Stress and Adaptation Nursing Practice Test

Blaming others and attributing your own unacceptable feelings, faults, or thoughts to someone else is projection. It’s a way the mind shields itself from anxiety by seeing traits or motives in others that actually originate inside the self. For example, someone who feels angry but can’t own that emotion might accuse a coworker of being hostile instead. This differs from identification, which is taking on another person’s characteristics as if they were your own; introjection, which internalizes others’ beliefs or rules; and displacement, which shifts emotions from the real target onto a safer substitute. Projection thus focuses on externalizing one’s own unwanted qualities onto another person.