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.
Cattell’s 16 personality factor system
- True factors of personality should be based on both S-data and T-data.
- Statistical approach.
- One of the largest taxonomies.
- Some of the factors include intelligence, emotional stability, dominance, shrewdness, and impulsivity.
- Cattell created a strong empirical approach to personality, but his approach has also been criticized for being impossible to replicate.
- He used factor analysis
Wiggins’ circumplex taxonomy of personality
- Wiggins developed measurement scales to assess traits in the circumplex model.
- He started with the lexical assumption, but he also argued that trait terms specify different kinds of ways in which people differ.
- One example is interpersonal traits. In addition comes material traits, character traits, mental traits, physical and attitude traits.
- Wiggins was especially interested in interpersonal traits, and separated these from the other categories.
- He defined “interpersonal” as “interactions between people involving exchanges”.
- The main advantages: provides an explicit definition of interpersonal behavior, specifies the relationships between the traits in the model (adjacent traits are positively correlated, or bipolar - negatively correlated, or orthogonal - unrelated), alerts investigators to gaps in investigations of interpersonal behavior.
- Criticism: limited to two dimensions, so some traits that are important in social interaction may be lost.
The five-factor model
- Includes more dimensions.
- The five factors are:1) Surgency/Extraversion2) Agreeableness3) Conscientiousness4) Emotional Stability5) Openness/intellect
- Originally based on a combination of the lexical approach and the statistical approach, refined in recent years
- The model has been replicated many times across different cultures and languages.
- The model uses two main ways to measure traits: self-ratings on single-word trait adjectives (talkative, organized, warm), and ratings on sentence items (my life is fast-paced).
- The NEO-PI-R: Neuroticism-Extraversion-Openness (NEO) Personality Inventory (PI) Revised (R): sentence items like “I have frequent mood swings”, correlate with Goldberg’s single word markers like “sympathetic, kind, warm, understanding” (for agreeableness).
- Each trait has multiple facets to it, providing more nuance than the Big Five alone.
- There is still disagreement about the content and replicability of the fifth factor. Some have labelled it culture, some intellect, some imagination, etc. The strategy (lexical/statistical/theoretical) used provides different item pools for factor analysis, which can explain the differences in definition.
- Criticism: leaves out important aspects of personality, such as manipulativeness, integrity, religiosity, egotism etc.
The HEXACO model
- Based on big five.
- Newer studies has landed on six factors rather than five.
- The sixth factor is honesty/humility.
- This model has recently been gaining popularity and attention.
Person-situation interaction
Behavior is a function of both personality traits and situational forces. This has become a standard view in modern personality research. For example: if the situation is frustrating, AND if the person has a hot temper, then aggression will be the result (if x AND if y, then z).
Situational specificity
Some traits are seen as specific to certain situations, and some very specific situations can produce behavior that is unusual or out of character for an individual. Some trait-situation interactions are rare, simply because some situations are rare (like a hostage situation).
Strong situations
Extreme or very emotional events where nearly everyone has a similar reaction, and trait differences play less of a role in how people react.
Situational selection
- We typically choose the situations we find ourselves in, and personality plays a role in determining which situations we choose to enter, and thus on which traits are expressed.
- For example - a person with a need for achievement spends more time in work settings.
- When given a choice, people often choose something that fits their personality.
- Personality affects which situations we enter, but once we find ourselves in a certain situation, the situation can affect personality as well.
Evocation
The idea that certain personality traits may evoke specific responses from the environment. For example, a manipulative person may evoke hostility from others.
Manipulation
The various means by which people influence the behavior of others - the intentional tactics people use to coerce or influence others. Different people use different forms of manipulation.
Aggregation
The process of adding up, or averaging, several single observations, resulting in a better measure of a personality trait than a single observation of behavior. ○ How we feel or think is affected by many more things than just personality, like how well we sleep, if you missed the bus, etc. Over time, the influence of personality on behavior gains magnitude and becomes more observable. By adding multiple assessments, the influence of momentary events on behavior is cancelled out.
Barnum statements
General statements that could apply to everyone, typically found in astrology.
Infrequency scales
Obvious statements added to quesionnaires. Questions like “I do not believe that wood really burns”. If someone answers these wrongly, they most likely are rushing through the questionnaire and their answers should be disregarded.
The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)
A standardized psychometric test designed to detect various mental illnesses, and consists of 550 items, and this is often given to screen out unfit applicants for jobs.
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
- The most widely used personality assessment device in business settings
- Tests for eight fundamental preferences (extraversion-introversion, sensing-intuition, thinking-feeling, judging-perceiving).
- Intuitive, relevant for the workplace
- Based on Jung’s theory of psychological types, which is not widely endorsed
- Few characteristics of persons follow a bimodal distribution. Instead, traits like extra/introversion are distributed along a bell curve. This means the majority of people are not either/or, as the MBTI implies.
- Forces a typology onto a normally distributed trait
- Uses the median score from a sample as the cut-off. However, a large percentage of people will be situated around the cut-off, so if the median score moves a few points in either direction, a lot of people would be reclassified to the opposite category.
