Personality refers to long-lasting patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving that make a person act in fairly consistent ways.
Correct Answer
True
True. Personality is defined by enduring traits and patterns that lead to consistent thoughts, feelings and actions, which is why it is considered relatively stable.
Category: Early Theories
Question 2
The Greek physician Galen rejected Hippocrates' theory that bodily fluids shape temperament.
Correct Answer
False
False. Galen built on Hippocrates' theory, arguing that imbalances in the four humors explained both disease and differences in personality. The idea stayed influential for more than a thousand years.
Category: Early Theories
Question 3
In Freud's model, the superego acts as a moral conscience and produces guilt when its standards are violated.
Correct Answer
True
True. Freud described the superego as the internalized sense of right and wrong learned through social interaction. It rewards meeting standards with pride and punishes violations with guilt.
Category: Freud's Psychodynamic Theory
Question 4
Freud believed that the conscious mind makes up the largest share of mental activity.
Correct Answer
False
False. Freud compared the mind to an iceberg: the conscious part is only a small portion above the surface, while most mental activity is unconscious and outside awareness.
Category: Freud's Psychodynamic Theory
Question 5
According to Freud, the id operates on the pleasure principle and seeks immediate gratification of its urges.
Correct Answer
True
True. The id is the unconscious, inborn source of primitive drives, and it demands satisfaction right away regardless of reality or morality. The ego, by contrast, follows the reality principle.
Category: Freud's Psychodynamic Theory
Question 6
Freud described the latency stage as the period when a child's sexual urges are focused on the parent of the opposite sex.
Correct Answer
False
False. Desire for the opposite-sex parent belongs to the phallic stage. In the latency stage, from about age 6 to puberty, sexual feelings are dormant and energy goes into school, friendships and hobbies.
Category: Freud's Psychodynamic Theory
Question 7
Sublimation is a defense mechanism in which unacceptable impulses are channeled into socially acceptable activities.
Correct Answer
True
True. In sublimation, an urge that could cause anxiety is redirected into a valued outlet, such as turning aggressive feelings into competitive sports or a desire for revenge into advocacy work.
Category: Freud's Psychodynamic Theory
Question 8
Erik Erikson held that personality is essentially complete by early childhood and changes little afterward.
Correct Answer
False
False. Erikson proposed eight psychosocial stages that span the entire lifespan, each centered on a social task, so personality keeps developing into old age.
Category: Neo-Freudian Theories
Question 9
Carl Jung proposed that the collective unconscious is made up of each individual's own forgotten experiences.
Correct Answer
False
False. A person's own forgotten experiences make up the personal unconscious. Jung's collective unconscious is a universal layer of mental patterns, including archetypes, shared by all humans.
Category: Neo-Freudian Theories
Question 10
In Karen Horney's theory, the coping style of moving away from people involves detachment, isolation and a strong desire for self-sufficiency.
Correct Answer
True
True. Horney described moving away from people as withdrawing into privacy and independence to cope with basic anxiety. Moving toward people involves seeking affection, and moving against people involves aggression and domination.
Category: Neo-Freudian Theories
Question 11
Bandura described self-efficacy as a person's confidence in their own abilities, and it can differ from one situation to another.
Correct Answer
True
True. Self-efficacy develops through social experiences. Someone may feel highly capable in math but much less so in public speaking, and higher self-efficacy helps people take on challenges and recover from setbacks.
Category: Learning Approaches
Question 12
Bandura argued that people are more likely to imitate behaviors they see punished than behaviors they see rewarded.
Correct Answer
False
False. In observational learning, people tend to imitate behaviors they see rewarded and to hold back behaviors they see punished.
Category: Learning Approaches
Question 13
B. F. Skinner viewed personality as a set of learned behaviors that can change when the consequences of behavior change.
Correct Answer
True
True. Skinner explained personality through reinforcement and consequences rather than inborn traits, so he expected behavior patterns to shift whenever the rewards and punishments in a person's life shifted.
Category: Learning Approaches
Question 14
Humanistic psychologists such as Maslow and Rogers viewed behavior as largely determined by biology and unconscious drives.
Correct Answer
False
False. Humanistic psychology, called the third force, emphasized free choice and the potential for growth. It rejected the determinism of both psychoanalysis and strict biological explanations.
Category: Humanistic Approaches
Question 15
The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart found that identical twins raised in different homes had very similar personalities.
Correct Answer
True
True. Identical twins showed strong personality similarity whether they grew up together or apart, which suggests that genes contribute to many traits.
Category: Biological and Trait Approaches
Question 16
The Eysencks linked high neuroticism to an underactive sympathetic nervous system.
Correct Answer
False
False. They linked high neuroticism to an overactive sympathetic nervous system, so that even mild stress could set off a fight-or-flight reaction.
Category: Biological and Trait Approaches
Question 17
Raymond Cattell treated each of his personality factors as a continuum on which people differ by degree.
Correct Answer
True
True. Rather than saying a person simply has or lacks a trait such as warmth, Cattell placed each factor on a range from low to high and measured it with his 16PF questionnaire.
Category: Biological and Trait Approaches
Question 18
Across adulthood, conscientiousness and agreeableness tend to decline slightly with age.
Correct Answer
False
False. Big Five traits are fairly stable in adulthood, but conscientiousness and agreeableness tend to rise slightly with age, while neuroticism and extroversion tend to fall slightly.
Category: Biological and Trait Approaches
Question 19
The United States, England and Australia are examples of cultures that score high on individualism.
Correct Answer
True
True. Individualist cultures stress independence, competition and personal achievement, and these Western nations rank high on that dimension. Many cultures in Asia, Africa and South America rank higher on collectivism.
Category: Culture and Assessment
Question 20
Projective tests present clear, structured questions with fixed answer choices.
Correct Answer
False
False. Projective tests use ambiguous stimuli, such as inkblots or vague pictures, on the idea that people will project unconscious feelings into their responses. Fixed answer choices describe self-report inventories like the MMPI.
Category: Culture and Assessment