L2/CH3 Flashcards
2 types of personality assessment
descriptive and explanatory research
Descriptive research
used to describe personality
Explanatory research
used to discover relationships between traits or between personality and other phenomena
Examples of descriptive research
self-reports, observer-reports, test data, life history/life-outcome data
Examples of explanatory research
experimental methods (e.g. true experiments, quasi-experiments), correlational studies
Correlational studies
non-experimental methods to identify associations (e.g. cross-sectional, longitudinal)
What does it mean when a relationship/result is significant?
the observation is likely caused by something other than random chance
Replication
process of repeating a study in a different population/context; key to gaining confidence in findings
Meta-analysis
statistical procedure for combining data from multiple studies
How is a meta-analysis conducted?
look at whether the effect size of a particular relationship/phenomena is consistent across studies that have been standardized, compared/summarized
WEIRD
western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic
Where do most psychology citations come from?
70% from the US
Case study
in-depth examination of the life of one person
3 characteristics of a case study
descriptive, exploratory, explanatory
3 definitions of traits
basic building blocks of personality; universal dimensions with individual differences; any adjective or noun that describes the way some people are and others aren’t
2 different perspectives of traits
internal causal properties vs descriptive summaries of behavior
Traits as internal and causal
people carry their needs and wants from one situation to the next and these can explain their behavior
Traits as descriptive
descriptive summaries of trends in a person’s expressed behavior with no assumption of internality or causality
Act frequency approach
counting the number of times one engages in a behavior
3 key elements of the act frequency approach
act nomination, prototypicality judgement, recording of act performance
Act nomination
process of identifying which acts belong to which trait categories
Prototypicality judgement
process of identifying which acts are most prototypical of each trait category
Recording of the act performance
gathering information on the actual performance of individuals in their daily lives
3 approaches to identifying which traits are most important
lexical, statistical, theoretical
What does it mean that some traits are more important than others?
they account for more variance in the population
Lexical hypothesis
all important individual differences have been encoded within language over time as trait terms, which are important for communication
2 criteria for identifying important traits
synonym frequency and cross-cultural universality
Statistical approach
statistical methods are used to organize and categorize a large, diverse pool of items (usually identified using the lexical approach) based on their covariance
What is the primary statistical method used?
factor analysis
Factor analysis
identifies groups of items that covary but tend not to covary with other groups; reveals underlying factors with a common property
Theoretical approach
a theoretical framework is used, which determines which variables or traits are important to study
Taxonomy
classification scheme that identifies and names groups within a subject field
5 trait taxonomies
eysenck’s hierarchical model of personality, grey’s reinforcement sensitivity theory, wiggins interpersonal circumplex, five-factor model of personality, HEXACO model of personality
2 criteria for personality traits in the hierarchical model of personality
must be heritable and must have psychophysiological foundation
3 broad traits in the hierarchical model of personality
extraversion, neuroticism, psychoticism
What does each broad trait consist of?
narrow traits, habitual actions, specific actions
Examples of narrow traits in extraversion
surgent, active, assertive, lively, sociable, carefree, dominant, sensation-seeking