Differential psychology Flashcards
What is differential psychology?
- how we perceive ourselves and representation to other people
- explain why individuals behave in such manner
What is Cronbach’s two disciplines of scientific psychology?
experimental psychology: manipulate conditions to see what happens
Correlation psychology: identify & measure patterns of nature not directly controlled
What are some criticisms of correlation psychology?
- doesn’t acknowlege situations
- constrains behaviour
Name a criticism of experimental psychology
- some errors in model which are systematic
- i.e individual differeneces
How is the correlational methodology used in psychology?
study genetics and developmental sources of individual differences in personality and intelligence
How is the experimental methodology used in psychology?
- manipulate situation circumstances and observe how affects typical behaviour and performance
List 3 between-person differences
- Physical
- Demographic status
- ## Psychological attributes
What is a domain specific difference?
- Variance = differences create error in psychological experiments
Why is the variance and mean needed?
- measure traits and compare difference to mean as distributed in population
How does Gottfredson define intelligence?
- mental capability to reason, plan, problem solve, comprehend complex ideas and learn quickly from experience
What is personality?
- individual’s characterisitcs of behaving, thinking, feeling
- psychological mechanisms in a person
Why is it important to study variation and differences?
- differences in personality & intelligence predict life outcomes
What are the difficulties in measuring individual differences?
- characteristics not directly observed
- reliability crisis
What is intelligence?
- global concept allowing purposeful actions and thoughts
- measuring unobserved concept
- intelligence is what intelligence test measures
How is intelligence measured?
Classical Hierarchical Model:
g = generalised quality of intelligence
the increase in one type of intelligence causes the increase in the other
Name Cattell’s two different types of intelligence
Fluid
Crystalised
What is fluid intelligence?
Biological fixed cognitive capacities applied to anything
- Ability to do something
- processing power
- context free, applicable to anything
What is crystallised intelligence?
- Acquisition of knowlegde and procedural skills
- continuously improving
- learning something new
What affects learning rate?
- time spent learning
- previous knowledge
- fear of future
What is personality?
- Individual characteristic style of behaving, thinking and feeling
- infer pattern of traits from behaviour
How is personality measured?
Normative: indicate how much you agree w statement on Likert scale
Ipsative: choosing which statement appeals the most
How are personality and intelligence similar?
- heriable, develop overtime
- active conscious roles in development and constraint
How are personality and intelligence different?
- no unitary personal capacity for personality
- typical performance vs maximal performance
How are personality and intelligence tests used?
- research -> description, prediction and explanation
- Decision-making -> diagnosis and classification
What is the difference between quantitative change and qualitative change?
quantitative = change in magnitude
qualitative = change in nature
How does Mendel argue traits develop?
- Genetically: parents passing to offspring
- dichotomous traits
What is the difference between genotype and phenotype?
- Genotype = what’s in the gene
- Phenotype = what’s expressed in the world
How does genetics explain traits to be developed?
- Dominant and recessive traits
- Genotypes and Phenotypes
What roles do genes play in personality and intelligence?
- psychological characterisitcs show genetic influence
- genes and environments interact during development
What are the two continuous not dichotomous traits?
- Polygenic = more than one gene contribute to trait
- pleiotropic = one gene influence two unrelated traits
What role does environment and genes have on traits?
- enviro affects gene expression -> affect development
- genes and environment not independent
What are the requirements for differential research?
- representative sample size
- dependent on difficulty of population access
- large sample size to maximise stats power
What did the Lothian Birth Cohort aim to look about intelligence?
- How intelligence from child changes into adulthood and what causes those differences
What is the pre-psychology history of differential development?
- different accounts of individual differences before formalised field
- wanting to know why individuals differences occur
What did the early personality researchers develop?
- lexical hypohthesis and idea personality encoded in language through traits
What did the early intelligence researchers develop?
- measure and analyse psychological attributes
- psychological characteristics are inherited
What is Galton’s great man theory?
- greatness inherited and continues while others dies
What did Spearman develop?
- factor analysis
- reliability
- general factor of ability
What did Binet develop?
IQ test
How is eugentics revelant to differential psychology?
- Pioneers were eugenicists; used stats to demonstrate some races superior than others
What parts of Freud’s theory is still used today?
- Dual process models: implicit/ unconscious + explicit/ conscious processing
- projection
What are the basics of psychological measurements?
- required ground truth or fixed quality that measurements can be derived from
- uses ratio scales
- dependent on making inferences rather that direct observations
- measurement consistent and in-line with theory
What is an error in psychological measurement?
why/how?
- operationalising psychological character has error
- impacts of stochastic and systematic processes
- interpretative disagreement
- Bias in testing -> distort accuracy of test capturing target constructs
What is the difference between error and noise?
