Personality Psychology

What is some history to personality psychology?

• Confucianism - “A gentleman puts loyalty and faithfulness foremost”

• Taoism - “A good solider is never aggressive”

• Islam - “The thrifty and the one who is forthcoming in good deeds”

• Ancient Greece - “The base person seems to go to every length for his own sake”

• Hinduism - “An agent unsteady, boorish, arrogant, dishonest, malicious”

• Buddhism - “One who is harmless to all living beings is called noble”

• Judaism - “The prudent are crowned with knowledge”

• Different traits seen as favourable or unfavourable

What was personality viewed as in history?

As personhood, persona and character

What is personality as an abstract concept?

• What is ‘beneath the mask’ or what we present as our ‘authentic’ self

• Personality as the true self is separate from social roles

• Linked to rise of Western individualism

• Personality as ‘psychological individuality’

What is personality psychology?

The stud of psychological diversity

What is personality often wrongly defined as?

• Individual differences - bigger than personality

• Psychological differences/cognitive abilities

• Intellectual vs non-intellectual (different to personality, not the most precise distinction)

• Mood-state because our mood frequently fluctuates/remains transient while personality typically remains stable over time

• Broad - patterns/tendencies to act in certain sorts of ways (CORRECT!)

Personality is not:

• Physical attributes (e.g. tall, sickly etc)

• Intellect-related attributes (e.g. stupid, intelligent etc)

• Transient (emotional mood-states) attributes (e.g. jealous, worried, angry etc)

• Context-specific attributes (e.g. smoker, jazz lover, anti-vaxxer etc)

How do psychologists define personality?

Enduring, relatively broad psychological differences between people, excluding cognitive abilities

Why is personality fundamentally important?

• Personal and self-concept

• Social communication and gossip

• Person perception

• Stereotypes

What was the Prentice (1990) study conducted on personality?

• Asked people to describe themselves

• 33% responded in terms of likes, beliefs, values

• 25% responded in terms of personality traits

• 9% responded in terms of interpersonal attributes

• Classified the traits people used to describe themselves and their personality

What did Robin Dunbar argue about the importance of personality to social communication?

• Human intelligence evolved to handle the complexities of group life

• Much of our social communication aims to learn what others are like (their personalities) to figure out who we are compatible with

What is person perception?

Judging other people’s personalities

• Dispositional inference and correspondence bias

• Rapid personality judgements (snap judgements from social psychology)

• People are good at extracting information about others personalities from static images

What are stereotypes?

Largely made up of personality traits believed (rightly or wrongly) to be associated with certain social groups (belief that is extended upon the whole group)

How are stereotypes measured on the warm and competence scales?

• Praised groups - warm and competent

• Pariah groups - cold and incompetent

• Not important about whether their ratings of warmth and competence are accurate or not (more so what people believe and how they rate them is more important)

What is the purpose of personality psychology as a field?

• Aims to understand the ‘whole person’

• Focuses on differences between people, not shared mechanisms and processes

• Related to clinical psychology (focused on atypical cases)

• Places emphasis on factors intrinsic to the person

How is personality psychology different to social psychology?

• Contrast to social psychology - person vs situation

• Social psychology looks at how individuals function in social settings (external)

• To understand individuals and human behaviour, we must focus on learning about both the internal and external factors

What is personality psychology’s triple focus (the bigger picture)?

• Human nature

• Systematic variation

• Personal uniqueness

• Personality theory investigates the components that make up the essence of being human

How should personality be described in a scientific sense?

• Needs a descriptive unit

• Needs a classification or ‘taxonomy’ of these units

Why is classification not the best or most accurate method in personality psychology?

• Lord Ernest Rutherford - “All science is either physics of stamp collecting” (using the principles of physics to explain science as a whole)

• Describing how things are - collecting information from various sources and combining them together (e.g. scrapbooking)

• Can use chemical taxonomy (e.g. periodic table), biological taxonomy (e.g. phylogenetic trees) and psychiatric taxonomy (e.g. DSM-5)

• All ways of classifying the nature of phenomena that we see in different scientific fields

• Personality psychology is often subjective and cannot be classified in the same, concrete ways as other sciences possibly can

What are personality traits?

