Individual Differences Lecture 1

Question 1

Individual difference types

Answer 1

Personality
Intelligence
Abnormality/ psychopathology
Criminality
sexuality
Age, sex, gender
Cultural, political, religious, ideological differences
Everything (stupid point)

Question 2

The study of individual differences

Answer 2

We can
- predict differences
- predict similarities
- create meaningful clusters or groupings
- use information to identify abilities/ disabilities/ psychopathologies
- link to other things we know about biology and environment

Question 3

The field isn’t new

Answer 3

Plato (the republic) - ‘ no two persons are born exactly alike but each differs from the other in natural endowments one being suited for one occupation and the other for another’

Question 4

Hippocrates and Galen (100BC- 129 AD)

Answer 4

Humorism (Latin meaning fluid)
Sanguine- blood- spring/air- optimistic, cheerful, fun loving
Choleric- yellow bile- summer/fire- leader, ambition, drive
Melancholic- black bile- autumn-earth- kind, considerate, creative, depressed
Phlegmatic- phlegm- winter/water- self- content, kind, shy, relaxed

Question 5

Anthropometrics- The phrenologists

Answer 5

Franz Joseph Gall (1976)
Influential in the 19th century but falls out of favour by the 20th century
Shape of the skull indicative of psychological traits
Precursor to- modern neurology, modern neuropsychology and theories of modularity

Question 6

Anthropometrics- Criminal Atavism

Answer 6

Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909)
‘Born criminal’ - although later expanded into social factors
Believed criminals were physically different- somehow born different from non criminals and from each other eg-
- murderers had sloped foreheads
- sexual offenders have full lips
Influential to begin with but had significant limitations (big ol’ racist) criticised for being imprecise, poorly sampled and lacked systematic analysis

Question 7

Francis Galton (1822- 1911)

Answer 7

Significant scientific contributions in the field
- the phrase nature Vs nurture
- the systematic surveys and questionnaires
- correlation, regression, standard deviation and variance
- the lexical hypothesis
- fingerprinting
- anthropometric data collection

Wrote ‘ hereditary genius’ in 1869

Question 8

Galton’s beliefs

Answer 8

• human characteristics are normally distributed
• need large, systematically gathered data sets to examine individual differences
• characteristics are heritable- eminent people come from eminent families
• there is something akin to general ability or intelligence
• amount of brain tissue related to intelligence
• intelligence related to sensory acuity
• some groups are superior to others

Question 9

Evaluating Galton

Answer 9

• leads to the first theories of intelligence
• consideration of sensory and motor abilities eg- reaction time
• emphasis on large samples describe IDs in a population
• the beginning of modern psychometrics
  But
• his work was the beginning of the eugenics movement and emphasised the superiority of some races/ ethnicities over others

Question 10

Idiographic

Answer 10

• idios= private or personal
• emphasises individual uniqueness
• deep rich understanding
• qualitative
• aims to tell us something fundamental about a person

Question 11

Nomothetic

Answer 11

• Nomos= law
• similarities between groups of individuals
• identity consistently occurring traits/ traits clusters
• quantitative
• allows ‘norms’ for comparison- how does one person differ from the population?

Question 12

Idiographic approaches to individual dufferences

Answer 12

• Sigmund Freud (1856- 1939)- psychoanalysis
• Erik Erikson (1902- 1994)- psychosocial stages

Not all psychoanalysts were purely idiographic
- Karl Jung (1875- 1961)

Question 13

Idiographic approaches to individual differences- George Kelly (1905- 1967)

Answer 13

• Theory of personal constructs
• in therapy the aim is to change the clients construction of the world
• each person is their own scientist with their own construction of reality (constructs)
• we use these constructs to make sense of the world by predicting and classifying
• self interpretations will differ from others interpretations of you
• you will have constructs that are not shared by others
• unlike psychoanalysis, work focused more on normal, student samples (not patients)

Question 14

Idiographic approaches to individual differences - Carl Rogers (1902- 1987)

