Personality Psychology

What is the history of personality?

Personality has different definitions over the years, being defined as being human, a person or a character.

What did Theophrastus question?

Why do we have different personalities within the same environment

What characterised Theophratus’ character types?

Being very dramatic

What is the obnoxious man?

A description of someone with a personality outside of social norms

What is personality?

Personality is the study of individual differences outside of social norms.

What is personality linked to?

The rise of Western individualism

What are the features of personality traits?

Individual differences that are psychological, not intellectual, enduring and broad patterns that can predict behaviour.

What traits are not a part of personality?

Physical appearance, intellectualism, transient mood and context-specific habits are not a part of personality

What is the definition of personality?

The enduring, relatively broad psychological differences between people, excluding their cognitive abilities

What does personality help shape?

personal identity and self-concept, social communication and gossip, person perception and stereotypes

What occurs when a person is asked to describe themselves

Personality characteristics are mainly referred to

What did Dunbar argue about personality?

Human intelligence morphologically evolved to handle complex social interactions, and that social communication aims to learn about each other's personalities

What is person perception?

The judgement of other's personalities

What processes occur in person perception?

dispositional inference (attributing a person's behaviour to their personality) and correspondence bias (overemphasis of personality characteristics on behaviour).

What are stereotypes?

personality traits associated with social groups

What dimensions are personality traits measured on?

competence and warmth

What is personality psychology dedicated to?

understanding the whole person and their variation

What are the similarities between clinical and personality psychology?

They recognise internal mechanisms that occur in individuals

What are the differences between clinical and personality psychology?

Personality psychology focuses on everyday internal mechanisms

What is personality psychology’s triple focus?

human nature, systematic variation and personal uniqueness

What do systematic descriptions of personality require?

a unit and classification system

What is the descriptive unit for personality?

A trait

What is a trait?

A consistent pattern of behaviour, thinking or feeling. It is characterised by stability, situational consistency, individual variation and innateness

How do traits vary?

in terms of broadness, narrowness and how they contribute to specific illustrative behaviours.

What are levels of traits?

high, mid and low

What dimensions are traits measured on?

external and internal hardness and external/internal softness.

What is the lexical approach to traits

We can describe personality based in language

What did Allport and Odbert identify?

18,000/550,000 words that described differences between people.

How did Cattell reduce 4503 words to 16 in describing personality?

sorting them into synonyms and acronyms through factor analysis.

What are Cattell’s 16 factors?

the basic dimensions of personality for different traits.

How and why did Fiske reduce 16 factors to dive

 factor analysis to ensure the dimensions of personality were independent to each other and non-correlated

What are the five basic factors of personality?

openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism

In terms of continuums how can personality be described?

Personality is the individual position on each of the Big 5 continuums

What is extraversion?

the activeness within interpersonal interaction

What is agreeableness?

the degree of friendliness in interpersonal interactions.

What is conscientiousness? 

the degree of personal preparedness

What is neuroticism?

proneness in experiencing negative emotions

What is openness to experience?

the degree of curiosity and imagination one has.

What are facets of factors?

Different correlating traits within each of the factors

What is the value of the big 5?

The big five factors can be used to assess personality, investigate personality correlates and explain behaviours through personality. They also provide a framework for mapping specific personality traits.

What are correlates of the big 5?

Behaviour that act as indicators of the traits

What trait is present in lecture theatre seating?

more conscientious people sit closer to the front

Where else has the Big 5 factors been evidenced?

cross culturally and within other species

How is the Big 5 challenged?

Through the questionnaire approach, where the assumption of adjectives being able to describe personality variation does not occur. This occurs through asking discrete personality questions.

What was Eysenck’s approach to personality?

He was a supporter of the Questionnaire approach.

What did Eysenck develop?

 the two-factor model of extraversion and neuroticism, which later introduced psychoticism

What did Eysenck propose?

Biological foundations for these factors through Hippocratic theory: personality is a manifestation of bodily fluids.

What are limitations of trait psychology?

the challenging of trait consistency, universal trait structure, the distinction between traits and types and if traits are enough to describe personality.

How is the consistency of traits measured?

 through consistency of behaviour

What did Michel propose?

the association between traits and behaviour in different situations is weak.

What were the findings of Hartshorne and May?

dishonesty was displayed inconsistently within different contexts, supporting the proposal of trait and behaviour association being weak.

