Personality Psychology Vocabulary

These flashcards cover the vocabulary from the lecture notes.

Personality psychology:

Addresses how people feel, think, and behave, even when these aspects conflict.

Trait Approach:

Focuses on the ways that people differ psychologically, how these differences are measured, and how they are followed over time.

Biological Approach:

Understanding individual differences in terms of the body, concentrating on biological mechanisms such as anatomy, physiology, genetics, and evolution.

Psychoanalytic Approach:

Understanding people by investigating the unconscious mind and the nature and resolution of internal mental conflict.

Phenomenological Approach:

Focuses on people's conscious experience of the world.

Humanistic Psychology:

Pursues how conscious awareness can produce uniquely human attributes such as existential anxiety, creativity, and free will.

Classical Behaviorism:

Focuses on overt behavior.

Social Learning:

How observation and self-evaluation determine behavior.

Cognitive Personality:

Focuses on cognitive processes, including perception and memory.

S Data:

A person's evaluation of his or her own personality, usually questionnaires or surveys.

High Face Validity:

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

I-Data:

Judgments by knowledgeable informants about general attributes of the individual's personality.

L-Data:

Verifiable, concrete, real-life facts that may hold psychological significance; obtained from archival records.

B-Data:

Data gathered by observing a person, or by having a person record themselves.

Reliability:

How accurate is our measurement.

Measurement Error:

The cumulative effect of extraneous influences; also called error variance.

Validity:

The degree to which a measurement measures what it is supposed to.

Constructs:

Things that cannot be directly seen, but affect and help to explain things that are visible.

Generalizability:

The degree to which you can apply the results of your study to a broader context.

Independent Variable (IV):

Imposed by the experimenter and is not affected by any characteristic or behavior of the participants.

Dependent Variable (DV):

Assumed to be dependent on, or caused by, the independent variable.

Statistical Significance:

A result that would only occur by chance less than 5% of the time.

Effect Size:

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

Replication:

Finding the same result repeatedly, with different participants and in different labs.

Open Science:

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

Situationism:

Belief that behavior is largely driven by the situation, and that personality is relatively unimportant.

Convergent Validation:

The more items of diverse information that converge, the more confident the conclusion.

Moderator Variable:

A variable that affects the relationship between two other variables.

Constructivism:

Reality, as a concrete entity, does not exist; all that does exist are human ideas, or constructions, of reality.

Critical Realism:

People gather all the information that might help the determine of the judgment is valid.

Rank-Order Consistency:

People tend to maintain the ways in which they are different from other people of the same age.

Heterotypic Continuity:

The effects of fundamental tempermental tendencies change with age.

Active Person-Environment Transaction:

People seek out compatible environments and avoid incompatible ones.

Reactive Person-Environment Transaction:

People respond differently to the same situation.

Evocative Person-Environment Transaction:

People change the situations they encounter.

Cumulative Continuity Principle:

Personality traits are relatively stable across the life span and become more stable with age.

Narrative Identity:

The story that you tell about your life.

Many-Trait Approach:

Looks for traits associated with a particular behavior.

Essential-Trait Approach:

Identifies which traits are most important.

Typological Approach:

Focuses on the patterns of traits that characterize a person.

Self-Monitoring:

An ability to regulate behavior to accommodate social situations.

The Big Five:

Neuroticism, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness

Temperament:

The term often used for the 'personality' of very young, pre-verbal children.

Personality Development:

Change in personality over time.

Plasticity Principle:

Personality can change at any time (but such change may not be easy).

Corresponsive Principle:

Person-environment transactions can cause personality traits to remain consistent or even magnify over time.

Oxytocin:

Promotes nurturant and sociable behaviors, relaxation and reduction of fear; decrease anxiety and increase attachment between mothers and children.

Testosterone:

The male sex hormone.

Cortisol:

Released in response to stress (physical or psychological): helps prepare body for action.

Heritability:

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

Authentic Existence:

Coming to terms with existence; being honest, insightful, and morally correct.

Anatta:

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

Nirvana:

A serene, selfless state; the result of enlightenment.

Self-Actualization:

The basic need to maintain and enhance life; the ultimate motive.

Self-efficacy:

The expectation that one can accomplish something successfully.

Personal Constructs:

The individual theories of each person based on how their construals are assembled; bipolar dimensions along with people or objects can be arranged (good/bad; large/small; strong/weak).

Mindfulness:

Can help reduce stress, enhance creativity, improve memory, and free people form distrubing, recurring thoughts.

Flow:

When challenge matches skill.

Awe:

The emotional response to perceptual vast stimuli that transcend current frames of reference.

Collectivism:

The importance of needs and rights of the group versus the individual.

Sociometer Theory:

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

Operant Conditioning:

When the animal learns to operate on the world in such a way as to change it to the animal's advantage.

Phenomenology:

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