Answer 14

• Person centered therapy
• humanistic focus- people are experts of their own subjective reality
• focuses on a persons feelings and lived experience ( phenomenology)
  -‘Self concept’ - who we are based on others feedback about us
• ’ self actualisation’- an innate, positive drive to help us maximise our potential

Question 15

Idiographic approaches to individual differences (Carl Rogers, self actualisation)

Answer 15

• in perfect conditions we would wholly ‘self actualise’
• rarely happens
• aim to be fully functioning person
• open to experience
• characterised by existential living
• trust in their own ability to attribute value
• creative
• live rich lives and are self aware
• rationale- not defensive
• may need help becoming this via counselling and therapy

Question 16

Evaluating idiographic Approaches

Answer 16

-Philosophical
- real depth of personal understanding
- therapeutic relevance
But
- can you prove the self concept exists? Falsifiability
- generalisability
- problems of data- self- report qualitative case studies

Question 17

Psychometrics

Answer 17

-Literally mind measurements
- often cant directly observe psychological phenomenon
- create tools ( measure) to help us evaluate them
- measures contain items, items measure specific elements of psychological construct
- psychometrics is the scientific creation and evaluation of items and measures

Question 18

Psychometrics I fall broadly into two categories

Answer 18

Psychometric tests- items are right/ wrong

Psychometric assessments- often more subjective- like scales

Question 19

Construct Validity

Answer 19

• how do we know a measure of something measures that something?

Question 20

Convergent reliability

Answer 20

• in a verbal intelligence measure, vocabulary should correlate with phenome ability

Question 21

Discriminant validity

Answer 21

• verbal intelligence should not correlate with sporting ability

Question 22

Concurrent validity

Answer 22

• verbal intelligence should be correlated with other measures of verbal intelligence

Question 23

Predictive validity

Answer 23

• verbal intelligence should predict test scores on a language test

Question 24

Face/Content validity

Answer 24

• the verbal intelligence test has items that appear on inspection to be relevant to something we call verbal intelligence

Question 25

Interrater reliability

Answer 25

- multiple observers should measure the same thing in the same way

Question 26

Test- retest reliability

Answer 26

- taking the test multiple times should give the same result

Question 27

Alternative form reliabiliy

Answer 27

- intelligence test A and intelligence test B should be strongly correlated if they both measured intelligence

Question 28

Internal reliability

Answer 28

- the items on a scale should all correlate with each other often indexed by something called Cronbachs alpha

Question 29

Deeper examination of items

Answer 29

Often look at measures in terms of their underlying factor structure Theory driven Advanced psychometric techniques include - factor analysis - latent class analysis - cluster analysis - multidimensional scaling - confirmatory factor analysis Aim to reduce lots of items down to a handful of meaningful scores

Question 30

Representing constructs (Factors and latent variables- constructed statistically from the items)

Answer 30

Conscientiousness- dependable, self disciplined or disorganised and careless Extraversion- extraverted, enthusiastic or reserved, quiet Openness- open to experience complex or conventional, uncreative Neuroticism- anxious, easily upset or calm and emotionally stable Agreeableness- critical, quarrelsome or sympathetic, warm -Representation of the big 5 personality traits

Question 31

What do we do with our constructs?

Answer 31

- analysis often correlational - positive correlation - when one goes up so does the other - negative- one goes up the other goes down

Question 32

Evaluating the nomothetic approach

Answer 32

- allows us to easily gather lots of data (often quickly) - allows group comparisons/norm references - can measure anything as long as it can be operationalised - established procedures to examine the integrity of the measures But - Little attention to the individual - measurement error/ statistical conclusion validity/ construct validity - causality is problematic to establish

Question 33

Nomothetic theorists

Answer 33

- Hans Eysenck -Paul Costa - Robert McCrae

Question 34

Idiographic theorists

Answer 34

- Sigmund Freud - George Kelly - Carl Rogers