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.