- Unreliable
- Assume large between-category differences, and no within-category differences, between people.
- The test is widely used despite huge amounts of criticism, most likely due to being simple and easy to understand and use.
- The test may still be useful in order to get people to think about differences between people, and understanding more of the relationship between personality and behavior. - It can also be used in teambuilding exercises.
Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI)
- Based on a solid scientific foundation.
- Two dominant themes in social life: the motive to get along with others, and the motive to get ahead of others.
- In a hierarchy, people want 1) acceptance, respect, approval, 2) status, control of resources, and 3) predictability.
- If a manager breaks any of these needs, problems may arise.
- The HPI measures aspects of the Big Five traits that are relevant to these three motives.
- The test contains seven primary scales (adjustment, ambition, sociability, interpersonal sensitivity, prudence, inquisitiveness, learning approach) and six occupational scales (service orientation, stress tolerance, reliability, clerical potential, sales potential, managerial potential).
- High levels of reliability and validity, and is good at predicting occupational outcomes. Based on the legitimate Big Five model.
- Modified specifically for applications in the workplace.
- The test consists of true-false items that takes about 20 minutes to answer.
Personality development
The continuities, consistencies and stabilities in people over time, and the way in which people change over time.
Rank order stability
The maintenance of individual position on a trait within a group. If people tend to maintain their positions on dominance or extraversion relative to others over time, there is high rank order stability to that personality characteristic. If people fail to maintain their rank order, the group is displaying rank order instability/change.
Mean level stability
Maintaining a consistent average level of a trait or characteristic over time (in a population).
Personality coherence
Maintaining rank order in relation to other individuals but changing the manifestations of the trait. This includes both elements of continuity and change - a “core” has stayed the same, but manifestations of it can be very different at different ages.
Studying personality change at the population level
This level deals with the changes and consistencies that happen to nearly everyone (for example, an increase in sexual motivation during puberty, or a decrease in risk-taking as people get older).
Studying personality change at the group differences level
Some changes affect different groups differently. For example, females and males go through different changes in puberty. Men become more risk-taking during adolescence than women, and women develop more empathy during the same period. Group differences are also found among ethnic and cultural groups.
Studying personality change at the individual differences level
This level often deals with trying to predict certain outcomes based on individual personality traits.
Temperament
Individual differences that emerge early in life, are involved with emotionality and arousability, and are likely to have a heritable basis. Mary Rothbart examined 6 factors of temperament: activity level, smiling and laughter, fear, distress to limitations, soothability and duration of orienting.
The Sensation-Seeking Scale (SSS)
Assesses people on the trait of sensation seeing. Contains four subscales: thrill and adventure seeking, experience seeking, disinhibition, and boredom susceptibility.
Personality coherence
Predictable changes in the manifestations or outcomes of personality factors over time, even if the underlying characteristics remain stable.
Electrodermal activity
When the sympathetic nervous system is activated, sweat glands in the skin begin to fill with water. Even if the sweat is not visible, it can be detected by small amounts of electricity because water/sweat conducts electricity. The more activity in the SNS, the more sweat is present, the better the skin conducts electricity. Electrodermal responses can be elicited by all sorts of stimuli, or lack thereof (especially for anxious persons with a chronic degree of activation).
Systolic blood pressure
The maximum pressure within the cardiovascular system produced when the heart muscle contracts.
Diastolic blood pressure
The resting pressure between heart contractions.
Cardiac reactivity
The magnitude of decreases or rises in heart rate in response to stimuli that differs from person to person.
Type A personality
A behavior pattern characterized by impatience, competitiveness and hostility, that may lead to higher risk for heart attacks and heart disease.
Eysenck’s theory of introversion/extraversion
- Introverts are characterized by higher activity in the brain’s ascending reticular activating system (ARAS) than extraverts.
- According to Eysenck, introverts have higher resting levels of arousal because their ARAS lets in too much stimulation, and thus they seek introverted behaviors since their systems are already overstimulated.
- Extraverts show extraverted behavior because they need to activate their understimulated ARAS.
- According to Hebb, an optimal level of arousal (for performing a task) exists. Eysenck incorporated this idea into his theory.
- Research showed no difference between introverts and extraverts at resting levels, but there was a difference in response to moderate levels of stimulation.
- The real difference thus may lay not in baseline levels, but the different levels of arousability between them.
- Indirect evidence supports the prediction that extraverts prefer higher levels of stimulation than introverts.
Gray’s reinforcement sensitivity theory
- RST proposes two systems in the brain: the behavioral activation system (BAS), which is responsive to incentives and regulates approach behavior, and the behavioral inhibition system (BIS), which is responsive to cues for punishment, frustration and uncertainty.
- According to Gray, people differ from each other in the relative sensitivity of their BIS or BAS system.
- Someone with a more active BIS would be more sensitive to punishment and be vulnerable to anxiety, for example.
- Someone with a more active BAS would be more sensitive to reward and thus more impulsive in their choices.
- The differences between people in sensitivity to reward and punishment are responsible for generating the varieties of behavior associated with anxiety/neuroticism and impulsivity/extraversion.