Why did people critique Mischel?

weak correlations still mattering in practical behaviour, consistency for behavioural patterns being more important than specific behaviours, situational influences being as weak as dispositional influences

What is an interactionist view of personality?

recognising the combined effects of traits and situation on personality

How is inconsistency in personality analysed?

measuring the frequency of behaviours with a certain degree of a factor and the degree that a given behaviour aligns with an extreme factor

What is inconsistency in personality explained?

People have a distribution of behaviours along a trait dimension, in which people high on a trait just engage in trait-related behaviour more than others.

What does the big-5 test challenge?

whether they can be translates into other languages for validation

What evidence is there for moderate universality in trait personality?

Evidence for moderate personality include consistency of translations. However, their a minor differences in content based on direct translation.

How do other culture’s lexicons challenge universality?

European languages show high congruency for Big Five Factors except openness. Other culture-specific factors can also emerge. Other cultural personality systems can also elicit more dimensions of personality.

Is personality a matter or traits or types?

Traits vary by degrees in dimensional models.

However, personality has been proposed to occur through types and discrete categorical models. This was proposed by Carl Jung and is common in popular psychology through MBTI tests.

What are types?

a discrete measure of personality based on two opposing categories.

What evidence is there for types?

There is no support for psychological types, traits are assumed to be dimensional.

What are other measures of personality that influence behaviour?

 values, interests and character strengths

What are values?

Concepts and beliefs about behaviours that transcend situations and guide selection and evaluation of behaviour and events.

What are cognitive beliefs?

Those linked to motives, desire and are characteristically intrinsic and learnt.

What are the 10 model types based in?

openness to change, self-transcendence, self-enhancement and conservation

On the Schwartz value wheel, what indicates whether values are compatible?

How close they are to each other

What are vocational interests characterised by?

realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising and conventional

What are character strengths?

Characteristics studied in opposition to abnormality and conflict

What are the features of character strengths? 

 being environmentally shaped, contribute to fulfilment in life, are valued in their own right and do not diminish anyone in society when exercised

What are the character strengths?

wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence

What are the alternate units of personality?

motives, needs, goals, schemas, personal constructs and interests.

What are the levels of personality?

dispositional traits (traits) , characteristic adaptions (goals, values, constructs) and life stories (identities, self-narratives). These increase in nature, depth and time to perceive. 

What is Comte's hierarchy of sciences?

The proposal that sciences vary in hierarchal complexity generality and explanatory reduction.

Complexity reduces

generality

generality reduces

complexity

What is explanatory reduction?

 the ability to explain things at the fundamental level

What levels to biological approaches to personality operate at

Distal to proximal.

Distal causes are

indirect.

Proximal causes are

direct

What are the biological approaches to personality?

genetics, brain functioning, neural systems, neural structures, neural chemicals and hormonal factors

How are genetics used to explain personality?

DNA variation underpins variations in personality

What are family studies?

Studies that examine the resemblance between family members as a function of genetic relatedness.

What do greater resemblance between greater related family members highlight?

Genetic contribution. However this disregards environmental contributions.

What are twin studies?

Studies that compare the resemblance between monozygotic and dizygotic twins.

How related are MZ twins?

100%

How related are DZ twins?

50%

If there is a greater resemblance for MZ twins…

it indicates there is a genetic contribution

What are adoption studies?

Studies that compare the resemblance of adopted children to their adoptive parents and biological parents.

The degree of adopted child resemblance to APs and BPs shows…

environmental and genetic contributions.

What are the limitations of adoption studies?

They must occur early, there is the problem of selective placement, and the biological mother may provide the prenatal environment as well ad the genes.

In understanding variance components…

the relative values of values of genetic and environmental components can be identified.

What do behavioural genetic studies yield?

Estimates of heritability

What is heritability?

 the proportion of variance in the trait accounted for by genes.

Most personality attributes show heritability from…

0.3 - 0.5

What do correlations between genetic and environmental studies show?

Genetic identity does not dictate overall personality

What are the challenges to heritability?

Substantial heritability does not mean parents and children are similar in personality. Heritability relates to variation in a population rather than genetic contribution. It also does not imply that personality is fixed. Substantial heritability can coexist with substantial environmental contributions to personality

What is the effect of environmental influences on personality?

Shared environmental influences are usually weak, whereas non-shared environmental influences are much stronger. Environmental factors can also be genetically influenced.

Are there specific personality related genes?

No, most traits are influenced by hundreds of genes.

What did Eysenck propose about the role of the cortex on extraversion?

Low cortical arousal leads to desire for stimulation and therefore extraversion

What did Eysenck propose about the role of the limbic system on neuroticism?

Neuroticism is linked to increased limbic system reactivity and a greater arousal to threat and stress.