- error/bias = mistake in something objective vs.
- noise = aggregations of error
What is beneficial about understanding nosie?
- examine impact of noise learn more about processes underlying them
- allows minimisation
What is classical test theory?
foundations of psychometrics
What is the central tenet?
- observed score = True score and error
(true scrore includes test + individual item components)
What inferences do we need to make about results?
- not all results mean the same
- consider test content, populations etc before conclusions
What are psychometrics?
- science of measuring psychological characterisitcs
Name the two main criteria for psychometrics
- reliability
- validity
What is the role of factor analysis in differential psychology?
- correlation = measure of association
- factor analysis = measure of association between many variables
What determines the structure of tests?
- a priori -> sub-tests within a test
- a posterior -> factor analysis
What is the origin of the type models?
the 4 humours
What is the modern iteration of the types model?
- Myers-Brig
What are the benefits of the type models?
- central tenet: people organised into discrete, discontinuous categories
- intuitive, easy to grasp
What are 4 criticisms of the type model?
- lacks internal consistency
- lacks test-retest reliability
- lacks predictive validity
- not credible in academic psychology
What is an alternative type of model for personality?
Dynamic model
What is the interactionist perspective on measuring personality?
- personality traits reflect stable patterns of corresponding personality states
- behaviour is product of trait-environment interactions
What has the interactionist perspective of personality found?
- varying more in own expression than between two people
How was the trait model developed?
- lexical hypothesis (personality encoded in langauge)
- several adjectives then wittled down into 5 important ones
- 5 factor model created
What is a negative of the 5 factor model development?
- subjectivity involved
List the 5 traits in the 5 factor model
- Openness
- Conscientiousness
- Extraversion
- Agreeableness
- Neuroticism
What are 4 traits missing from the FFM?
- Antisocial behaviour
- Social dominance
- Morality & religiosity
- Psychopathology
List 4 critiques of the FFM
- created without underlying theory of personality
- created from subjective methods
- social desirability
- broad trait definitions making lack of consensus + vary in models
What could the lexical hypothesis alternatively point out?
- more about socialisation than biology
- derive 5 factors in other cultures but specifics differ
What does each trait in the FFM predict?
- High N and low A predict psychopathology
- High C, O and low N predict educational achievement and work
- Low A predicts higher income
High C predicts health
Why does the FFM work?
- influence behaviour and life choices
- definitions are psychologically relevant
- social desirable behaviour rewarded
- content overlap between items
What does the FFM reflect?
- biological contributions are relatively fixed and stable after 30
What do the FFM cause causal influence on?
- affect
- behaviour
- cognition
- desire
which all maintain stability; environment produces short-term variance
What does the FFM not account for?
- factors correlate
- personality keeps changing
- environment contributes to stability
evidence for biological coherence is limited
What are ABCDs?
- traits comprised of
- Affect: how we feel
- Behaviour: what we do
- Cognition: what we think
- Desire: what we want
- Personality traits present patterns of ABCD = consistent over situations, stable overtime and heritable
Explain Narcissim using ABCD
Affect: extremely emotional
Behaviour: hypersensitive to heriarchy
Cognition: better than everyone
Desire: needs to be fulfilled
How do we measure personality?
- Personality inventories
- self-report statements/adjective apply on scale
- Projective techniques
- Reactions/ responses interpreted by test administrator
- free from reaction to ambiguous stimuli
How are empirically designed objective tests designed?
- match groups differing in some crucial way
- administer tests to both groups
- identify items distinguish sub-groups
- clinical testing
What are the limitation of questionnaire measures?
- Inventory responses aren’t referenced behaviours
- implicitly reflect social desirability
- people lack insight on how others view them
- interpretations are subjective and speculative
What are the advantages of questionnaire measures?
- information breadth
- motivation to report
- casual force
- practicality
How has self-presentation bias been avoided?
- modify personality items to be more neutral
- rephrasing variable to make it less social desirable & more honest
What causes correlations to inflate?
- ## measuring predictors and outcome using same method
How effective are trait measures overall?
- evidence suggests all trait measures are very good at population level
- High re-tests reliability
- self & informant reports correlate
- different measures of same constructs correlate
What are the downsides to trait measures overall?
- Type measures are less good
- all personality measures are less good than intelligence measures
What is IQ?
A score on specific test following a normal distribution
What is cognitive ability?
Used to refer to intelligence or used to refer to similar cognitive constructs
How is intelligence distributed?
Normally distributed:
- mean of 100
- standard deviation 15
What is a hidden assumption of intelligence?
