Chapter 12

Question 1

What is personality and what is it used to explain?

Answer 1

• • Personality is the set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are organized and relatively enduring and that influence her or his interactions with, and adaptations to, the intrapsychic, physical, and social environments
• —>•Traits: personality descriptors that allow for comparisons with others (similarities & differences)
• —>•Mechanisms: These elements/traits of your personality shape the way you process information (inputs, decision rules, outputs)
• —>•Within: we carry this with us into all situations
• —>•Organized: some sort of coherence to our personality & behaviours. Ex. People who are generally sociallable are more likely to be friendly and warm
• —>•Enduring: over time and across situations. Most fluctuations in personality generally happen in childhood and adolescence but even then, without some major life impact your personality generally stays the same
• —>•Interacting with and adapting to our environments. This includes the intrapsychic environment (environment within our own mind), our physical environment, and our social environment
• -Used to explain (1) the stability in a person’s behaviour over time and across situations (consistency) and (2) the behavioural differences among people reacting to the same situation (distinctiveness)

Question 2

What is a personality trait?

Answer 2

– Traits are individual difference variables (something that can differ between individuals); characteristics that describe ways in which people differ from each other. ex. someone who is introverted compared to someone who is extroverted. We’re comparing these traits to other people. Ex. height
– Can be thought of as an internal causal property; desires and needs within us that guide behaviour
–Can be thought of as purely descriptive summary – a label that we apply to describe/summarize a person’s typical behaviour (describing the average tendencies of a person)
•ex. if someone always always does kind behaviours, then we would summarize their behaviour tendencies and say that they’re a kind person
– In personality psychology, the concept of trait has been used to denote consistent intercorrelated patterns of behaviour, especially expressive or stylistic behaviour
– Individuals can be characterized in term of relatively enduring (stable) patterns of thoughts, feelings, and actions; that traits can be quantitatively assessed; that they show some degree of cross-situational consistency

Question 3

What is the most common approach to personality?

Answer 3

• -Most approaches to personality assume that some traits are more basic than others
• -a small number of fundamental traits determine other, more superficial traits. For example, a person’s tendency to be impulsive, restless, irritable, boisterous, and impatient might all be derived from a more basic tendency to be excitable.

Question 4

What is factor analysis and how has it been used to determine the basic traits?

Answer 4

• • factor analysis, correlations among many variables are analyzed to identify closely related clusters of variables.
• • If the measurements of a number of variables (in this case, personality traits) correlate highly with one another, the assumption is that a single factor is influencing all of them. Factor analysis is used to identify these hidden factors. In the case of personality, these hidden factors are the basic, fundamental traits
• • Based on his factor analytic work, Raymond Cattell concluded that an individual’s personality can be described completely by measuring just 16 traits.

Question 5

What is the Dark Triad?

Answer 5

• • Consists of three separate but intercorrelated traits: machiavellianism (meaning manipulative, indifference to morality, etc), psychopathy, and narcissism
• • behavioural tendencies toward self-promotion, emotional coldness, duplicity, and aggressiveness
• • The traits forming the Dark Triad represent the dark side to human personality. Individuals displaying this personality type exhibit vengeful attitudes and show a tendency to engage in antisocial activities that harm others, such as exploiting others sexually in short-term relationships, showing no empathy for the suffering of their victims, and often enjoying the physical and emotional abuse they cause others

Question 6

What is the Dark Tetrad?

Answer 6

• -Paulhus has added a fourth trait to the Dark Triad: sadism
• • The sadistic personality is unique among the Dark Tetrad in involving an appetite for cruelty, as opposed to callous indifference

Question 7

What are the four different personality theories?

Answer 7

(1) psychodynamic perspectives: include all of the diverse theories descended from the work of Sigmund Freud, which focus on unconscious mental forces.
(2) behavioural perspectives:
(3) humanistic perspectives
(4) biological perspectives

Question 8

What is Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory to personality and why were they controversial?

Answer 8

• • Psychoanalytic theory attempts to explain personality by focusing on the influence of early childhood experiences, unconscious conflicts, and sexual urges
    1) Arguing that people’s behaviour is governed by unconscious factors of which they are unaware, Freud made the disconcerting suggestion that individuals are not masters of their own minds
    2) Claiming that adult personalities are shaped by childhood experiences and other factors beyond one’s control, he suggested that people are not masters of their own destinies
    3) emphasizing the importance of how people cope with their sexual urges, he offended those who held the conservative, Victorian values of his time

Question 9

What is the id, ego, superego?

