Human personality and aetiology

Question 1

What is personality?

Answer 1

Traits and characteristics that don’t vary across time and situation, they are stable
Eg introversion and extraversion are known to be more biological as can be measured from birth

Question 2

what is the fundamental attribution error

Answer 2

this is the individuals tendency to overemphasise internal characteristics in explaining behaviour rather than external factors

there may be actor-observer bias which people overestimate the role of situation and underemphasise personality

Question 3

What is personality disorder?

Answer 3

Behaviour that consistently transcends social norms.

- ICD10 and DSMIV/V give 9-11 forms
- Psychopath is an example (aka 'dangerous and severe PD' or 'antisocial PD'
- 4-10% (~8%) of people are affected by a form of PD
- This is the only psychiatric disorder diagnosed on the basis of behaviour
- 1% of the worlds population is schizophrenic therefore much more likely to encounter PD

Question 4

What is the critical period for human brain plasticity?

Answer 4

In humans the critical period is 0-12 years of age of maximal brain plasticity - personality sort of solidifies at aged 12. Biological maturity Is reached around 21-23 years old and it is a decline from then on. This is shown in increasing defective reproductive rates as age increased. The current social norms are jut under 30 for marriage and 31 for having children. >35 is when a real risk of birth defect begins to occur.

We are always looking for what is ‘normal’ in society, culture, those around you from the day you are born, and looking at how to behave.

- Eg if both parents smoke then ~80% likelihood a child will too, but I the whole country smoking rates are ~20%
- Eg twin studies

Question 5

What are the 5 stable characteristics of personality? The five factor model of personality (John and Srivastava 1999).

Answer 5

1. Openness to experience
   
   2. Conscientiousness
   3. Extraversion
   4. Agreeableness
   5. Neuroticism (propensity to experience negative feelings on a regular basis, but useful in spotting threat)

Question 6

How do we test personality

Answer 6

• questionnaires
• case studies

Question 7

what are individual outcomes of personality prediction

Answer 7

that can be manifested by an individual outside of a social context. E.G. Physical health, psychopathology, happiness

Question 8

what are interpersonal outcomes of personality prediction

Answer 8

• involve other individuals and it generally matters who the other is. E.G. Forming and maintaining quality relationships

Question 9

what are the interpersonal effects

Answer 9

The strongest personality links shown for empathy, i.e. a combination of extraversion and agreeableness, and emotional regulation, best predicted by low neuroticism.

Romantic relationships - Neuroticism and low agreeableness consistently shown to be predictors of negative relationship outcomes e.g. relationship dissatisfaction, (Karney & Bradbury 1995).

Question 10

what are the social/ institutional outcomes

Answer 10

more impersonal, organisational, societal-level processes involving interactions with more generalised others. E.G. Work satisfaction and performance

Question 11

how does an abusive childhood impact personality?

Answer 11

yes, 92% of people with a PD having suffered abuse.

Society diagnosis and treatment of disorders such as schizophrenia do vary culturally - eg might be made leader of a tribe in some places as might be thought to be communicating with the spirit world.

If someone suffers from a PD and never acts within norms then there are two options –> they don’t know, or they don’t care.

Question 12

What are some factors that contribute to personality that aren’t included in the big five?

Answer 12

• Time keeping
  
  • Spending behaviour
  • Humour
  • Consistent negativity
  • Proclivity to opposite/same sex (obsession)
  • Stubbornness
  • Aggression/violence

Question 13

What are contributing factors to personality?

Answer 13

Genetics
IQ
alcohol
Appearance
Sex
Childhood
Morality
Society
Religion
gender
sex
attitudes
personality
peer group
diet

Question 14

How do genetics contribute to personality?

Answer 14

• 50-54% of personality is inherited from parents.
  
  • Means we are not as unique as we might like to think.
  • Intelligence is >50% inherited.

Question 15

How does IQ contribute to personality?

Answer 15

• Data shows that as IQ increases, length of life increases too
• Less likely to engage in risky behaviour
• Not just for that reason however, the main reason is nothing to do with human behaviour
The latest theory is that IQ is a very rough measure of how well you are put together as a biological machine (this doesn’t necessarily mean better though!

Question 16

How does alcohol contribute to personality?

Answer 16

30% of all UK hospital admissions every year (mostly on Friday and Saturday night). Society and culture affects this with difference age limits and rules.

Question 17

How does appearance contribute to personality?

Answer 17

better and younger looking get shorter sentences, more success, more jobs etc.
We tend to judge attractive people are more intelligent, which there may be a link with. Similarly to IQ, attractiveness may also be a rough measure of how well the biological machine is put together.

Question 18

How does childhood contribute to personality?

Answer 18

experiences, nutrition, oxygen, in the womb etc

Question 19

how does society contribute to personality?