• The simplest descriptive unit of personality psychology

• A consistent pattern of behaviour, thinking or feeling

What are the key features of a personality trait?

• Relatively stable over time

• Relatively consistent across situations

• Varying between people

• Dispositional (inherent/natural tendencies of individuals under certain contexts/different environments where they have different social roles)

• Generally vary in generality or ‘bandwidth’ (narrow vs broad)

What is an example of the hierarchy of traits, differing in bandwidth?

• Extraversion - high-level trait (refers to a wide range of human behaviours)

  • Sociability

  • Sensation-seeking (mid-level trait)

    • Physical sensation-seeking (low-level trait)

      • Sky-diving (illustrative behaviour)

    • Sexual-sensation seeking (low-level trait)

      • Raunchy dating app profile (illustrative behaviour)

• All demonstrating extraversion in different ways

• Low-level traits - narrower bandwidth compared to high-level traits which are significantly broader

What was Muhammad Ali’s theory of personality types/classification?

People come in four types

• Pomegranate - hard on the outside, hard on the inside

• Walnut (hard-soft)

• Prune (soft-hard)

• Grape (soft-soft)

What is the lexical approach to developing a scientific taxonomy of personality?

• Survey the traits that are encoded in language

• Lexical approach

• Assumes that important distinctions for describing people are captured in single words

• Personality traits are intangible

How did Allport & Odbert (1936) use the lexical approach to classifying personality?

• Searched a dictionary for words to describe how people differ

• 18,000 out of 550,000

• Filtered to remove: physical attributes, cognitive abilities, transient/emotional mood-states and evaluative terms (e.g. moron, only reveals how you subjectively feel about the person, not a true accurate reflection of their personality)

• 4,504 terms remained

How did Raymond Cattell use the lexical approach to classifying personality?

• 4,504 trait words was considered too many (many of them were synonyms)

• Cattell distilled the set (placed on paper and then grouped)

  • Sorted words into 171 groups of synonyms or antonyms

  • Reduced these in several steps to 16 “factors” using factor analysis

  • Factors - basic dimensions of personality

    • Each dimension is between 2 extremes (e.g. reserved vs outgoing)

    • Every individual’s personality could be summarised using these 16 different dimensions

What were the results of the correlation analysis conducted to create Cattell’s 16 factors?

• People given the list of personality dimensions and they rate themselves

• Almost perfect +ve correlation

What were the results of the factor analysis conducted to create Cattell’s 16 factors?

• Tried to re-organise by finding variables that correlate with one another

• 2 underlying groups

• Interprets common elements between them leading to the creation of the 16 factors

What was the issue with Cattel’s 16 factors?

• Too many factors that were still correlated (e.g. reserved vs outgoing and shy vs venturesome

• Different factors might both reflect a single underlying “super-factor”

• Non-redundant set of personality factors/pieces of information about an individual was needed (ideally the dimensions should be independent of one another)

What are the “Big Five” traits created by Donald Fiske that reduced the 16 factors further to 5?

• Openness to Experience

• Conscientiousness

• Extraversion

• Agreeableness

• Neuroticism

• Way of organising the diversity of personality language in a bipolar way (in terms of extremes)

What is extraversion?

The level of social interactions you crave

• High - sociable, energetic, enthusiastic, assertive

• Low - shy, reserved, quiet, retiring

What is agreeableness?

How pro-social you are

• High - warm, modest, kind, trusting helpful

• Low - cold, unfriendly, quarrelsome

What is conscientiousness?

Your ability to self-manage your responsibilities and commitments

• High - efficient, organised, thorough, self-controlled

• Low - careless, irresponsible, frivolous

What is neuroticism?

How often you experience negative mood states

• High - tense, irritable, moody, nervous, high-strung

• Low - stable, calm, contented, unemotional

What is openness to experience?

The extent to which your thought process remains broad and open to new ideas (open-mindedness)

• High - imaginative, original sophisticated

• Low - simple, shallow, conventional, narrow

How does the “Big Five” measure personality?

• 1 factor cannot be measured by 1 item

• Not immediately intuitive (something that can be explained logically)

• Each factor has low-level facets but all of them reflect the same broad, underlying trait (e.g. some people express and manifest their neuroticism differently but it is all still considered to be neuroticism)

What is the value of the “Big Five”?

