Chapter 13 | Personality Flashcards

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1
Q

Personality

A

A person’s characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors.

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2
Q

Personality trait

A

A pattern of thought, emotion, and behavior that is relatively consistent over time and across situations.

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3
Q

Gordon Allport

A

Classic scientific definition of personality - the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine [the individual’s] characteristic behavior and thought

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4
Q

Organization

A

Personality is a coherent whole

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5
Q

Dynamic

A

The organized whole is dynamic.

It is goal-seeking, sensitive to particular contexts, adaptive to the person’s environment, and fluid over time.

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6
Q

Psychological systems

A
  1. mental nature of personality (psycho)
  2. biological processes and external environments (physical)
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7
Q

Temperaments

A

Biologically based tendencies to feel or act in certain ways

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8
Q

Trait approach

A

Approaches to studying personality that focus on how individuals differ in personality dispositions.

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9
Q

Five-factor theory

A

The idea that personality can be described using five factors: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

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10
Q

Openness to experience

A

Imaginations v. down-to-earth
Likes variability v. likes routine
Independent v. conforming

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11
Q

Conscientiousness

A

Organized v. disorganized
Careful v. careless
Self-disciplined v. weak-willed

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12
Q

Extraversion

A

Social v. retiring
Fun-loving v. sover
Affectionate v. reserved

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13
Q

Agreeableness

A

Soft-hearted v. ruthless
Trusting v. suspicious
Helpful v. uncooperative

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14
Q

Neuroticism

A

Worried v. calm
Insecure v. secure
Self-pitying v. self-satisfied

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15
Q

Eysenck’s Biological Trait Theory of Personality

A

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).

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16
Q

Behavioral approach system (bas)

A

The brain system involved in the pursuit of incentives or rewards

17
Q

Behavioral inhibition system (bis)

A

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.

18
Q

Fight-flight-freeze system (fffs)

A

The brain system that responds to punishment by directing an organism to freeze, run away, or engage in defensive fighting

19
Q

Humanistic approaches

A

Approaches to studying personality that emphasize how people seek to fulfill their potential through greater self-understanding

20
Q

Rogers’s Person-Centered Approach to Personality

A

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.

21
Q

Locus of control

A

People’s personal beliefs about how much control they have over outcomes in their lives.

22
Q

Bandura’s Reciprocal Determinism Theory of Personality

A

The theory that the pression of personality can be explained by the interaction of environment, person factors, and behavior itself.

23
Q

Need for cognition

A

The tendency to engage in and enjoy thinking about difficult questions or problems.

24
Q

Situationism

A

The theory that behavior is determined more by situations than by personality traits.

25
Q

Interactionism

A

The theory that behavior is determined jointly by situations and underlying dispositions.

26
Q

Idiographic approaches

A

Person-centered approaches to assessing personality that focus on individual lives and how various characteristics are integrated into unique persons.

27
Q

Nomothetic approaches

A

Approaches to assessing personality that focus on the variation in common characteristics from person to person.

28
Q

Projective measures

A

Personality tests that examine tendencies to respond in a particular way by having people interpret ambiguous stimuli.

29
Q

Projective Measures of Personality

A

Projective measures are meant to provide insight into a particular person’s personality by allowing the person to project unconscious thoughts onto ambiguous images.

30
Q

Self-schema

A

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.

31
Q

Self-esttem

A

The evaluation aspect of the self-concept in which people feel worthy or unworthy.

32
Q

Sociometer

A

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.

33
Q

Social comparison

A

The tendency for people to evaluate their own actions, abilities, and beliefs by contrasting them with other people’s.

34
Q

Self-serving bias

A

The tendency for people to take personal credit for success but blame failure on external factors

35
Q

Cultural Differences in Self-Construal

A

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.