Answer 9

• -id: Pure instinctual energy (sexual & aggressive instincts)- to eat, sleep, defecate, copulate, and so on- that energize human behaviour. Operates according to the pleasure principle (which demands immediate gratification of its urges). Primary-process thinking, which is illogical, irrational, and fantasy-oriented. Entirely unconscious
• • ego: Deals with demands of reality (partly conscious). mediates between the id, with its forceful desires for immediate satisfaction, and the external social world, with its expectations and norms regarding suitable behaviour. Decision-making component of personality that operates according to the reality principle (which seeks to delay gratification of the id’s urges until appropriate outlets and situations can be found).
• • superego: Deals with morality (partly conscious). incorporates social standards about what represents right and wrong. The superego emerges out of the ego at around three to five years of age

the id’s desires for immediate satisfaction often trigger internal conflicts with the ego and superego. These conflicts play a key role in Freud’s theory

Question 10

What are the three levels of awareness?

Answer 10

1) The conscious consists of whatever one is aware of at a particular point in time.
2) The preconscious contains material just beneath the surface of awareness that can easily be retrieved. Examples might include your middle name, what you had for supper last night, or an argument you had with a friend yesterday
3) The unconscious contains thoughts, memories, and desires that are well below the surface of conscious awareness but that nonetheless exert great influence on behaviour. Ex. a forgotten trauma from childhood, hidden feelings of hostility toward a parent, and repressed sexual desires.

• -the id, ego, and superego are distributed differently across three levels of awareness (conscious, pre-conscious, unconscious)
• • the id is entirely unconscious, expressing its urges at a conscious level through the ego

Question 11

What is the conflict between sex/aggression?

Answer 11

• • Freud believed that conflicts centring on sexual and aggressive impulses are especially likely to have far-reaching consequences
• • This is because Freud thought that sex and aggression are subject to more complex and ambiguous social controls than other basic motives. The norms governing sexual and aggressive behaviour are subtle, and people often get inconsistent messages about what’s appropriate
• • Also, sexual and aggressive drives are thwarted more regularly than other basic biological urges. If you get hungry or thirsty, you can simply head for a nearby vending machine or a drinking fountain. But if a department. store clerk infuriates you, you aren’t likely to reach across the counter and slug him or her. Likewise, when you see a person who inspires lustful urges, you don’t normally walk up and propose a tryst in a nearby broom closet

Question 12

What are anxiety and defence mechanisms?

Answer 12

• • Defence Mechanisms: Procedures the ego uses to unconsciously distort reality in order to reduce anxiety
• -prolonged and troublesome conflicts involve sexual and aggressive impulses that society wants to tame. These conflicts are suppressed into the unconscious part of the mind. But this takes effort and control. Sometimes our defences slip (our self-control is weak), and this can be when an urge/impulse/emotion gets through our defences and expresses itself in our behaviour.The anxiety can be attributed to your ego worrying about (1) the id getting out of control and doing something terrible that leads to severe negative consequences or (2) the superego getting out of control and making you feel guilty about a real or imagined transgression
• • This effort to ward off anxiety often involves the use of defence mechanisms (largely unconscious reactions that protect a person from unpleasant emotions such as anxiety and guilt)

Question 13

What are the different types of defence mechanisms?

Answer 13

• • rationalization: which is creating false but plausible excuses to justify unacceptable behaviour.
• • Repression: keeping distressing thoughts and feelings buried in the unconscious. Called “motivated forgetting.”Ex. forget a dental appointment or the name of someone you don’t like
• • Projection: attributing one’s own thoughts, feelings, or motives to another. The thoughts one projects onto others are thoughts that would make one feel guilty. For example, if lusting for a co-worker makes you feel guilty, you might attribute any latent sexual tension between the two of you to the other person’s desire to seduce you
• • Displacement: diverting emotional feelings (usually anger) from their original source to a substitute target. Social constraints often force people to hold back their anger, and they end up lashing out at the people they love most
• • Reaction formation: behaving in a way that’s exactly the opposite of one’s true feelings. For example, Freud theorized that many males who ridicule homosexuals are defending against their own latent homosexual impulses
• • Regression is a reversion to immature patterns of behaviour. When anxious about their self-worth, some adults respond with childish boasting and bragging.
• • Identification is modeling behaviour after someone else because you don’t know how to deal with the impulse/emotion/memory/etc. ex. Adults may join exclusive country clubs or civic organizations as a means of identification.
• • sublimation: when unconscious, unacceptable impulses are channelled into socially acceptable, perhaps even admirable, behaviours. For example, Freud believed that many creative endeavours were sublimations of sexual urges. Intense aggressive impulses might be rechannelled by taking up boxing or football. Sublimation is regarded as a relatively healthy defence mechanism
• -Denial: Refusing to believe a reality

Question 14

What are the psychosexual stages and fixation?