• Provides a framework for mapping specific traits (e.g. shyness is a combination of (low) Extraversion and (high) Neuroticism)

• Each factor has distinct causes and not every single trait is a pure reflection of an individual BUT it is often a blend of traits that can be an accurate representation of an individual

Allows for:

• Assessment of personality

• Investigation of personality

• Explanation of the causes of personality

What are the behavioural correlates of the “Big Five”?

A way to predict people’s behaviour (many patterns of findings support this framework/method)

What are the correlates of extraversion?

• Preference for stimulant drugs

• Quicker reaction time

• +ve emotionality

What are the correlates of agreeableness?

• Trustingness

• Cooperation in experimental games

• Altruistic (selfless) behaviour

What are the correlates of conscientiousness?

• Longevity

• Work performance

• Low rates of substance use (opposite to the extraversion correlate related to substance use)

What are the correlates of neuroticism?

• Low self-esteem

• Vulnerability to depression and anxiety

• Negative emotionality (more likely to experience negative mood-states often)

What are the correlates of Openness to Experience?

• Artistic interests

• Higher educational attainment

• Less prejudice (progressive social attitudes)

What important outcomes does the “Big Five” predict?

Mortality and divorce (personality correlates more strongly with these outcomes than economic hardship and socioeconomic status)

What are the different ways in which your “Big Five” personality can be analysed and understood?

• Looking at your home setting (e.g. bedroom)

• Looking at the lecture theatre seating

What is some other evidence for the “Big Five”?

• Similar factors have been found in studies of many languages

• Similar personality factors (except Openness to Experience & Conscientiousness) appear in other species (e.g. piglet extraversion = frequency of snout-touching)

What does evidence suggest about the universality of the “Big Five”?

Moderate degree of universality based on the observation of similar factors (e.g. extraversion compared to neuroticism) in animals

What are the flaws of the “Big Five” approach to personality?

• Derives from the lexical approach which may be flawed

• The “questionnaire approach” does not assume that all important personality variation is captured by single adjectives

• Uses personality test items to derive basic factors

• Begins with statements and questions that can be asked on a daily basis, not necessarily targeted towards analysing personality traits through language

What role did Hans Eysenck have in refining the “Big Five” approach?

• Major supporter of the model

• Developed a two-factor model with extraversion and neuroticism

• Later proposed a third factor - Psychoticism (the risk that individuals have of developing psychological disorders and suggested it has a link to different brain functions)

• Proposed biological foundations for these factors

How did Eysenck incorporate Hippocrates principles of personality into a new theory?

• Suggested that the human body is made up of different parts: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile which all constitute human health

• Health is the state in which these substances are the correct proportion to each other in strength and quantity

• Certain kinds of temperament

• An imbalance among different fluids can exist (e.g. melancholia = black bile = neurotic introvert)

What was Mischel (1968) study on whether individual differences remain consistent and consequent critique of traits?

• Behaviour expressing a trait in different situations often correlates weakly

• The situation is the main determinant of behaviour

• Traits are weak predictors of behaviour (not consistent across different contexts)

• Personality tests must lack validity

• Proposed ‘situationism’ where traits are highly context-dependent

How did Hartshorne & May (1928) support the idea that behaviour is inconsistent across contexts?

• Studied deceit in children by giving thousands of 10 to 13 year old children behavioural tests of dishonesty to test if they would lie, cheat or steal

• Dishonesty was displayed inconsistently across the tests (average correlation between tests = 0.26)

What were the responses to Mischel’s critique?

• ‘Weak’ correlations still matter

• Consistency is greater for behavioural patterns than for single behaviours (we care more about whether behaviour is considered routine or odd for an individual)

• Situational influences are just as weak as dispositional influences

• We need an interactionist view that recognises traits, situations and their combined effects

What is a good way to think about inconsistency in behaviour?

• We can all behave in a versatile, context-specific way but mean differences between people also exist which are what we consider as traits

• Each person has a distribution of behaviours along a trait dimension, from high to low

• People who are higher on a particular trait just engage in that particular trait-related behaviour more often compared to those without that trait

How was the universality of the “Big Five” assessed?

