Finals Flashcards
is the biologically based tendency to behave in particular ways from very early in life
Temperament
o Born in Berlin on March 4, 1916
o His mother was Ruth Werner, a starlet at the time of ________ birth. His father Anton edward, was a comedian, singer, and actor.
o He was the only child of a theatrical family
Hans Jurgen Eysenck
What are the four criteria for identifying a factor that Eysenck established?
o Psychometric evidence for the factor’s existence must be established
o The factor must also possess heritability and must fit an established genetic model
o The factor must make sense from a theoretical view
o The factor must possess social relevance
The Four Levels of Behavior Organization:
o Specific acts or cognitions
o Habitual acts or cognitions
o Trait
o Superfactors / Types
- individual behaviors or thoughts that may
or may not be characteristic of a person
Specific acts or cognitions
- responses that recur under similar conditions
Habitual acts or cognitions
Important semi-permanent personality dispositions. Defined in terms of significant intercorrelations between different habitual behaviors
Trait
made up of several interrelated traits
Superfactors / Types
oEysenck and Cattell arrived at a different number of ____________ because they worked at different levels of factoring
o Many current factor theorists insist that ample evidence exists that five—and no more and no fewer—general factors will emerge from nearly all factor analyses of personality traits
DIMENSIONS OF PERSONALITY
Eysenck extracted three general superfactors:
o Extraversion (E)
o Neuroticism (N)
o Psychoticism (P)
Introversion
Extraversion
Stability
Neuroticism
Superego
Psychoticism
does not imply that most people are at one end or the other of the three main poles
The bipolarity of Eysenck’s factors
He contended that each of these factors meets his four criteria for identifying personality dimensions
Eysenck
- have lower cortical arousal level that results in higher sensory thresholds, thus lesser reactions to sensory stimulation
- are characterized primarily by sociability and impulsiveness but also by jocularity, liveliness, quick-wittedness, optimism, and other traits indicative of people who are rewarded for their association with others
Extraverts
- are characterized by a higher level of arousal, and as a result of a lower sensory threshold, they experience greater reactions to sensory stimulation
- can be described as quiet, passive, unsociable, careful, reserved, thoughtful, pessimistic, peaceful, sober, and controlled
Introverts
- a physiological condition that is largely inherited rather than learned
Cortical Arousal Level
o People who score high on this often have a tendency to overreact emotionally and have difficulty returning to a normal state after emotional arousal
o ________ does not necessarily suggest a neurosis in the traditional meaning of that term
Neuroticism
o Eysenck proposed this emotional reactivity in neuroticism is due to this phenomenon
Highly reactive Limbic System
are vulnerable to illness because they have either a genetic or an acquired weakness that predisposes them to an illness
Diathesis Stress Model
are often egocentric, cold, non-conforming, impulsive, hostile, aggressive, suspicious, psychopathic, and antisocial
High P scorers
tend to be altruistic, highly socialized, empathic, caring, cooperative, conforming and conventional
o Low P scorers
– assessed only the correlation between extraversion and neuroticism
o Maudsley Personality Inventory (MPI)
contains a lie scale to detect faking, but more importantly, it measures extraversion and neuroticism independently
Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI)
o Researchers have found nearly identical factors among people in various parts of the world, not only in Western Europe and North America.
o Evidence suggests that individuals tend to maintain their position over time on the different dimensions of personality.
o Studies of twins shows a higher concordance between identical twins than between same-gender fraternal twins reared together
BIOLOGICAL BASES OF PERSONALITY
Born on April 14, 1953 in Indianapolis, Indiana to Arnold H., Sr. and Edith Nolte
Even though he grew up in an academic family, in his teens he drifted toward mediocre grades in school and got involved in drugs in high school, even being arrested twice on drug charges.
David Michael Buss
were the first thinkers to argue for an evolutionary perspective of psychological thought and behavior
Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer
The first signs of change was put forth by who when he argued for a merger of the biological and social sciences and dubbed his movement “sociobiology”
E.O. Wilson
It is Coined in 1973 by biologist Michael Ghiselin (1973), and later popularized by the anthropologist John Tooby and psychologist Leda Cosmides in the early 1990s.
Evolutionary Psychology
The scientific study of human ______________ from an evolutionary perspective and focuses on four big questions
thought and behavior
Why is the human mind designed the way it is, and how did it come to take its
current form?
How is the human mind designed; that is, what are its parts and current structure?
What function do the parts of the mind have, and what is it designed to do?
How do the evolved mind and current environment interact to shape human
behavior?
