Intro to Personality Psychology (Chap 1) Flashcards
Definition of trait-descriptive adjectives
Words that describe traits, the attributes of a person that are reasonably characteristic of the individual and perhaps even enduring over time.
Definition of personality
The set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are organized and relatively enduring and that influence his or her interactions with, and adaptations to, the environment (including the intrapsychic, physical, and social environment).
Definition of psychological traits
Characteristics that describe ways in which people are unique or different from or similar to each other. They include all sorts of aspects of persons that are psychologically meaningful and are stable and consistent aspects of personality.
Definition of average tendencies
Propensity to display a certain psychological trait with regularity. For example, on average, a research within this general domain: the genetics of personality, the psychophysiology of personality, and the evolution of personality
Definition of psychological mechanisms
Similar to traits, except that mechanisms refer more to the processes of personality. For example, most personality mechanisms involve some information-processing activity. A psychological mechanism may make people more sensitive to certain kinds of information from the environment (input), may make them more likely to think about specific options (decision rules), or may guide their behaviour toward certain categories of action (outputs).
Definition of within the individual
The important sources of personality reside within the individual - that is, people carry the sources of their personality inside themselves - and hence are stable over time and consistent over situations.
Definition of person-environment interaction
A person’s interactions with situations include perceptions, selections, evocations, and manipulations. Perceptions refer to how we “see” or interpret an environment. Selection describes the manner in which we choose situations - such as out friends, our hobbies, our classes, and our careers. Evocations refer to the reactions we produce in others, often quite unintentionally. Manipulations refer to the ways in which we attempt to influence others.
Definition of adaptations
Inherited solutions to the survival and reproductive problems posed by the hostile forces of nature. Adaptations are the primary product of the selective process. An adaptation is a “reliably developing structure in the organism, which, because it meshes with the recurrent structure of the world, causes the solution to an adaptive problem.”
Definition of human nature
The traits and mechanisms of personality that are typical of our species and are possessed by everyone or nearly everyone.
Definition of individual differences
Every individual is like some other people (in traits and characteristics, such as extraversion), but different from others. The study of all the ways in which individuals can be similar to or different from others, as well as the number, origin, and meaning of such differences, is the study of __________.
Definition of differences among groups
Individuals are also members of various groups, such as culture, social class, and gender, and these groups may differ from one another according to various personality traits. The study of the ways in which groups differ in personality from one another (on average) is the study of differences among groups.
Definition of nomothetic
The study of general characteristics of people as they are distributed in the population, typically involving statistical comparisons between individuals or groups.
Definition of idiographic
The study of single individuals, with an effort to observe general principles as they are manifest in a single life overtime.
Definition of domain of knowledge
A specialty area of science and scholarship, where psychologists have focused on learning about some specific and limited aspect of human nature, often with preferred tools of investigation.
Definition of dispositional domain
Deals centrally with the ways in which individuals differ form one another. As such, this domain connects with all the other domains. Psychologists are primarily interested in the number and nature of fundamental dispositions, taxonomies of traits, measurements issues, and questions of stability over time and consistency over situations.
Definition of biological domain
The core assumption of these approaches to personality is that humans are, first and foremost, collections of biological systems, and these systems provide the building blocks (e.g. brain, nervous system) for behaviour, thought, and emotion. The term biological approaches typically refers to three areas of research within this general domain: the genetics of personality, the psychophysiology of personality, and the evolution of personality.
Definition of intrapsychic domain
Deals with mental mechanisms of personality, many of which operate outside the realm of conscious awareness. The predominant theory in this domain in Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis. This theory begins with fundamental assumptions about the instinctual system - the sexual and aggressive forces that are presumed to drive and energize much of human activity. This domain also includes defense mechanisms such as repression, denial, and projection.
Definition of cognitive-experiential domain
Focuses on cognition and subjective experience, such as conscious thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires about oneself and others. This domain includes our feelings of self, identity, self-esteem, our goals and plans, and our emotions.
Definition of social and cultural domain
Personality affects, and is affected by, the social and cultural context in which it is found. Different cultures may bring out different facets of our personalities in manifest behavior. The capacities we display may depend to a large extent on what is acceptable in and encouraged by our culture. At the level of individual differences within cultures, personality plays itself out in the social sphere. One important social sphere concerns relationships between men and women.
Definition of adjustment domain
Personality plays a key role in how we cope, adapt, and adjust to the ebb and flow of events in our day-to-day lives. In addition to health consequences of adjusting to stress, certain personality features are related to poor social or emotional adjustment and have been designated as personality disorders.
Definition of good theory
A theory that serves as a useful guide for researchers, organizes facts, and makes predictions about future observations.
Definition of theories and beliefs
Beliefs are often personally useful and crucially important to some people, but they are based on leaps of faith, not on reliable facts and systematic observations. Theories, on the other hand, are based on systematic observations that can be repeated by others and that yield similar conclusions.
Definition of scientific standards for evaluating personality theories
The five key standards are: comprehensiveness, heuristic value, testability, parsimony, and compatibility and integration across domains and levels.
Definition of comprehensiveness
1 of the 5 scientific standards used in evaluating personality theories. Theories that explain more empirical data within a domain are generally superior to those that explain fewer findings.