- Research suggests that learning from punishment and learning from reward are under separate neural control systems.
- Impulsive people, according to Gray’s theory, do not learn well from punishment because they have a weak BIS.
Monoamine oxidase
An enzyme responsible for maintaining the proper levels of neurotransmitters. MAO breaks down the neurotransmitter. High sensation seekers tend to have low levels of MAO (and thus, high amount of neurotransmitter) compared with low sensation seekers.
Cloninger’s tridimensional personality model
Novelty seeking is linked to low levels of dopamine, harm avoidance is linked to abnormal serotonin metabolism, and reward dependence is linked to low levels of norepinephrine.
Free running circadian rhythm
No time cues to influence your behavior or biology.
In free running time, most people follow a 24-25 hour cycle.
Hostile forces of nature
Events that impede survival (food shortage, disease, extreme weather, predators).
Intrasexual competition
Two members of the same sex compete, and the winner gets greater sexual access to the opposite sex.
Intersexual selection
Members of one sex choose a mate based on their preferences.
Differential gene reproduction
Reproductive success relative to others.
Inclusive fitness theory
One’s personal reproductive success plus the effects you have on the reproduction of your genetic relatives, weighted by degree of relatedness.
Adaptations
Inherited solutions to the survival and reproductive problems posed by the hostile forces of nature. Adaptations are “reliably developing structures which, because it meshes with the recurrent structure of the world, causes the solution to an adaptive problem”. Key features of adaptations include efficiency, precision and reliability in solving the problem. Three key premises: Domain specificity - adaptations are presumed to be domain-specific; designed to solve one particular problem, Numerousness - we have a large number of psychological mechanisms to respond to the large number of unique adaptive problems humans have confronted, Functionality - our psychological mechanisms are designed to accomplish particular adaptive goals.
Adaptive problem
Anything that impedes survival or reproduction.
Evolutionary by-products
Incidental effects that are not properly considered to be adaptations.
Evolutionary noise
Random variations that are neutral in respect to selection.
Social pain theory
Reactions to social exclusion and social behavior in general are regulated by a general threat-defense system that prepares the organism for potential harm.
Emotions (according to evopsych)
Adaptive psychological mechanisms that signal fitness affordances in the social environment. Emotions can be viewed as a way to try and manipulate the psychological mechanisms of other people.
Evolutionary-predicted sex differences
The sexes should show different adaptations in areas where they have faced different problems.
The double-shot theory
- Due to their different adaptive problems, men and women should differ in the weighting they give to cues that trigger jealousy.
- Research has shown that men, who face the risk of not knowing if they are the father of a child, fear sexual infidelity more.
- Women, on the other hand, face the risk of a man putting resources and support into another woman, and they fear emotional infidelity more.
- These sex differences have been shown across cultures.
- DeSteno and Salovey argue that these differences are because women assume that emotional infidelity->sexual infidelity and men assume that sexual infidelity->emotional infidelity.
- The double-shot theory have since been contradicted by research.
Frequency-dependent selection
The reproductive fitness of a trait depends on its frequency relative to other traits in the population.
Reactive heritability
A trait that is reactively heritable is a secondary consequence of other heritable characteristics (body build etc).
Restricted sexual strategy
Delayed intercourse and prolonged courtship; focused on commitment level, signalling her own fidelity.
Unrestricted mating strategy
Less delayed intercourse; focused on the quality of the male’s genes.
Psychic energy (Freud)
The source of motivation within a person. Life and death instincts provided the energy in the psychic system.
Id
- The most primitive part of the personality and the source all our drives and urges.
- Operates according to the pleasure principle - the desire for immediate gratification.
- During infancy, the id dominates, but it is also present in adults.
- The id operates with primary process thinking: thinking without logical rules of conscious thought. Examples of PPT are dreams and fantasies.
- The id participates in wish fulfillment: the conjuring of something unavailable, leading to temporary satisfaction.
Ego
- The part of the personality that constrains the id to reality.
- Develops during the first couple of years of life.
- Operates according to the reality principle: it understands that the urges of the id are often in conflict with social reality.
- The ego engages in secondary process thinking: development of strategies for solving problems and obtaining satisfaction.
Superego
- The part of the personality that is the upholder of social values, expectations and ideas.
- The values of society are usually instilled in the child from socialization agents.
- Freud saw the development of the superego as closely linked to a child’s identification with their parents.
- The superego makes us feel ashamed or guilty if we break its rules or go against its values.
- Unlike the ego, and like the id, the superego is not bound by reality, and can freely set up its own standards, even if they are unrealistic.
- People’s standards differ, and some hold themselves to impossible moral standards, while others do not.
Objective anxiety
A fear response to a real, external threat.
Neurotic anxiety
Occurs following a direct conflict between the id and the ego. The danger is that the ego may lose control over an unacceptable desire of the id.
Moral anxiety
Occurs following a conflict between the ego and the superego.
Repression
- The process of preventing unacceptable thoughts, feelings or urges from reaching conscious awareness.
- Repression was the forerunner for all the other defense mechanisms that Freud considered.
