3: Big Five

Question 1

Broadly speaking, modern personality psychology thinks about personality traits as _____ not as _____.

Answer 1

Dimensions; categories.

Question 2

Knowing the mean and standard deviation of personality questionnaire scores in a population can help you interpret the score. How is this?

Answer 2

Can only be low, average, or high in a personality trait relative to everyone else.

Question 3

What is extraversion?

Answer 3

Implies an energetic approach toward social and material world, includes traits such as sociability, activity, assertiveness, and positive emotionality.

Question 4

What is neuroticism? People high in it feel what?

Answer 4

Tendency to experience negative emotions more strongly than other people.

Feel negative emotions more intensely for longer periods, have more difficulty regulating negative emotions.

Question 5

What is agreeableness?

Answer 5

Contrasts a prosocial and communal orientation toward others with antagonism, includes traits such as altruism, tender-mindedness, trust, and modesty.

Question 6

Openness to experience is considered something of an oddity. Why is this?

Answer 6

Initially discovered as correlates to self-rated estimates of intelligence.

Question 7

What is openness to experience?

Answer 7

Cluster of characteristics that describes breadth, depth, originality, and complexity of an individual’s mental and experiential life.

Question 8

There is much disagreement on central words in openness to experience. Elaborate.

Answer 8

People think of high-brow, dignified people as high in openness, but they aren’t necessarily.

Question 9

What is conscientiousness?

Answer 9

Describes socially prescribed impulse control that facilitates task-and goal-directed behavior, such as thinking before acting, delaying gratification, following norms and rules, and planning, organizing, and prioritizing tasks.

Question 10

What is a strong criticism of the lexical hypothesis approach?

Answer 10

Atheoretical, no explanation for why there are 5 factors, or what these traits actually are.

Question 11

Define the realist approach to personality traits. Historically, it often draws on what other approaches?

Answer 11

Personality traits are objective, real entities that exist in the world independently of perceivers.

Draws on biological approaches.

Question 12

Define the fight-flight-freeze system (FFFS) in Gray’s Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory. What are the associated personality factors and what is it the biological mechanism for?

Answer 12

Responsible for mediating reactions to aversive stimuli of all kinds, through hierarchy of neural modules responsible for avoidance/escape behaviour.

Associated personality factor comprises fear-proneness and avoidance. Biological mechanism by which punishment and negative reinforcement work.

Question 13

Define the Behavioural Inhibition System (BIS) in Gray’s Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory. It generates what emotion and what is it the biological mechanism for?

Answer 13

Responsible for the resolution of goal conflict in general, generates the emotion of anxiety.

Biological mechanism that steadily increases negative valence of stimuli, works with FFFS until threshold for action is achieved, typically experienced as “worry” or rumination.

Question 14

Define the Behavioral Activation System (BAS) in Gray’s Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory. What are the associated personality factors and what is it the biological mechanism for?

Answer 14

Mediates reactions to all appetitive stimuli, generates ‘anticipatory pleasure’ and hope itself.

Associated personality comprises optimism, reward-orientation and impulsiveness, clinically maps onto addictive and high-risk behaviours.

Biological mechanism for positive reinforcement.

Question 15

Gray’s rotation imply a hybrid of what?

Answer 15

Neuroticism and extraversion.

Question 16

Functionalists equate personality with what? What two questions does it ask?

Answer 16

Social perception.

What good does inferring a trait do for someone? What can they do with the knowledge of a person’s level on a trait?

Question 17

List one advantage and two disadvantages for extraversion.

Answer 17

Have more positive affect.

Network extraversion bias; proactive introverts make more profit than extraverted leaders.

Question 18

Some prospective evidence shows that neuroticism temporally precedes diagnoses of mental illness. However, the relationship shrinks ~50% once you control for what?

Answer 18

Prior history of disorder.

Question 19

People high in neuroticism tend to use ineffective coping strategies to deal with their problems. What is this strategy called?

Answer 19

Emotion-focused coping: focusing on soothing emotions rather than solving problem generating those emotions.

Question 20

People high in O tend to cope with what? People low in O?

Answer 20

Intellectualization: turning deep personal issues into abstract, depersonalized thoughts stripped of emotion.

Denial or distraction: refusing to admit that something is really a problem, or distracting oneself with other unrelated tasks.

Question 21

O tends to be a relatively polarizing personality trait because it maps onto political beliefs in what way?

Answer 21

High in O tend to vote left-wing, people low in O tend to vote right-wing.

Question 22

Describe the relationship between conscientiousness and post-secondary academic performance. Which other traits were important?

Answer 22

Moderate effect size.

O, E, A , N relatively unimportant.

Question 23

An extreme, maladaptive variant of conscientiousness comprises what disorder?

Answer 23

Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.

Question 24

People high in C tend to have what lower form of intelligence? What does this suggest?

Answer 24

Fluid (on-the-spot reasoning ability) intelligence. Suggests C as strategy to compensate for lower fluid IQ.

Question 25

People high in C tend to experience especially decreased well-being after what?

Answer 25

Work failures.

Question 26

What is considered a universal marker for openness to experience?

Answer 26

Aesthetic chills.

Question 27

Extraversion is _____ across cultures.

Answer 27

Consistent.