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).