- Repression is, in psychoanalysis, thought to have a pathogenic effect on psychological and physical functioning.
- Repression prevents an accurate perception of reality, so adequate coping becomes difficult.
- Repression consists of an autonomous, unconscious entity that can activate the repressive forces.
- The concept of repression has been criticized as there is little empirical evidence to support it. People usually do remember their traumatic experiences.
Denial
Insisting that things are not the way they seem, refusing to see the facts. A common form of denial is the dismissal of negative feedback as wrong or irrelevant.
Displacement
Channeling a threatening or disturbing impulse from its original source to a non-threatening target. Displacement can also involve the redirection of inappropriate sexual urges to a more acceptable object. Fears can also be redirected to other objects. These processes may seem deliberate, but take place outside of conscious awareness.
Rationalization
Generating acceptable reasons for outcomes that otherwise would appear unacceptable. Rationalization reduces anxiety by generating an explanation that is easier to live with than the actual reason. This mechanism is especially common amongst educated people.
Projection
Attributing our own unacceptable qualities onto others. This reduces anxiety because it is easier to live with disliking another person than to dislike ourselves. This reduces anxiety because it is easier to live with disliking another person than to dislike ourselves.
The false consensus effect
People tend to assume that others are similar to them and have the same personality traits as them. Having a false consensus about one’s own negative traits can be ego defensive, because you are not seeing yourself as the only person with this bad quality, and can easier live with it.
Sublimation
The channeling of unacceptable sexual or aggressive instincts into socially desired activities. Freud thought sublimation was the most adaptive defense mechanism. Sublimation may occur through sports, choice of occupation or creative endeavors.
Psychoanalysis
A theory of personality, a theory of culture, a method of psychotherapy, a technique for helping people with mental disorders.
Free association
Letting the mind wander, saying whatever comes to mind, relaxing the censoring we usually do in order to uncover unconscious material.
Dream analysis
Interpreting dreams and how unconscious material is presented. Freud made a distinction between the manifest content - the actual contents, and the latent content - the real meaning of the items presented.
The oral stage
- Occurs during the first 18 months, main source of pleasure is the mouth and lips.
- The main conflict during the oral stage is weaning off breast/bottle.
- Id wants immediate gratification from nourishment and pleasure from the mouth, and psychologically the child fears being left to take care of themselves.
- Being fixated on the oral stage can lead to a large need to be taken care of by others.
- Another conflict in this stage occurs when the child gets teeth, and wants to bite and chew but is discouraged from these acts by parents.
- Fixation related to teeth/biting/chewing can lead to a hostile and rude personality.
The anal stage
- Occurs between 18 months and 3 years, main source of pleasure is the anal sphincter.
- Pleasure is retained from expelling faeces and, during potty training, retaining faeces.
- The id first desires immediate tension reduction when there is pressure in the rectum.
- After a while, children learn to control the impulse and only relieve themselves when it is appropriate.
- Too little control achieved = sloppy personality.
- Too much control achieved = compulsive personality.
The phallic stage
- The child discovers their genitals and the pleasure that can be derived from them.
- This phase is the awakening of sexual desire directed outwards, toward the parent of the opposite sex.
- Freud referred to the main conflict for boys as the Oedipal conflict. The boy wants to kill the father and have sex with his mother.
- He is driven to leave this desire behind due to castration anxiety (fear of his father).
Penis envy
The girl simultaneously desires her father and is envious of him for having a penis.
The latency stage
Occurs between age 6 and the onset of puberty, little psychosexual development occurs during this time.
Motives
Internal states, often caused by a deficit (or a need for growth), that arouse and direct behavior toward specific objects or goals. Motives differ from each other in type, amount, and intensity, and depend on the person and the circumstances.
Needs
States of tension within a person, which is reduced when the need is satisfied.
Hierarchy of needs
Various needs existing at different levels of strength within a person. Each need interacts with other needs, creating a motive dynamic.
Press
Need-relevant aspects of the environment.
Alpha press
Need-relevant aspects of the real environment.
Beta press
Need-relevant aspects of the perceived environment.
Apperception
Interpreting the environment and perceiving the meaning of what is happening.
The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
- A technique for assessing needs and motives and their influence on apperception.
- A person is presented some ambiguous images, and asked to make up a story about what is happening in the picture.
- The psychologist then codes the stories for the presence of various types of images associated with particular motives.
- The test has been modified many times since its original version was presented in 1935, for example by introducing formal scoring systems, updating the pictures, and arousing motives beforehand.
- TAT can assess either state levels of needs or trait levels of needs.
- Criticized for its low test-retest reliability, and its validity has been questioned as well.
State levels of need
The momentary amount of a need, which fluctuates with circumstances.
Trait levels of need
The average tendency of the occurrence of the need/motive.
The Multi-Motive Grid
A test combining TAT features with self-report questions, with 14 pictures supposed to arouse one of the three main motives: achievement, power or intimacy.
Need for achievement (nAch)
- A need/preference/readiness to do better, be successful and feel competent.
- Energized by incentives of challenge and variety, accompanied by feelings of interest and surprise, and associated with curiosity and exploration.
