Theories of Personality - Exam 1

State

• acute reaction to something temporary

  • You feel gratitude because of a gift someone just gave you.

Trait

• more of a stable characteristic of a person

  • ex.) you are arrogant a lot of the time

Personality

• someone’s usual pattern of behavior, beliefs, thoughts, and feelings.

Person-situation debate

• In 1968, Walter Mischel argued that the effect of personality on behavior is too small to matter

• Personality can be impacted by situations/experiences.

• Personality can make us choose certain situations over others

• People respond differently to the same situation based on their personality.

• People change the situations they enter based on their personality

Strong situations

• Situations in which people act in similar ways, usually because there are established expectations that everyone understands and conforms to.

Weak situations

• situations that contain little pressure as to an appropriate behavior; People act more according to their unique personalities

Fundamental attribution error

• an error made when someone wrongly

  attributes a person’s behavior to their

  personality, when really it is the situation that elicited the behavior

Personality Assesment

• a psychological process and set of tools used to measure and evaluate an individual's unique, enduring patterns of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, known as personality traits

Informant reports

• when another person reports on a person (often in a survey)

Clinical interviews

• Involves asking clients relevant questions about:

  • Past and present life experiences

  • Social and family relationships

  • Reasons for seeking psychological help

• A wide range of behaviors, feelings, and thoughts can be investigated in the interview, including general appearance, demeanor, and attitude; facial expressions, posture, and gestures; preoccupations; degree of self-insight; and level of contact with reality

• Useful for making diagnoses/making decisions about treatment

Measuring/observing behavior as it occurs

• Best done on multiple occasions

• Can be done in naturalistic settings

• Using a controlled lab setting to measure reactions

Archival Data

• records of past behavior, thoughts, feelings, etc.

Thought/Experience Sampling

• Thought- participants answer the

  same questions about current

  thoughts/moods over multiple time points

• Experience- – same as thought

  sampling, but ask additional questions

  about the context surrounding those

  thoughts/feelings

Projective tests

• personality assessments that utilize ambiguous stimuli

  like inkblots or images, encouraging individuals to project their thoughts,

  feelings, and unconscious processes onto the stimuli

Physiological measures

• Assessing physical reactions/activities, such as heart rate, sweating, brain activity, hormone level, etc.

self report

subjects answer questions about themselves (often in a survey); report on themselves

strategies we have to make sure we get more accurate/truthful data from self-report measures

•1.) Do not give the name of assessment or tell exactly what is being measuring.

•2.) Do not collect identifying info and do inform participants it is confidential.

•3.) Tell respondents there no right or wrong answers, but researchers are simply

interested in the truth.

•4.) Multiple questions to assess the same thing

•5.) Include reverse-scored questions.

•6.) Check wording of questions – simple language, not double-barreled, not leading

•7.) Include additional measures designed to identify people who might lie (e.g.,

Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale) on your personality assessment.

•8.) Choose measures that have been shown to be reliable and valid

 acquiescence response set

a set of responses to an assessment where the participant agreed with everything on a questionnaire regardless of the question content

socially-desirable responding

responding to an assessment in a way to making yourself seem better than you actually are

reverse-scored items

It allows us to catch the people that are not reading carefully

Likert-scale

a psychometric scale commonly used in surveys to measure attitudes, opinions, and sentiments on a spectrum of agreement, satisfaction, or frequency

reliablity

consistency of the measure

four types of construct reliability

Internal reliability- when all items/questions of a scale yield consistent scores

(after any reverse scoring), suggesting they all reliably assess the same

underlying construct.