Answer 19

• Laws
  
  • Convention (subjective)
  • No objective reason for things being right or wrong, if was for an objective reason then go to either religion or morality

Question 20

How does religion contribute to personality?

Answer 20

religions make us quite predictable as they often enforce a code of conduct

Question 21

How does our peer group contribute to personality?

Answer 21

social norms - behaving in socially acceptable ways

Question 22

How might diet contribute to personality?

Answer 22

different foods affecting health?

Question 23

What is personality?

Answer 23

• Traits that are stable across time and situations
• But beware: most often the situation one finds oneself in is a better determinant of eventual behaviour
• Fundamental attribution error = individuals tendency to overemphasise internal characteristics in explaining behaviour rather than external factors. Converse = actor-observer bias which people overestimate role of situation and underemphasise personality
• Milgram experiments 1960’s and 1970’s

Milgram showed that if you take normal people and put them in a situation where you demand they kill someone else, 70% of the did (electric shock experiments) - and most almost did.

This is an example of how you can take a normal individual and make them do something which society says is horrific, quite easily.

People are very good at doing bad things when they have been told to do it and so therefore they can shift the blame to someone else. This makes them a lot more likely to do it. This is known as the fundamental attribution error.

Actor observer bias is when people put more on the situation. Real world examples of this include bystander apathy - when you see something bad happening but don’t do anything about it, eg there was a rape in Central Park New York and there was over 150 witnesses yet no one did anything about it, they just watched. There is a phenomenon that the more people that watch something, the less likely any one person is to do something about it. Everyone diffuses the responsibility, and doesn’t feel individually responsible for what they are witnessing. Assume that someone else will do about it, and when all assume the same thing, no one does anything about it at all.

Question 24

Who said that 50% of variations in the 5 dimensions of personality are determined by genetics?

Answer 24

Any, Lively and Vermon 1996

the five were derived through factor analysis. Started off with 150-160 criteria that were stable over time and didn’t vary between individuals. Then did factor analysis which tells you if they are all statistically different, or if there are categories of higher order things which could explain a number of other things and these five were found to be able to explain all of the others.
• But beware what is inherited are more likely to be limits around set points rather than absolute characteristics
The environment clearly plays a role

Question 25

What are the 5 dimensions of personality?

Answer 25

John and Srivastava 1999

OCEAN

Openness
Conscientiousness
Extraversion
Agreeableness
Neuroticism

Question 26

What is Openness?

Answer 26

willingness to try new things, ‘openness to experience’, like novelty, get bored easily

Question 27

What is conscientiousness?

Answer 27

Hardworking, committed, plan, ensure goals

Question 28

What is extraversion?

Answer 28

Sociability, more likely to be happier on the whole, less likely to get psychologically sick, lots of social contact which is the most protective and beneficial ting humans can do (introverts risk psychopathologies of certain forms but also more likely to come up with new ideas through focus etc)

Question 29

What is agreeableness?

Answer 29

The extent to how agreeable you are, being a person that people want to be around, helpfulness, if you help other people lessen your own likelihood of survival in evolutionary terms (eg giving food away), makes sense in kin but not in non-kin, in modern day agreeableness is useful as need to get on with other people in order to get by (non-agreeableness has advantages in someone who you need to go and get something serious from someone else eg politicians)

Question 30

What is neuroticism?

Answer 30

Propensity to feel negative, not necessarily pathological, means you regularly feel quite off, don’t feel happy very often, but there is nothing wrong with you. Could be useful in terms of recognising threat, may be able to better understand other people’s pain and unhappiness, in evolutionary terms might have been made a doctor/healer/spiritual teacher/watchman

Question 31

What is meant by the 5 dimensions of personality being orthogonal?

Answer 31

Modern research is showing they are ‘orthogonal’, particularly neuroticism - can be extremely positive and extremely negative at the same time. One does not preclude the other - one makes the other less likely but there are still instances where you can have both.

Question 32

What is meant by the 5 dimensions of personality being bipolar factors?

Answer 32

These are all known as bipolar factors, eg agreeable, disagreeable and a midpoint where you are neither. There is a scale from one end to the other.

Question 33

How do we test personality?

Answer 33

• Almost invariably assessed by questionnaire
• Based on research some more narrow traits have been identified but factor analysis suggests the big 5 encompass most fo the information
• Big 5 inventory where do you fall?
• Alternative models - Jung

Question 34

Does personality predict important outcomes?

Answer 34

Extraverts live slightly longer
More conscientious live longer
Neuroticism more likely to become pathological so might get some form of mental health issue
Highly disagreeable more likely to die

Mental illness has advantages as evolution hasn’t got rid of it, 25% of people have some sort of mental health problem, in very influential/dynamic/world changing people = more than 50% of them had something. Mental illness may influence genius/creativity etc.

Question 35

How does personality affect happiness and subjective well being?

