lectures 1-6 (personality)

Personality does NOT include

IQ or physical characteristics

Big Five

Extraversion agreeableness conscientiousness neuroticism openness

Extraversion

Outgoing and talkative

Agreeableness

Agreeable and likeable

Conscientiousness

Neat organized and self-controlled

Neuroticism

Worried emotional and stress-sensitive

Openness to experience

Enjoys change new ideas and exploration

Limits of the Big Five

Does not capture every aspect of personality

Personality vs situation

Behavior reflects both personality and surroundings

Nature vs nurture

Nature is genetics, nurture is environment

Walter Mischel

Argued personality effects were weak compared with situations

Henry Stack Sullivan

Doubted people have fixed personalities

Milgram experiment

Situations strongly influence obedience but personality also matters

Person-situation interaction

People choose and can change their situations

Need for affiliation

Desire to be emotionally close to others

Need for power

Desire to influence decisions, affecting others

Need for achievement

Desire to accomplish great things

Self-report questionnaire

Person reports their own personality

Acquiescence response set

Tendency to agree with everything

Reverse-scored items

To balance agreement bias in questionnaires

Norm

Average score from a particular comparison sample

SD score

(Your score minus mean) divided by standard deviation

Reliability

Consistency of a measurement

Internal reliability

Questions consistently measure the same construct

Test-retest reliability

Measure produces similar results over time

Inter-rater reliability

Coders consistently agree on assessments

Validity

Measure accurately captures what it should measure

Predictive validity

Measure predicts relevant future outcomes

Face validity

Measure appears to assess its intended construct

Construct validity

Measure accurately represents the intended theoretical construct

Content validity

Measure covers important parts of the construct

Convergent validity

Measure correlates with similar measures

Discriminant validity

Measure does not correlate with different constructs

Myers-Briggs

Personality typing system with reliability and validity concerns

Big Five

Five-factor model with stronger reliability and validity

Barnum effect

Belief in vague general personality descriptions

Response bias

Answering questionnaires in ways harming accuracy

Social desirability response set

Answering to make oneself look socially acceptable

Forced-choice format

Choose between equally socially desirable statements

Generalizability

How well findings apply to different people

Experiment

Random assignment allows testing causation

Correlational study

Studies naturally occurring relationships without proving causation

Independent variable

Variable researchers manipulate in an experiment

Dependent variable

Behavior or outcome researchers measure

Random assignment

Gives participants equal chances of entering conditions

Confounding variable

Outside factor that could explain an observed effect

Personality research

Mostly correlational because personality cannot be randomly assigned

Personality measurement methods

Self-reports, peer reports, observations, projective tests, physiology, interviews, records

Research

Systematic observation and measurement

Random sample

Sample where everyone has an equal selection chance

Voluntary response sample

Self-selected sample that may be biased

Research process

Idea, design, collect, analyze, write up, publish

Journal article

Scientific research report published in a journal

PsycINFO

Database for finding psychology research articles

Teaching university role

Lecturers primarily focus on teaching

Research university professor

Professors balance research teaching and service

Extraversion and stimulation

Extraverts prefer higher levels of stimulation

Extraversion and emotion

Extraverts tend to experience more positive emotion

Extraversion and leadership

Extraverts are more attracted to leadership

Extraversion and social behavior

Extraverts tend to have more social interaction

Neuroticism

Emotional instability and difficulty handling stress

Neuroticism and health

Higher neuroticism can relate to depression and poorer health

Conscientiousness and self-control

Involves persistence impulse control and self-discipline

Conscientiousness and work

Higher conscientiousness predicts better workplace performance

Conscientiousness and health

Associated with healthier behaviors and better physical health

Agreeableness and harmful behavior

Low agreeableness relates to aggression crime and risky behavior

Hostile attribution bias

Interpreting others’ actions as intentionally hostile

Agreeableness vicious cycle

Low trust can create increasingly negative social interactions

Openness to experience

Comfort with change theoretical ideas and artistic ideas

Openness and creativity

Higher openness is associated with greater creativity

Big Five across cultures

Traits appear across cultures but structures can differ

Big Five and animals

Animals show differences in emotional reactivity, affection, energy, and competence

Genetics

Inherited biological information from parents

Biology

Physical characteristics and processes of the body

Shared environment

Family experiences shared by siblings

Non-shared environment

Unique experiences not shared by siblings

Twin studies

Compare twins to estimate genetic and environmental influences

Identical twins

Share essentially all their genetic material

Twin study conclusion

Shared environment has little influence on most Big Five traits

Genetic influence on personality

Genetics explains substantial but not all personality variation

Non-shared environment

Unique experiences may explain unexplained personality differences

Restriction of range

Limited environmental variation can underestimate environmental effects

Gene-environment interaction

Genes and environments jointly influence behavior

Genotype

Genetic makeup of an individual

Phenotype

Observable traits produced by genes and environment

Epigenetics

Changes in gene expression without changing DNA sequence

Epigenetic inheritance

Gene-expression changes may affect future generation