Answer 14

– psychosexual stages are developmental periods with a characteristic sexual focus that leave their mark on adult personality
– Fixation is a failure to move forward from one stage to another as expected. Caused by excessive gratification of needs at a particular stage or by excessive frustration of those needs (needs are under- or over-gratified). Fixations left over from childhood affect adult personality.
1) Oral (first year of life)
– erotic focus: mouth (sucking, biting)
– the manner in which the child is weaned from the breast or the bottle
•Early stage task is feeding
– struggles feeding – Oral Incorporative Personality – could lead to the development of a dependent personality; good listener, gullible
– Behaviours include: eating, drinking, smoking, kissing
•Late stage task is weaning
– Struggles weaning (from bottle to regular food)– Oral Sadistic Personality – could lead to the development of an aggressive personality; sarcasm, cynicism, ridicule.
– Behaviours include: gum chewing, overeating, nail-biting.
2) Anal (2–3)
– erotic focus: anus (expelling or retaining feces)
– The crucial event at this time is toilet training
•Early stage task is feces expulsion
– Anal Expulsive Personality – self-confident, uninhibited, resistant to authority. Lack of bowel control, bed-wetting.
– Behaviours include: overly generous, creative, extreme messiness
•Late stage task is feces retention
– Anal Retentive Personality – rigid, compulsive. Constipation.
– Behaviours include: perfectionistic, stubbornness, stinginess
3) Phallic (4–5)
– erotic focus: genitals (masturbating)
•Boys: Oedipus complex (desires for their opposite-sex parent, accompanied by feelings of hostility toward their same-sex parent). Castration anxiety
– Phallic character. Hyper-masculinity.
– Behaviours include: Concerns with expressing virility. Power tools, trucks, cars, large machinery. Heavy reliance on masturbation
•Girls: Electra complex (desires for their opposite-sex parent, accompanied by feelings of hostility toward their same-sex parent). Penis envy (young girls feel hostile toward their mother because they blame her for their anatomical “deficiency.”)
–Hysterical character. Hyper-femininity.
–Behaviours include: Flirtatiousness. Promiscuity. Male-bashing. Heavy reliance on masturbation
4) Latency
– 6–12
– erotic focus: none (sexually repressed)
– expanding social contacts beyond the immediate family
5) Genital
– Puberty onward
– erotic focus: genitals (being sexually intimate)
– sexual energy is normally channelled toward peers of the other sex, rather than toward oneself, as in the phallic stage
–contributing to society through working

–• an adults behaviour is a manifestation of their progression through these stages (1-4 excluding genital). If they progressed through these stages in balance, they move on to become a healthy functioning adult. If they had any fixation at any of these stages, then your personality will be shaped by one of these

Question 15

What is Carl Jung’s analytical psychology theory?

Answer 15

• -proposed that the unconscious consists of two layers
  1) personal unconscious, is essentially the same as Freud’s version of the unconscious. The personal unconscious houses material that is not within one’s conscious awareness because it has been repressed or for- gotten
  2) collective unconscious is a storehouse of latent memory traces inherited from people’s ancestral past. According to Jung, each person shares the collective unconscious with the entire human race
• • Jung called these ancestral memories archetypes; they are not memories of actual, personal experiences but emotionally charged images and thought forms that have universal meaning
• • symbols from very different cultures often show striking similarities because they emerge from archetypes that are shared by the entire human race.

Question 16

What is Adler’s individual psychology?

Answer 16

• • Adler’s theory stressed the social context of per- sonality development
• -Some people engage in overcompensation in order to conceal, even from themselves, their feelings of inferiority
• • importance of birth order as a factor governing personality

Question 17

What are the criticisms of the psychodynamic approaches?

Answer 17

1. Poor testability: Psychodynamic ideas have often been too vague and speculative to permit a clear scientific test. Ex. how do you know the id is entirely unconscious?
2. Inadequate evidence: Psychodynamic theories depend too heavily on clinical case studies in which it’s much too easy for clinicians to see what they expect to see. Ex. Freud frequently distorted his patients’ case histories to make them mesh with his theory
3. Sexism: psychodynamic theories are characterized by a sexist bias against women. Ex. Freud believed that females’ penis envy made them feel inferior to males. He also thought that females tended to develop weaker superegos and to be more prone to neurosis than males. Also, the psychodynamic approach has generally pro- vided a rather male-centred point of view
4. Unrepresentative samples: Freud’s theories were based on an exceptionally narrow sample of upper-class, neurotic, sexually repressed Viennese women. They were not even remotely representa- tive of Western European culture, let alone other cultures

Question 18

What is behaviourism?

Answer 18

• -a theoretical orientation based on the premise that scientific psychology should study only observable behaviour
• • behaviourists explain personality the same way they explain everything else, in terms of learning.
• • three behavioural views of personality: B. F. Skinner, Albert Bandura, and Walter Mischel

Question 19

How did Skinner explain personality in terms of conditioning?

