1: Course introduction and core personality methods

Question 1

Adjectives that can be used to describe characteristics of people are called … ?

Answer 1

Trait-descriptive adjectives

Question 2

What is psychological traits?

Answer 2

Psychological traits are characteristics that describe ways in which people are different from each other.

Traits can be descibed as:
Internal = causal properties
External = descriptive summaries or act frequencies

Question 3

What does the psychological traits describe?

Answer 3

They describe the average tendencies of a person

Traits are probabilistic - and will be observed at different levels (man kan svinge ml. hvor extrovert man er)

Question 4

What is psychological machanisms?

Answer 4

They are like traits, except that the term mechanisms refers more to the processes of personality.

For example, most psychological mechanisms involve cognitive processes that entail an information-processing activity.

Question 5

What are the 3 essential ingredients in most psychological mechanisms?

Answer 5

• inputs (fx fare)
• decision rules (fx hvis jeg er modig prøver jeg at bekæmpe, er jeg bange flygter jeg)
• outputs (den handling man foretager sig pba. ovenstående)

Question 6

What does “within the individual” mean?

Answer 6

It means that personality is something a person carries with him or herself over time and from one situation to the next

Question 7

What does “organized” mean?

Answer 7

It means that the psychological traits and mechanisms, for a given person, are not simply a random collection of elements. Rather, personality is organized because the mechanisms and traits are linked to one another in a coherent fashion

Question 8

How does psychological traits evolve during life?

Answer 8

Psychological traits are relatively enduring/permanent over time, particularly in adulthood, and are somewhat consistent over situations

Question 9

What does influential forces of personality mean?

Answer 9

It means that personality traits and mechanisms can have an effect on people’s lives

Question 10

What does perception refer to?

Answer 10

It refers to how we see, or interpret, an environment

Question 11

What does selection describe?

Answer 11

It describes the manner in which we choose situations to enter – how we choose our friends, hobbies, university classes and careers

Question 12

What are Evocations?

Answer 12

they are the reactions we produce in others, often quite unintentionally.
To some extent, we create the social environment that we inhabit/live in

Question 13

What are manipulations?

Answer 13

Manipulations are the ways in which we intentionally attempt to influence others

Question 14

What is perception, selection, evocations and manipulations part of?

Answer 14

The person–environment interaction

Question 15

What is adaptation / adaptive functioning?

Answer 15

adaptive functioning – accomplishing goals, coping, adjusting and dealing with the challenges and problems we face as we go through life

(fx ved at vise at man bekymrer sig, opnår man støtte fra andre. På den måde går man fra noget ukonstruktivt “at bekymre sig” til noget mere konstruktivt “støtte”)

Question 16

What is the intrapsychic environment?

Answer 16

Intrapsychic means ‘within the mind’.

We all have memories, dreams, desires, fantasies and a collection of private experiences that we live with each day.

This intrapsychic environment, although not as objectively verifiable as our social or physical environment, is nevertheless real to each of us and makes up an important part of our psychological reality

(fx har selvværd stor betydning på de personlighedstræk som kommer til udtryk)

Question 17

Personality can be analysed at three different levels (Kluckhohn & Murray, 1948), which?

Answer 17

1. like all others (the human nature level);
   - the traits and mechanisms of personality that are typical of our species and are possessed by everyone or nearly everyone. For example, nearly every human has language skills, which allow him or her to learn and use a language.
2. like some others (the level of individual and group differences);
   
   • Individual level = ways in which each person is like some other people (e.g. extraverts, sensation seekers).
   • Group differences = people in one group may have certain personality features in common, and these common features make that group of people different from other groups. (fx aldersgrupper, socioøkonomisk status mv.)
3. like no others (the individual uniqueness level).
   
   • No two individuals, not even identical twins raised by the same parents in the same home in the same culture, have exactly the same personalities. Every individual has personal qualities not shared by any other person in the world

Question 18

In which ways could individuals be studied?

Answer 18

nomothetically – that is, as individual instances of general characteristics that are distributed in the population

idiographically - as single, unique cases

Question 19

What is a domain of knowledge?

Answer 19

It is a speciality area of science and scholarship, in which psychologists have focused on learning about some specific and limited aspects of human nature.

A domain of knowledge delineates the boundaries of researchers’ knowledge, expertise and interests

Question 20

Name the six distinct domains of knowledge about human nature…

Answer 20

Dispositional domain 
Biological domain 
intrapsychic domain 
cognitive-experiential domain 
social and cultural domain 
adjustment domain

Question 21

What is central in the dispositional domain?

Answer 21

personality is influenced by traits the person is born with or develops

The central goal of personality psychologists working in the dispositional domain is to identify and measure the most important ways in which individuals differ from one another. They are also interested in the origin of the important individual differences and in how they develop and are maintained

Question 22

What is central in the biological domain?

