Chapter 13 - Exam 4

Culture and Psychology

Two main ways culture intersects with personality psychology

* Individuals may differ from each other to some extent because they belong to different cultures
* Members f groups may differ from each other in distinctive ways
* Cross-cultural psychology
* Cultural psychology

Cross - cultural psychology

generally refers to research that compares cultures with one another

Cultural psychology

a branch of psychology that is focused on how our emotions and behaviors are influenced by or rooted in our individual cultures. 

Cross - cultural universals vs specifity

* evidence of both
* culture refers to attributes of groups (mostly psychological attributes)
* Enculturation: Learning your birth culture
* Acculturation: Learning a new culture

Cross - cultural differences are important

Cross - cultural differences and similarities, and the role of culture in psychology is relatively new … and important!

* *How generalizable are our theories and research findings?*
* *Even if these are accurate, how important are they in another culture?*
* Culture can affect how personality is expressed and emotion is experienced
* What does this mean for our theories and what we (think we) know?
* Cross - cultural understanding
* Varieties of human experience

Characteristics of cultures

* Ethic & emic
* Though & easy
* Achievement & affiliation
* Complexity
* Tightness & looseness
* Head versus heart
* Collectivism & individualism
* Honor, face & dignity

Etic vs. Emic

Personality and individual differences have

* Aspects that are the same across cultures
* Aspects particular to a specific culture

This is the assumption underlying cultural comparison

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The universal components of an idea are called etics, and the particular aspects are called emics.

Tough & Easy

Pertains to the variety and number of goals that can be pursued

… And the ease and number of ways of achieving goals

Achievement & Affiliation

* Achievement pertains to motivation improve personal performance and accomplish challenging goals
* Affiliation pertains to motivation to improve social interactions and maintain meaningful relationships

The need to achieve could be assessed by looking at children’s stories (the little engine that could )

Complexity

Based on several variables, such as…

* Interpersonal relationships
* Politics
* Economy
* Architecture
* Industrialization & Technology

Not this simple

* What’s (in)visible to outsiders?

Tightness & looseness

* Based on the amount of deviation from “proper behaviors“ tolerated within the culture
* Tight → Less tolerance for deviation
* Loose → More tolerance for deviation

Head vs Heart

* Strength of head
* Artistic excellence, creativity, curiosity, critical thinking, and learning


* Strengths of the heart
* Fairness, mercy, gratitude, hope, love, and religiously

Collectivism & Individualism

Importance of needs and rights of the group versus the individual versus the individual

* Self and others
* personality and collectivism
* Need for self-regard
* Sociability, emotion, and motivation
* Behavioral consistency
* vertical & horizontal
* Caution

Honor, face, & dignity

* Honor
* face
* dignity



The key idea is that individuals are valuable in their own right and this value does not come from what other people think of them.

Similarities when describing cultures and individuals

* Culture complexity
* Cultural tightness
* Collectivist/individuals

Cultural Complexity

* Cultural complexity is comparable to the characteristic of cognitive complexity
* Cognitive complexity: an individual’s capacity to perceive minor aspects and subtle differences

Cultural Tightness

* Cultural tightness is comparable to the personality trait of conscientiousness
* And the trait of intolerance for ambiguity

Collectivist/Individualist

* The collectivism versus individualism spectrum parallels the allo -centrism versus ideo- centrism spectrum
* Both dimensions pertain to values focused on the importance of the individual versus the group
* Allo - cetrism: the individual is more important than the group
* Ideo - cetrism: The group is more important than the individual

Comparing the same trait across cultures

\*\*Most common approach

* Environmental and sociocultural factors are believed to contribute to variations in development, expression, and maintenance of personality
* Most cross-cultural studies have focused on the Big Five

Different traits for different countries

Different traits for different cultures

* Do traits have the same meaning across cultures?
* The big five are found in more than 50 cultures
* CEA might be only universal traits

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* Create endogenous scales
* Some of the big five traits have emerged
* Factors other than the Big Five that have merged: unselfishness, gentle temper, dependency/fragility, positive valence, negative valence, pleasantness, engagement, interpersonal relatedness

Thinking & Values

Thinking

* To what degree do people from different cultures differently?
* Holistic perception and the self
* May be related to collectivism - individualism

Values

* How can seemingly obvious and basic values vary across cultures?
* The search for universal values
* Seek values that are universal to all cultures
* Implications
* Possible list of 10 universal values

WHY are cultures different? \n \n What determines the specific, distinctive psychology that a particular culture develops?