Answer 19

• -Skinner showed little interest in what goes on “inside” people and instead focused on how the external environment moulds overt behaviour. He also did not break the developmental process into stages. Nor did he attribute special importance to early childhood experiences.
• • Determinism: asserting that behaviour is fully determined by environmental stimuli. He claimed that free will is but an illusion
• • Skinner viewed an individual’s personality as a collection of response tendencies that are tied to various stimulus situations
• -A specific situation may be associated with a number of response tendencies that vary in strength, depending on past conditioning
• • human responses are shaped by the type of conditioning that he described: operant conditioning (reinforcement, punishment, and extinction determine people’s patterns of responding)
• • Because response tendencies are constantly being strengthened or weakened by new experiences, Skinner’s theory views personality development as a continuous, lifelong journey
• • that conditioning strengthens and weakens response tendencies “mechanically”—that is, without the person’s conscious participation. Thus, Skinner was able to explain consistencies in behaviour (personality) without being concerned about individuals’ cognitive processes

Question 20

What is Bandura’s social cognitive theory?

Answer 20

• • Bandura contends that conditioning is not a mechanical process in which people are passive participants. Instead, he maintains that “people are self-organizing, proactive, self-reflecting, and self-regulating, not just reactive organisms shaped and shepherded by external events”
• -emphasizes the important role of forward- directed planning, noting that “people set goals for themselves, anticipate the likely consequences of prospective actions, and select and create courses of action likely to produce desired outcomes and avoid detrimental ones
• • reciprocal determinism is the idea that internal mental events, external environmental events, and overt behaviour all influence one another
• • According to Bandura, humans are neither masters of their own destiny nor hapless victims buffeted about by the environment

Question 21

How does Bandura explain personality in terms of observational learning?

Answer 21

• -Observational learning occurs when an organism’s responding is influenced by the observation of others, who are called models (a person whose behaviour is observed by another)
• • Some models are more influential than others; both children and adults tend to imitate people they like or respect more than people they don’t. People are also especially prone to imitate the behaviour of people whom they consider attractive or powerful. Imitation is more likely when people see similarity between models and themselves. People are more likely to copy a model if they observe that the model’s behaviour leads to positive outcomes

Question 22

How does Bandura explain personality in terms of self-efficacy?

Answer 22

• • Self-efficacy refers to one’s belief about one’s ability to perform behaviours that should lead to expected out- comes
• • When self-efficacy is high, individuals feel confident that they can execute the responses necessary to earn reinforcers. When self-efficacy is low, individuals worry that the necessary responses may be beyond their abilities
• • Perceptions of self-efficacy are subjective and specific to certain kinds of tasks and can influence which challenges people tackle and how well they perform

Question 23

What is Walter MIschel’s person-situation controversy?

Answer 23

• • According to Mischel, people make responses that they think will lead to reinforcement in the situation at hand. For example, if you believe that hard work in your job will pay off by leading to raises and promotions, you’ll probably be diligent and industrious
• • Mischel reviewed decades of research and concluded that people exhibit far less consistency across situations than had been widely assumed. For example, studies show that a person who is honest in one situation may be dishonest in another.
• • This sparked a debate about the relative importance of the person as opposed to the situation in determining behaviour (both the person and the situation are important determinants of behaviour)
• • When small chunks of behaviour are examined on a moment-to-moment basis, situational factors dominate and most individuals’ behaviour tends to be highly inconsistent
• • However, when larger chunks of typical behaviour over time are examined, people tend to be reasonably consistent and personality traits prove to be more influential

Question 24

What does Norman Endler argue?

Answer 24

– interactional approach to personality: argued that personality traits interact with situational factors to produce behaviour

Question 25

What are the criticisms of the behavioural perspectives to personality?

Answer 25

• -The behaviourists used to be criticized because they neglected cognitive processes. The rise of social cognitive theory blunted this criticism
• • However, social cognitive theory undermines the foundation on which behaviourism was built—the idea that psychologists should study only observable behav- iour. Thus, some critics complain that behavioural theories aren’t very behavioural anymore
• • Other critics argue that behaviourists have indiscriminately generalized from animal research to human behaviour

Question 26

What is humanism and the humanistic theory to personality?

Answer 26

• • Humanism is a theoretical orientation that emphasizes the unique qualities of humans, especially their freedom and their potential for personal growth
• • Humanistic theories assume that (1) people can rise above their primitive animal heritage and control their biological urges, and (2) people are largely conscious and rational beings who are not dominated by unconscious, irrational needs and conflicts.
• • emphasizes the the phenomenological approach, which assumes that one has to appreciate individuals’ personal, subjective experiences to truly understand their behaviour.
• • According to this notion, if you think that you’re homely or bright or sociable, this belief will influence your behaviour more than the realities of how homely, bright, or sociable you actually are

Question 27

What does Carl Rogers explain personality in terms of self-concept?

Answer 27

• • Rogers’s approach is called a person-centred theory.
• -A self-concept is a collection of beliefs about one’s own nature, unique qualities, and typical behaviour ex. “I’m smart”. Individuals are aware of their self-concept. It’s not buried in their unconscious.
• • Incongruence is the degree of disparity between one’s self-concept and one’s actual experience (in contrast, if a person’s self-concept is reasonably accurate, it’s said to be congruent with reality)
• • Rogers maintained that too much incongruence undermines one’s psychological well-being

Question 28

How is self-concept developed according to Carl Rogers?