Test-retest reliability-

Inter-rater reliability -

Cronbach’s alpha

• a statistical measure that assesses the internal consistency and reliability of a set of test items

• .60 to .69 = acceptable

• .70 or above = good

Test-retest reliability

when two or more administrations of an assessment yield consistent overall scores

Inter-rater reliability

• often used in behavioral observations. Checking that multiple raters came up with consistent scores. For instance, suppose had three raters observe children and give them an aggression score, you would want the scores across the raters to be pretty similar.

validity

accuracy of the measure

4 types of construct validity

• Face validity

• Convergent validity

• Predictive validity

• Discriminant validity

Face validity

– the items/questions/aspects of a measure LOOK valid

Convergent validity

the overall score from the assessment correlates with other theoretically-related assessments

Predictive validity

the measure is related to a specific objective behavior or outcome

Discriminant validity

• when a scale does NOT correlate too highly with unrelated things

variable

• a characteristic that varies across the subjects studied

manipulated variable

the researcher assigns subjects to different experiences of interest;

who gets what experience is controlled by the researcher

measured variable

the variable is assessed as it naturally exists

Descriptive research designs

describing measured variables in isolation, not looking at relationships between variables

Correlational research designs

examining relationship between two measured variables; can only say relationship; can’t say that one variable causes other.

Experimental research designs

examining if a manipulated IV affects a measured DV; better for determining cause and effect.

two problems with correlation research designs

Directionality - Which comes first? The chicken or the egg? Optimism and GPA example

Third variable problem- ice cream and homicide example

Better method for establishing causality

Temporal precedence- The IV is manipulated first and then you see what later happens with the DV

Random assignment- can get rid of confounds

Independent variable

the variable the researcher manipulates; thought to be the cause

Experimental group

gets the treatment or experience the researcher is most interested in knowing about

Control group

• goes about their business as usual with no special treatment or experience OR gets some sort of neutral experience

• serves as comparison group

Dependent variable

the variable the researcher measures; thought to be the outcome

Internal validity versus external validity

Internal validity- The degree to which a study can confidently establish a cause-and-effect relationship between variables.

external validity- The extent to which study results can be generalized beyond the specific conditions of the study (to other people, settings, or times).

Big Five creation

• It started with a hypothesis (language holds the key), involved massive data collection (18,000 words), and used powerful statistics (factor analysis) to find a result that other scientists could test and replicate

lexical hypothesis

the most important and socially relevant personality characteristics will eventually become encoded into a culture's language.

What did Allport and Odbert do?

Scoured an english dictionary and extracted approximately 18,000 words that could be used to describe personality. This vast list, while comprehensive, was too unwieldy for practical use. The next crucial step was to identify the underlying structure of these descriptors.

factor analysis

studying multiple correlations among adjective, item, or question ratings to determine which ones cluster together to possibly form the same overarching category

What did Goldberg do

• Coining the phrase "Big Five“ and gave the labels to each of the Big Five.

two major measures of the Big Five

The NEO PI-R: Measures the five broad factors and also six narrower facets within each factor

BFI: Measures the five broad factors with fewer items; BFI-2 adds three facets per trait

VIA Character strengths model- why

Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson decided to stop mapping the darkness and start mapping the light. Mission: to create a "manual of the sanities"—a scientifically grounded classification of the best of what it means to be human

• they scoured 2,000 years of human wisdom

• "golden threads"— the virtues that all of humanity, across continents and centuries, agrees are the pinnacle of character

Traits of the Big Five

Openness

Contentiousness

Extraversion

Agreeableness

Neuroticism

Openess

novelty

• imagination

• artistic Interests

• Adventurousness

• Intellect

• Emotionality

• liberalism

Contentiousness

responsible

• Self-efficacy

• Orderliness

• Dutifulness

• Achievement-striving

• Self-discipline

• Cautiousness

Extraversion

seeking stimualtion

• friendliness

• gregariousness

• assertiveness

• high-activity level

• excitement seeking

• cheerfulness

Agreeableness

the positive view of other people

• trust

• morality

• altruism

• cooperation

• modesty

• sympathy/empathy

Neuroticism

negative emotions

• anxiety

• anger

• depression

• self-consciousness

• immoderation

• vulnerability