The Ecological approach

* Older model

Ecology → culture → socialization → personality → behavior
* New model

Challenges for cross cultural personality research

* Ethnocentrism
* Assumptions
* Cultural Relativism
* Subcultures & Multiculturalism

The universal of human condition

* Newer emphasis on how people are psychologically similar
* Differences in rules for appropriate behavior might mask similar motivations and desired behaviors
* Culture may influence how people want to feel more than how they actually feel
* Same desires that manifest differently (ex. to please parents)
* Degree of similarity of persons and situations and seems higher than originally expected

Learning

* Learning based approaches explain personality in terms of the learning process
* Implies everyone should behave the same in the same environment or situation

Behaviorism

Behavior is the direct result of a person’s environment

Direct Observation

The causes of behavior can be directly observed

Functional Analysis

Determining how behavior is a function of one’s environment

Habituation

* Simplest form of behavior change as a result of experience
* **A decrease in responsiveness withe each repeated exposure to something**

Classical Conditioning

A unconditioned response (Feeling itchy) that is naturally elicited by one stimulus (lice) becomes elicited also by a new, conditioned stimulus (the word lice)

US + NS = > CR

Stimulus - response (S-R) conception of personality

Operant Conditioning

Behaviors are learned by the effect of the behavior on the environment

Two main consequences

* Reinforcement
* Punishment

Operant Conditioning

Limitations

* Ignores thinking, motivation, and emotion
* Ignores the social of dimension of learning
* Organism are treated as essentially passive

Social Learning Theory

* Dollard & Miller’s Theory
* Rotter’s Theory
* Bandura’s Theory

Dollard & Miller’s Theory

Aimed to integrate psychoanalytic theory and behaviorism and proposed that a drive is a need that stimulates a behavioral response

Rotter’s Theory

Emphasizes the role of expectancies in determining behavior

* Locus of control - the more motivated you will be to try to make a difference.

Bandura’s Theory

Monkey see, monkey do.

Bandura’s Social Learning Theory

* Self - efficacy
* Learning occurs due to observation and modeling
* Humans learn nearly everything by observation

Motivation

What do you want?

How will you try to get it?

^^**Goals**^^ and ^^**strategies**^^

* Goals drive behavior
* Strategies get you there

People do not always behave consistently with their stated goals

Short - Term & Long - Term Goals

Long - term goals helo organize short - term goals

Short - term goals help achieve long - term goals

Idiographic Goals

Current concerns : Motivations that persist until goal met / dropped

* Personal projects : Efforts put into goals
* Personal Strivings : Long - term goals that organize life

Nomothetic Goals

* Essential motivations that almost everyone pursues
* Broad goals almost all people pursue

Strategies

How do you get what you really, really want?

* Scripts: Basic strategies based on an abstraction of typical patterns
* Broad strategies: Help you organize and pursue important goals

Defensive Pessimism (vs Optimism)

Defensive Pessimism: Assumes the worst, which is motivating

Optimism: Assumes the best will happen, which is motivating

* Some consistency across situations
* Advantages and disadvantages to both strategies
* Optimists tend to be happier, but pessimists might not be happier as optimists

Emotion

A type of procedural knowledge

A set of mental and physical procedures

Core emotions

Happiness , sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust

Circumplex model

* of emotion contrasts the degrees to which emotions are aroused versus unaroused and negative versus positive; another widely used rotation of this model contrasts emotions on the dimensions of excited versus bored and alarmed versus serene.

Emotions Circumplex

Stimuli, Responses & Functions of Emotions

Individual Differences in Emotional Life

* Differences are core aspects of personality
* Emotional experience
* Preference for emotions
* Affect intensity
* Rate of change
* Emotional Intelligence
* Alexithymic - At the low end of the emotional intelligence scale are peo-

ple sometimes characterized as
* Related to emotional expressiveness, quality of personal relationships, levels of optimism and cognitive control

Cognitive - Affective Personality System (CAPS)

The most important aspect of many systems of personality and cognition is their interaction

Belief. emotions, and action tendencies (BEATS)

* Personality emerges form mental representations of BEATS that are relevant to important goals
* People have basic needs that combine to produce emergent needs, from which the final need for self - coherent or meaning in life emerges
* Basic motivations lead to goals: goal create BEATS

Williams James

Me (Epistemological self)

I (Ontological self)

* Theoretically distinct but often confused in practice
* Recent research focuses on the me

Psychological Self (Contents and purposes of the self)

