I can relate to that, because when I was a younger child, I always used to cling to my father more than my mother- but now that I am a teenager, I crave my mother's attention more than my father's. Is that normal with most situations? Defense mechanisms protect us from being consciously aware of a thought or feeling which we cannot tolerate; it only allows the unconscious thought or feeling to be expressed indirectly in a different form. Repression, regression, reaction formation, projection, rationalization, displacement, sublimation, and replacement are all involved in the process of the ego protecting itself against anxiety. The mechanism entails rejecting the thought or feeling, reverting to an old behavior to get out your feeling, being vaguely aware of the thought or feeling, but trying to hide it, morphing the feeling into an entirely different emotion (isn't this like rationalization/denial?), believing that someone else has that same feeling- coming up with various explanations to validate the situation while denying your true feelings (isn't this like the reaction formula?), redirecting your feelings, and the transformation of unacceptable impulses into socially valued motivations. I learned about the projective tests, in which subjects reveal aspects of their personality when they talk about ambiguous stimuli "involves the Thematic Apperception Test and the Rorschach inkblot test.
The trait perspective states that behavior comes from expressing biologically influenced dispositions, or characteristics. Reading about this, I learned about the factor analysis, which is the statistical procedure to identify groups of test items that involve basic components of intelligence. I thought that this was really interesting because the use of factor analysis helped psychologists to come up with the "Big Five" personality factors, which categorize people's personalities into five different sections: emotional stability, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.
