Clinical Assessment of Personality: Perspectives from Contemporary Personality Science Flashcards
List three reasons, discussed in this chapter, that the trait approach to personality may not be especially useful for clinical assessment.
1) The traits in 5 factor models are latent constructs identified through the analysis of populations of persons, NOT individual people- so populations-level constructs cannot be assumed to function at the level of the individual. The latent variables only account for between people and don’t explain within-person consistency and variation.
2) The factors show a modest level of between-person predictive utility at population level and implies less predictability at individual level- implying low clinical significance.
3) Trait scores are assumed to be stable throughout life- therefore theoretically are not amenable to interventions or treatments that would change the traits
4) The five factors summarize decontextualized trends in observable behaviors, cognitions, and affects. They do not capture much intraindividual variability over time or context.- Something gets lost when trying to understand and transition from observed bxs, cognitions, and affect to internal causal agents
Describe the trait approach and the social cognitive approach to personality, as described in this chapter. According to this chapter, which is more useful for clinical assessment?
Social Cognitive Approach- Looks at shared interactions in our social environment that help us develop our personality and makes it more fluid . So personality develops through interactions with the social environment- situations and interpersonal interactions mold our cognition. Persoanily is a product of more interworking cognitive and affective processes defined within a context.
Trait Approaches- Used factor analysis to say that people differ from one another on various traits summarized global trends in cognition, behavior, and affect. More stable- across time and setting you can exhibit different levels or degrees of cognitions, behaviors, and affects but the absolute levels of trait scores remain constant and the influence of situation is considered an error variance that interferes with the “true score”.
Social Cognitive Approach is better. The chapter says trait has some level of predictive utility at pop level but do not provide info on internal psychological mechanisms or therapeutic technique and therefore cant help with planning, conceptualization, or treatment.