* Influences behavior
* Organizes
* Memories
* Impressions and judgements of others
* knowledge
* Jobs
* Self - regulation
* Information - processing filter
* Help us relate to others
* Identity

Self Knowledge

* Knowledge you have about yourself
* Declarative Knowledge
* Facts you know
* Procedural Knowledge
* Relational self - said to be based on past experiences that direct how we

relate with each of the important people in our live
* Implicit self - self-relevant behavioral patterns are not readily accessible to

consciousness

Declarative Self

* Who you think you are
* Self esteem
* High and low self esteem
* Attempts to increase self-esteem may backfire
* Self - esteem can be too high
* How to legitimately increase self - esteem

Self - Schema

* Who you think you are --- but --- Organized
* Consequences for how you process information
* Not based only on memories of specific events

Self - Reference & Memory

* Long term memory
* Self - reference effect
* Increases accessibility
* Explains why your most meaningful memories stay with you the longest
* Depends on culture

Self - Efficacy

* Self - schema helps you set limits for what you attempt to do

“YOU CAN DO IT“

That person that you are…

…Is that the only person that you are or could be?

Possible Selves

* Images and ideas we have or can create of the other selves we could be
* Possible future selves may affect goals
* Evidence that it affects mate preferences
* Want future selves that fulfill the needs for self-esteem, competence, and meaning
* People want to fulfill needs for similar future selves.

Self - Discrepancy Theory

* Interactions between our possible selves and the actual selves and the actual determine your feelings about life
* Ideal self
* Discrepancy leads to depression
* Ought self
* Discrepancy leads to anxiety

Procedural Self

* Not conscious and not possible to explain to others
* Learned by doing and watching others
* Relational selves
* Relational self-schema
* Deeply ingrained and difficult to change

“Your actions define you. Not your words“

Implicit Selves

* Includes the relational self
* Has been measure with the Implicit Association Test (IAT)
* Implicit self - esteem
* High implicit self - esteem: respond more quickly when “me“ and “good” are paired than when “me“ and “bad“ are paired
* Predicts responses to success and failure
* Only weakly related to declarative self-esteem
* Implications for narcissism
* Implicit shyness
* Implication

Changing the self

* Practice and feedback
* psychotherapy
* Life events
* time
* fake it

Relationships Deal - Makers

* Deal - makers: traits that promote good relationships
* Extraversion and agreeableness
* Being liked is associated with being high on communal traits
* Number of friends and degree of agreement or conflict
* Success in relationships and at speed dating

Relationships Deal-Breakers

* Deal-breakers: Traits that prevent or undermine relationships
* Inverse of traits for deal-makers
* Untrustworthy and anger issues
* Dispositional contempt
* Rejection sensitivity

Sexual Relationships

* Mating behavior
* Mate selection & attraction
* Mating startegies
* Jealousy

Attraction

All - Want the highest likelihood of healthy offsprings who will survive and reproduce

Women - Place higher value on economic security and prefer older mates

Men - Place higher value on physical attractiveness and prefer younger mates

\*\* Attraction is influenced by more than physical characteristics

\*\* Culture matters

Matting Strategies

* Differences between men and women explained in terms of reproductive success
* Some similarities

Jealousy

* Gender difference in the experience of jealousy
* Sexy son hypothesis - This hypothesis proposes that a few women

consistently—and many women occasionally—follow an atypical reproductive strategy

Sociasexuality

* Men are generally higher than women
* Implications of high versus low levels

Sexual Orientation

* 1950s survey
* Homosexuality was listed as a mental disorder until the 1970s
* Problems
* An explanation of the origin of homosexuality is not empirically well established or widely accepted

Romantic Orientation

* Much less studied than sexual orientation
* Often conflated with sexual orientation (split attraction model)
* Implications of distinction between the two largely unknown

Attachment Theory

Patterns of relationships with others are consistently repeated with different partners throughout life

Love & Attachment - **John Bowlby**

* Saw attachment as the basis of love
* Based on evolutionary theory
* Desire for protection leads to attachments
* Working models of others and working models of the self are based on childhood experiences
* Children learn lessons from early experiences with adult caregivers

Love & Attachment - **Mary Ainsworth**

* Developed the strange situation task
* Three types of attachment
* Anxious - ambivalent: caregivers are inconsistent or chaotic
* Avoidant: Caregivers rebuff attempts for contact and reassurance
* Insecure
* Secure attachment: Have a confident faith in self and caregivers
* Self-fulfilling nature

Love & Attachment

* Attachment patterns are self - fulfilling
* Change is difficult but not impossible
* Even people with secure attachments can have relationship problems
* Moving to two dimensions: anxiety and avoidance
* Evidence of unconscious priming of attachment figures

