1. By the early years of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud had begun to write about psychoanalysis, which he described as ‘a theory of the mind or personality, a method of investigation of unconscious process, and a method of treatment’ (1923/62). Identify the true statement from those given below, in relation to his psychoanalytic theories:

a) The concept of unconscious mental processes is the idea that unconscious motivations and needs have a role in determining our behaviour.
b) The concept of unconscious mental processes emphasizes the rational aspects of human behaviour.
c) A psychogenetic model of development shows how the mind is organized.
d) A topographic model of the psyche shows how personality develops.

2. Which of the following statements relating to the stages in Freud’s psychogenetic model of development matches up with Freud’s suggestions?

a) At an early oral stage children usually start to explore their environment but experience control and discipline from their parents.
b) Fixation at the anal stage results in children deriving pleasure in adulthood from activities such as overeating, smoking, drinking and kissing.
c) At the genital stage children discover pleasure from touching their genitals.
d) During the latency period sexual impulses are rechannelled into activities such as sport, learning and social activities.

3. According to Freud, fixation at which stage of development is associated with sarcasm, criticalness, overeating and nail-biting in adults?

a) Oral
b) Anal
c) Phallic
d) Latency
e) Genital

4. Which is FALSE? Humanistic theories of personality:

a) Present a positive and optimistic view of human behaviour.
b) Regard people as victims of their unconscious motivations and conflicts.
c) Place an emphasis on individual experiences, relationships and ways of understanding the world.
d) Are based on beliefs that everyone’s experience is unique, and that the individual’s perception of the world is critical to their understanding and behaviour.

5. Which of the following are true of personal construct theory?

George Kelly developed personal construct theory to examine how individuals view the world.
Personal construct theory portrays people as victims of unconscious desires and impulses.
Personal construct theory does not try to locate the individual on the personality theorists� dimensions.
Kelly basically took the view that we are all artists.

a) 1 & 2
b) 3 & 4
c) 1 & 3
d) 2 & 4

6. Who developed a model of personality based on 16 trait dimensions?

a) Allport
b) Rogers
c) Freud
d) Cattell
e) Eysenck

7. Which of the following is true of traits?

a) Traits are descriptors used to label personality.
b) Sheldon (1974) categorized people according to four body types.
c) Modern theorists view traits as discrete rather than continuous entities.
d) According to trait theorists, categorizing people into separate groups of ‘sociable’ versus ‘unsociable’ is extremely useful.

8. Which of the following is NOT one of the dimensions in Cattell’s 18 Personality Factors Questionnaire (18PF)?

a) Forthright – shrewd.
b) Placid – Neurotic.
c) Undisciplined – controlled.
d) Tough-minded – tender-minded.

9. Which of the following traits is not part of the five-factor model of personality?

a) Openness
b) Anxiety
c) Extraversion
d) Agreeableness
e) Conscientiousness

10. The nomothetic approach to personality emphasizes that people are __________ whereas the idiographic approach to personality emphasizes that people are __________.

a) Introverts; extroverts
b) Extroverts; introverts
c) Similar; unique
d) Unique; similar
e) Dependent; independent

11. Recent work in behavioural genetics has examined the contribution of genetic and environmental factors to human behaviour. But which of the four assertions below is NOT true?

a) Research has shown monozygotic twins to have much more similar personality traits than dizygotic twins.
b) Both adoption studies and twin studies are consistent with a genetic influence on personality.
c) Adoption studies have shown that environment plays no part in the development of personality.
d) Children who are genetically more active and impulsive can cause their parents to be more responsive to their needs than other children.

12. Which of the following are commonly accepted dimensions of attribution? (Please highlight all correct answers.)

Internal�external.
Stable�unstable.
Wide�narrow.
None of the above.

a) 1 & 2
b) 4
c) 2 & 3
d) 1 & 3

13. According to Mischel and Shoda�s (1995) cognitive-affective units in the personality system, what category refers to how processes such as selective attention, interpretation, and categorization of events affect personality?

a) Competencies
b) Goals and values
c) Affects
d) Expectancies and beliefs
e) Encodings

14. Identify the FALSE statement relating to affects, from those given below:

a) The way we feel can be determined by stable individual differences in personality.
b) The way we feel can be determined by immediate responses to situations as they occur.
c) Feeling angry, anxious or happy might impact on any of the other types of cognition, changing the way we respond.
d) A dispositionally calm person will not become anxious even when the elevator they are travelling in becomes stuck between floors.

15. Students who experience a persistent depressed mood after failing an exam probably have which type of attributional style?

a) Stable, global
b) Unstable, specific
c) External, global
d) External, specific
e) Internal, specific

16. The extent to which people believe that they can bring about an outcome is referred to as _________.

a) Extraversion
b) Neuroticism
c) Self-efficacy
d) Self-regulation
e) Self-actualization

17. Which dimension of personality can predict individual preferences for study areas, number of study breaks and performance on long vigilance tasks?

a) External-internal
b) Experimenting-conservative
c) Neuroticism-stability
d) Open-closed
e) Extraversion-introversion

18. According to Higgins� self-discrepancy theory, what are individuals motivated to do?

a) Attain the attributes of the ought self
b) Attain the attributes of the ideal self
c) Reduce discrepancies between the actual self and ideal self
d) Reduce discrepancies between the actual self and ought self
e) All of the above

19. Defensive pessimists set low expectations and ruminate over the worst possible outcomes; however, research has shown that they perform similarly in terms of academic performance compared to which group of people?

a) Pessimists
b) Optimists
c) Neurotics
d) Depressives
e) Extraverts

20. Which, if any, of the following statements about self-consciousness is INCORRECT?

a) Carver and Scheier’s control theory of human functioning states that there are stable individual differences in the extent to which we attend to aspects of the self.
b) In control theory, if we perceive ourselves to have reached too high a standard of behaviour, the personality system will increase the discrepancy between the standard and the perceived level.
c) Fenigstein, Scheier and Buss (1975) developed a self-consciousness scale to measure what they considered to be stable individual difference in private and public self-consciousness.
d) None of the above – all are correct.