Intro to Personality Psychology

Gordon Allport emphasized the importance of taking an ______ approach to studying human nature (the uniqueness of the individual), rather than _______ approach (lawfulness across persons).

Idiographic, nomothetic

Who proposed the famous equation suggesting that human behavior is a joint function of the person & the environment, B = f(P, E)?

Kurt Lewin

What did Mischel (1968) argue was the largest possible correlation any study might find between a personality trait (e.g., score on a self-report survey of extraversion) and people’s behavior?

.30

Multiple meta-analyses, which have aggregated across the results of tens of thousands of studies in social and personality psychology, have shown that the average correlation found in BOTH social psychology and personality psychology is equal to approximately which of the following?

.30

What term is used to describe the extent to which we can find the same pattern of results in an independent sample?

Replicability

Which subfield of psychology tends to perform best with respect to the term described in the previous question?

Personality Psychology

According to the Self-Other Knowledge Asymmetry Model, people tend to be less accurate in judging personality traits that are less _____ (e.g., neuroticism, self-esteem) and tend to be more accurate (in terms of predicting outcomes like job performance and academic achievement) in judging traits that are highly ______ in nature (e.g., charm, irritability, likeability)

Observable, evaluative

People who are (higher/lower) in agreeableness are generally more accurate in making personality judgments.

Higher

People who are (higher/lower) in neuroticism (i.e., specifically, the anxiety facet) are generally more accurate in making personality judgments

Higher

People who score (higher/lower) on cognitive ability tests (e.g., ACT, SAT) are generally more accurate in making personality judgments.

Higher

Women tend to be (more/less) accurate in making personality judgments than men due to socialization effects.

More

In the room study which two of the big five traits were most accurate in guessing? What clues were used?

Openness and Conscientiousness, clues of books and organization

In the room study which two of the big five traits were most inaccurate in guessing? What clues were used?

Neuroticism and Agreeableness, clues of messiness and decorations

o   In Study 1, Gosling et al. (2002) found that when people had less _____ information available to them, they were more likely to apply stereotypes in making judgments about occupants’ personalities.

Individuating

What is the purpose of random assignment in experimental designs? What does it allow you to conclude?

It eliminates confounds and allows for conclusions ensuring that the observed effects are due to the independent variable and not other factors.

What is an example of a positive correlation?

Higher levels of exercise are associated with higher levels of cardiovascular health

What is an example of a negative correlation?

Higher stress levels are associated with lower sleep quality

In order to separate out the variance attributable to people’s “true” standing on latent factor versus error variance (i.e., measurement error) in a Structural Equation Model (SEM), you need at least how many items?

Three

In what kinds of studies or research designs do personality psychologists generally want to prioritize minimizing participant burden, over capturing greater detail or specific facets of personality?

In large-scale surveys and studies over long periods of time

Trait scores based on BFI/BFI-2 are ____ correlated, r = _____ with trait scores of NEO/FFM tradition, but the BFI/BFI-2 and NEO/FFM traditions have ______ (the same/different) facet structures.

Highly, .90, different

Schwaba and colleagues (2019) assessed N = 497 students at UC Berkeley the first week of college, fourth year of college and 24 years later and found results that highlight the value of assessing personality at the ____ level.

Facet

______ was more highly associated with academic engagement than other facets of openness

Intellect

______ predicted exploratory, nontraditional career trajectories (e.g. more jobs, more financial difficulties, fewer work hours per week), whereas _________ predicted relatively stable, traditional trajectories (e.g. fewer jobs, caring more about salary and job prestige).

Openness to experience, Conscientiousness

The _________ frames personality as a system of goal-directed, self-regulating mechanisms and proposes that the Big Five are nested under two higher-order factors or meta-traits: ______ and ______.

Cybernetic Big Five Model, Stability, Plasticity

What is Stability? What traits fall under this meta trait?

A meta-trait that functions to protect goals, interpretations, and strategies against disruptions from impulses; Conscientiousness, agreeableness, and emotional stability/low neuroticism.

What is Plasticity? What traits fall under this meta trait?