Conscientiousness & Job Performance

* Predictive validity of supervisor ratings = .41 or .70 percent accuracy
* Predictive validity of absenteeism = .33 or 67 percent accuracy
* **Predicts all criteria for all occupations**
* Related to citizenship performance
* Related to success of ones spouse
* use to alleviate bias in testing

Leadership & Management

* Get people to do things with persuasion, counseling, and suggestion
* Predictors of management performance: emotional stability, consciousness, extraversion, openness
* Dark triad - leadership styles are selfish, impulsive, exploitative, and toxic

Occupational Choice

* Hierarchy of needs: Employee motivation
* Personality - job fit: Find the best niche for your personality
* Holland’s six types realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, conventional

Behaviors and success in relationships and careers are affected by personality

and are critically important for how life turns out

Personality Disorders

Configurations of personality traits, characteristics, and styles that are

* socially undesirable
* extreme
* and cause dysfunction

There is not an exact point that differentiates between normals and disorder personality

Prevalence: about 15% of American adults

Personality Disorders in the DSM

* First edition: 1952
* Mistake: DSM-III
* Controversy
* Current edition: DSM-5-tr IN 2022
* Two systems for personality disorders
* Purposes
* Make diagnosis more objective
* Insurance billing

Defining Personality Disorders

* Usually (more) extreme personality attributes
* In terms of context (ex. cultural)
* Distortions of reality
* Problematic
* Cause of functional impairment for the individual
* Can cause issues for others
* Interpersonal in nature
* Relatively stable over time
* Just like personality
* Often ego-syntonic (Not all PD’s)
* Symptoms can be seen as normal and valued aspects of personality by the individual
* Can think others are the ones with the problem

Major personality disorders (OLD)

Old (but still used) system

* 10 major disorders in three clusters
* Cluster A: odd and eccentric patterns of thinking
* Cluster B: impulsive and erratic pattens of behavior
* Cluster C: anxious and avoidant emotional styles

Major personality disorders (NEW)

New (better but not perfect) system

* Alternative DSM - 5 Model for personality disorders (AMPD)
* Criterion A: Personality Functioning Impairment
* Criterion B: Maladaptive Traits
* Six specific personality disorders
* Four were deleted
* Politics and money involved
* Meh

Other Systems & Frameworks

* ICD - 11’s chapter on personality disorders and related traits
* Like the DSM’s AMPD but traits are optional
* Model from Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual - 2 (PDM-2)
* Big Five / Trait Model
* Personality disorders are extreme, maladaptive variants of normal personality traits

Personality Disorders

* Paranoid PD
* Schizoid PD
* Schizotypal PD
* Antisocial PD
* Borderline PD
* Histrionic PD
* Narcissistic PD

Paranoid PD

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* Distrust and suspiciousness that involves interpreting the motives of others are malevolent

Schizoid PD

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* Detachment from social relationships and restricted range of emotional expression in interpersonal settings
* Core belief that dependency and love are dangerous, and the social world is impinging and engulfing

Schizotypal PD

* Social and interpersonal deficits involving acute discomfort with and reduced capacity for close relationships, distortions in cognition and perception, and eccentricities in behavior

Antisocial PD

* Disregard for and violation of the rights of others since age 15
* Core belief that they can do whatever they want because everyone is selfish, manipulative, dishonorable, or weak

Borderline PD

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* Instability in interpersonal relationships, self - image, and effects
* Core belief of not knowing who they are and that others are one-dimensional and defined by their effects on the individual

Histrionic PD

* Excessive emotionality and attention seeking
* Core belief that the world is best understood in terms of gender (power) and gender conflicts, and there is something problematic with their gender (weak) and its meaning

Narcissistic PD

* Grandiosity, a need for admiration, and lack of empathy
* Core belief that they need to be perfect to feel OK, and the more they have the better they’ll feel (about themselves)

Avoidant PD

* Social inhibition, feelings of inadequacy, and hypersensitivity to negative evaluation
* Core belief that they’re in constant danger they must elude and others are sources of extreme danger or protection

Dependent PD

* Excessive need to be taken care of that leads to submissive and clinging behavior and fear of separation
* Core belief that they’re inadequate and others are powerful, and they need their care

Obsessive - compulsive PD

* Preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism, and mental and interpersonal control that severely limits flexibility, openness, and efficiency
* Core belief that most feelings are dangerous and must be controlled, and others are less precise or not in control