Chapter 1: Knowing Oneself 1.
Id
Three domains of human development:
1. Physical development – covers the
growth of the body and the brain,
motor skills, and physical health.
2. Cognitive development – covers
our capacity to learn, speak,
understand, to reason, and create.
3. Psychosocial development –
includes our social interactions
with other people, our emotions,
attitudes, self-identity, beliefs, and
values.
Influences of Human Development
1. Heredity – inborn traits passed on
by the generations of offspring
from both sides of the biological
parents’ families.
2. Environment – is the world
outside of ourselves and the
experiences that result from our
contact and interaction with the
external world.
What is Personal Development?
Personal Development the process in
which persons reflect upon themselves,
understand who they are, accept what
they discover about themselves, and learn
(unlearn) new sets of values, attitudes,
behavior, and thinking skills to reach their
fullest potential as human beings.
Psychology and Personal Development
Provinces of the Mind
The childish part of our
personality.
 Has no regard of what is
good and bad
 Serves as the pleasure
seeking principle
 Its sole function is to seek
pleasure
2. Superego
 Represents the moral and
ideal aspect of personality.
 Guided by the moralistic
and idealistic principles.
 It is our ego ideal and
conscience
3. Ego
 The only region of the mind
in contact with reality
 It is governed by the reality
principle
 The mediator
When ego can’t balance the
demands of id and superego, it will
experience negative feelings such as
anxiety, guilt, shame, etc. To avoid these
negative feelings, ego uses certain
defense mechanisms.
Defense mechanisms are
techniques that ego uses to
defend itself against the pain of
anxiety.
1. Compensation - covering up
weaknesses by emphasizing a more
desirable trait or by overachievement in a
more comfortable area.
2. Denial - an attempt to screen or
ignore unacceptable realities by refusing
to acknowledge them.
3. Displacement - the transferring
or discharging of emotional reactions
from one object or person to another person relieves guilt by making
object or person. reparation.
4. Identification - an attempt to To know oneself is the first step in
manage anxiety by imitating the behavior personal development.
of someone feared or respected.
What is Personality?
5. Projection - a process in which
Personality refers to the unique and
blame is attached to others or the
relatively enduring set of behaviors,
environment for unacceptable desires,
feelings, thoughts, and motives that
thoughts, shortcomings, and mistakes.
characterize an individual.
6. Rationalization - justification of
• Trait theory is an approach in
certain behaviors by faulty logic and
identifying types of personalities
ascription of motives that are socially
based on certain traits or
acceptable but did not in fact inspire the
attributes, which vary from one
behavior.
person to another.
7. Reaction formation - a
Big Five or Five Factor Model
mechanism that causes people to act
exactly opposite to the way they feel. • Psychologist Costa and
Mcrae (1992)
8. Regression - resorting to an
developed a
earlier, more comfortable level of
categorized scheme
functioning that is characteristically less
that described
demanding and responsible.
personality.
9. Repression - an unconscious
• They discovered a five
mechanism by which threatening
universal and widely
thoughts, feelings, and desires are kept
agreed upon
from becoming conscious; the repressed
dimensions of
material is denied entry into
personality.
consciousness.
10. Sublimation - displacement of
energy associated with more primitive
sexual or aggressive drives into socially
acceptable activities.
11. Substitution - the replacement
of a highly valued, unacceptable, or
unavailable object by a less valuable,
acceptable, or available object.
12. Undoing - an action or words
designed to cancel some disapproved
thoughts, impulses, or acts in which the