• English language personality tests were translated

• Multiple tests across many translations of the NEO-PI-R test of the 5 factors suggest strong consistency

• Some evidence of minor differences of content (e.g. Extraversion and Agreeableness better described as Dominance & Love in Filipino, Korean and Japanese cultures)

• However, there is a supposed flaw with structurally embedding this 5 factor model into these cultures

How can Indigenous personality systems be assessed?

• Among several European languages, there is strong congruence for most Big Five factors except Openness to Experience

• Occasionally apparent culture-specific factors emerge

• 6900 person-descriptive terms extracted from a Filipino dictionary, reduced to 1297 by expert judges

• Factor analyses of ratings yield 7 dimensions

• There is family resemblance to the 5-factor model but no exact similarities which suggests that the model is only somewhat universal

Is personality a matter of traits or types?

• Traits vary by degrees (they are dimensions or different dichotomies)

• ‘Type’ concept proposed by Carl Jung which is common in popular psychology (e.g. MBTI)

What is a type?

Suggests that there are different sub-populations within the wide population that differ by a certain trait of interest (may be better described as a dimension because not every individual will be one or the other)

What research has been conducted on personality types?

• Statistical methods exist for comparing typological and dimensional models of psychological variables

• No persuasive evidence for any personality types (including MBTI)

• Therefore, we can assume that traits are dimensional (not discrete)

Are traits enough to describe personality?

• Traits are behavioural dispositions

• Other aspects of personality might not be reducible to such behavioural tendencies (values, interests, character strengths)

What are values?

• Broad concepts or beliefs about desirable end states or behaviours that guide life choices or evaluation of specific behaviours and events (helps you decide what is good and bad and interpret your overall life experience)

• Cognitive, linked to motives and desires, intrinsically desirable and learned

• A model of 10 value types developed by Schwartz, replicated in approximately 60 countries

What is the Schwartz value circle?

• Emphasises that values do not always correspond to behaviour

• Two main dimensions of human values

  • Self-enhancing - you value your own authority, power and success vs Self-transcendence - primarily focused on others and human rights

  • Conservation - maintaining traditions and cultures

  • Openness to change

• All values can be blends of these different dimensions

What does ‘positive psychology’ aim to study and promote?

• Human character strengths (merges values and traits)

• Created in opposition to traditional focus on abnormality and conflict

• The VIA taxonomy aims to classify character strengths that are:

  • Environmentally shaped

  • Contribute to fulfilment in life

  • Valued in their own right

  • Do not diminish anyone in society when exercised

• All desirable and contributed positively to overall life satisfaction

How can personality be described?

• Can be described using many alternative units beyond traits

  • Motives, needs, goals

  • Schemas, personal constructs, interests

• Traits may not be able to describe everything related to personality on their own but they are a simple place to start (provide us with a good but decontextualised introductory glimpse into who someone is)

What are McAdams’ personality levels?

• Dispositional traits

• Characteristic adaptations

• Life stories

• Different categories that present different personality traits - level, examples, nature, depth and time to perceive

What was Comte’s ‘hierarchy of sciences’?

Sociology > psychology > biology > chemistry > physics > mathematics (increasing in complexity as you move up and increasing in generality as you move down)

What was Comte’s reasoning behind the ‘hierarchy of sciences’?

• Each layer of science builds upon the other as you go up

• Generalisable across different culture and social contexts as you move down and then becomes more specific as you move up

• Explanatory reduction - explaining one level of science using the one below it (e.g. psychological phenomena explained using biological and chemical processes)

What can biological approaches to personality be described as?

Explanations of the biological basis of personality operate at several levels, from “distal” (further away from the concept you are explaining - e.g. explaining personality using the concept of genes and DNA) to “proximal”

What was the reasoning behind believing personality is genetically inherited?

• DNA as the source of our similarities and differences

  • 20,000 protein-coding genes

  • Approximately 3 billion DNA base pairs

  • Most DNA is shared between people (i.e. 99.6% is identical between any two people)

What do family studies suggest about the heritability of personality?

• Examining resemblance between family members as a function of genetic relatedness

• Greater resemblance for closer relations implies genetic contribution

• Genetic contributions are confounded with shared environmental contributions (nature AND nurture)

• Immediate family tend to share both genetic and environmental factors which makes it more difficult to build an association between genetics and personality

What do twin studies suggest about the heritability of personality?

