Individual Differences Flashcards
What is personality?
the distinctive and relatively enduring ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that characterise a person’s responses to life situations
What is a personality trait?
Personality Traits: relatively stable cognitive, emotional, and behavioural characteristics of people
- help establish their individual identities and distinguish them from others
- We can’t observe traits but infer from behaviour
What is Eysenck’s two factor model?
Eysenck’s personality theory has two main factors:
- Neuroticism or stability – the tendency to experience negative emotions
- Extraversion – the degree to which a person is outgoing and seeks stimulation
What is the five factor model of personality?
The big five factors of personality (“supertraits”) are thought to describe the main dimensions of personality —specifically, neuroticism (emotional instability), extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness
- Openness: this refers to left-field experience
- Conscientiousness: about being orderly, efficient and well-organised
- Extroversion: about stimulation seeking
- Agreeableness: about warmth and empathy
- Neuroticism: the tendency to experience negative shifts in emotion
*OCEAN
What were Eysenck’s proposed biological, genetic basis for personality traits?
Extroversion and introversion are based on differences in customary levels of cortical arousal
- Introverts are over-aroused; extraverts are under-aroused
Neuroticism: suddenness of shifts in arousal
- Unstable (neurotic) people show large, sudden shifts in limbic system arousal; stable people don’t
Which supertrait is most strongly associated with positive health outcomes?
conscientiousness
- Longevity: adds 7.5 years to lifespan
- Less likely to engage in harmful behaviours, more likely to engage in healthy behaviours
- Medical engagement and adherence: more frequent contact and careful compliance
What is intelligence?
the ability to acquire knowledge, to think and reason effectively, and to deal adaptively with the environment
What scales measures mental age?
Binet-simon scale
What did Charles Spearman believe about intelligence?
intellectual activity involves a general factor (g) and specific factor (s)
Factor analysis suggests that people who do well on one task (e.g. numerical) tend to do well on others (e.g. language)
What is the Wais-iv?
the most common intelligence test that is used in many settings. It is made up of a general ability score (may be considered as the equivalent to an IQ score). Within that, there are cognitive domains, in which there are specific tasks to test the domain
- Wechsler Test: the CHILD VERSION of the test. It assesses a range of different abilities (verbal and non-verbal).
What are Gardner’s multiple intelligences?
- Linguistic Intelligence: e.g. Shakespeare
- Logical-Mathematic Intelligence: e.g. Einstein
- Spatial Intelligence: e.g. Gaudi
- Musical Intelligence: e.g. Lennon
- Bodily-Kinaesthetic Intelligence: e.g. Messi
- Intrapersonal Intelligence: e.g. Socrates
- Interpersonal functioning: e.g. Freud
What’s the psychometric approach?
Cattell and Horn (1971, 1985) broke down Spearman’s ‘g’ into two distinct but related subtypes:
- Crystallized Intelligence (gc): the ability to apply previously acquired knowledge to current problems. Will commonly improve with age then stabilise.
- Fluid Intelligence (gf): the ability to deal with novel problem-solving situations for which personal experience does not provide a solution. Shows steady pattern of decline in aging.
- Our fluid intelligence peaks in our early adult life, and then gradually shows a drop across the lifespan. Crystallised intelligence increased until mid-life, and then is largely stable.
How does human cognitive ageing vary?
Inductive reasoning, spatial orientation and perceptual speed aspects ALL require a fluid-type ability that peaks quite early.
Verbal and numeric ability take a while to develop, peak around mid-life, and don’t show much deterioration from this point on.
What things determine cognitive ability later on in life?
- The higher predictive factor was ability at age 11. Everything else contributes a BIT.
- Sport of marginal gains makes a slight difference to our cognitive ability.
- There is evidence for physical fitness, strength and respiratory function having a role.
- There is little evidence for sex having a role.
- The APOE gene has been linked to cognitive ability, because it’s linked to Alzheimer’s. However, on its own, there is not a huge link.
What are the heredity and environmental factors that affect IQ?
Genetic factors can influence the effects produced by the environment
- Accounts for 1/2 to 2/3 of the variation in IQ
- No single “intelligence gene” identified
Environment can influence how genes express themselves
- Accounts for 1/3 to 1/2 of the variation in IQ
- Both shared and unshared environmental factors are involved
- Educational experiences are very important
