Psych 2550 Test 2

 Adoption Studies

- Positive correlations:

           o Between adopted children and adoptive parents provide evidence of environmental influence

           o Between adopted children and genetic parents provide evidence of genetic influence

                    - Really informative in terms of how much the environment has an impact

                    - Genetics: twins separated at birth and when they are reconnected it is realized how many small gestures or kinds of behaviour that they have in common

                                · Using your pinky finger to push up your glasses

                                · Using the same specific hair gel

 Temperament 

- Temperament is referred to as a different dimension than personality 

- Preverbal children we use temperament to describe 

- Something that could be used to explain animals as well (example: different dog breeds have different temperaments) 

Ability Emotional Intelligence

•Goleman

•Traditional measures of intelligence/ability predict school performance

–But not outcomes later in life, such as occupational attainment, salary, marital quality

Ability Emotional Intelligence- Five specific abilities 

1. Awareness of our own feelings and bodily signals, being able to identify our own emotions, and make distinctions

2. Ability to regulate emotions, especially negative emotions, and to manage stress

3. Ability to control one’s impulses, direct attention and effort, delay gratification, and stay on task toward goals

4. Ability to decode social and emotional cues of others, empathy

5. Ability to influence and guide others without incurring anger, resentment

Act Frequency 

- Traits are categories of acts

- A trait is a descriptive summary of the general trend in a person’s behaviour relative to other people 

Act frequency formulation is good for

o Making explicit the behavioural phenomena to which most trait terms refer

o Identifying behavioural regularities

       - A behavioural regularity would be if you put your clothes on in a different order than what you do every other day 

Act nominations

o Designed to identify which acts belong in which trait categories

       - Is x behaviour representative of a certain trait category or is it motivated by something different

                · Does tapping your foot mean you are anxious? – or is it an unconscious reflex

       - Things you can watch, and then have agreement for scoring key 

Active

- Person with particular genotype seeks out a particular environment

         · High sensation seekers expose themselves to risky environments 

Adoption studies are powerful because 

they get around the equal environments assumption 

Androgyny

you are moderately high on both masculinity and femininity 

Assumption that adopted children and their adoptive and genetic parents are representative of the general population

o This is questionable

o Majority of adults, are not on an adoption waiting list

• This means- there are unique characteristics of those who are willing and want to adopt versus the rest of the population who aren’t looking for adoption options 

Behaviour is shaped by 

•interpretation or construction of the world

•Every construction is open to revision or replacement

Behavioural Genetics Methods

- Twin studies

- Family studies

- Adoption studies

- Selective breeding- e.g., dogs

        o Don’t do on humans- unethical 

Behaviourism’s view of the person 

- People can be viewed as collections of machine-like mechanisms

           - This is an issue with radical behaviouralist

                       - Pavlov, Watson, Skinner

- Explores how these mechanisms “learn”, how they change in reaction to environmental input 

Behaviourism’s view of the science of personality 

- Behaviour must be explained in terms of the causal influence of the environment on the person

- Understanding of people should be built entirely upon controlled laboratory research (research could involve either people or animals)

        o Against naturalistic or observational research

        o Thought you needed to manipulate people- had to be in a research setting

Biological Underpinnings- Limitations

o Many other personality traits should moderate heritability

o Eysenck may have missed important traits

           - Does not account for gender differences etc.

Cattell’s 16 PF (personality factors)

- Wanted the “basic units” of personality

- True factors of personality should be found across different types of data, such as self-reports (S-data) and laboratory tests (Test data)

***will not test on the actual 16 PF (knowing what they are) 

Causes and treatment of psychopathology

- Maladaptive, “abnormal” behaviour is caused by maladaptive environments to which the person has been exposed

- The task of therapy is not to analyze underlying conflicts or to reorganize the individual’s personality 

Challenge of behaviourism

- May be impractical and/or unethical to manipulate environmental variables that affect every day behaviours

         - Skinner? – said if he was given any child, he could turn them into a criminal or a lawyer

         - Taking kids out of a certain environment (low income/low SES), and put them in a new environment to see the affect (high income/nice              neighbourhood)

                     · These are both unethical- would not be okay now

- Difficult to sort out the potentially lawful relations between any on environmental factor and behaviour 

Character 

- We don't typically refer to peoples character in modern day personality psychology 

Circumplex model 

· Wiggins (1979) 

            - Started with the lexical assumptions 

            - Argued that trait term specify different kinds of ways in which individuals differ

