Individual Differences Reading

Individual Differences I

Chapter 10

• Intelligence

  • The ability to use one’s mind to solve novel problems and learn from experience

  • Good indicators of health and financial stability

• Ratio IQ - metric designed by child’s mental age/ physical age *100

• Deviation IQ - adult’s test score/average adult test score *100

• Positive manifold

  • When a person’s performance on a variety of tests are positively correlated

• Two factor theory of intelligence

  • Suggests a person’s performance on tests are due a combination of different general cognitive abilities AND abilities that are specific to the test

• Crystallized intelligence

  • The ability to apply knowledge that was acquired through experience

• Fluid intelligence

  • The ability to solace and reason about novel problems (generally measured by tests that have abstract problems)

• Theory Based Approach

  • Discovers middle level abilities through observation of the patterns of correlations between performances and tests

• emotional intelligence

  • The ability to reason about emotions and to use emotions to enhance reasoning

• Genetic relatedness

  • Family members may have similar levels of intelligence based genes or because of shared environments

  • Overall genes play an important role in determining intelligence

• Heritability coefficient (h^2)

  • Statistics that describes the proportion of the difference between two or more people’s IQ scores that can be explained by differences in their genes

  • DOESN'T tell us about

• Shared environment

  • Refers to features of the environment that are experience by all relevant members of a household

• Nonshared environment

  • Feature of environment that are not experienced by all people in a household

• The Flynn effect - average IQ score today is rough 30 points higher than it was a century ago

• Social economic status

  • Being raised by wealthier family increases IQ compared to poorer families

• There is wider disparity amongst male IQ than women IQ

• Stereotype threat

  • The anxiety associated with the possibility of confirming other people’s stereotypes about one’s group

• Cognitive Enhancers

  • Drugs that improve the psychological that construct intelligent performance

Individual differences II

Chapter 12

• Personality

  • An individual’s characteristic style of behaving, thinking, and feeling

• Self report

  • When people provide subjective info on their own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors

• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)

  • A well researched clinical questionnaire used to assess personality and psychological problems

• Projective tests

  • Designed to address the limitations of self report tests, such as test takers being inaccurate

  • Reveal inner aspects of personality

  • Rorschach Inkblot Test

    • Example of projective technique to reveal inner thoughts and feelings

    • Uses cards with abstract figures

  • Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

    • Patients use ambiguous pictures of people to make up stories, and these stories are then analyzed to reveal underlying thoughts

• TRAITS

  • Stable dispositions to behave in a particular and consistent way

  • The Big Five (ocean)

    • Openness to experience

    • Conscientiousness - (dis)organized, careful/less, disciplined

    • Extraversion - social, retiring, fun loving, sober

    • Agreeableness - softhearted, ruthless, trusting, suspicious

    • Neuroticism - worried, calm, insecure, secure

  • Behavioral activation system (BAS)

  • Psychodynamic approach

    • Regards personality as formed by needs, striving, and desires largely operating outside of awareness – motives that can produce emotional disorders

    • Id - source of bodily needs, wants, desires, and impulses

    • Ego - componenet of personality, developed through contact with the external world, that enables us to deal with life’s practical demands

    • Superego - the mental system that reflects the the internalization of cultural rules

  • Defense mechanisms

    • Unconscious coping mechanisms that reduce anxiety generated by threats from unacceptable impulses

• Humanistic approach

  • How humans can make healthy choices that create their personalities

  • Self actualizing tendency

    • The human motive toward realizing our inner potential

  • Flow - engagement in tasks that exactly match one’s capabilities

• Existential approach

  • Personality as governed by the an individual’s ongoing choices and decisions in the context of realities about life/death

  • Belief that people live their lives with death in mind, and that this directly impacts their personalities

• Social cognitive approach

  • View personality in terms of how a person thinks about the situations they experience in their daily life

• Person- situation controversy

  • Focuses on whether behavior is caused by personality or by situation factors

• Personal constructs

  • Dimensions people use in making sense of their experiences

• Outcome expectancies

  • A person’s assumptions about the likely consequences of a future behavior

• Locus of control

  • Measure a person’s tendency to perceive the control of rewards as internal or external

• Self concept

  • A person’s explicit knowledge of their own behaviors, traits, and other personal characteristics

  • Self schemas - draw info about self into a coherent scheme

  • Self concept maintained through interactions with others

  • Self verification - the tendency to seek evidence to confirm the self - concept

  • Self esteem - the extent to which an individual likes, values, and accepts the self

  • Self serving bias - ppl tend to take credit for their successes but downplay responsibility for their failures

    • Narcissism - seeing yourself as as way better than the average person

  • Implicit egotism examaples

    • Name letter effect - ppl were more likely to say their fav letter was the first letter of their name

    • Ppl named george were more likely to move to Georgia