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Psychology > 5. Individual differences > Flashcards

5. Individual differences Flashcards

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1
Q

What is a personality?

A

The distinctive and relatively enduring ways of thinking, feeling and acting that characterise a person’s responses to life situations

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2
Q

What are personality traits?

A
  • Relatively stable cognitive, emotional and behavioural characteristics of people
  • Help people establish their individual identities
  • Continuum along which individuals vary
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3
Q

What 2 factors does Eysenck’s personality theory have?

A
  • Neuroticism/stability - tendency to experience negative emotions
  • Extraversion - degree to which a person is outgoing and seeks stimulation
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4
Q

What are the 5 traits in the five-factor model of personality?

A
  • Openness - imagination
  • Conscientiousness - organised
  • Extroversion
  • Agreeableness - trust and empathy
  • Neuroticism (emotional instability)

OCEAN

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5
Q

What did Eysenck propose as the biological basis of extroversion and introversion?

A
  • Customary levels of cortical arousal

* Introverts are over-aroused and extraverts are under-aroused

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6
Q

What did Eysenck propose as the biological basis of neuroticism?

A
  • Suddenness of shifts in arousal

* Neurotic people show large, sudden shifts in limbic system arousal

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7
Q

In a test comparing identical and fraternal twins, what percentage of traits are genetically determined according to the results?

A

50% genetically determined

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8
Q

If someone is calm under extreme pressure and can be selfish, how would they score on the five-factor model?

A
  • Low on neuroticism

* Low on agreeableness

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9
Q

How does conscientiousness affect someone’s wellbeing?

A
  • Adds 7.5 years to lifespan
  • Less likely to engage in harmful behaviours
  • Medical engagement and adherence
  • Improving conscientiousness
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10
Q

How does neuroticism affect someone’s wellbeing?

A
  • Increased reporting of somatic symptoms e.g. pain
  • Higher rates of mental health disorders
  • Higher mortality rates e.g. CVD
  • Higher rates of healthcare usage - less adherence to healthy behaviours
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11
Q

When can neuroticism be protective?

A

When combined with high conscientiousness - person more inclined to look after health

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12
Q

How can you decrease neuroticism?

A
  • Psychological therapies

* Medication

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13
Q

What is intelligence?

A

Ability to:
• Acquire knowledge
• Think and reason effectively
• Deal adaptively with the environment

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14
Q

What test measures mental age?

A

Binet-Simon Scale

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15
Q

What is the average in the IQ (intelligence quotient) test?

A

100

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16
Q

How are the IQ scores distributed?

A

Normal distribution

17
Q

What percentage of people score within 2 SD of the mean score in the IQ test?

A

95%

18
Q

Are there many outliers in the IQ test?

A

Very few

19
Q

What did Charles Spearman believe that intellectual activity involves?

A
  • General factor (g)
  • Specific factor (s) e.g. mechanical, verbal, numerical, spatial
  • Analysis suggests that people who do well on one task tend to do well on others
20
Q

What is the most common intelligence test that is used in many settings, what is it made up of, and what is the child version called?

A
  • WAIS-IV
  • Made up of a general ability score
  • Cognitive domains within that, in which there are specific tasks to test the domain
  • Child version: Wechsler test
21
Q

What are the problems with intelligence tests?

A
  • Quite narrow
  • Hard to decide what intelligence is
  • Ability to survive in harsh conditions may be more adaptive and useful?
22
Q

What are Garder’s multiple intelligences?

A
  • Linguistic intelligence
  • Logical-Mathematic intelligence
  • Spatial intelligence
  • Musical intelligence (important to listen to patterns of sounds in medicine)
  • Bodily-Kinaesthetic intelligence
  • Intrapersonal intelligence
  • Interpersonal functioning
23
Q

Give an example of the clinical use of IQ tests?

A

Testing cognitive function of stroke patients

24
Q

Why is it sometimes a problem to averaging something like limb strength quotient?

A
  • If a tennis player sprained his left ankle, his LL score would go down to 50
  • His other limb scores could all be above 100 and all average to above 100
  • This could give a LQ of above 100 - appears to be no problem, even though there is
25
Q

What 2 subtypes did Cattell and Horn break down Spearman’s general factor of intellectuality into, and how do they change throughout life?

A

• Crystallised intelligence (gc) - ability to apply previously acquired knowledge to current problems
- e.g. verbal and numeric ability
- improves with age until mid-life then stabilises
• Fluid intelligence (gf) - ability to deal with novel problem-solving situations for which personal experience does not provide a solution
- e.g. spatial orientation, inductive reasoning
- peaks in early adult life, then declines with age

26
Q

How stable are human cognitive test score over lifetime?

A
  • Largely stable

* Whatever contributes to intelligence in early age is likely to remain and show in elderly life

27
Q

Is there a gender difference in gender intelligence?

A

No, but there are difference in performance on certain types of intellectual tasks

  • e.g. men do better on spatial tasks, target-directed skills and mathematic reasoning
  • e.g. women do better on tests of perceptual speed, verbal fluency, mathematical calculation and precise manual tasks
28
Q

What is autism?

A 
• Lifelong, developmental disability that affects communication, relation to other people and surrounding experiences
• 3 areas of difficulty:
- social and emotional
- language and communication
- flexibility of thought (imagination)
• 4:1 - male:female
29
Q

What is Asperger’s syndrome?

A
  • High functioning autism
  • Autistic traits but perform normally on IQ tests
  • 9:1 - male:female
30
Q

What can the social and communication difficulties and narrow interests be explained by, according to Baron-Cohen?

A
  • Social and communication difficulties - deficit in empathising
  • Narrow interests - higher skills in systemising e.g. using train timetables
31
Q

What does empathising consist of?

A

Being able to infer the thoughts and feelings of others, and having an appropriate reaction

32
Q

What is systemising?

A

Drive to analyse or construct any kind of system i.e. identifying the rules that govern a system, in order to predict how that system will behave

33
Q

Place male, female and autism in order of scoring (lowest to highest) for the empathising and systemising quotient

A
  • Empathising - autism, males, females

* Systemising - females, males, autism

34
Q

What ‘type’ are you if you score higher on the empathising and systemising quotient?

A
  • Empathising - type E (females without autism more like to score this than males)
  • Systemising - type S (males without autism more likely to score this than females)
35
Q

Foetal levels of what hormone are associated with autism?

A

Higher levels of foetal testosterone are associated with higher scores on the autism quotient

36
Q

What is neurosexism?

A
  • Assumption that gender differences perceived in character and behaviour are caused by biological differences in brains
  • Self-fulfilling by providing a framework for treating children and adults differently on the basis of gender
  • Boys may be encouraged to play with mechanical toys - help develop systemising abilities
  • Girls may be encouraged to nurture their dolls - help develop empathising abilities

Psychology (14 decks)

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