• Examining resemblance between monozygotic twins (100% related) and dizygotic twins (50% related)

• Greater resemblance for MZ twins implies there is a genetic contribution

• Environments are equally similar for both twins so environmental factors not confounded (unlike in family studies)

• Possibility of more similar environments for MZ twins and twins are not representative of the wider population

What do adoption studies suggest about the heritability of personality?

• Examining resemblance of adopted children to adoptive parents (0% related but provide environment for the child) and biological parents (50% related)

• Degree of resemblance to APs and BPs shows that there are both environmental and genetic contributions

  • Adoption must occur early for the study’s results to be valid as the biological mother provides the prenatal environment as well as genes (environmental influence during gestation)

How can variance components be used to determine the influence of genetics and the environment?

• Certain degree of resemblance from genes and the environment using hypothetical sibling correlations

• Can estimate the size of biological and environmental influence in different environments (e.g. MZ twins reared together - 0.4 genetics correlation and 0.3 environmental correlation)

How does behavioural genetic estimate heritability?

• Heritability = proportion of variance in the trait accounted for by genes

• Most personality attributes show heritability from 0.3 to 0.5

• True for apparently purely learned attributes (e.g. vocational interests, political attitudes etc) despite being learned, still grounded in some type of genetic source

What are some important caveats about the correlation between heritability and personality?

• Substantial heritability of personality does not mean that parents and children are always similar in their personality traits (40% on average but not the only factor involved in shaping personality)

• Heritability = variation within a population and does not suggest anything about genetic contribution to personality

• Heritability does not imply that personality remains fixed over time

• Substantial heritability can coexist with substantial environmental contributions to personality

What role does the environment play in shaping personality?

• ‘Shared’ environmental influences tend to be weak (e.g. parental education, neighbourhood, physical environment etc)

• ‘Non-shared’ environmental influences tend to be much stronger (e.g. illnesses, friend groups etc)

• Environmental factors themselves can be genetically influenced (e.g. susceptibility to certain life events)

Are there specific personality-related genes?

• Heritability suggests that there are no specific genes for personality

• Several specific genes have been identified in candidate gene studies but do not replicate (e.g. novelty-seeking & dopamine sensitivity)

  • Greater dopamine = greater desire to seek out new and exciting experiences

• Few replicable personality genes

• Most traits are influenced by hundreds of genes, each with a very small effect

• No fewer than 190 genes affecting neuroticism from adding together smaller, individual influences to make a bell curve

What was Eysenck’s theory about the influence of brain functioning on personality?

• Extraversion and low cortical arousal - leads to desire for stimulation and/or novel experiences (brain is more prone to boredom and seeks out stimulation)

• Neuroticism and limbic system reactivity - leads to greater autonomic NS and arousal to threat and stress (more susceptible)

What was Gray’s theory about the influence of brain functioning on personality?

• Behavioural activation system (BAS) - links to sensitivity to reward and pleasure (e.g. hope, elation, extraversion etc)

• Behavioural inhibition system (BIS) - links sensitivity to punishment and pain (e.g. fear, anxiety, avoidance, neuroticism etc)

What does it mean if someone has a strong BAS?

They are very attracted to good things and the prospect of these good things become strong motivation to seek out new experiences that may lead to those goods things

What does it mean if someone has a strong BIS?

Their motivation towards choosing different experiences comes from avoiding bad things rather than being attracted to good things

Is there a link between brain functioning and personality?

• Some links founds between the “Big 5” and size (volume) of different brain structures

• Extraversion - region involved in processing reward information

• Agreeableness - region that processes information about other people’s intentions and mental states

• Recent meta-analysis questioned the validity of these links - more promising direction is exploring patterns of functional activity and connectivity in the brain

What is the link between neural activity patterns and neuroticism?

• Associated with high resting activity of the amygdala

• Greater neural response to errors in dorsal anterior cingulate cortex

• Greater wave height in response to novel and exciting experiences = greater neuroticism

What is the link between neural activity patterns and extraversion?

Greater neural response to experiences of reward in frontal brain regions

What is the link between different brain chemicals (hormones) and personality?