                     - interpersonal, temperament, character, material, attitude, mental and physical 

Circumplex model goes into a circle that looks like a square 

· Wiggins is saying that the typical personality traits we talk to will fit in these quadrats 

· Discovered you can take dimensions and plug it in here 

         - Example: if you are psychopathic you are cold hearted

· This model is still actually used today 

         - Idea is that dominance, status, agency and how much you commune with others are very important dimensions when it comes to engaging with others  

Common Environment (c²)

- Amount of variance in an observed (measured) variable which can be attributed to the effects of living together

• Being all exposed to the same- due to identical and fraternal twins

• Example in environment: being exposed to cuddling, lots of cuddling with parents- higher levels of agreeability when older

• “Growing up” in the same household

• 100% effect for both MZ and DZ twins 

Controversy about genes and personality 

Behavioural geneticists attempt to determine the degree to which individual differences are caused by genetic and environmental differences 

o   Negative eugenics

• Hitler- wanting to remove a group of genetic people, not wanting Jewish people to be able to reproduce

o   Controversial

• Ideological concerns

           · Can people claim it’s their genes that drove them to commit a crime

o   Answer is no

• Concerns about renewed interest in eugenics 

           · Idea that you are now going to have some kind of societal idea of who should have children and who shouldn’t 

Critics of the Big 5 

· Some many important things are left out 

· Omits important aspects of personality 

         - Positive evaluation 

         - Negative evaluation 

         - Masculinity/femininity 

         - Religiosity or spirituality

         - Attractiveness

         - Sexuality 

Dizygotic (DZ) 

- Fraternal twins

- 50% of genes in common

- Siblings which were born together

        - When doing analyses: always get rid of opposite sex twins because they have different hormones

                     - Will make the comparison with identical twins too extreme 

Empirical evidence of Big-Five

- Replicable in studies using english language trait words as items 

- Found by more than a dozen researches using different samples

- Replicated in different language 

          - Shows some degree of replication 

Environmental determinism and its implications for the concept of personality 

- We are subject to physical laws that can be understood through scientific analysis

- Thoughts and feeling are “behaviours” that are caused by the environment

- General laws of learning, would eliminate the need for distinct field of study called “personality psychology”

- Variables of other theories are merely descriptions of patterns of psychological experience that are caused by the environment 

Estimating Heritability (h²)

***won’t be tested on memorizing/knowing the exact formula

h² = 2 (MZr – DZr)

     o   r = correlation between twin 1 and twin 2

     o   Goes from 0-1

- Logic to equation:

h² = 2 [(100% genes + 100% common environment) – (50% genes + 100% common environment)]

     o If similar, most likely due to environment and not genes

     o But attitudes etc., can also have genetic influences

-  Can be reduced to…

h² = 2 (50% genes)

h² = 100% genes 

Example of act nomination

o Is visiting a sick relative an example of altruism?

o What about pushing a stranger’s car out of a snowbank?

Example of lexical approach

o Allport and Odbert

o 1936 Trait-names: A psycho-lexical study. Psychological Monographs

o Located terms within dictionaries 

Example of monitoring act performance

o Daily diary studies

o Could be used for moods as well as actions 

Example of prototypicality judgments 

o Being talkative is more indicative of extraversion than having a lot of social media “friends”

         - Has to be consistent over time and across situations

         - Context is important: prof talks a lot more in lecture than usual, she is an introvert, but you  may not know that based on her being talkative in class 

Eysenck’s Model (PEN)

1. Extraversion-Introversion (E)

2. Neuroticism-Emotional Stability (N)

3. Psychoticism (P)

         o Higher in psychoticism means you don’t care about others’ emotions

         o Example: When I was child, I liked to torture small animals or fry ants with a magnifying glass

         o High degree of warm heartedness- high level of empathy- low psychoticism

         o Scoring highly in psychoticism- more likely to modify your car (loud muffler)

                     - Callous disregard for others

- Combinations of these could predict job success and who interacts best with others 

Eysenck’s PEN Model- Biological Underpinnings

***good exam question

Key criteria for “Basic” Dimensions of Personality 

o Heritability: P, E, and N have moderate heritability

           - Psychoticism usually has lowest heritability estimate- less genetically driven

           - E and N much more heritable

o Identifiable physiological substrate

           - You have to be able to have some degree of  physiology that you can measure

           - Extroverts and introverts – electrodes on brain, see the results of braining calming down

