This document discusses the importance of guidance and counseling services in helping individuals live happy, balanced, and effective lives. It notes that people differ in psychological attributes and individual differences can be measured and studied to explain and predict behavior. Individual difference psychology examines how people are similar and differ in their thinking, feeling, and behavior. Some key individual differences discussed include locus of control, self-monitoring, self-esteem, needs for achievement, affiliation, and power, attitudes, values, and defense mechanisms.

1. UNIT II
Psychological Bases of Counselling: Human behaviour and Individual
differences – Defense Mechanisms – Maladjustment – Mental health
– Integrated Personality. Sociological bases: Social Nature of Human
beings – Nature of Human relationships – Increasing complexity of
today’s world – Conflict of Values.

3. If the commitment of a society is to make every individual live
a happy, balanced and effective life, guidance and counselling
services have to be given priority in the plans and
programmes of social service.

4. •People vary on a range of psychological attributes
•It is possible to measure and study these individual
differences
•individual differences are useful for explaining and
predicting behaviour and performance
Individual difference psychology examines
how people are similar and how they differ in
their thinking, feeling and behaviour.

5. Gender differences -hunters=men, gatherers=women
Intelligence differences - caste, class, education, etc.
Personality differences - job specialisations

6. LOCUS OF CONTROL - how much control they have over situations they are in
and over what happens to them
External locus of control
Internal locus of control
SELF- MONITORING - try to control the way they present themselves to others.
SELF- ESTEEM - pride in themselves and their capabilities.
TYPE A and TYPE B personalities:
NEED FOR ACHIEVEMENT, AFFILIATION and POWER
ATTITUDES AND VALUES

7. The desire to perform challenging tasks well and to meet
one's own high standards is the need for achievement.
The desire to establish and maintain good relations with
others is the need for affiliation.
Need for power is the desire to exert emotional and
behavioural control or influence over others.
NEED FOR ACHIEVEMENT, AFFILIATION and POWER

8. Attitudes are relatively stable clusters of feelings, beliefs,
and behavioural dispositions or intensions towards some
specific objects.
ATTITUDES AND VALUES

9. Defense mechanism, in psychoanalytic theory is a group of mental
processes that enables the mind to reach compromise solutions to
conflicts that it is unable to resolve.
The process is usually unconscious, and the compromise generally
involves concealing from oneself internal drives or feelings that
threaten to lower self-esteem or provoke anxiety.
The term was first used in Sigmund Freud’s paper “The Neuro-
Psychoses of Defence” (1894).