• Personality factors may be associated with neurotransmitter activity in the brain

• Extraversion and dopamine levels (e.g. incentive motivation)

• Neuroticism and norepinephrine levels (e.g. negative emotion)

• Agreeableness and opioids (e.g. attachment processes)

• Constraint and serotonin levels (e.g. inhibition of emotional response)

What is the link between hormonal factors and personality?

• Evidence that personality is influenced by prenatal exposure to sex hormones

• Rule of index finger: ring finger (2D:4D) is associated with testosterone exposure (based on the length of finger)

• Lower ratio in men than women (especially on right hand)

What does a lower 2D:4D ratio correlate with among men?

• Physical aggression

• More stereotypically ‘masculine’ career interests

• Less stereotypically ‘feminine’ gender role

What does a lower 2D:4D ratio correlate with among women?

• More indirect aggression (spreading rumours, malicious humour etc)

• More stereotypically ‘masculine’ career interests

What did the Benderlioglu & Nelson (2004) study find about the link between a lower 2D:4D ratio among women to reactive aggression?

• Participants asked to raise money for a fictitious charity by making calls

• Calls went to kind but non-donating or hostile confederates

• Hostility assessed by how hard phone was put down and by tone of follow-up letter

• Women with lower 2D:4D ratio were more hostile (measured behaviourally)

What are the cognitive explanations for personality?

• Explanations for personality with reference to cognitive processes and structures (e.g. thoughts, plans, beliefs etc)

• Views personality as a bundle of processes, rather than a combination of individual traits that change across time that we use to actively make sense of our experiences

• Focuses on ways of thinking and the construction of meaning

  • Having vs doing

  • People as active sense-makers

  • Emphasis on ‘experience-near’ phenomena

  • Motivation to understand predict

  • Person-as-scientist model

What is cognition?

The way the mind manipulates information similar to a computer system

Is there a cognitive theory for personality?

• No single cognitive theory

• 4 different types of cognition

  • Perceiving (personal constructs)

  • Explaining (attributional style)

  • Thinking (emotional intelligence)

  • Representing (the self)

What did George Kelly propose about personal constructs?

• Humans are primarily driven to understand, predict and control their environment

• We develop ‘theories’ to do so

• ‘Personal’ because they are unique to us as individuals

• We ‘construct’ a sense of the world from these theories

• We use them to ‘construe’ the world through our eyes

How did George Kelly use personal constructs to explain personality?

• Human cognition is contrastive (e.g. warm vs cold, honest vs dishonest etc)

• Each person has a set of constructs they use to perceive the world and give meaning to our experiences

• System of constructs = personality

• Radical approach - focuses on perception vs behaviour and emphasises the uniqueness of constructs to each individual to allow each individual to be understood on their own terms as unique individuals without broadly categorising them through frameworks such as the “Big Five”

How is ‘The Repertory Grid’ used as a way to describe personality?

Comparing two of the closest people in your life with a third person construct to spontaneously distinguish between different people and measure personality as an individual construct

What are construct systems?

Can be analysed in many ways to generate a ‘map’ of the individual’s construct system (seeing everyone in your world in terms of distinctions in personality)

• Simplicity vs complexity

• Rigidity

• Internal conflict

What are attributions?

• How we explain the world

• People aim to determine the causes of different events and experiences

• Differ on several dimensions

  • Internal vs external (the situation vs the person)

  • Stable vs unstable (lasting vs transient)

  • Global vs specific (broad vs narrow)

• Causes can vary along these dimensions

What are attributional styles?

• Individual differences in the attributions people make

• Focuses on explanations for negative events

• ‘Pessimism’ is the disposition to explain such events with Internal, Stable and Global causes (sense of pessimism differs from the standard sense)

• Pessimists may also explain positive events through External, Unstable and Specific causes

• Both pessimism and optimism may be considered irrational at times

• Attributions to external events can sometimes help improve mood compared to internal attributions

• Can predict many phenomena (e.g. poorer academic performance, shorter life span from attributing failure to internal causes and interfering with resilience)

What is an example of attributional styles?

• Internal = low-self esteem

• Stable = hopelessness

• Global = helplessness (generalising the effect of this one event to other parts of life)

What is emotional intelligence (EI)?

Being able to navigate and solve problems involving social skills or emotional reasoning (recent extension of the intelligence concept beyond academic-related cognitive abilities)