Exam 4 personality Flashcards
What is personality?
An individual’s characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior, together with the psychological mechanisms behind those patterns.
What makes a behavior “characteristic”?
Is it the same behavior across situations and environments?
Is it the same behavior over time, from year-to-year?
What do personality theories try to accomplish?
They try to define and describe personality b
what was humanistic psychology, origin?
People disliked Freud’s theories because they were to sex motivated and behaviorists for being themselves and so negative so they took a more positive approach
What does humanistic psychology focus on?
There are higher level needs. People strive to grow when their basic needs have been met.
People are active. People don’t just respond to the environment like a rat in a cage. They do things.
People are good. We’re sensible and understand ourselves. We want to improve and grow.
Focus on self-actualization.
What is Humanistic psychology
Focuses on the healthy development of human potential (self-actualization).
People have a need to grow and be better people.
People need to be genuine and true to themselves.
What is self-actualization?
The need to maintain and enhance life, and according to humanists, this is the goal of existence.
Involves Realizing one’s potential, Improving one’s experiance, Deeply appreciating life
How did Maslow view self-actualization?
People are motivated by a hierarchy of needs and strive for self-actualization and self-transcendence.
How did Rogers view self-actualization?
To self-actualize, you need the following…
Listen to and follow your inner guide
Unconditional positive regard loving yourself without expectations or demands.
Living in ways that are consistent with your innermost beliefs.
What are some of the criticisms of humanistic psychology?
Use vague, subjective, difficult to measure concepts.
Advance individualism and self-centered values.
Offer naively optimistics assumptions about human nature.
What are some of the benefits of humanistic psychology?
Influenced counseling, education, child raising, and management.
Laid the groundwork for positive psychology.
Renewed interest in the concept of the self
What defines the trait approach to personality?
Focusing on the ways we systematically differ from each other, but it doesn’t focus on truly unique qualities.
Describe differences rather than trying to explain them.
Suggest that genetic predispositions influence many traits.
Assume traits influence overall behavior but not always in specific situations
What is factor analysis?
statistical procedure used to identify similar clusters of test items to tap basic components of personality.
What is a personality inventory?
questinare on which people respond to items designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors.
Used to assess selected personality traits
Test items empirically derived and verified
Tests are objectivley scored.
Why isn’t the Myers-Briggs a good test of personality?
personality traits had a low correlation with the behaviors they were supposed to predict
What was the Person-Situation Debate?
Debate over if personality traits or situations have the strongest influence on behavior, and do personality traits really matter?
How did personality psychologists address the criticism that personality traits didn’t predict behavior well enough?
In general, personality traits are stable and socially significant, predicting mortality, divorce, and occupational attainment.
Consistency of specific behaviors from one situation to another is weak; average behaviors are predictable.
What evidence is there that personality is stable over time?
With age, personality traits become more stable, as reflected in the stronger correlation of trait scores with follow-up scores 7 years later
What is the evidence that personality variable over time?
Changes over time
May be based on changing social roles and life events that encourage these traits.
Also big life experiances (ex homelessness) changes your personality too
How does your personality change as you get older?
Yes, over time People become…
less neurotic.
more agreeable.
more conscientious.
What are the Big Five personality traits?
Openess, consientiousness, Extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism
Extraversion
One of the most important individual differences in psychology.
Extraverted people may be more likely to experience postive emotions and more sensitive to rewards. (they also tend to be happier and more social)
Neuroticism
Over-react to and don’t deal well with stress
Sensitive to rejection
Neurotic people may be more likely to experience negative emotions and be more sensitive to punishment
(Also very important and nonrefuted trait)
Agreeableness
The tendency to be cooperative and get along well with others.
Reflects an important aspect of the survival of our species
Tend to Say nice things to others.
More involved in community and religious activities.
Have a good sense of humor
Be healthy and well-adjusted.
Be accepted by peers
Conscientious
The tendency to be organized, disciplined and hard-working.
tend to:
Do better in college. It’s a better predictor than the SAT.
Do better at work. Predicts better job performance and less absenteeism.
Live longer and avoid drinking and smoking
Openess
least accepted of the big 5
imagnitive, intellent, origonal, wide intrest.
tend to Be liberal.
Use drugs
Play an instrument.
Believe in the paranormal
What is the Dark Triad?
Narcissism, Machiavllianism, and psychopathy that tend to occur together and show callousness twoard others
Psychopathy
impulsive people who show little remorse
Narcissism
entitled, attention-seeking egotists
Machiavellianism
people who like to manipulate others.
How is the Dark Triad related to the Big Five personality traits?
It is a facet of agreeableness
According to Boyce et al (2015), what was the effect of long-term unemployment on personality?
long term unemployment was associated with changes in personality.
Found decreases in agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness
What is the social cognitive perspective to personality, and what defines it?
Views behavior as influenced by the interaction between people’s traits (including their thinking) and their social context.
Emphasizes interaction of our traits with our situations
What is reciprocal determinism?
Describes the interaction and mutual influence of behavior, internal personal factors, and enviromental factors.
The environment influences how you think, but your behavior can also influence your enviroment, its a circle
What is the self?
a variety of psychological processeses related to how you see yourself and how you act on the world.
What is the spotlight effect?
We’re keenly aware of something unusual about ourselves that others can see.
As a result, we oversestimate how many people notice.
What did Gilovich et al (2000) do? What did they find?
Participents were asked to wear an embarassing shirt and walk into a classroom and delever a teacher a note
Participants overestimated how many people noticed the t-shirt.
What is a hoped-for possible self? What did it do?
The self you want to be in the future and motibvates you to achieve stuff
What is a feared possible self? What did it do?
The version of yourself you fear becoming so you make desicions to not become it
What is self-esteem?
our evaluation of our self-worth – part of the “me” aspect of the self.
What are the drawbacks of high self-esteem?
Excessive optimism.
Poorly assess risks and take potentially dangerous chances.
Blindness to incompetence
You may not realize just how poor you are at a task, until it’s too late.
Self-serving bias.
Self serving bias
You believe you cause good things to happen, and bad things are not your fault.
How should we view self-esteem in regard to being a successful person?
Self estem is a consquence of sucess not a cause
How did humanistic psychologists assess a person’s sense of self?
Some reject tests and relied on interviews and conversations. Others used questioneres where people described their ideal self. Now most use the life story approch
How does biology influence personality traits?
Some triats are genetic
