Personality Psychology

Flashcards from Personality Psychology Lecture Notes

Personality

An individual’s characteristic patterns of thoughts, emotion, and behavior, together with the psychological mechanisms-hidden or not-behind those patterns

Psychological Triad

The combination of how people think, feel, and behave

Trait Approach

Focuses on how differences might be conceptualized, measured, and followed over time

Biological Approach

Includes anatomy, physiology, genetics, and evolution

Psychoanalytic Approach

The unconscious mind and the nature and resolution of internal mental conflict

Phenomenological Approach

Focus on people’s conscious experience of the world

Humanistic

Conscious awareness produces uniquely human attributes; understand meaning and basis of happiness

Cross-cultural

The experience of reality might be different across cultures

Classic Behaviorism

Focuses on overt behavior

Social Learning

How observation and self-evaluation determine behavior

Cognitive Personality

Focuses on cognitive processes, including perception, memory, and thought

Funder’s First Law

Great strengths are usually great weaknesses, and surprisingly often, the opposite is true as well

S Data

A person’s evaluation of his or her own personality

High Face Validity

The degree to which an assessment instrument appears to measure what it is intended to measure

Self-Efficacy

What you think you are capable of and the kind of person you think you are

Self-Verification

People work to convince others to treat them in a manner to confirms their self-conceptions

Fish-and-water effect

People do not notice their most obvious characteristics because they are always that way

I-Data

Judgments by informants

L-Data

Verifiable, concrete, real-life facts that may hold psychological significance

B-Data

Gathered by observing a person, or by having a person record themselves

Natural B-Data

Gathered by observing a person, or by having a person record themselves

EAR

Electronically activated recorder

Ambulatory Assessment

Using computer-assisted methods to assess behavior thoughts, and feelings during normal daily activities

Null-hypothesis significance testing

Determines the chance of getting the result if nothing were really going on

P-Level

Probability of obtaining a result if there is no difference between groups or no relationship between variable

Effect Size

An index of the magnitude of strength of the relationship between variables

Positive Correlation

As one variable goes up, so does the other; likewise, as one variable goes down, so does the other

Negative Correlation

As one variable goes up, the other variable goes down

Publication Bias

Studies with strong results are more likely to get published

Open Science

A set of practices intended to move research closer to the ideals on which science was founded

Sociometer Theory

Feelings of self-esteem evolved to monitor the degree to which a person is accepted by others

Life History Strategy (LHS)

A strategy that may encompass different kinds of adaptation

Fast-Life History Strategy

Animal reproduces multiple times at a young age but does not devote many or any resources to protecting offspring

Slow-life History Strategy

The animal does not reproduce until relatively late in life, has fewer offspring

Eugenics

Idea that humanity could be improved through selective breeding

Heritability Coefficient

Reflects the degree to which variance of the trait in the populations can be attributed to variance in genes

Genome-Wide Association Studies

Look for associations between hundreds of thousands of genes or patterns of genes and personality in large samples

Epigenetics

Explores how experience, especially early in life, can determine how or even whether a gene is expressed during development

Free Association

“The Talking Cure”

Psychic Determinism

Everything that happens in a person’s mind, including everything a person think and does, has a specific cause

Libido

Creation, protection, and enjoyment of life; creativity, productivity, and growth

Thanatos

Introduced later to account for destruction of life; end of life theory

Phenomenology

One’s conscious experience of the world; everything a person hears, feels and thinks

Construal

A person’s particular experience of the world, which forms the basis of how you live your life

Introspection

Observation of one’s own perceptions and thought process

Thrown-ness

The time, place, and circumstances you happened to be born in

Existential Anxiety/Angst

The unpleasant feeling caused by contemplating the meaning of life

Bad Faith

Our moral imperative-face thrown-ness and angst directly and seek purpose of existence in spite of these

Authentic Existence

Coming to terms with existence; being honest, insightful and morally correct (alternative to bad faith)

Anatta

nonself, the idea that the independent, singular self you sense inside your mind is an illusion

Anicca

Idea that all things must pass

Nirvana

A serene, selfless state; a result of enlightenment

Actualization

The basic need to maintain and enhance life; goal of existence is to satisfy this need

Cross-Cultural Psychology

Research that compares cultures with one another

Cultural Psychology

Seeks to understand individual cultures in their own terms and avoids making comparisons

Enculturation

Learning the culture into which one was born

Acculturation

Picking up a new culture

Etics

The universal components of ideas across cultures

Emics

Components of ideas that are particular to certain cultures

Behaviorism

Study of how a person’s behavior is a direct result of his environment, particularly the rewards and punishments that the environment contains

Habituation

A decrease in responsiveness with each repeated exposure to something

Learned helplessness

Belief that nothing one does really matters

Respondent Conditioning

The conditioned response is essentially passive with no impact of its own

Goal

The ends that one desires

Strategies

The means used to achieve goals

Idiographic Goals

Goals that are unique to the individuals who pursue them

Nomothetic Goals

Relatively small number of essential motivations that almost everyone pursues

Cybernetics

The study of systems that respond to changes in the environment in the pursuit of goals

Entity Theories

Beliefs that personal qualities are unchangeable; lead to judgment goals

Incremental Theories

Beliefs that personal qualities can change with time and experience; lead to development goals

Me

An object that can be observed and described; statements about the self

I

A somewhat mysterious entity that does the observing and describing; experiences life and makes decisions; people differ in level of self-awareness

Implicit Self

Unconscious self-knowledge

Possible Selves

The images we have, or can construct, of the other possible ways we might be

Relational Self-Schema

Self-knowledge based on past experiences that directs how we relate to the important people in our lives

Attachment Theory

A foundational relationship that is the basis of other emotional attachments that develop later in life

Deal-Makers

Traits that promote good relationships

Deal-Breakers

Traits that prevent good relationships

Working models of others and working models of the self

Based on childhood experiences (Children learn lessons from early experiences with adult caregivers)

Temperament

Biologically based pattern of attentional and emotional reactivity

Schizoid Personality Disorder

A pattern of detachment from social relationships and a restricted range of emotional expression

Histrionic Personality Disorder

A pervasive pattern of excessive emotionality and attention seeking

HiTOP System

Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology: Aims to cover the whole range of psychological distress, not just personality disorders