PRINCIPLES OF EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY
The true origin of personality is evolution, meaning that it is caused by an interaction between an ever changing environment and a changing body and brain
There was a serious problem though: natural selection typically works to lessen individual differences insofar that successful traits and qualities become the norm and less adaptive traits die out
EVOLUTIONARY THEORY OF
PSYCHOLOGY
The tendency to assume that the environment alone can produce behavior void of a stable internal mechanism
Fundamental situational error
The tendency to ignore situational and environmental forces when explaining the behavior of other people and instead focus on internal dispositions
Fundamental attribution error
operate according to principles in different adaptive domains
number in the dozens or hundreds (maybe even
thousands)
are complex solutions to specific adaptive problems (survival, reproduction)
Mechanisms
Physiological organs and systems that evolved to solve problems of survival
Physical mechanisms
Internal and specific cognitive, motivational, and personality systems that solve specific survival and reproduction problems
Psychological mechanisms
These drives are “adaptations” because they directly affect the health and well-being of the person
Motivation and Emotion
aggression, dominance, achievement, status, “negotiation of hierarchy”
Power
love, attachment, “reciprocal alliance”
Intimacy
- starts with the assumption that motivation, emotion, and personality are adaptive in that they solve problems of survival and reproduction
- conceptualizes individual differences and personality as strategies for solving adaptive problems
Personality Traits Buss
Buss’s model of personality very closely resembles the Big Five trait approach of McCrae and Costa but it is not identical in structure
?
Surgency/extraversion/dominance
Agreeableness
Conscientiousness
Emotional stability (opposite of neuroticism)
Openness/intellect
The disposition to experience positive emotional
states and to engage in one’s environment and to be sociable and self-confident
Put into the language of evolution,this involves “hierarchy proclivities”; that is, how people negotiate and decide who is dominant and who is submissive
Surgency
Marked by a person’s willingness and capacity to cooperate and help the group on the one hand or to be hostile and aggressive on the other.
Agreeable individuals are likely to work to smooth over group conflict and form alliances between people.
marks a person’s willingness to cooperate.
Agreeableness / Hostility
One’s capacity and commitment to work
people are careful and detail-oriented as well as focused and reliable
signals to others whom we can trust with tasks and responsibilities and whom we can depend on in times of need
Conscientiousness
All animals have alarm systems that warn them of potential danger and harm
This takes the form of anxiety as an emotional state
This involves one’s ability to handle stress or not
Emotional Stability / Neuroticism
what are Environmental Sources?
- Early Experiential Calibration
- Alternative Niche Specialization
childhood experiences make some behavioral
strategies more likely than others
Early Experiential Calibration -
- different people find what makes them stand out from others in order to gain attention from parents or potential mates
Alternative Niche Specialization
Body type, facial morphology, and degree of physical attractiveness act as heritable sources of individual differences
Genetic Sources
the extent to which a trait is under genetic influence
Heritability
mutations that are neutral in that they are neither harmful nor beneficial to the individual
Non-adaptive Sources
Neutral genetic variations -
- those that actively harm one’s chance for survival or decrease one’s sexual attractiveness
Maladaptive Sources / Maladaptive traits
o Born in Manhattan, New York, on April 1,
1908
o was the oldest of seven children born to Samuel and Rose Schilosky
o childhood life was filled with intense feelings of shyness, inferiority, and depression
Abraham Harold Maslow
o The whole person, not any single part or function, is motivated
o Motivation is usually complex
o People are continually motivated by one need or another
o All people everywhere are motivated by the same basic needs
o Needs can be arranged on a hierarchy
Maslow’s basic assumptions regarding motivation:
This concept assumes that lower level needs must be satisfied or at least relatively satisfied before higher level needs become motivators
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
- the five needs composing this hierarchy
Conative Needs
- Can be arranged on a hierarchy or staircase, with each ascending step representing a higher need but one less basic to survival
Basic Needs
have prepotency over higher level needs; that is, they must be satisfied or mostly satisfied before higher level needs become activated
Lower level needs
Maslow listed the following needs in order of their prepotency:
physiological,
safety,
love and belongingness,
esteem
self-actualization.
o The most basic needs of any person
o Include food, water, oxygen, maintenance of body temperature, and so on
o are the most prepotent of all
o When people do not have their ______ satisfied, they live primarily for those needs and strive constantly to satisfy them
o They are the only needs that can be completely satisfied or even overly satisfied
o A second characteristic peculiar to ________ is their recurring nature
Physiological Needs
o Include physical security, stability, dependency, protection, and freedom from threatening forces such as war, terrorism, illness, fear, anxiety, danger, chaos, and natural disasters
o also differ from physiological needs in that they cannot be overly satiated
Safety Needs