Answer 28

• -Rogers was concerned with how childhood experiences pro- mote congruence or incongruence between one’s self-concept and one’s experience
• • conditional love from parents foster incongruence because children often block out of their self-concept those experiences that make them feel unworthy of love
• • unconditional love from parents fosters congruence because they have less need to block out unworthy experiences because they’ve been assured that they’re worthy of affection, no matter what they do

Question 29

How does anxiety/self-defence affect personality according to Carl Rogers?

Answer 29

• • people with highly incongruent self-concepts are especially likely to be plagued by recurrent anxiety
• • To ward off this anxiety, individuals often behave defensively in an effort to reinterpret their experience so that it appears consistent with their self-concept.
• -Thus, they ignore, deny, and twist reality to protect and perpetuate their self-concept.

Question 30

What is Tory Higgins theory of self-discrepancy?

Answer 30

• • discrepancy between the actual self (our beliefs about the kind of person we think we are) and two standards we hold for the self (the ought self and the ideal self) can lead to emotional discomfort and even psychopathology if the discrepancy is extreme enough
• • The ideal self refers to our beliefs about the kind of person we wish to be (e.g., a top student)—our hopes, goals, and aspirations for ourselves
• • The ought self refers to our beliefs about the kind of person we have a duty or obligation to be (e.g., a faithful spouse)
• • discrepancy between the actual and ought selves leads to agitation and, in extreme cases, anxiety. And discrepancies between the actual and ideal selves lead to dejection and, in extreme cases, depression. Research has revealed impressive support for his theory

Question 31

What is Roy Baumeister theory of self-regulation?

Answer 31

• • self-regulation: the self’s ability to alter its actions and behaviours
• • When we self-regulate, we are adapting our behaviour to fit with important goals and standards we hold for ourselves
• -For example, if attending law school is something that is important to you, then you may forgo some leisure activities in order to put extra time into studying for the LSATs.

Question 32

What are promotion and prevention focus?

Answer 32

• -some people are promotion focused while others are prevention focused and that these two types of people orient themselves differently in pursuit of their goals
• • People with a promotion focus approach their personal goals with gain and advancement in mind; they focus on the rewards and benefits of their actions
• • People who adopt a prevention focus are more oriented to playing it safe, doing what’s necessary. Rather than playing to win rewards and benefits, they play not to lose, to avoid failure.
• • Research has shown that these two orientations affect many facets of our behaviour, our thoughts, our feelings and mental health, and our actions

Question 33

What is Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs?

Answer 33

• -hierarchy of needs; a systematic arrangement of needs, according to priority, in which basic needs must be met before less basic needs are aroused.
• • The needs toward the bottom of the pyramid, such as physiological or security needs, are the most basic. Higher levels in the pyramid consist of progressively less basic needs
• • Need for self- actualization, which is the need to fulfill one’s potential; it is the highest need in Maslow’s motivational hierarchy. For example, if you have great musical talent but must work as an accountant, or if you have scholarly interests but must work as a salesclerk, your need for self- actualization will be thwarted.
    1) Physiological needs
    2) Safety and security needs
    3) Belongingness and love needs
    4) Esteem needs
    5) Cognitive needs (knowledge/understanding)
    6) Aesthetic needs (beauty/order)
    7) Need for self-actualization

Question 34

What is the healthy personality?

Answer 34

–self-actualizing persons are people with exceptionally healthy personalities, marked by continued personal growth.
characteristics of self-actualizers:
– accurately tuned in to reality and that they’re at peace with themselves
– open and spontaneous
– sensitive to others’ needs
– not dependent on others for approval or uncomfortable with solitude
– have “peak experiences” (pro- found emotional highs) more often than others.
– strike a nice balance between many polarities in personality (both childlike and mature, both conforming and rebellious)

Question 35

What are the criticisms about the humanistic perspectives?

Answer 35

Critics argue that (1) many aspects of humanistic theory are difficult to put to a scientific test, (2) humanists have been unrealistically optimistic in their assumptions about human nature and their descriptions of the healthy personality, and (3) more empirical research is needed to solidify the humanistic view.

Question 36

What is Eysenck’s theory to personality?

Answer 36

• • many superficial traits are derived from a smaller number of more basic traits, which are derived from a handful of fundamental higher-order
• -all aspects of personality emerge from just three higher-order traits: extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism.
• -Each of these traits is represented in the theory as a bipolar dimension: extraversion– introversion, stability–neuroticism (instability), and psychoticism–self-control.
• • Eysenck theorizes that some people can be conditioned more readily than others because of differences in their physiological functioning
• • He has proposed that introverts tend to have higher levels of physiological arousal, or perhaps higher “arousability,” which makes them more easily conditioned than extraverts
• • people who condition easily acquire more condi- tioned inhibitions than others. These inhibitions make them more bashful, tentative, and uneasy in social situations. This social discomfort leads them to turn inward. Hence, they become introverted.

