Ch 1 Flashcards
What is a personality theory?
- An organized collect of concepts and assumptions about how best to regard people and study them
What is a good definition of personality?
- The internal and external aspects of a person’s character that influence behavior in different situations`
Implicit Personality Theories
- Ideas held by people not based on data
Fundamental Attribution Error
- Tendency to underestimate situational influences and overestimate dispositional influences on other’s behavior
- Mainly attributing fundamental differences to a person’s disposition and ignoring the situational factors that would influence their behavior
Construct
A theoretical concept that has no physical reality and cannot be directly observed (e,g., extraversion, locus of control, narcissism
Actor Observer Difference
- Tendency to attribute other’s behavior to traits/internal causes and attribute our behavior to situational factors
Maddi’s 3 Models of Personality Theories
- Conflict, Fulfillment, Consistency
- Discussed how different theorists consider what made people’s personalities the way they are (influences on personality)
Conflict Model
- People are continuously caught between two strong and often opposite forces
- People who followed this model: Freud, Jung, and Erikson
Fulfillment Model
One powerful force within an individual; life = increasing expression of this force
- People who believed this model: Rogers, and Maslow
How do we study and assess personality? [placeholder]
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Nomothetic Methods
- Experimental research concerning laws of behavior that can be applied to people in general
Idiographic Methods
- Emphasizes the intense study of single individuals
Validity
- Extent to which an assessment device measures what is intended to measure
Reliability
- Consistency of response to a psychological assessment device
Test- retest Reliability
- How consistent are scores over time
Internal Consistency
- Do the items all measure the same construct
Inter- rater Reliability
- Can different observers agree
How do we “test” personality?
- Objective Personality Tests (self-report_
- Projective Personality Tests
- Interviews
- Behavioral Assessment
Objective Tests
- MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory - Most widely used personality assessment
- NEO-PI
- “paper and pencil”, multiple choice tests
- Avoid subjectivity
Empirically keyed
- Relies on items to predict a criterion (e.g., depression)
MMPI
- 567 True/False Questions
- Ex: I see things that other people don’t
- Ex: I often feel so angry I want to hit something
Projective Tests
- Rorschach
- TAT
Rorschach Inkblot Test
- 10 inkblots
- Reveal unconscious functioning
- Ex: Looking at a picture and determining what led up to a situation, what are the characters thinking? How will the story end?
- Psychiatric disorders
Thematic Apperception Test
- 30 Drawings of ambiguous human situations
- 1 Blank Card
- Reveal conflicts, feelings, and motives
The Projective Hypothesis
- Ambiguous material serves as a screen on which we “project” our personality, thoughts, needs, anxieties, conflicts, etc.
Responses/ interpretations are affected by moods and other temporary states like –>
- Sleep deprivation
- Anxiety
- Drugs
- Hunger
- Frustration
Projectives: The Disadvantages
- Questionable reliability
- Questionable validity (detect schizophrenia but little else)
- Over-pathologize
- May tell more about the interpreter than the client
- May be subject to faking
Projectives: The Advantages
- Establish rapport
- Can provide information to discuss with client
- Can tell therapist how a client responds to ambiguity
Three Tasks for Personality
- To describe what all human beings have in common
- To describe the ways we differ from one another: individual differences
- To explain how personality develops: how do we get to be the way we are
