2: Brief History of Personality Traits Flashcards
List the four components of a personality trait.
Internal dispositions that are relatively stable across time and situations.
Viewed in bipolar terms (e.g., on a continuum).
Additive and independent.
Broad individual differences in social and emotional functioning.
List Galen’s four humors of personality.
Choleric: bad tempered, irritable.
Melancholic: gloomy, pessimistic.
Phlegmatic: sluggish, non-excitable.
Sanguine: bold, confident.
Which variant on the popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is widely criticized in academic personality psychology as poorly measured, but popular in business circles?
Keirsey Temperament Sorter.
Galen was one of the first people to study what? It was used in what unfortunate event?
Whether personality and intelligence were hereditary.
Eugenics movement.
Galton was the forefather of what two modern statistical techniques? Who improved on them?
He originally used what instead of mean and standard deviation?
Correlation, linear regression. Pearson.
Median, interquartile range.
What was Galton’s lexical hypothesis?
Most important individual differences in humans will come to be encoded as single words in language.
Allport came up with two things - common traits and personal disposition. Define each.
Common Traits: dimensions of human functioning upon which people are likely to differ. Exist in all people, thus can be used to compare people.
Personal Disposition: trait especially characteristic of a given individual, therefore instrumental for depicting that individual person’s uniqueness.
What are the three types of personal dispositions?
Cardinal Disposition: key trait that defines person, shapes most of their behaviour (0-2).
Central Disposition: wider range of dispositions that are important for describing person’s behaviour (5-10).
Secondary Disposition: features of personality exhibited only under relatively limited set of conditions (many).
Factor analysis is a statistical technique that “lumps” data together into “latent variables”. If you ask people to respond on a 1-5 scale to a bunch of words, what can factor analysis tell you?
Which groups of words belong together (i.e., people respond similarly to them).
Cyril Burt is famous in the history of what? Why is this?
History of intelligence, famed for twin studies on heritability of intelligence.
Cyril Burt was an early adopter of what? Which two people did he teach this to?
Factor analysis. Cattell and Eysenck.
Raymond Cattell drew on Allport’s list of trait items and used it to create what?
16 Personality Factor Questionnaire.
Why did Cattell come to a different conclusion on his model versus others like the Five Factor Model?
“Oblique” rotation in his factor analyses.
Eysenck was made famous for his attempts to link _____ to individual differences in humans.
He founded what model of personality?
Biology.
PEN.
Under the PEN model, what was the biological rationale for extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism?
Extraversion: cortical arousal of introverts is HIGH, so they minimize simulation. Cortical arousal of extraverts is LOW, so they maximize stimulation.
Neuroticism: suddenness in how rapid autonomic shifts occur (e.g., “fight or flight”). Shifts are fast and have low thresholds for people high in N.
Psychoticism: believed testosterone and monoamine oxidase is implicated.
