vs. incremental theories of ability lead people to pursue judgment vs. development goals and adopt helpless vs. mastery responses to failure.
- Many and perhaps all personality traits can be conceptualized in terms of the strategies that people follow—e.g., the agreeable person follows the strategy of avoiding argument and being friendly to everyone.
- According to Norem, defensive pessimists follow the motivational strategy of imagining the worst outcomes and then seeking to avoid them.
- Emotions are a form of procedural knowledge; everyone knows what they are but they are difficult to put into words.
- Emotional experience includes stages of appraisal, physical response, nonverbal behaviors, and motivation. These stages may occur nearly simultaneously or in various orders.
- A circumplex model of emotion contrasts the degree to which emotions are aroused vs. unaroused and negative vs. positive; another widely used rotation of this model contrasts emotions on the dimensions of excited vs. bored and alarmed vs. serene.
- People differ in the degree to which they are prone to particular emotions, the intensity of their emotional experience, the frequency with which their emotions change, and their understanding of and ability to control their emotions (emotional intelligence).
- Happiness is determined by genetics, life circumstances, and intentional activities, and has positive effects on health, occupational success, and supportive relationships.
- Because personality is something an individual "does" as well as something he or she "has," in that sense personality is a verb.
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