- intelligence is an inherent personal capacity, stable throughout life varying between people
Name 5 ways intelligence can be measured
- Vocabulary
- Identifying sequence progressions
- Short-term and working memory
- Speed of simple processing
- Ability to visualise transformation
Name 4 challenges in intelligence measurements
- Drop in from the sky
- artificial, limited context and low real-world fidelity
- Non-verbal IQ tests
- testing situations are often intimidating
- Some stress improves performance and some hinders
What is the drop in the sky measurement?
intelligence tests
- extremely fast-paced questions
confounded w prior experience w related material
What is missing from the drop in the sky tests?
- self- insight and ability to understand
- creativity
- ability to carry out practical tasks
- decision-making quality
Why might intelligence tests not work well?
- some more test-retest reliable than others
- tap into different specific components of intelligence
Why might intelligence tests work well?
All tend to correlate together
- Positive manifold/ Spearman’s g
- robust observation
What are the two different views of intelligence?
- one intelligence -> g loaded
- many intelligences
What is the modern consensus of intelligence?
- Pattern of correlations -> 8 mid-level abilities independent of each other and g
i.e, fluid intelligence, crystallised intelligence, general memory and learning
What is the classical hierarchical model of intelligence?
- variation in g causes variation in underlying abilities
- underlying abilities arbitrary depending on test structure
What is the Flynn effect?
- Rise in IQ scores -> WWI soldiers intellectually disabled today
- Charles Dickens never sold novels in pulp magazine
What has caused the Flynn effect?
- Education
- Cultural saturation in abstract thinking
- Better nutrition
- Better healthcare
Name 3 misconceptions of intelligence
- fluid intelligence biologically limited capacity for processing info
- crystallised intelligence = accuracy and amount of info available for processing things perceive and measure
- Cant measure them discriminately
What is development?
- growing/shrinking in size or becoming more or less mature or emergence of something new over time.
How can we examine the development of differences?
- establish whether differences are stable
- make a good prediction about something in one’s life later on
What are the requirements for examining the development of differences?
- Identify needed data
- collect good sample
- appropriate research design
Name 2 developmental research designs
- cross-sectional design
- longitudinal design
Name 5 disadvantages of a cross-sectional design
- varying levels of sample selectivity
- can’t evaluate prior influences on individual differences
- cohort effects -> generational difference not accounted for
Name 5 disadvantages of a longitudinal design
- Limited to one cohort
- high drop out rate
- order effects -> retests effects
- questions and measured get dated
- age and time-of-measurement effects are tangled
- time consuming and expensive
List 3 advantages of cross-sectional design
- Faster and Cheaper
- fewer concerns around drop-out
- enable bigger samples
List 3 advantages of longitudinal design
- measures change in indivduals
- measures individual differences in change
- evaluate prior influences on individual differences
What was the Lothian Birth Cohort about?
- Tested intelligence of every 11 yr old in Scotland and tested their cognitive ability later on
What was the population representation for the Lothian cohort?
- Focused on geographical proximity to Edinburgh -> sample was better educated on average and higher social class
- eligible criteria
List 5 extraneous variables which could affect the Lothian Birth Cohort?
- social class
- Education
- Lifestyle between data collection
- community, hobbies
- Personality
What kind of changes occur in the Lothian Birth Cohort?
- Quantitiative
- Qualitative
What occurs in a qualitative change?
- Simple difference in magnitiude with same mechanisms
- needs common measuring rod used in same way
What occurs in a qualitative change?
- capacities appeared or disappeared
- no common measuring rod
- pervasive in childhood and young adulthood and life transitions
What are the common patterns of change?
- step like change
- inverted U-shape
- Continious increasing ability
- continuous decreasing ability
What is change and stability measured by?
- mean-level
- Rank-order
What is mean-level?
- Population level change
- Do average trait scores increase or decrease
What is rank-order?
- Do relative standings change or stay the same in relation to others
What other patterns of change can occur?
- rank- order remain stable but variance increases]
What change occurs in intelligence?
- relatively stable over lifespan but declines in older age
- affected by drop-out and decline
- mean-level smoothed population level pattern miss a lot on individual differences
what changes occur in personality?
- changes relatively stable development over lifespan
- maturation principle -> more conscientious, emotionally stable over lifespan
What key biological components interact with genetics?
- DNA, Chromosomes
- Base pair, SNP, gene
- Genotype and Phenotype
- Shared and non-shared environmental effects
What does Mendel reveal about genetic production?
parents have genetic potential to pass off traits to offspring
Dominant traits: expressed if relative gene inherited from 1+ parent
Recessive traits: expressed if only relevant inherited from both parents
What is the problem with the Mendelian genetic work?
- over-simplified for complex continuous characteristics for psychological characteristics
How do we explore genetic influence in humans?
natural experiments
