Human Behaviour wk6 p1

Flashcards covering key vocabulary from a lecture on personality psychology, focusing on the person-situation debate and trait theory.

Person-Situation Debate

The debate in personality psychology that explores the extent to which an individual's personality predicts their behavior versus the power of situational factors.

Personality Psychology

The branch of psychology that studies individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving.

Personality Traits

Enduring characteristics that describe an individual's consistent patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior.

Cardinal Traits

Traits that are dominant and define a person's life.

Central Traits

General characteristics that form the basic foundations of personality.

Secondary Traits

Traits that are more situationally bound and less consistent.

Factor Analysis

A statistical technique used to identify underlying factors or traits that correlate with each other.

The Big Three

Eysenck's model of personality organized under three major dimensions: psychoticism, extroversion-introversion, and neuroticism-stability.

Neuropsychological Theory

Gray's theory focused on two major systems: the behavioural activation system (BAS) and the behavioural inhibition system (BIS).

The Big Five

A five-factor model of personality, the most widely accepted and used model of personality (OCEAN).

Openness to Experience

A Big Five personality dimension characterized by imagination, feelings, actions, and ideas.

Conscientiousness

A Big Five personality dimension characterized by competence, self-discipline, thoughtfulness, and goal-driven.

Extroversion

A Big Five personality dimension characterized by sociability, assertiveness, activity, and excitability.

Agreeableness

A Big Five personality dimension characterized by being cooperative, trustworthy, and good-natured.

Neuroticism

A Big Five personality dimension characterized by the tendency toward unstable emotions.

Longitudinal Studies

Research that tracks the same individual or set of individuals over time to observe changes or stability.

Meta-Analysis

A study in which an author will actually take a number of results from other studies and compile them together in order to be able to compare consistency across the studies in terms of their findings.

Cross-Cultural Studies

Research that compares different cultures to identify similarities and differences in psychological traits or phenomena.

Twin Studies

Studies that compare identical twins (monozygotic) with fraternal twins (dizygotic) to assess the genetic and environmental influences on personality.

Monozygotic

Twins who share 100% of their genes.

Dizygotic

Twins who share about 50% of their genes