Konsepter Flashcards
The dispositional domain
Deals with the ways individuals differ from one another. The dispositional domain connects with all other domains. Interested in the number and nature of fundamental dispositions, taxonomies of traits, measurement issues and questions of stability and consistence over time and situations.
The biological domain
Humans are first and foremost biological creatures, and biology provides the building blocks for behavior, emotions and thoughts. Focus on genetics, psychophysiology and evolution.
The intrapsychic domain
Based on Freud’s psychoanalysis, which focused on sexual and aggressive forces. Focus on mechanisms of personality; forces outside of conscious awareness, power, achievement, intimacy and motives.
The cognitive experimental domain
Focus on cognition and subjective experience of feelings, beliefs, desires etc. Interested in self-esteem and intelligence differences.
The social and cultural domain
Personality is affected by the social and cultural context, and the traits we display are affected by the norms in the culture or social environment. Focus on relations between men and women, gender expectations’ influence on trait display etc.
The adjustment domain
Our personality plays a key role in how we cope and adjust to events in our lives, and is linked to health related behaviors. Focus on personality disorders and their link to errors in normal adjustment.
A good theory
Should direct us to the most important questions and bring coherence and understanding. It organizes known findings, provides a guide for researchers and makes predictions for future research. It should be compatible with knowledge in other domains and be parsimonious. It should be possible to test it empirically.
Self-report data (S-data)
The information given from a person about themselves. May be more or less accurate, influenced by social desirability etc. The most common method in personality research. Can be gathered through fill in the blanks or true/false surveys, or by measuring traits with Likert scales. Can also be gathered through projective tests such as the TAT or word association tests.
Observer-report data (O-data)
Information gathered from family, friends, or professional observers. Friends and family etc may have much but always limited or context-specific information about a person. Can gather info from more people and check inter-rater reliability. Gives more comprehensive information. Can be done with naturalistic or artificial settings.
Test data (T-data)
Participants are placed in a standardized testing situation, in order to see how people react (differently) to identical conditions. Information can be gathered through technological devices and physiological measures like fMRI. Projective tests are also uses.
Life-outcome data (L-data)
Information gathered from events, activities and outcomes in someone’s life that are available to the public. Often, S-data and O-data are used to predict L-data.
View of traits as internal and causal properties
- When we say that a person has a need/desire/want, we refer to something inside them that drives them to act in a certain way.
- This approach does not equate traits with the external behavior.
- However, this assumes that we have access to and can understand people’s inner feelings and motivations independently from their actions and behavior.
- Even if one never expresses a trait, they could still have that trait - for example, one can be a dominant person but still end up never expressing it due to social constrains or other reasons.
- Traits are presumed to exist even in the absence of observable expressions.
- If we presume that someone’s actions are consequences of their traits, we can rule out other causes - however, can we ever really know what the true reason is?
View of traits as purely descriptive summaries
- This approach makes no assumptions about causality or internality.
- Traits are purely useful to describe actual behavior, for example jealousy, which can be showed in being hostile towards people who talk to your partner.
- Jealousy may be caused by deep seated issues, or social situations - we cannot know, according to this view.
The Act Frequency Formulation of Traits
- Traits are descriptive summaries
- This approach starts with the notion that traits are categories of acts.
- A trait is a category with hundreds of acts as members of the category.
- This approach involves three key elements: act nomination, prototypicality judgement, and the recording of act performance.
- Criticism: not taking context into consideration when deciding how to categorize an act (for example, the power balance between the people involved in a situation), failing to explain instances of failing to act, which can also be reflect a trait, may not be able to capture complex traits.
- However, behavior is the basis for inferences about personality traits.
Act nomination
A procedure designed to identify which acts belong in which categories.
Prototypicality judgement
Identifying which acts are most central to, or prototypical of, each trait category.
Recording of act performance
Securing information on the actual performance of people in their daily lives.
Three approaches to finding the most important traits
The lexical, the theoretical, and the statistical approach.
The lexical approach
- All traits listed and defined in the dictionary form the basis of the natural way of describing differences between people, so the natural language is the best place to look.
- “The lexical hypothesis”: all important individual differences have become encoded with the natural language.
- Two clear criteria: synonym frequency (the more synonyms, the more frequent and important), and cross-cultural universality (the more important the trait is, the more languages will have a word for it).
The statistical approach
- This approach uses factor analysis or other procedures to identify major personality traits in the population.
- Atheoretical.
- Starts with a large pool of adjectives/items/sentences, and then a large number of people rate themselves on the items, and then statistical procedures are used to identify groups or clusters of items.
- The most commonly used method to identify the dimensions is factor analysis and factor loadings.
- If multiple factors covary/go together/overlap sufficiently, they can be considered as a single trait, and not multiple different traits.
- It is important to include all relevant traits in the factor analysis.
Factor analysis
Factor analysis identifies groups of items that go together, but tend to not go together with other groups of items. Allows us to determine which personality variables have some common property and reduce the large amount of traits into smaller sets of underlying factors and organize them.
Factor loadings
How much of the variation in an item is explained by the factor. They indicate the degree to which the item correlates with the underlying factor.
The theoretical approach
- Researchers rely on theories to identify traits.
- Starts with a theory that determines which traits are important.
- Because of this, the theoretical standpoint of the researcher will determine the results to a large degree.
If the theory is strong, the approach is strong.
Eysenck’s hierarchical model of personality
- Strongly rooted in biology, the nervous system etc.
- Defines three traits that were seen as highly heritable and that had a likely psychophysiological foundation.
- Theoretical approach.
- The three main traits: Psychoticism (P), Extraversion-Introversion (E), and Neuroticism-Emotional Stability (N) - PEN.
- Each of these are at the top of a large hierarchy, containing multiple more narrow traits.
- These traits have indeed shown to have a moderate heritability, but so does many traits other than these.
- Eysenck may have missed some important traits in his taxonomy.