A meta-trait that promotes exploration, creation of new goals, interpretations, and strategies; Extraversion and openness

Plasticity is believed to be linked to the (dopaminergic/serotonergic) system, and Stability is believed to be linked to (dopaminergic/serotonergic) system.

Dopaminergic, Serotonergic

Participants high in ________ are more sensitive to rewarding properties of drugs that increase ________ function; respond with greater energy and positive affect in response to stimuli previously paired with drug experience, relative to neutral stimuli and more ________ individuals

Extraversion, dopaminergic, introvered

Which of the Big Five traits show the greatest change in response to taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), a kind of antidepressants?

Neuroticism

Research suggests that neuroticism is connected to the ______ axis that controls the body’s “fight-or-flight” response, and higher levels of neuroticism are associated with higher levels of the hormone _____.

HPA, Cortisol

What is the epic approach?

Researchers transport existing personality models or measures into new cultural contexts to test their universality or cross-cultural equivalence.

What is the emic approach?

Researchers draw on native languages and cultural informants to identify personality constructs

Which of the Big Five traits tends to perform the worst cross-culturally, or is the least likely to be found across languages and cultures?

Openness

What are the Cross-Cultural Big Two?

Social Self-Regulation, Dynamism

Perhaps the strongest criticism of the HEXACO model of personality is that the “H” factor, or ______ tends to show a _______ correlation with which other trait _____?

Honesty-Humility, Negative, Agreeableness

The HEXACO model does show good performance in predicting _______ which is one of the reasons it is more popular in industrial-organizational psychology. What are some examples?

Deviance, stealing and altering clock in hours

What are the advantages and disadvantages of neuroticism?

Heightened threat detection, increased stress and anxiety

What are the advantages and disadvantages of extraversion?

Social bonding, higher risk taking

What are the advantages and disadvantages of agreeableness?

Cooperation, risk of exploitation

What does it mean if a trait/phenotype is 35% heritable?

35% of the variance of that trait is explained by genetic differences in a given population

A heritability estimate of 50% means that, if a person’s biological parent has a trait (e.g., brown eyes), that person has a 50% chance of also having that trait. (True/False)

False

Genetic contributions to personality traits (e.g., heritability estimates of personality traits) tend to ______ (increase/decrease) across the lifespan.

Increase

Shared environmental factors generally account for minimal proportions of the variance in personality traits (True/False). What are some examples?

True, Family economic status, religion

In the ACE twin model, why are the A factors correlated at 1.00 for MZ twins and .50 for DZ twins?

MZ twins share all genes while DZ share only half.

Why are the C factors correlated at 1.00, but the E factors are uncorrelated?

C factors are the shared gene environment (what makes siblings similar), E factors are non shared gene environment (what makes siblings different).

______ arise when people actively seek out environments that are compatible with their genotype (“niche picking”; e.g., pursuing a major and career that aligns with one’s interests).

Active Gene Environment Correlations

______ arise when how the environment reacts or responds to a person is shaped by their disposition/genotype (e.g., teacher reacting harshly to child with disagreeable disposition).

Evocative Gene Environment Correlation

The contributions of genetic factors to cognitive ability (e.g., heritability estimates) is _____ (higher/lower), on average, among people whose socioeconomic status (SES) falls towards the lower end of socioeconomic spectra. Why is this the case? ________

Lower, due to environmental constraints like limited access to education

What is Falconer’s Formula?

2(X-Y)

Why are findings of candidate gene studies not trustworthy?

They rely on small sample sizes and don’t replicate well. Polygenic means that traits are influenced by many genes.

What are the three criteria for causal influence?

Covariation - x and y must be related

Temporal Precedence - X must come before Y

Elimination of Confounds - No third variable explaining the relationship

What is an example of a spurious correlation that can be explained by a confound?

Ice cream sales and drowning deaths both increase in the summer. (Confound=hot weather). Ice cream is not causing the deaths.

What are the limitations of the MBTI?

Lack of predictive validity, assume dichotomous traits, and has poor test-retest reliability.