Chapter 13 | Personality Flashcards
Personality
A person’s characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors.
Personality trait
A pattern of thought, emotion, and behavior that is relatively consistent over time and across situations.
Gordon Allport
Classic scientific definition of personality - the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine [the individual’s] characteristic behavior and thought
Organization
Personality is a coherent whole
Dynamic
The organized whole is dynamic.
It is goal-seeking, sensitive to particular contexts, adaptive to the person’s environment, and fluid over time.
Psychological systems
- mental nature of personality (psycho)
- biological processes and external environments (physical)
Temperaments
Biologically based tendencies to feel or act in certain ways
Trait approach
Approaches to studying personality that focus on how individuals differ in personality dispositions.
Five-factor theory
The idea that personality can be described using five factors: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
Openness to experience
Imaginations v. down-to-earth
Likes variability v. likes routine
Independent v. conforming
Conscientiousness
Organized v. disorganized
Careful v. careless
Self-disciplined v. weak-willed
Extraversion
Social v. retiring
Fun-loving v. sover
Affectionate v. reserved
Agreeableness
Soft-hearted v. ruthless
Trusting v. suspicious
Helpful v. uncooperative
Neuroticism
Worried v. calm
Insecure v. secure
Self-pitying v. self-satisfied
Eysenck’s Biological Trait Theory of Personality
According to Eysenck, personality is composed of traits that occur in three dimensions: extraversion/introversion, emotionally stable/neurotic, and high constraint/low constraint (originally called psychoticism).
Behavioral approach system (bas)
The brain system involved in the pursuit of incentives or rewards
Behavioral inhibition system (bis)
The brain system that monitors for threats in the environment and therefore slows or inhibits behavior in order to be vigilant for danger or pain.
Fight-flight-freeze system (fffs)
The brain system that responds to punishment by directing an organism to freeze, run away, or engage in defensive fighting
Humanistic approaches
Approaches to studying personality that emphasize how people seek to fulfill their potential through greater self-understanding
Rogers’s Person-Centered Approach to Personality
According to Rogers’s theory, personality is influenced by how we understand ourselves and how others evaluate us, which leads to conditions of worth or unconditional positive regard.
Locus of control
People’s personal beliefs about how much control they have over outcomes in their lives.
Bandura’s Reciprocal Determinism Theory of Personality
The theory that the pression of personality can be explained by the interaction of environment, person factors, and behavior itself.
Need for cognition
The tendency to engage in and enjoy thinking about difficult questions or problems.
Situationism
The theory that behavior is determined more by situations than by personality traits.
Interactionism
The theory that behavior is determined jointly by situations and underlying dispositions.
Idiographic approaches
Person-centered approaches to assessing personality that focus on individual lives and how various characteristics are integrated into unique persons.
Nomothetic approaches
Approaches to assessing personality that focus on the variation in common characteristics from person to person.
Projective measures
Personality tests that examine tendencies to respond in a particular way by having people interpret ambiguous stimuli.
Projective Measures of Personality
Projective measures are meant to provide insight into a particular person’s personality by allowing the person to project unconscious thoughts onto ambiguous images.
Self-schema
A knowledge structure that contains memories, beliefs, and generalizations about the self and that helps people efficiently perceive, organize, interpret, and use information related to themselves.
Concepts that overlap with the self are most strongly related to the self. Concepts connected to the self with a solid line are not quite as strongly related to self-knowledge. Clothing, connected with a dotted line, is related more weakly. Concepts with no connecting lines are not related to the self.
Self-esttem
The evaluation aspect of the self-concept in which people feel worthy or unworthy.
Sociometer
An internal monitor of social acceptance or rejection.
According to sociometer theory, self-esteem is the gauge that measures the extent to which people believe they are being included in or excluded from a social group. (a) If the probability of rejection seems low, a person’s self-esteem will tend to be high. (b) If the probability of rejection seems high, a person’s self-esteem will tend to be low.
Social comparison
The tendency for people to evaluate their own actions, abilities, and beliefs by contrasting them with other people’s.
Self-serving bias
The tendency for people to take personal credit for success but blame failure on external factors
Cultural Differences in Self-Construal
Self-construal differs across cultures. (a) In individualist cultures, self-construal focuses on elements within the person. (b) In collectivist cultures, self-construal centers around areas where the person’s sense of self is connected with others.