Answer 22

The core assumption within the biological domain is that humans are, first and foremost, collections of biological systems, and these systems provide the building blocks for behaviour, thought and emotion.

As personality psychologists use the term, biological approaches typically refers to three areas of research within this general domain: genetics, psychophysiology and evolution

Question 23

What is central in Psychophysiology (area under the biological domain)?

Answer 23

Within this domain, researchers summarize what is known about the basis of personality in terms of nervous system functioning.

(fx hormoner, søvnrytme mv.)

Question 24

What is central in evolution (area under the biological domain)?

Answer 24

how evolution may have shaped human psychological functioning. This approach assumes that the psychological mechanisms that constitute human personality have evolved over thousands of years because they were effective in solving adaptive problems.

An evolutionary perspective sheds light on the functional aspects of personality

Question 25

What is central in the intrapsychic domain?

Answer 25

Personality is shaped through conflicts within the person’s own mind.

deals with mental mechanisms of personality, many of which operate outside of conscious awareness. The predominant theory in this domain is Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis

Question 26

What is central in the cognitive-experiential domain?

Answer 26

Personality is shaped by personal and private thoughts, feelings, desires, beliefs and other subjective experiences.

Focuses on cognition and subjective experience, such as conscious thoughts, feelings, beliefs and desires about oneself and others

Question 27

What is central in the social and cultural domain?

Answer 27

different cultures may bring out different facets of our personalities in manifest behaviour. Everyone may have the capacity to be peaceful as well as the capacity for violence. Which one of these capacities we display may depend on what is acceptable in and encouraged by the culture

Question 28

What is central in the adjustment domain?

Answer 28

Personality is formed by the adjustments that the person must make to the inevitable challenges of life

refers to the fact that personality plays a key role in how we cope with, adapt and adjust to the ebb and flow of events in our day-to-day lives

Question 29

What characterize a good theory?

Answer 29

A good theory is one that fulfils three purposes in science:
provides a guide for researchers;
organizes known findings; and
makes predictions

Question 30

Which (5) standards should one consider for evaluation of theories of personality?

Answer 30

• comprehensiveness (does the theory do a good job of explaining all of the facts and observations?)
• heuristic value (does the theory provide a guide to important new discoveries?)
• testability (does the theory render precise enough predictions so that one can test them empirically?)
• parsimony (does the theory contain few premises and assumptions?)
• compatibility and integration across domains and levels

Question 31

What is comprehensiveness?

Answer 31

does the theory do a good job of explaining all of the facts and observations within its domain?

Theories that explain more empirical data within their domains are generally superior to those that explain fewer findings

Question 32

What is heuristic value?

Answer 32

does the theory provide a guide to important new discoveries about personality that were not known before?

Theories that steer scientists to making these discoveries are generally superior to theories that fail to provide this guidance

Question 33

What is testability?

Answer 33

does the theory render precise enough predictions that personality psychologists can test them empirically?

Some theories – for example, certain aspects of Freud’s theory of intrapsychic conflict – have been criticized on the grounds that they are difficult or impossible to test

Question 34

What is parsimony?

Answer 34

does the theory contain few premises and assumptions (parsimony) or many premises and assumptions (lack of parsimony)?

As a general rule, theories that require many premises and assumptions to explain a given set of findings are judged to be poorer than theories that can explain the same findings with fewer premises and assumptions.

(OBS! Betyder dog ikke nødvendigvis at simple teorier er bedre end komplekse)

Question 35

Give examples of low compatibility and integration across domains and levels?

Answer 35

A theory of cosmology in astronomy that violated known laws of physics, for example, would be incompatible across levels and hence judged to be fundamentally flawed.

A theory of biology that violated known principles of chemistry similarly would be judged to be fatally flawed.

In the same way, a personality theory in one domain that violated well-established principles in another domain would be judged highly problematic.

Question 36

what is the most obvious source of information about a person?

Answer 36

self-report data (S-data)

Question 37

What is self-report-data (S-data)?

Answer 37

Data which can be obtained through a variety of means, including interviews that pose questions to a person, periodic reports by a person to record the events as they happen, and questionnaires.

The person gives information about themselves.

Question 38

What is the reason to use self-report data?

Answer 38

The most obvious reason is that individuals have access to a wealth of information about themselves that is inaccessible to anyone else

Question 39

What is central in the “Twenty statements test”?

Answer 39

20 statements like “I am ….. “

One should fill in the rest by themselves

Question 40

What is the Likert rating scale?

Answer 40

A scale where you mark how much you agree/disagree

Question 41

What is the limitations with self-report?

Answer 41

For the self-report method to be effective, respondents must be both willing and able to answer the questions put to them. Yet people are not always honest, especially when asked about unconventional experiences, such as unusual desires, their deepest secrets, unconventional sexual practices and undesirable traits.
Some people may lack accurate self-knowledge

Question 42

What is experience sampling?