- Prefer a moderate level of challenge instead of a very high one, since they are motivated to do better than others
- Prefer tasks where they are personally responsible for the outcome, and where they can receive feedback on their performance.
- Men with high nAch are more attracted to business occupations than others, and more drawn to businesses with potential risk and uncertainty, where success is a matter of personal responsibility.
- Expressed differently in different cultures.
- Parents setting challenging standards may lead to a high nAch in children.
- People with a secure attachment style are more likely to have high nAch.
Independence training
Ways parents promote independence and autonomy in their children, to promote confidence and mastery, and maybe high nAch.
Need for power (nPow)
- Aneed/preference/readiness to have an impact on others.
- nPow correlates positively with having arguments, taking larger risks in gambling, behaving assertively in small groups, and reporting more anger in situations of disobedience, interest in control of situations and other people, and a preference for not-too-popular friends.
- People high in nPow do not deal well with conflict and frustration, and they show stress responses when their power is blocked or questioned (power stress).
- The increased stress can lead to worse immune system functioning and increased disease risk.
Need for intimacy (nInt)
- A need/preference/readiness for warm, close, and communicative interaction with others.
- Seek meaningful contact with others, spend more time thinking about relationships, report more pleasant emotions when they are around other people, smile more and make more eye contact, and start up conversations more often, many times about feelings, intimate thoughts and emotions.
- Not always extroverts, and many of them instead have a few very good friends and prefer meaningful one-on-one conversations over partying.
- High nInt is related to well-being when their needs for intimacy are met, but when they are not met, this can lead to enhanced levels of envy and indirect aggression.
- More common in women than in men.
Implicit motives
Motives a person is largely unaware of, that guide their behavior.
The humanistic tradition
- Places great emphasis on the conscious awareness of needs, choice and personal responsibility.
- The meaning of life is found in the choices a person makes, and the responsibility they take for these choices.
- The human need for growth and realization of one’s full potential is important, in contrast to psychoanalysts’ pessimistic view of human nature.
- People are motivated by growth more than deficits.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
- Needs are hierarchically organized, with basic needs at the bottom and self-actualization at the top. The needs at the bottom are more urgent (usually) have to be fulfilled before one goes on to the next level.
- Bottom to top: physiological needs, safety needs, need for love and belonging, need for esteem and recognition, and need for self-actualization.
- This means that motivation to achieve the “higher” needs is weaker than the motivation to meet the basic needs.
- However, achieving these higher needs are more pleasurable.
- Research has provided support to Maslow’s hierarchical arrangement, while highlighting differences in how people react to the attainment or frustration in the various need levels.
Flow
A subjective state that people report when they are completely involved in something to the point of forgetting time, fatigue and everything else, except the activity.
Rogers’ fully functioning person
Someone who is on their way to self-actualization, even if they are not fully there yet. Open to new experiences, enjoy novelty and diversity, are present in their lives, do not dwell on the past or future, trust themselves and their feelings, and follow their own obligations and standards.
The desire for positive regard
An inborn need to be loved and accepted by their parents and others.
Conditions of worth
The requirements set forth by parents for earning positive regard.
Conditional positive regard
Positive regard that must be earned by meeting certain conditions. Children who face many conditions of worth may lose touch with their own desires, and remain preoccupied with what others think of them in their adult lives.
Unconditional positive regard
Acceptance without conditions. This is what Rogers believed parents should provide, as it would lead to positive self-regard.
Emotional intelligence
The ability to know and regulate own emotions, ability to motivate oneself, ability to know and influence how others are feeling. Emotional intelligence has been found to correlate with self-actualization.
Rogers’ client-centered therapy
- A therapy form were the therapist tries to create conditions for the client (not patient) to change themselves, instead of providing interpretations or suggestions directly.
- Three core conditions for client-centered therapy: genuine acceptance, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding.
- The therapist should simply reflect back the things the client says, instead of trying to interpret the reasons for their opinions and thoughts.
- Goal: enable the client to understand their own thoughts and feelings better.
Personalizing cognition
Recalling similar events from one’s own life in response to a stimulus.
Objectifying cognition
Recalling objective facts in response to a stimulus.
Three levels of cognition that are of particular interest to personality psychology
Differences/similarities between people in perception, interpretation, and conscious goals (the standards people develop to evaluate themselves and others). Differences in how people perceive and interpret stimuli may be related to their personalities. Perception of the same stimuli can be very different between individuals, due to factors like their personalities, cultures, age, gender etc.
Field dependence
Dependence on the visual field in perception and cognition. Field-dependent people have stronger social skills and are more attentive to social context.
Field independence
Reliance on own sensations, not the perception of the field. Field-independent people have been shown to focus better without being distracted in noisy situations etc. Field-independent people also seem to more efficiently reconstruct virtual environments and learn better in hypermedia-based instructional environments, and they have an easier time learning a second language. They to be more creative and good at analyzing complex situations, but they also tend to have lower social skills and be more introverted.