                        · Extroverts- will calm quickly but then fidget and looking for stimulus

                        · Introverts- will have a busy mind, is not looking for other stimulus, because there is already plenty of stimulus occurring in the brain

                                   - More likely to ruminate

            - Can predict neuroticism based on cortisol (stress hormone) in the body

                       · High levels of cortisol = greater levels of neuroticism

Family Studies 

- Correlates the degree of genetic overlap among family members with the degree of similarity in personality trait

    o You inherit most of your testosterone from your opposite sex parent

• Daughter from father

• Male from mother

    o If you wanted to know about male baldness

• Had to look at your mother’s father

- If a trait is highly heritable

     o Family members with greater genetic relatedness should be more similar to one another on the trait than family members who are less closely genetically related 

Five-Factor Model (OCEAN)

1. Extroversion (surgency)

       - Surgency → goldbergs lexical big five this is what he referred to it as 

       - Extroversion → exact same as hans isinc described 

2. Agreeableness

       - More controversial 

       - Washed down psychoticism → described by hans isinc  

       - They get along with others

       - They make great councilors

       - Low → hostile, somewhat cold hearted 

3. Conscientiousness 

       - Hard workers 

4. Neuroticism /emotional stability 

5. Openness-intellect /openness to experience

       - Goldberg → intellect 

       - Patel → openness

               - Close minded vs open minded people  

Genes and the Environment: Two issues 

- Genotype-Environment interaction

        o Genes to be very tall, but then grow up in a basement with less nutrients

• Your gene potential will not be reached

- Genotype-Environment correlation

Genotype-Environment Correlation

- Differential exposure of individuals with different genotypes to different environments

- Genotype-environment correlations can be positive or negative 

Genotype-Environment Interaction

- Differential response of individuals with different genotypes to the same environments

    o For example, task performance of introverts versus extraverts in loud versus quiet conditions

    o Individual differences interact with environment to affect performance

• One group of people or sub section of population is going to react differently to a situation compares to another group or subsection 

Goal of psychopathology (behaviourism)

- Goal is to provide new learning experiences for the client

          - If you correct the environment, you will correct the persons behaviour

          - Believed you could “reprogram” people 

Heritability (a² or h²)

- Amount of variance in an observed (measured) variable which can be attributed to genetic effects

•  A² – average genetic

•  H² – is simply heritability

- Observed variance

     = Phenotypic variance

• Phenotypic just because it is observed 

HEXACO model does not cover some traits 

- masculinity/femininity 

HEXACO: Scores high 

you can trust this kind of person

- Trusting more than just conscientiousness

- Sincere 

- Faithful 

- Labrador retriever of personality dimensions 

HEXACO: Scores low

greedy 

- Manipulative 

- Machiavellianism and narcissism has a negative correlation with honesty and humility 

Hopelessness to experience 

• Cost and macray 

• Open to having sensations 

How the Rep test works

•E.g., name a favourite teacher.

•Name a neighbour you do not like.

(Kelly viewed characters as playing a “role” in your life – note, you list 24 people in the test)

•Then explain how you are similar to the named people

•And how you are different from the named people

•Then how you are similar to one person but not the other

•Then rate the relevance

•Rep. Test explains which constructs are important, as well as what features

If behaviour is determined by the environment, then:

- Manipulate environmental variables to learn how they influence behaviour in carefully controlled laboratory experiments

- Study things that are observable

Implication: Determinism 

-   Event is caused by some prior event

-   Cause being something that can be understood according to basic laws of science

-   Stands in opposition to the belief in “free will”

-   Behaviourism – a reaction to psychoanalytic

o   Radical psychologists thought it wasn’t science enough so wanted to bring behaviourism into it 

Important Traits (3 ways)

1. Lexical approach

        o If something is important to society, they will encode it into language

        o More words associated with one term

                - Getting drunk – hammered, black out, pissed

2. Statistical approach

        o Getting info and data to discover trends and patterns

3. Theoretical approach 

Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory

•Called a metatheory.

•People anticipate events by the meanings or interpretations they place on those events.

Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory- Anxiety 

= Result of not being able to understand and predict life events

Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory- Commonality Corollary

–If two people have similar construct systems, they will be psychologically similar

Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory- Human nature

Humans-as-scientists; people attempt to understand, predict, and control events

Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory- Personal Constructs

–Constructs people use to interpret and predict events

Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory- Scientist as person

•Scientists can also be seen as people and their pronouncements should be regarded with the same skepticism

Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory- Sociality Corollary 

–To understand a person, must understand how that person construes the social world

Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory- The Role Construct Repertory (Rep) test

•Used to discover how people relate to others

Key limitations of The Wiggins Circumplex

- Interpersonal; map is limited to two dimensions 

- Other traits may have important interpersonal consequences 

Lexical Approach

- Starts with lexical hypothesis:

       o All-important individual differences have become encoded within the natural language

- Trait terms are important for people in communicating with others

Lexical Approach- Two criteria for identifying important traits

1. Synonym frequency

2. Cross-cultural universality 

Love and Status

· Dimensions of status and love define axes 

· Status and agency driven→  you are concerned with rank do you fixate on the person's status or rank 

· Communion or love → you are concerned with how you can get every individual you meet to be your friend

           - You want to be with this person and include them into your network 

           - If you are low on communion you are more focused on yourself 

           - Canadians generally score higher on love and  communion → how much do you care about others around you

           - Suggesting that if you are concerned you may be more concerned about others than the ranking system 

· He says that these things really determine how you interact with other individuals

Machiavellianism 

· Avg usually 3.35

· Machiavellianism 

          - Found typically in people who are high in political interest

          - Very charming when you meet them but you can't rely on them

          - They have a lot of acquaintances but not a lot of close friends 

          - These people can hurt you through manipulation 

Material

- People are programmed different and build of different neurotransmitters, hormones

- The individual is different inside and out 

Monitoring act performance 

o Securing information on actual performance of individuals in their daily lives 

Monozygotic (MZ) 

- Identical twins 

- 100% of genes in common

**will always be the same sex

Most powerful research design that combines strengths of twin and adoption studies 

is studying twins reared apart 

Narcissism 

· Avg usually 2.95

· Loving yourself

· They think they are the best and no one is better

· Everything is because of them

· Those who are low in narcissism are high in humility 

· Some argue that a moderate degree of narcissism is goof for you 

· Its when you get too high 

· Vulnerable narcissism → will not act aggressively until attacked and questions about their competency they will get defensive

          - Does not come across as narcissistic until they are questioned 

Nature-Nurture Debate Clarified  

- Not at the individual level

- Influence of genes and of environment is only relevant for the group-level variation 

Notes about heritability 

- Heritability CANNOT be applied to single individual

      o You can’t say: based on this info, x% of your variance

      o You are talking population wide: “on average”

- Heritability is NOT constant or immutable

      o For example: heritability of intelligence in 1940’s, estimate lower than it is now

• More people today are exposed to better nutrients

- Heritability is NOT a precise statistic… it is an estimate

       o Spend a lot of time saying “about” and “approximately”

       o Metanalysis are very useful because it compares many samples

• Can see the differences in the estimates people find 

Passive 

- Parents provide both genes and environment to children, yet children do nothing to obtain that environment

          · Child’s verbal ability and the number of books in the home 

Personal construct examples

•Similarities among events.

•E.g., this place is like ____ (other place you know)

•Similarities among people.

•E.g., you remind me of X.

  I like X.

  I like you!

•Differences among people.

•Commonly perceived differences becomes a “rule” for the individual

Post-Kelly

•Kelly was interested in how people perceived the world

•Later research discovered that some are better than others in perceptions

•Led to the field of Emotional Intelligence

Problem with family studies

o Members of a family who share the same genes also usually share the same environment-confounds genetic with environmental influences

o Family studies are never definitive 

Problems and limitations of lexical approach

o Many traits are ambiguous, metaphorical, obscure, or difficult

o Personality is conveyed through different parts of speech (not just adjectives), including nouns and adverbs 

Problems with act frequency formulation

1. Does not specify how much context should be included in the description of the trait-relevant act 

Example: 

o Not all “parties” are the same

       - If someone completed a diary entry and says they are at a party, that could mean many things

       ***need much more information on the context

                · A photo would help

o Tailgate versus cocktail 

2. Seems applicable to overt actions, BUT what about failures to act or covert acts not directly observable?

Example: 

o “Acts” do not include thoughts

       - Can’t look at someone and be able to tell how intelligent they are

       - Or look at someone and be able to tell if they would help you get your car out of a snowbank

o May not capture complex traits 

Prototypicality judgments

- involves identifying which acts are most central or prototypical of each trait category 