Answer 42

A method where people answer some questions, perhaps about their moods or physical symptoms, every day for several weeks or longer.

Question 43

What is observer data (O-data)?

Answer 43

Our friends, families, teachers and casual acquaintances are all potential sources of information about our personalities.

Observer-report data (O-data) capitalize on these sources for gathering information about a person’s personality

Question 44

What is the advantages of observer data (O-data)?

Answer 44

• observers may have access to information not attainable through other sources. For example, observers can report about the impressions a person makes on others, his or her social reputation stc.
• multiple observers can be used to assess each individual, whereas in self-report only one person provides information

Question 45

What is inter-rater reliability?

Answer 45

the use of multiple observers allows investigators to evaluate the degree of agreement among observers

Øget reliabilitet

Question 46

Which stategies does reseachers use for selecting observers?

Answer 46

1. to use professional personality assessors who do not know the participant in advance.
2. to use individuals who actually know the target participants

Sikrer et objektivt perspektiv som kan sammenholdes med de øvrige observatører som kender vedkommende.

Question 47

What characterize a naturalistic observation?

Answer 47

observers witness and record events that occur in the normal course of the lives of their participants. For example, a child might be followed throughout an entire day, or an observer may sit in a participant’s home

Question 48

What characterize a artificial observation?

Answer 48

An observation in contrived or artificial settings. Experimenters can instruct participants to perform a task (for instance, participate in a group discussion), and then observe how individuals behave in these constructed settings

Question 49

What is test data (T-data)?

Answer 49

personality-relevant information comes from standardized tests

participants are placed in a standardized testing situation. The idea is to see if different people react differently to an identical situation. The situation is designed to elicit behaviours that serve as indicators of personality variables

Question 50

What are the limitations of T-data?

Answer 50

• Some participants might try to guess what trait is being measured and then alter their responses to create a specific impression of themselves

○ difficulty in verifying that the research participants define the testing situation in the same manner as the experimenter

○ these situations are inherently interpersonal, and a researcher may inadvertently influence how the participants behave

Question 51

What are the advantages of T-data?

Answer 51

T-data remain a valuable and irreplaceable source of personality information.

Procedures used to obtain T-data can be designed to elicit behaviour that would be difficult to observe in everyday life.

They allow investigators to control the context and to eliminate extraneous sources of influence. And they enable experimenters to test specific hypotheses by exerting control over the variables that are presumed to have causal influence

Question 52

How could T-data be collected?

Answer 52

By mechanical recording devices (e.g. actigraphs - watch - about activity level)

By psychological data - via fMRI

By projective techniques in which the person is given a standard stimulus and asked what he or she sees. The most famous projective technique for assessing personality is the set of inkblots developed by Hermann Rorschach (what people describe says something about their personality)

Question 53

What is Life-outcome data (L-data)?

Answer 53

Life-outcome data (L-data) refers to information that can be gleaned from the events, activities and outcomes in a person’s life that are available to public scrutiny (fx antal bøder, karakterer gennem folkeskolen mv.)

Question 54

There are several ways to estimate reliability, which - and what are they called?

Answer 54

• to repeat a measurement over time (Test-retest reliability)
• to examine the relationships among the items themselves at a single point in time (internal consistency reliability)
• to obtain measurements from multiple observers (applicable only to the use of observer-based personality measures) (inter-rater reliability)

Question 55

What does response sets refer to?

Answer 55

response sets refers to the tendency of some people to respond to the questions on a basis that is unrelated to the question content

fx bare svare ja, svare forkert el. lign.

Question 56

There are several kinds of response sets, which?

Answer 56

• acquiescence, or yea saying (man erkærer sig bare enig uanset hvad der står)
• extreme responding (the tendency to give endpoint responses, such as ‘strongly agree’ or ‘strongly disagree’)
• social desirability (the tendency to answer items in such a way as to come across as socially attractive or likeable)

Question 57

How do you minimize acquiscence?

Answer 57

By intentionally reverse-scoring some of the questionnaire items, such as an extraversion item that states, ‘I frequently prefer to be alone’

Question 58

How do you minimize social desirability?

Answer 58

By using a forced-choice questionnaire format.

In this format, test takers are confronted with pairs of statements and are asked to indicate which statement in each pair is more true of them. Each statement in the pair is selected to be similar to the other in social desirability, forcing participants to choose between statements that are equivalently socially desirable (or undesirable)

Question 59

What is face validity?

Answer 59

The simplest facet of validity, which refers to whether the test, on the surface, appears to measure what it is supposed to measure

Question 60

What is predictive validity?

Answer 60

How well your measure relates to something it should relate to/whether the test predicts criteria external to the test (thus it is sometimes called criterion validity)

Concurrent – at the same time
Predictive – at a later time

Question 61

What is convergent validity?