Petrie’s reducer/augmenter theory:
- The dimension along which people differ in their reaction to sensory stimulation; some appear to reduce sensory stimulation, while others appear to augment stimulation.
- Petrie: differences in reduction/augmentation originate in the nervous system.
- Reducers should be motivated to seek stronger stimulation to compensate for their lower sensory reactivity (related to optimal level of arousal).
- Research have found that reducers indeed to drink more coffee, listen to louder music, smoke more, and have lower thresholds for boredom.
- This theory bares resemblance to theories on sensation seeking and Eysenck’s theory of extraversion.
Constructs
Sets of observations and the meanings of them we use to give meaning to, and interpret, the social world. All constructs are bipolar - they consist of a characteristic understood against it opposite (smart-not smart, tall-short etc).
Personal constructs
Unique key constructs a person habitually applies in their interpretations of the (social) world, leading to the observed differences in personality. Personal constructs are used to create social groupings of people according to these dimensions.
The fundamental postulate (Kelly)
All our processes (thoughts, behaviors, feelings etc) are shaped by what we anticipate. The fundamental postulate was elaborated on to include 11 corollaries (propositions following from an approved premise)
The construction corollary
We use knowledge from out past to construct our anticipations.
The range corollary
Any construct can only be applied to a limited number of events.
The modulation corollary
Constructs that are permeable, which more easily allow new events within their range, make a person more flexible in dealing with new situations. Less permeable constructs lead to difficulties with adapting to new situations.
Two alternative ways to construct and anticipate our reality (Kelly)
We either extend (trying different aspects of the same reality and thus broadening our understanding of it) or define (specializing/gaining expertise in a certain aspect of reality).
Locus of control
A person’s perception of responsibility (internal/external) for the events in their life. People base their expectancies about what will happen in a new situation on their generalized expectancies about whether they have the ability to influence events - internal/external locus of control. People with internal locus of control have a reduced risk of obesity, complete their degrees quicker, and have better credit ratings.
Rotter’s expectancy of reinforcement theory
Some people expect that certain behaviors will result in obtaining a reinforcer, and other people fail to see the link between their behavior and reinforcement. Different behavior can be caused by different expectations for whether or not a behavior will bring reinforcement.
Behavior potential
The likelihood of engaging in a particular behavior in a specific situation.
Reinforcement value
Reinforcement is another name for the outcomes of our behavior. Reinforcement value refers to the desirability of these outcomes. Things we want to happen, that we are attracted to, have a high reinforcement value. Things we don’t want to happen, that we wish to avoid, have a low reinforcement value. If the likelihood of achieving reinforcement is the same (i.e., expectancies are equal), we will exhibit the behavior with the greatest reinforcement value, the one directed toward the outcome we prefer most.
Rotter’s predictive formula of behavior
BP = f(E & RV)
- Behavior potential (BP) is a function (f) of expectancy (E) and reinforcement value (RV).
- The likelihood that a person behaves in a certain way depends on the probability of that behavior to lead to the certain outcome and the desirability of that outcome.
Generalized expectancies
A person’s expectations for reinforcement that are held across a variety of situations.
Specific expectancies
Expectations for reinforcements that are specific to the situation. People do not show internal/external locus of control across every single situation.
Personal project
A set of relevant actions intended to achieve a goal that a person has selected. Personal projects reflect how people navigate through daily life. Some goals are short-term, Overall happiness seems to be most related to feeling in control of, unstressed, and optimistic about personal projects.
Social cognition
How we perceive, process, code, store, and retrieve information relating to other people - biases, representations, mechanisms etc. Social cognition consists of learning about others - their groups, minds, etc. We learn from observing others.
Cognitive social learning approach
An approach that emphasizes the cognitive and social processes whereby people learn to value and strive for certain goals over others.
Self-efficiacy
- The belief that one can execute a specific course of action to achieve a goal.
- Higher self-efficacy is related to better decision making and better pain management, as well as academic success.
- Self-efficacy and performance mutually influence one another.
- Can be influenced by modelling - seeing others engage in the performance with positive results.
Mischel’s cognitive-affective personality system (CAPS)
- People’s behavior is more strongly influenced by the situations they are in, than by the personality traits they bring to the situations.
- Personality is not a collection of traits, but an organization of cognitive and affective activities that influence how people respond to certain kinds of situations.
- People differ from each other in terms of the distinct organization of their cognitive and affective processes.
- Different processes are activated in different situations - if a happens, then x is the resulting behavior, but if b happens, then y is the resulting behavior.
- Personality plays a role in terms of the specific situational ingredients that prompt behavior from the person.
- The meaning of the situation from the person’s individual perspective is what organizes behavior.
Emotions (affective domain definition)
Consist of three parts: subjective affect, bodily changes, and action tendencies: increases in probabilities of certain behaviors. People differ in their emotional reactions to the same events. Some theories of emotion emphasize the functions of emotions.
Darwin’s functional analysis of emotions
Focused on how emotions can increase the fitness of an individual.
Emotional states
Transitory, have a specific cause, typically originates from events outside the person.
Emotional traits
Patterns of emotional reactions that a person consistently experiences across a variety of situations.
