Individual Differences Flashcards
Describe the 4 key principles of personality
- Enduring - consistent across time and contexts
- Distinction - distinguishes individuals
- Contribution - to behaviour allows for the collection of empirical data as well as theory building
- Feeling, thinking and behaving - takes into account all aspects of a person
Describe the trait approach to understanding personality
- Behaviour is determined by relatively stable traits that are fundamental units of personality
- These traits predispose one to act in a certain way, regardless of the situation
What are the big 5 in the trait approach?
- Conscientiousness (eg organised vs disorganised)
- Agreeableness (eg ruthless vs soft hearted)
- Neuroticism (eg calm vs anxious)
- Openness (eg imaginative vs practical)
- Extraversion (eg sociable vs retiring)
Describe the interactional approach to understanding personality
- Behaviour is determined by both the person and situational factors as well as by their interaction
- B=f(P.E)
- A person has a psychological core, typical responses and role-related behaviour
What is the other approach to understand behaviour on top of trait and interactional?
Situational
What was the conclusion to Woodman et al.(2015)?
- Personality is consistently related to training behaviours
- Performances strategies explain training behaviours over and above personality
- Personality traits and psychological skills interact to predict training behaviours
What is the self determination theory?
- A motivational theory of personality, development and social processes that examines how social contexts and individual differences facilitate different types of motivation
- These types of motivation are autonomous motivation and controlled motivation, and in turn predict learning learning, performance, experience and psychological health
Describe the 4 phases to the self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan, 1985)
- Social factors - eg rewards, competition, feedback and climate
- Needs satisfied - perceived confidence, perceived autonomy, perceived relatedness
- Motivational level - behavioural regulation
- Outcome - affect, behaviour, cognition
Describe the organismic integration theory (Deci and Ryan, 1985)
- Intrinsic motivation - for enjoyment and pleasure, no reward
- Extrinsic motivation - consists of integrated (achieve personal goals), identified (acting out of choice), introjected (acting out of avoidance/for approval), and external (rewards) regulation
- Amotivation - neither intrinsic or extrinsic, lack of control
What two main functions do rewards serve?
- Controlling/perceived autonomy - external locus of causality, cause of behaviour lies outside of the person
- Informational/perceived competence - either positive or negative information about competenceq
Describe the cognitive evaluation theory
- Any factors in the social environment that detract from autonomy will decrease intrinsic motivation
- Therefore, competition may lead to a reduction in intrinsic motivation owing to its controlling nature
What are the consequences of motivational regulations?
- Self-determined motivation leads to adaptive achievement-related behaviours like effort and persistence
- Less self-determined motivation leads to maladaptive achievement-related behaviour
Define Motivation (Weinberg & Gould, 2014)
The direction and intensity of effort
Describe the 3 approaches to studying motivation
- Trait - motivated behaviour is primarily a function of individual characteristics
- Situational - motivated behaviour is primarily determined by the situation
- Interactional - trait and situational factors interact do determine an individual’s motivation
What was the result of Sorrentino & Sheppard 1978 in relation to swimming?
- Social approval/approval oriented - slower performance swimming alone, faster when swimming in relay
- Social rejection/rejection threatened - faster performance alone, slower in relay
Define achievement motivation (Gill, 2000)
- A person’s orientation to strive for task success, persist in the face of failure, and experience pride in accomplishments
- 2 theories are achievement goal theory, and attribution theory
What are the effects of achievement motivation?
- Choice of activities
- Effort to pursue goals
- Intensity of effort
- Persistence in the face of failure
What is meant by attributions?
How people explain their success and failures
What are the 4 dimensions within the attribution theory (Weiner, 1985, 1986)? Give examples
- Stable - cause is constant eg ability, task difficulty
- Unstable - cause is temporary eg luck, effort
- Internal - cause within yourself eg ability, effort
- External - cause outside yourself eg luck, task difficulty
- Also controllability (ability uncontrollable, effort is)
What are the consequences of attributions in terms of expectancy?
- Successful performance attributed to stable factors increases expectations of future success
- Unsuccessful performance attributed to stable factors decreases expectations of future success
- These expectations influence future achievement behaviour
What are the consequences of attributions in terms of emotional responses?
- Locus of causality x controllability = pride, shame or guilt
- Successful performance attributed to internal, controllable, and potentially uncontrollable causes increases feelings of pride, but external causes don’t
- Unsuccessful performance attributed to internal, controllable causes increase feelings of guilt, and due to uncontrollable shame and embarrassment, external guilt and shame
What are the behavioural consequences of individuals with learned helplessness, and mastery-oriented individuals?
- LH - Less likely to attribute their successful experiences to internal, controllable or stable reasons
- Mastery - successes to controllable, internal and stable causes
