Chapter 1-5 Dispositional domain Flashcards
Definition of personality
Personality is a set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are organized and relatively enduring and that influence his/her interactions with, and adaptations to, the intrapsychic, physical and social environment.
How can you study personality? 6 perspectives
- Dispositional domain-Traits a person is born with
- Biological domain-Biological events(genetics, psychophysiology & evolution)
- Intrapsychic domain-Conflicts within the mind(unconscious)
- Cognitive/experimental domain-Cognition and subjective experiences, intelligence, emotions
- Social & cultural domain-Position in the world, personality affected by cultural context.
- Adjustment domain-Adjustments a person have to do in their daily life, personality disorders
A good theory fulfill…(3)
- Provide a guide for researchers
- Organize known findings
- Make predictions
Nomothetic research
Statistical comparisons between groups of people. Typically used for identifying human characteristics and group differences.
Idiographic research
Focuses on a single object, trying to observe general principles that are manifested in a single life, over time.
Three levels of personality analysis
- Like all others (the human nature level)
- Like some others (the level of individual & group differences)
- Like no other (the individual uniqueness level)
S-data
Self-report data
Pro’s: People have a lot of information about themselves.
Consequences:
-Social desirability(exaggerate)
-Lack of self-knowledge
-Lack of motivation (Boring questions->stop caring about the questions)
O-data
Observer-report data
Observers gather data about the person’s personality
Advantages:
-Acess to information which cannot be gathered through other sources
-Multiple observers can observe (inter-rater reliability: degree of agreement of multiple observers)
Professional observers
Intimate observers
Naturalistic:
-Secure info in realistic setting, not able to control events
Artificial:
-Control the event. sacrificing realism
T-data
Test data
-Standardized tests
-Person can control the situation->Higher power
Participant unaware of what is measured
Possible consequences:
-Participants might try to guess what trait is
being measured
› Researcher might influence how participants
behave
L-data
Life-outcome data (L-data)
› Results or “residue” of personality
Info that can be derived from events, activities, and
outcomes in a person’s life that are available for public
scrutiny
e.g., marriage, speeding tickets
› Can serve as important source of “real life”
information about the personality
Psychological traits
Characteristics that describe ways in which people are different from each other
trait-descriptive adjectives
Adjectives that can be used to describe people (thoughtful, charming)
Actigraph
A modified self-winding watch, strapped to legs or arms. Assess personality differences in activity or energy level
Triangulation
strategy of personality assessment and personality research that examines results that överskrider data sources
Meta-analysis
a statistical procedure for combining data from multiple studies. allows researchers to calculate with greater objectivity and precision whether a particular difference between groups of people is consistent across studies
Respond set
Tendency to respond to a questionnaire unrelated to the question
Acquiescence
The tendency to simply agree with with the all questions
Three levels of personality analysis
- Like all others-universals
- Like some others-particulars
- Like no others-uniqueness
Five scientific standards for evaluating personality theories
- Comprehensiveness
- Heuristic value
- Testability
- Parsimony
- Compatibility and integration across domains and levels
Naturalistic observation
observers witness and record event that occurs in the normal course of the lives of their participants
fMRI
identify the areas of the brain that light up when performing certain tasks
Five validities
- Face validity- does the test measure what it is supposed to?
- Criterion validity- whether the test predicts criteria external to the test
- Convergent validity- whether a test correlated with other measures that it should correlate with?
- Discriminant validity- is often evaluated simultaneously with convergent validity; to what a measure should not correlate with
- Constructs validity- a test that measures what it claims to measure, correlates with what it should correlate with
Act nomination
a procedure designed to identify which acts belong in which category
Lexical approach
All important individual differences have become encoded within the natural language.
- Synonym frequency: lots of words for one attribute
- Cross-cultural universality: if a trait is sufficiently important in all cultures that its members have confided terms to describe the trait then the trait must be universally important in human affairs.