Answer 35

• Happiness and subjective wellbeing
• SWB includes a cognitive component/judgement of one’s life satisfaction (Diener et al. 1985), and an affective component that includes
• And an emotional component comprising of the experience of positive and absence of the negative emotions (Larsen 2000)
• demographic factors, including age, sex, marital status, employment, social class, and culture, are only weakly to moderately related SWB
• high extraversion and low neuroticism see events and situations in a more positive light and tend to discount opportunities that are not available to them
• Differences in conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness to experience are less strongly and consistently associated with SWB
• Personality traits have a stable effect on health and longevity (Caspi et al 2005)
• positive emotionality (extraversion) and conscientiousness predict longer lives
• hostility (low agreeableness) predicts poorer physical health (eg cardiovascular health(
• Neuroticism and health and longevity is more complex, some studies suggest an association between neuroticism and increased disease risk, whereas other show associations with illness behaviour only (Smith and Spiro 2002)
• Whether personality has a causal role remains unclear (Caspi et al 2005)
• Goodwin and Friedman (2006)
• Examined 5 factor personality and health in 3032 representative North Americans
• Conscientiousness is associated with reduced physical and mental health risk
• Neuroticism is associated with increased physical and mental health risk
• Inconsistent effects of other personality characteristics

Personality more affects how happy you are than any factors such as employment, marriage, age, social class, sex. This is interesting as society teaches us that these things make you happy, but actually your character which we don’t choose is what makes you happy.

Hedonic Treadmill - seeking pleasure, but this is bad news in humans as it means that (illustrated by human temperature regualtion) human temp is 37*, if we get any hotter we start sweating caused by homeostasis, and this also occurs for happiness. Which is why happiness is set largely by the factors making up your personality.

Neuroticism is related to mental health illnesses - but the relationship is messy

Studies have been done on this, eg conscientiousness associated with reduced mental health risk.

Question 36

What are the interpersonal effects of personality?

Answer 36

The strongest personality links shown for empathy, ie a combination of extraversion and agreeableness, and emotional regulation, best predicted by low neuroticism

Romantic relationships - neuroticism and low agreeableness consistently shown to be predictors of negative relationship outcomes eg relationship dissatisfaction (Karney and Bradbury 1995)

Certain pathologies make this not possible (understanding how other people see the world) eg psychopaths because they don’t have the mental models. About 10-15% of people can be ‘naughty’ and it’s useful because boundaries are pushed and things advance when things are questioned.

As psychopaths struggle with empathy, they struggle also with guilt, remorse and regret - this significantly affects their behaviour.

Extroversion and agreeableness are linked to emotional regulation.

Question 37

What are the social effects of personality?

Answer 37

• Barrick et al 2003, larson et al 2002
• Examined using meta analysis relations between personality traits and occupational types
• Extraversion was related to social and enterprising occupational
• Agreeableness to social interests
• Openness to investigative and artistic interests
• Neuroticism not related to any occupational interest
• Barrick et al 2001
• Conscientiousness predicts work performance across occupations
• Ways, in all included occupations. Smaller, though nearly as broad, effects were found for
• Extraversion and emotional stability - smaller effects but are important for some, though not all occupational groups
• Only weak and narrow effects for agreeableness and openness were identified
• Agreeableness related to job performance when a teamwork is important
• Best known occupation-specific measure of job performance is grade point average (GPA) in the US. But in the UK school leaving exams are related to later work outcomes and- there is a positive relation between GPA and conscientiousness (Paunonen 2003)
• Years o education, is related to intellect, or openness (Goldberg et al 1998)
• Thoresen et al 2003 extraversion and emotional stability associated with jo satisfaction and organisational commitment. Furthermore, they are negatively related to a wish to change jobs and burnout.
• Conscientiousness best predicts how well one performs at work
• But extraversion and emotional stability are more important for understanding how one feels about work
• Roberts et al 2003
• Emotional stability (negative emotion) is strongly related to financial security
• Agreeableness (positive emotion-communion) related to occupational attainment
• Resource based power and work involvement predicted by extraversion (positive emotion-agency)
• Low conscientiousness consistently associated with various aspects of criminal/antisocial actions. And is related to adolescent behaviour problems (Shiner et al 2002), deviance and suicide attempts (Verona et al 2001)
• Low agreeableness, and low conscientiousness associated with substance abuse (Walton and Roberts 2004)

This says that your personality leads you to certain environments.

Dichotomy between affect and … - how good you are at your job and how you feel about it

There has been seen to be combinations/patterns of personality traits which lead to things such as spending habits.

Occupational attainment is linked to being more agreeable than actually being any better at your job.

Question 38

links of personality and age

Answer 38

Stability or change?
Roberts, Walton & Viechtbauer (2006)
With age conscientiousness and emotional stability increase especially between 20 and 40
Openness decreases across the lifespan
Agreeableness rises
These changes are independent of sex
Carstensen – individuals change their social networks – also positivity effect
Diary studies