Question 37

How can your genes determine your personality?

Answer 37

• -For instance, in twin studies of the Big Five personality traits, identical twins were found to be much more similar than fraternal twins on all five traits. This is true even when the identical twins are reared in different homes
• -shared family environment appears to have remarkably little impact on personality. This unexpected finding has been observed quite consistently in behavioural genetics research
• • A number of studies have found a link between a specific dopamine-related gene (D4DR) and measures of extraversion, novelty seeking, and impulsivity
• • a variety of studies have reported a link between a serotonin-related gene and measures of neuroticism, but the results have been inconsistent
• -The ultimate problem, however, is probably that specific personality traits may be influenced by hundreds, if not thousands, of genes, each of which may have a very tiny effect that is difficult to detect

Question 38

What is the neuroscience of personality?

Answer 38

• • participants’ extraversion correlated with the volume of brain regions known to process reward
• • Variations in neuroticism correlated with the volume of brain areas known to be activated by threat, punishment, and negative emotions

Question 39

What is the evolutionary approach to personality?

Answer 39

• • personality has a biological basis because natural selection has favoured certain traits over the course of human history
• • Buss argues that the Big Five reflect the most noticeable features of others’ behaviour because humans have evolved to notice these features more. This is because humans historically have depended heavily on groups and people have had to make difficult but crucial judgments about the characteristics of others. Humans evolved to notice the Big Five personality traits because these personality traits have had adaptive implications
• • Daniel Nettle asserts that the traits themselves (as opposed to the ability to recognize them in others) are products of evolution that were adaptive in ancestral environments
• • For example, he discusses how extraversion could have promoted mating success, how agreeableness could have fostered the effective building of coalitions, and so forth
• -variations in extraversion may be shaped by variations in attractiveness and physical strength, two traits that could have influenced the reproductive value of extraversion in human ancestral environments
• -Thus, they predict attractiveness should correlate positively with extraversion in both genders, and that strength should be predictive of extraversion in men

Question 40

What are the criticisms of the biological perspectives?

Answer 40

• -Critics assert that too much emphasis has been placed on heritability estimates, which vary depending on sampling and statistical procedures
• • Critics also argue that effects of nature and nurture are twisted together in complicated interactions that can’t be separated cleanly
• • Thus, genetic and environ- mental influences on personality are not entirely independent.

Question 41

How does culture affect personality?

Answer 41

• -continuity has been apparent in cross-cultural comparisons of the trait structure of personality. For example, when scales that tap the Big Five personality traits have been administered and subjected to factor analysis in other cultures, the usual five traits have typically emerged
• • some cross-cultural variability is seen when researchers compare the average trait scores of samples from various cultural groups. For example, Brazilians scored relatively high in neuroticism, Australians in extraversion, Germans in openness to experience, Czechs in agreeableness, and Malaysians in conscientiousness
• • national character: the idea that various cultures have widely recognized prototype personalities
• • asked subjects from many cultures to describe the typical member of their culture on rating forms guided by the five-factor model. There was little or no relationship between perceptions of national character and actual trait scores for various cultures
• • American culture fosters an independent view of the self. American youngsters learn to define themselves in terms of their personal attributes, abilities, accomplishments, and posses- sions.
• • in Asian cultures such as Japan and China, socialization practices foster a more interdependent view of the self. Parents teach their children that they can rely on family and friends, that they should be modest about their personal accomplishments so they don’t diminish others’ achievements
• -Consistent with this analysis, Markus and Kitayama report that Asian subjects tend to view themselves as more similar to their peers than American subjects do

Question 42

What is individualism and collectivism and how do they affect personality?

Answer 42

• -Individualism involves putting personal goals ahead of group goals and defining one’s identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group memberships
• -collectivism involves putting group goals ahead of personal goals and defining one’s identity in terms of the groups one belongs to
• -individualism and collectivism foster cultural disparities in self-enhancement
• • Self- enhancement involves focusing on positive feed- back from others, exaggerating one’s strengths, and seeing oneself as above average.
• • Self-enhancements tend to be pervasive in individualistic cultures, but far less common in collectivist cultures

Question 43

What is the lexical trait approach?

Answer 43

• • Important differences will have become a part of our language. Thus, we can examine language (i.e. the dictionary) for trait terms
• • •Synonym frequency: if we have a lot of different synonyms for a trait, then that trait must be very important. Ex. nice has many synonyms so that must mean that being nice is an important or meaningful
• • •Cross-cultural universality: if we want to understand if a trait is part of humanity/very important, then we look at different cultures and repeat that synonym frequency for those cultures. If a particular trait is really a core element of our humanity, then we’ll find high synonym frequency across those cultures /language groups. If many different cultures/languages have many synonyms for agreeable/disagreeable, then that must mean the trait is a very core part of our humanity

Question 44

What is the statistical trait approach?