Psychopathy 

· Avg usually 1.91

· Individuals who score high are cold hearted 

· Take pleasure in watching others suffer and be in pain 

· They have no issue being the source of that pain 

· They enjoy situations where they make others feel unvalued 

· Low psychopathy is higher in empathy, cares about others 

· The most threatening one arguably 

Reactive

- Parents (or others) respond to children differently depending on the child’s genotype

- E.g., baby’s liking for cuddling and the mother’s cuddling behaviour

      · Harry Harlow: monkey experiment

            o Mechanical monkey mothers, one provided food, one didn’t provide any but were soft and cuddly

                     - The monkeys always went back to the cuddle mother, would only go to cold food one if they were absolutely starving- but would always go back to the other 

Religion in the HEXACO model 

- Religion is in the honesty factor 

           - Some people argue that honesty is too religiously based 

Sadism 

· Avg usually 2.24 

· They enjoy watching events of people suffer

· They enjoy watching torture 

· Difference from psychopath → psychopath wants to do the action and sadist wants to watch it happen 

· Sadism is passive 

· Low on sadism are very concerned about violence and tend to have more prosocial personality profile 

Short dark tetrad (SD4)

· Paulhus et al (2020)

· Dark factor has a degree of heritability 

        - You inherit this darkness and it manifests 

        - Narcissism is the least harmful as they aren't necessarily hurting anyone 

· This all fits in with freud's idea of id impulse 

Situational specificity behaviour 

Not everyone will want to or will get into a fist fight at the bar 

Solution to the challenge of behaviourism 

- Study simple responses by simpler organisms, such as rats and pigeons

- Strategy of studying simple systems

          - BUT… will the results of these experiments generalize from animals in the lab to humans in the social world? 

Specific Environment (e²)

- Amount of variance in an observed (measured) variable which are due to unique experiences

- Something one twin experienced which their co-twin did not

• Extreme case: one twin dropped on their head, the other is not

• Would impact intelligence

• Occurs for both MZ and DZ

• Won’t always have exactly the same experiences 

Statistical Approach 

- Starts with a large, diverse pool or personality items

- Most researchers using lexical approach turn to statistical approach to distill ratings of trait adjectives into basic categories of traits 

Statistical Approach- Goal

o Identify major dimensions of personality

          - Many different models out there for this

o i.e., factors through factor analysis

          - personality works the same as intelligence

o Start with a blind model, once you have the factors, you try to organize and understand it 

Taxonomies of Personality 

- Eysenck’s Hierarchical Model of Personality

- Cattell’s Taxonomy: The 16 Personality Factor System

- Circumplex Taxonomies of Personality: The Wiggins Circumplex (1979)

- Five-Factor Model

- The HEXACO Model 

The HEXACO Model 

· Micheal ashton & Kibeom Lee

        - Western Graduates  

        - Criticisms of the big 5 

*** You need to know the difference between the hexaco and big five for exam 

        - Hexaco is 6 factors 

Theoretical Approach

- Starts with a theory, which then determines which variables are “important”

Three key advantages of The Wiggins Circumplex

1. Provides an explicit definition of what constitutes “interpersonal” behavior 

2. Specifies relationships between each trait and every other trait in the model (agency, bipolarity orthogonality)

          - Are they coles, or opposite ends etc

3. Alerts investigators to “gaps” in work on interpersonal behavior 

Three types of Genotype-Environment Correlation

Passive
Reactive 
Active

Trait EI and Vocational Interests • Emotionality associated with:

- Social and artistic interests

Trait EI and Vocational Interests • Self-control associated with:

- an interest in business (sales, managerial roles)

Trait EI and Vocational Interests • Sociability associated with:

-Business and Social, and interests in biology/life sciences

-Negative association with an interest in the skilled trades

Trait EI and Vocational Interests • Well-being associated with:

- a social interest (social work, government jobs, looking “after” society)

- An artistic interest (creative and performing arts)

Trait Emotional Intelligence

Petrides

EI is seen as a personality dimension

Four major dimensions…..

  … take the measure

Trait Emotional Intelligence- scoring- Well-being

“high score” = can cope with difficult situations, is happy and optimistic

Significant negative correlation with neuroticism

Significant positive correlation with extraversion

Trait Emotional Intelligence- scoring- Self-Control

High score = able to control emotions in difficult/stressful environments

Significant negative correlation with neuroticism

Significant positive correlation with openness

Trait Emotional Intelligence- scoring-Emotionality

High score = empathic, able to “read” emotions of others

Significant positive correlations with extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness.