Personality Psychology

Week 13

personality psychology

describing unique patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that distinguish a person from other people

3 building blocks of personality

1. traits

2. motives

3. narrative identity

personality traits

characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors

Lexical hypothesis

all important and socially relevant personality differences become encoded in language

Big 5

Openness to experience

conscientiousness

extraversion

agreeableness

neuroticism

openness to experince

intellectual curiosity, aesthetic sensitivity, creative imagination

conscientiousness

organization, responsibility, productiveness

extraversion

sociability, assertiveness, energy level

agreeableness

compassion, respect, trust

neuroticism

anxiety, depression, emotional volatility

personality motives

what people desire for themselves

broad motives

achievement, power, affiliation

get along, get ahead, find personal meaning

specific / individual motives

life goals (have a high status career)

personal strivings (make life easier)

personal projects (apply to graduate school)

a lot of uniqueness here

narrative identity

“tell me your story” — a person’s story of how they became the person that they are

more individualized (idiographic) than trait and motive approaches

not a comprehensive list of facts and events but involved narrative choices (why its a good tool; see what you do and dont include)

methods for testing personality

1. self-report questionnaires

2. informant-reports

3. structured interviews

4. Behavioral observations, experience sampling, reaction time measures, neuroimaging, hormone levels, behavioral responses, open-ended questions, implicit measures, memory tasks

self report questionnaires

100%

validated personality questionnaires

easy to administer + people have full access to their own behaviors, thoughts, and feelings

use big 5

method of recording participants descriptions of their personality traits using surveys, questionnaires, or tests

informant reports

86%

romantic partner, friend, family member

provides an outsider perspective and can aggregate across multiple informants

moderate self-other agreement

little evidence for self-enhancement effect

narrative interviews

76%

divides your life into chapter and to recount key scenes (an early memory, a high point, a lot point, a turning point)

trained coders apply validated coding schemas to these narratives

coding schemas

structure

motivational and affective themes

autobiographical reasoning

temperament

when humans are young, we don’t really have personality but instead temperament

positive (extraversion) / negative (neuroticism) emotionality and effortful control (conscientiousness and self regulation, patience, and focused)

across the lifespan

actors —> agents —> authors

develop patterns —> motivated behaviors —> cohesive narrative identity

does personality change?

moderately stable across long periods of time

becomes more stable w age but continues to change across the lifespand

not everyone experiences change in come way

plasticity principle

personality can be influenced by the environment at any age

maturity principle

people tend to become more conscientious, agreeable, and emotionally stable

typically, personality chanced across the lifespan to be more mature

can you change personality?

some volitional change (ie. decreased neuroticism after therapy)

personality predicting power

1. health and mortality

2. academic success

3. job performance

4. relationship length + quality

5. drug use

6. criminality

comparable to iq, socioeconomic status, and biomedical predictors of diease

personality predicting health + mortality

key: higher conscientiousness = longer lives and healthier behaviors

+: lower neuroticism = longer lives and healthier behaviors

personality predicting antisocial behavior

key: high agreeableness = less antisocial

+: high conscientiousness = less antisocial

+: associated with voting behavior, volunteerism, civic engagement

personality predicting prosocial behavior

key: high agreeableness = high prosocial behavior

personality predicting close relationships

key: neuroticism predicts romantic relationship satisfaction

observed in self and partner reports

personality predicting school + work

key: high conscientiousness = better academic performance

Some evidence that personality predicts school grades better than achievement tests and predicts educational attainment and wages better than IQ