Answer 44

• • Begin with a number of trait terms, and then use a statistical technique (factor analysis) to determine the “major traits” – this is done by clustering together the trait terms that correlate (i.e., are similar)
• • Get a large sample of participants and get them to rate themselves on a whole variety of trait terms. Get thousands of people to rate themselves on a scale of -3 to +3 on a trait like being nice, then a trait like being friendly, or warm, etc. Then we look for patterns in the data (this is called factor analysis). Factor analysis involves looking for a pattern of correlations across a broad data set, and then finidng the core factor influencung the broad data set. For example, If peoples scores are generally correlating among terms like nice, warm, friendly, agreeable, then maybe all these terms are describing the same core trait. We can then cluster these traits like nice, warm, friendly into one core trait and give it a label

Question 45

What is the theoretical trait approach?

Answer 45

• • we start with a theory that may have originally been meant for something else and wasn’t necessarily meant specifically for personality, and then use this theory to help explain and classify personality
• • the theory then determines how we are going to classify personality, and what the core traits will be
• • Ex: Recall Murray’s Theory of Needs – his big three needs were Achievement, Power, Intimacy.
• • we can use these to define “trait-like” characteristics with which we can use to describe individual differences between people

Question 46

How do people express their traits differently?

Answer 46

• Even though people may have a similar score on some specific trait, the way each person manifests that behaviour of that trait might be different. Ex. if two people score high on conscientiousness, one person manifests their conscientiousness by being very dutiful (being very on time), the other person who also scored high on conscientiousness might manifest theirs by being very diligent and careful (being very prepared) and by doing that they might always be very late. This happens because we take like 20 000 different traits and lumped them all the way down to 5 so these individual differences on one trait will be common

Question 47

What is the five factor model of personality trait?

Answer 47

• • Robert McCrae and Paul Costa used the statistical method to identify five major/core traits
• -• Research has found cross-cultural universality, as well as stability across the life span
• -• Each trait is a unidimensional, bipolar construct – meaning that we can score high or low (or in the middle) on the trait
  1) Extraversion vs introversion: Characterized as outgoing, sociable, upbeat, friendly, assertive, and gregarious. They also have a more positive outlook on life and are motivated to pursue social contact, intimacy, and interdependence
  2) Neuroticism vs emotional stability: Tend to be anxious, hostile, self-conscious, insecure, and vulnerable. They also tend to exhibit more impulsiveness and emotional instability than others
  3) Openness vs closed to experience: Associated with curiosity, flexibility, imaginativeness, intellectual pursuits, interests in new ideas, and unconventional attitudes. People who are high in openness also tend to be tolerant of ambiguity.
  4) Agreeableness vs antagonism: Tend to be sympathetic, trusting, cooperative, modest, and straightforward. Agreeableness is also correlated with empathy and helping behaviour
  5) Conscientiousness vs lack of direction: Tend to be diligent, well-organized, punctual, and depend- able. Conscientiousness is associated with strong self-discipline and the ability to regulate oneself effectively

Question 48

What are criticisms of the trait approach?

Answer 48

• Personality often changes according to a given situation.
• Traits often do a poor job of predicting actual behaviour.
• Walter Mischel’s Situationism: The rules and roles of the situation control/determine behaviour.
• This lead to a divide in the field…
• Solution: Integration – both traits and situations are needed to understand behaviour

Question 49

What is the correlation between the big-five personality traits and health?

Answer 49

1. Traits are associated with underlying factors that cause disease.
   –• Hostility (low Agreeableness) related to increased sympathetic nervous system activation. This is connected to an increased risk of developing coronary artery disease
2. Personality may lead to behaviours that protect or diminish health
   –•Extraversion related to more social relationships & support. This is connected to positive health.
   –•Low Conscientiousness related to unhealthy behaviours (smoking, poor diet, lack of exercise).
3. Personality related to successful implementation of health-related coping behaviours & adherence to treatment.
   •High Conscientiousness is connected to being more likely to follow doctor’s orders (adhere to treatment and successful implementation)

Question 50

What is the McAdams & Donnellan personality and drinking risk factor study?

Answer 50

• • Measured: The Big Five, Sensation Seeking, Alcohol use, Hangover symptoms (i.e. experienced a headache, or vomited), and Drinking problems (i.e. passing out, getting into a fight)
• • • Extraversion – the facets of gregariousness and excitement seeking were positively associated with alcohol use.
• • • Agreeableness – the facet of morality was negatively associated with alcohol use.
• • • Conscientiousness (and specifically the facet of achievement striving) was negatively associated with alcohol use.
• • • Neuroticism – the facet of immoderation was positively associated with alcohol use.
• • • Gregariousness, excitement seeking, immoderation, and impulsive sensation seeking (each on their own) were all positively associated with experiencing hangover symptoms and with experiencing drinking problems.

Question 51

How does personality affect relationships?

