Personality Psychology Lecture Notes

These flashcards cover key concepts and definitions related to personality psychology as discussed in the lecture notes.

What is personality?

The set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that is organized and relatively enduring and that influences interactions with, and adaptations to, the environment.

What is personality NOT?

Specific attitudes, likes, and dislikes; morals, values, and beliefs; abilities; physical characteristics; social categories.

Define human nature in the context of personality research.

How we are like all others.

What do individual and group differences refer to in personality?

How we are like some others.

Explain individual uniqueness in personality.

How we are like no others.

What are the components of descriptive research in personality assessment?

Self-Reports, Observer-Reports, Test-Data, Life History.

What is explanatory research in personality?

Research used to discover relationships between traits or between personality and other phenomena.

Name the two types of research methods under explanatory research.

Experimental Methods (true experiments, quasi-experiments) and Correlational Studies.

What is reliability in the context of personality assessment?

The degree to which an assessment yields consistent results over time.

Define the Lexical Approach to traits.

Suggests that all important individual differences have become encoded within language over time.

What is the Statistical Approach to identifying traits?

Uses factor analysis to identify groups of items that covary.

Describe the Theoretical Approach to traits.

Starts with a theoretical framework to determine which traits are important to study.

What are Eysenck's three main personality traits?

Extraversion, Neuroticism, Psychoticism.

What are the 'Big Two' traits in the Wiggins Circumplex model?

Agency and Communion.

List the five traits in the Five-Factor Model of Personality.

Extraversion, Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Openness to Experience.

Identify the key characteristics of the Dark Tetrad.

Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Subclinical Psychopathy, Dispositional Sadism.

What does the term situational specificity refer to?

Certain situations can provoke behavior that is out of character for an individual.

Define strong situations.

Situations that prompt similar behavior from everyone.

What is meant by weak situations?

Ambiguous or weakly effective situations where personality has a stronger influence on behavior.

Explain the concept of person-environment fit.

Certain environments are more complementary to a person's traits and characteristics.

What is the fundamental attribution error?

The tendency to emphasize internal characteristics of other people when explaining their behavior.

What is heritability?

Proportion of observed variance in a group that can be explained by genetic variance.

Define shared environmental effects.

Family and environmental influences that affect twins or siblings similarly.

What is genotype-environment interaction?

The environment has a different impact depending on an individual's genotype.

Summarize the concept of epigenetics.

The study of changes in organisms caused by changes in gene expression due to environmental influences.

What does the concept of coherence refer to in personality?

Predictable changes in the manifestations of personality over time while the underlying traits remain stable.

Explain the nature-nurture debate in personality.

The question of whether inherited or acquired influences have more impact on behavior.

List the Four evolutionary explanations for maintaining individual differences.

Environmental triggers of differences, frequency-dependent selection of traits, contingencies among traits, optimal variance over time and space.