5. Individual differences Flashcards
What is a personality?
The distinctive and relatively enduring ways of thinking, feeling and acting that characterise a person’s responses to life situations
What are personality traits?
- Relatively stable cognitive, emotional and behavioural characteristics of people
- Help people establish their individual identities
- Continuum along which individuals vary
What 2 factors does Eysenck’s personality theory have?
- Neuroticism/stability - tendency to experience negative emotions
- Extraversion - degree to which a person is outgoing and seeks stimulation
What are the 5 traits in the five-factor model of personality?
- Openness - imagination
- Conscientiousness - organised
- Extroversion
- Agreeableness - trust and empathy
- Neuroticism (emotional instability)
OCEAN
What did Eysenck propose as the biological basis of extroversion and introversion?
- Customary levels of cortical arousal
* Introverts are over-aroused and extraverts are under-aroused
What did Eysenck propose as the biological basis of neuroticism?
- Suddenness of shifts in arousal
* Neurotic people show large, sudden shifts in limbic system arousal
In a test comparing identical and fraternal twins, what percentage of traits are genetically determined according to the results?
50% genetically determined
If someone is calm under extreme pressure and can be selfish, how would they score on the five-factor model?
- Low on neuroticism
* Low on agreeableness
How does conscientiousness affect someone’s wellbeing?
- Adds 7.5 years to lifespan
- Less likely to engage in harmful behaviours
- Medical engagement and adherence
- Improving conscientiousness
How does neuroticism affect someone’s wellbeing?
- 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
When can neuroticism be protective?
When combined with high conscientiousness - person more inclined to look after health
How can you decrease neuroticism?
- Psychological therapies
* Medication
What is intelligence?
Ability to:
• Acquire knowledge
• Think and reason effectively
• Deal adaptively with the environment
What test measures mental age?
Binet-Simon Scale
What is the average in the IQ (intelligence quotient) test?
100
How are the IQ scores distributed?
Normal distribution
What percentage of people score within 2 SD of the mean score in the IQ test?
95%
Are there many outliers in the IQ test?
Very few
What did Charles Spearman believe that intellectual activity involves?
- 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
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?
- 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
What are the problems with intelligence tests?
- Quite narrow
- Hard to decide what intelligence is
- Ability to survive in harsh conditions may be more adaptive and useful?
What are Garder’s multiple intelligences?
- 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
Give an example of the clinical use of IQ tests?
Testing cognitive function of stroke patients
Why is it sometimes a problem to averaging something like limb strength quotient?
- 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
What 2 subtypes did Cattell and Horn break down Spearman’s general factor of intellectuality into, and how do they change throughout life?
• 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
How stable are human cognitive test score over lifetime?
- Largely stable
* Whatever contributes to intelligence in early age is likely to remain and show in elderly life
Is there a gender difference in gender intelligence?
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
What is autism?
• 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
What is Asperger’s syndrome?
- High functioning autism
- Autistic traits but perform normally on IQ tests
- 9:1 - male:female
What can the social and communication difficulties and narrow interests be explained by, according to Baron-Cohen?
- Social and communication difficulties - deficit in empathising
- Narrow interests - higher skills in systemising e.g. using train timetables
What does empathising consist of?
Being able to infer the thoughts and feelings of others, and having an appropriate reaction
What is systemising?
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
Place male, female and autism in order of scoring (lowest to highest) for the empathising and systemising quotient
- Empathising - autism, males, females
* Systemising - females, males, autism
What ‘type’ are you if you score higher on the empathising and systemising quotient?
- 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)
Foetal levels of what hormone are associated with autism?
Higher levels of foetal testosterone are associated with higher scores on the autism quotient
What is neurosexism?
- 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