Answer 51

– Personality & Relationships for children
•Agreeableness and Extraversion are the best predictors of outcomes related to peer-relations in children (e.g. peer acceptance and friendship).
•Low Agreeableness (hostility) and Low Extraversion (being withdrawn) are associated with rejected peer status (being rejected by peers).
– Personality & Relationships for young adults
•Relations among peers – extraversion (not agreeableness) seems to be the most important predictor of popularity and status among young adults.
•Relations between young adults and their parents (the older generation) are negatively affected by the young adults’ neuroticism, low conscientiousness, and low extraversion
– Personality & romantic relationships
•Neuroticism and/or Low Agreeableness consistently emerge as predictors of negative relationship outcomes such as relationship dissatisfaction, conflict, abuse, relationship dissolution
•Relationship quality is affected by Neuroticism (mediated by sexual satisfaction). Neuroticism was contributing to a poor quality of sexual relations, which then was having an impact on relationship quality
What traits will predict marital dissatisfaction and divorce?
– •Husband’s impulsivity
– •Wife’s neuroticism
– •Husband’s neuroticism

Question 52

What is the Grant & Langan-Fox personality and work stress study?

Answer 52

– Participants: 211 middle-managers (88 men, 123 women)
– Measured: Big Five, Coping strategies, Occupational stress, Job satisfaction
• High Neuroticism combined with low Conscientiousness: predicts higher stress, dysfunctional coping, physical ill health, job dissatisfaction, lower problem-focused coping (not identifying/fixing the problem)
• High Neuroticism combined with low Agreeableness: predicts job dissatisfaction
• High Extraversion and high Conscientiousness and low Neuroticism: predicts lower stress, lower physical ill health, and lower job dissatisfaction
• High agreeableness in men associated with lower income and low agreeableness in women associated with high income

Question 53

What is the Barber, Munz, Bagsby & Grawitch personality and academic achievement study?

Answer 53

•Time Perspective: An individual difference variable; a cognitive bias toward a particular temporal state (future-oriented or present-oriented. Some people have a lower ability to delay their gratification (some positive reinforcer) and some people have a higher ability to delay gratification
•Self-control: The ability to adjust your dispositional tendencies to meet situational demands
•The hypothesis is that self-control can act as a buffer between Time Perspective and Academic Achievement
•Results:
–•Future-oriented individuals were more likely to have higher grades.
–•Present-oriented individuals with high self-control also had higher grades.
–•Present-oriented individuals with low self-control had lower grades.
•Self-control can be thought of as a skill – practice can increase self-regulation strength across a variety of domains

Question 54

What are the different types of trait perfectionism?

Answer 54

1) Self-oriented perfectionism
- -• Demanding perfection of ourself. Setting unrealistic standards for self. Selective attention (and hyper focus) on failure. All-or-none thinking where only total success or total failure exist as possible outcomes. Leads to self-criticism
2) Other-oriented perfectionism
- -• Demanding perfection of others. Setting unrealistic standards for others, placing a high importance on other people being perfect, and stringently evaluating the performance of others. Leads to other- directed blame, lack of trust, hostility, frustration, loneliness
3) Socially prescribed perfectionism
- -• The perception that significant others have unrealistic standards for us, that they evaluate us stringently, and that they are exerting pressure on us to be perfect

Perfectionistic self-presentation: This is about the public expression of the trait - the person’s need to appear perfect to other people, and not display imperfections

• -•Perfectionistic self-promotion: having to show to others that they’re always perfect
• -•Non-display of imperfection: concealing/hiding any imperfections
• -•Non-disclosure of imperfection: not wanting to verbally acknowledge the imperfection

•some people with a high socially prescribed perfectionism might become resentful and rebel against that perfectionism. others with a high socially prescribed perfectionism respond to that pressure by doing the perfectionistic self-presentation (minimizing mistakes in front of others, keeping up appearances, not displaying their imperfections)

Question 55

How is trait perfectionism correlated with personality?

Answer 55

1) Self-oriented perfectionism: correlated with compulsivity (feeling compulsively driven) -double/triple checking to make sure you’ve done something right, high achievement striving
2) Other-oriented perfectionism: correlated with entitled, dramatic, and aggressive behaviour
3) Socially prescribed perfectionism: correlated with emotional dysregulation. Mental representations of others as critical and demanding lead to interpersonal distress and unstable interpersonal interactions
•Conscientiousness: correlated with self-oriented perfectionism, and also with compulsivity
•Extraversion: negatively correlated with non-disclosure and non-display (less likely to hide their imperfections), and also negatively correlated with inhibition (inhibition means restricting emotional expression)
•Agreeableness: negatively correlated with socially-prescribed perfectionism, non-display, and also negatively correlated with dissociality (dissociality means being callous towards others, conduct problems, suspicion of others, and other unsocial behaviour)
•Neuroticism: correlated with socially-prescribed perfectionism, perfectionistic self-promotion, and non-display, also correlated with dysregulation (emotional instability, anxiety, avoidance, oppositionality, etc)