The categorical approach to emotions
Aims to describe primary and distinct emotions, and reduce complexity. Which emotions are primary? The universally recognized emotions, or the emotions with clear motivational consequences? The categorical approach focuses on conceptual distinctions of emotions.
The dimensional approach
Aims to discover the broad variety of emotions. Most studies show that people categorize emotions based on two primary dimensions: pleasantness and level of arousal. Emotions that often occur together and are experienced as similar are understood as defining a common dimension.The dimensional approach focuses more on how people experience emotions than how they think about them.
Emotional content
The specific kind of emotion that a person experiences (the what).
Emotional style
The way in which an emotion is experienced (the how).
Neuroticism
Persons that score high on Neuroticism are more prone to worrying, anxiety and crying, as well as irritation.
- May be caused by an overly active limbic system, and the trait also shows high heritability, suggesting a biological basis for often experiencing emotions such as anxiety and annoyance.
- Some theorists argue that neuroticism is a function of the overall cognitive system, and the person’s attending, thinking and remembering style.
- For example, people high on neuroticism may easier remember negative episodes and have more active association networks for negative memories.
- People high on neuroticism may be more susceptible to immune-mediated diseases.
- People high on neuroticism are unstable in their moods, constantly looking out for threats, and have stronger behavioral inhibition systems.
Hostility
- A tendency to respond to everyday frustrations with anger and aggression, to become irritated easily, to feel frequent resentment, and act in a rude and critical manner.
- Many people may be hostile without actually performing aggressive actions.
- Anger can cause people to lose control.
- Violent criminals often show signs of brain damage or abnormalities, especially to the prefrontal cortex.
Happiness
- Researchers often measure happiness in two complementary ways: degree of life satisfaction, and ratio of positive to negative emotions.
- Having positive illusions about oneself can help increase happiness and satisfaction.
- Questionnaire measures of happiness predict other aspects of life, such as hostility, disease etc.
- Self-report measures of happiness appear to be valid.
- Happiness correlates with marriage, health, self-esteem, altruism, good immune system function, effective conflict resolution, creativity and job satisfaction.
- Lyubomirsky: longitudinal studies provide evidence that happiness leads to positive outcomes in many areas of life.
- The situation may involve reciprocal causality.
- Few sex differences in happiness across cultures.
- Factors which make people happy change with age.
- People living in Northern European countries are the happiest.
- Poorer countries with few civil rights tend to possess less happiness.
- Cultural homogeneity showed little correlation with wellbeing.
Situational selection
Choosing to enter/avoid a situation - depends on personality.
Attraction similarity theory
People are attracted to those who have similar personality characteristics.
The violation of desire theory
People cohabiting with or married to others who lack desired characteristics will more frequently dissolve the relationship.
Shyness
A tendency to feel tense, worried or anxious during or anticipating a social interaction. Shy people need more time to form relationships and form fewer relationships than others. Shy people can be just as, or even more, socially competent when they spend time with people they know well.
Evocation
The ways in which features of personality elicit (emotional) reactions from others.
Hostile attribution bias
The tendency for aggressive people to interpret others’ actions as hostile. This bias causes aggressive people to be hostile towards others, which may evoke a hostile response, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Expectancy conformation/the Pygmalion effect
People’s beliefs about the personality of others cause them to evoke in others the actions that are consistent with the initial beliefs.
Manipulation
The ways in which people intentionally try to change and influence the psychology and behavior of others.
The 11 tactics of manipulation and their relationship to specific traits
- Charm, coercion, silent treatment, reason, regression, self-abasement, responsibility invocation, hardball, pleasure induction, social comparison, and monetary reward.
- Women and men use many of the same tactics, but women tend to use regression (crying, pouting, whining) a bit more than men.
- People high on dominance tend to use coercion and responsibility invocation. People low on dominance tend to use self-abasement and hardball.
- People high on agreeableness tend to use pleasure induction and reason. People low on agreeableness tend to use coercion and silent treatment.
- People high on conscientiousness tend to use reason. People low on conscientiousness tend to use criminal strategies.
- People low on emotional stability tend to use hardball, coercion, reason, monetary reward, and most commonly, regression.
- People high on openness/intellect tend to use reason, pleasure induction and responsibility invocation. People low on openness/intellect tend to use social comparison.
Minimalist position on sex differences
Sex differences are small and unimportant, show small magnitudes of effect and do not have much practical importance (the gender similarities hypothesis).
Maximalist position on sex differences
Sex differences should not be trivialized, some of the differences are large and many are moderate, and differences can have wide reaching consequences.
Masculinity trait dimension
Assertiveness, boldness, dominance, self-sufficiency and instrumentality.
Femininity trait dimension
Nurturance, expression of emotions and empathy.
Androgyny
Scoring high on both femininity and masculinity.
Gender schemata
Cognitive orientations that lead individuals to process social information on the basis of sex-linked associations.
Gender stereotypes
- Beliefs about men and women (and how they differ).
- Three components:1. Cognitive - social categories formed on the basis of sex, 2. Affective - our emotions toward someone vary based on the category they are placed in, and 3. Behavioral - we act differently toward someone based on the category.