Answer 61

whether a test correlates with other measures that it should correlate with

Question 62

What is discriminant validity?

Answer 62

It is often evaluated simultaneously with convergent validity.

Whereas convergent validity refers to what a measure should correlate with, discriminant validity refers to what a measure should not correlate with

Question 63

What is construct validity?

Answer 63

construct validity is the broadest type of validity, subsuming face, predictive, convergent and discriminant validity.

This form of validity is called construct validity because it is based on the notion that personality variables are theoretical constructs

Question 64

What is Generalizability?

Answer 64

It is the degree to which the measure retains its validity across various contexts

Question 65

What is the correlational method?

Answer 65

a statistical procedure is used for determining whether or not there is a relationship between two variables

Question 66

Which problems with causality occurs within the correlational method?

Answer 66

There are at least two reasons correlations can never prove causality.

One is called the directionality problem.
- If A and B are correlated, we do not know if A is the cause of B or if B is the cause of A.

The second reason that correlations can never prove causality is the third variable problem.
- Two variables might be correlated because a third, unknown, variable is causing both

Question 67

What is aggregation?

Answer 67

The process of adding up, or averaging, several single observations, resulting in a better (i.e. more reliable) measure of a personality trait than a single observation of behaviour

Question 68

Why is aggregation so important?

Answer 68

It usually provides psychologists with a better measure of a personality trait than does using a single observation. Because what matters is how a person behaves over the long run, and not just on one specific moment in time.

Question 69

McAdams (1995) describes 3 levels for knowing a person, which?

Answer 69

1. Trait descriptions “psychology of the stranger” (De første bidder af info man får af en person når man skal vurdere om man vil interagere med vedkommende, og hvordan denne interaktion vil blive. De mest basic informationer.)
   - Vurderes ud fra fx objekter eller hvilke karakterer man får
2. Goals, motives, plans (Hvad man sætter pris på, værdier og prioriteringer)
   - Kan tilgås ret nemt ved at tale med folk - dog kræver det mere arbejde i selve forskningen (tidskrævende)
3. Personal narrative (Hvorfor en person gør som de gør)
   - Meget begrænset tilgang - kan tilgås i fx terapi eller i dybe venskaber (hvor man taler om hvorfor nogen gør som de gør).

McAdams beskæftiger sig mest med de 2 første niveauer i hans forskning.

Question 70

Describe Meehls clinical vs. mechanical predictions?

Answer 70

○ Mechanical prediction:
Tre former:
1) Statistical prediction - explicit equations
2) Actuarial prediction - ofte baseret på forsikringsselskaber (man forventer at unge har flere biluheld)
3) Algorithmic prediction - via computerprogrammer som laver forudsigelser

The mechanical prediction står i kontrast til den kliniske (menneskelige) måde at lave forudsigelser på.

Meehl så at den mekaniske dominerer den kliniske (altså er bedre)

Question 71

What are the limitations and benefits of self-report?

Answer 71

+ Easy to access
+Who knows better than you?
+“Causal force” (kan forudsige noget om fremtidig adfærd)
+Can cover anything/everything (såfremt folk vil svare)

• May lie
• May have poor self-understanding

Question 72

What are the limitations and benefits of informant/observer data?

Answer 72

+Based on real-world behaviors (ses i virkelig kontekst)
+Allows for context in interpretation (Kender man vedkommende kan man observere mere korrekt fordi man har kontekstuel viden om vedkommende (man ved om det er et særtilfælde eller om det afspejler virkeligheden))
+“Causal force”
+Can cover many traits from many situations (man agerer forskelligt omkring forskellige mennesker, hvilket kan tydeliggøres)

• Don’t witness all relevant behaviors (man har et bestemt fokus når man observerer)
• Filtered through their lenses (Man har fx en forestilling om ens vens personlighed når man observerer = bias)
• May lie (fx grundet social desirability)

Question 73

What are the limitations and benefits of life outcome data?

Answer 73

+Objective
+Complete (dækker store tidsspænd)

-“Multidetermination” – many routes to the same life events (svært at sige noget om kontekst/sammenhæng)

Question 74

What are the limitations and benefits of behavioral/test data?

Answer 74

+Objective
+Able to control the environment
1) Eliminate confounds
2) Provide novel stimuli

• Artificial environments (kan påvirke adfærd)
• Uncertainty over interpretation
• expensive

Question 75

What is factor analysis?

Answer 75

is a statistical method that looks at how lots of different observations correlate and determines how many theoretical constructs could most simply explain what you see.

Måde at identificere hvilke ord der repræsenterer et bestemt tema og hvilke der ikke gør
Ord som minder om hinanden grupperes som en “factor”

Når man laver en factor analysis ser man på factor loadings (korrelationer)