- The content of gender stereotypes is highly similar across cultures.
- Men are viewed as more aggressive, achievement-focused, dominant, independent, and persevering.
- Women are viewed as more affiliative, nurturant, communal, and self-abasing.
- People seem to overestimate the magnitude of sex differences in personality.
- Women are often perceived to hold masculine traits, while men are rarely perceived to hold feminine traits.
- Men and women are divided into subtypes of stereotypes, including playboys, career men, whores, mothers etc.
- Women are often stereotyped in terms of sexuality or sexual attractiveness.
Gender roles in Bandura’s social learning theory
Girls watch their female role models and boys watch their male role models, guiding them to a perception of what is masculine/feminine.
Social role theory of sex differences
Sex differences originate because men and women are distributed differently into occupational and family roles.
Hormonal theories of sex differences
Men and women differ because of their different hormones. There is some evidence that hormonal influences on sex differences begin in utero. These theories do not identify the origins of these differences.
Socialization theories of sex differences
Men and women differ because they are socialized into different roles. These theories do not identify the origins of these differences.
Evolutionary psychology theory of sex differences
Men and women differ in the domains of personality where they have faced different adaptive problems, but show large similarities in most domains, where they have faced the same adaptive problems. This theory does not account for individual differences within each sex.
Stress
The subjective feeling produced by events that are uncontrollable or threatening. Stress is not in the situation, but in how people respond to the situation.
The interactional model (health)
Objective events happen to people, but personality factors determine the impact of those events by influencing people’s ability to cope. Personality influences the relationship between stress and illness.
The transactional model (health)
Personality influences coping, but also how the person interprets events, and personality can in fact influence the events themselves. The event itself does not cause stress, but rather how the event is interpreted. People also create situations through their choices and actions.
The health behavior model (health)
Personality affects health indirectly through health-promoting or health-degrading behaviors.
The predisposition model (health)
Personality and illness are both expressions of an underlying predisposition or third variable (perhaps genes).
The illness behavior model
Personality influences people’s illness behavior (the actions people take when they think they have an illness). The way people perceive their sensations and symptoms are influenced by personality.
Stressors
Extreme, uncontrollable events, that often produce opposing tendencies, and that cause stress. When a stressor appears, people experience a pattern of emotional and physiological reactions.
Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) model
A stressor, leads to a three-stage bodily response:
- Stage 1: Alarm
Upon perceiving a stressor, the body reacts with a “fight-or-flight” response and the sympathetic nervous system is stimulated as the body’s resources are mobilized to meet the threat or danger.
- Stage 2: Resistance
The body resists and compensates as the parasympathetic nervous system attempts to return many physiological functions to normal levels while body focuses resources against the stressor and remains on alert.
- Stage 3: Exhaustion
If the stressor or stressors continue beyond the body’s capacity, the resources become exhausted and the body is susceptible to disease and death.
Major life events
Eevents that require people to make major adjustments in their lies. Death of a close friend or family member is likely to evoke the most stress, but positive events like marriage can also cause a lot of stress.
Acute stress
Results from the sudden onset of demands. Can be experienced as headaches, agitation and gastrointestinal disturbance.
Episodic acute stress
Repeated episodes of acute stress. Can lead to stroke, depression, anxiety etc.
Traumatic stress
Massive instance of acute stress, can cause PTSD or other long-lasting issues.
Chronic stress
Stress that does not end. Can cause diabetes, cardiovascular disease etc.
Lazarus two cognitive events to induce stress
The first is primary appraisal: the person must perceive that the event is a threat to his or her personal goals. The second is secondary appraisal: the person concludes that they do not have the resources to cope with the demands of the event.
Dispositional optimism
The expectation that good events will be plentiful in the future, and that bad events will be rare in the future.
Genotype-environment interaction
The differential response of individuals with different genotypes to the same environments.
Genotype-environment correlation
The differential exposure of individuals with different genotypes to different environments. Can be passive, active or reactive. Can be positive - encouraging the trait, or negative - discouraging the trait.
Passive genotype-environment correlation
Parents provide both genes and the environment to children, but the children do nothing to obtain that environment. i.e: highly verbal parents pass on genes and get a highly verbal child - the parents buy many books since they are highly verbal - child is highly verbal and has many books but has done nothing to cause the books to be in their home.
Reactive genotype-environment correlation
Parents react to children differently depending on the child’s genotypes. For example: in the beginning, give both kids footballs and sign them up for a team, but after a while one hates it and one loves it. The one who hates it gets to quit and turns out less athletic.
Active genotype-environment correlation
A person with a particular genotype creates or seeks out a particular environment. Nicke picking.
The genital stage
- If the Oedipus/Electra complex is resolved, the person moves on to the genital stage, lasting from puberty and throughout adult life.
- In the genital stage, the libido is focused on the genitals, but not in the manner of self-manipulation.
- This stage has no specific conflict, as in order to reach it, a person has to have successfully resolved all the conflicts.
- Freud believes personality is developed fully around 6 years, based on the way conflicts are handled in childhood.
