Lecture 1 Flashcards
What is the ABCs of psychology?
Affect (emotion), behaviour, cognition (thoughts)
Personality is consistent and relevant?
True
What does trait theory focus on?
How people differ from each other and trying to explain these differences
Which criteria do alternative approaches get compared by?
Testability Productivity Parsimony Comprehensiveness Compatibility
How does Freud and trait theory differ on these criteria?
Trait theory has done well in all aspects other than comprehensiveness (mental life isn’t accounted for). Freud, on the other hand, was strong on comprehensivenss but weak in every other criteria.
What is McAdams three levels of knowing a person?
- Trait description
- Goals, motives, plans
- Personal narrative
What does “trait description” contain?
The data that are straight forward. Example, grades achieved.
How will you get to know people’s motives, goals and values?
Here, you will need extended interviews. Limitation to how far you can take it.
What does personal narrative contain?
Why a person does what it does. Need for extremely extensive personal talks.
Why does research not focus on all three levels (McAdams) equally?
We focus particularly on level 1 because there is no meaningful way in a scientific field to focus on level 2 or 3. Can be explained with Meehl’s theory
What can Meehl’s theory be used to?
Explain why personality psychology accepts the limit that it does.
Mechanical prediction (Meehl)?
It is statistical (uses explicit equations), actuarial (uses actuarial tables from insurance companies) or algorithmic (e.g. a computer program emulating expert judges).
It means that you make predictions with formulas, and that numbers will win over human prediction.
Clinical way of making predictions (Meehl)?
Anytime when an individual is using their own judgement to make a prediction.
In general, we overestimate our ability to identify the irregularities of the world.
What is the four kinds of data in personality research?
Self-report, informant aka observer, life outcomes, and behavioral aka test data.
Advantage and disadvantage of self-report?
Casual force, easy to do, can cover everything. But they may lie and may have poor self-understanding.
Advantage and disadvantage of informant aka observer?
Causal force, based on real-world behavior, can cover many traits from many situations. But don’t witness all behavior, filtered through their lenses, may lie.
Advantage and disadvantage of life outcomes?
Objective, complete. But “multidetermination” - many routes to the same life events.
Advantage and disadvantage of behavioral aka test data?
Objective, able to control the environment. But artificial, expensive.
Reliability?
Consistency! Will the measure give the same sore to the same person every time?
Validity?
Does it measure what you want to measure?
How are reliability and validity related?
You can have a reliable measure that is not valid. But not a valid measure that isn’t reliable.
Criterion-related validity?
How well your measure relates to something it should - concurrent (at the same time) or predictive (at a later time).
Convergent validity?
When a test correlates with other tests that it should correlate with.
Face validity?
Does it appear to measure what it does?
Construct validity?
Feature both criterion-related, convergent and discriminant. How well does the measure capture the construct?
Discriminant validity?
When the test doesn’t correlate with other tests that it should not correlate with.
Generalizability?
What does this thing mean to the real world? Does it represent what people actually do in real life?
Violation of generalizability?
Gender bias.
Shows vs no-shows.
Cohort effect (if the psychological trait differs across time and place).
Cultural differences
Why is aggregation so important?
To improve reliability.
What is the meaning of correlations?
The extent to which two variables are associated. Works best when you suspect a linear relationship.
Correlations does not equal causality.
What is significance testing?
p
Statistical significance?
Does the effect exist?
Effect size?
Cohen’s d. Is the effect large?
Relation between statistical significance and effect size?
They are related that if you have a particularly large effect, it is likely that the effect would be statistically significant. Just because a statistically significant, it doesn’t mean that they have a large effect on the real world.
They don’t equal each other!
What are the three essential components of psychological mechanisms?
Inputs, decision rules and outputs.
What do the three essential components mean?
Their personality mechanisms may make certain people more sensitive to certain information (input), may make them think in a certain way (decision rules) and may guide them towards a certain behavior (output).
What are the three levels of personality analysis?
The human nature level, the level of individual and group differences, and the individual uniqueness level.
What is the ideographic design method?
When you focus on one subject.
What is “the twenty-statement test”?
20 questions as “I am ____” where people have to fill out the blanks.
What is “experience sampling”?
People answer questions about their mood or feelings every day for several weeks or longer.
What is observer-report data (O-data)?
Uses people around a person as a source to understand that persons personality. It can either be observers who know the person or people who don’t.
What is the opposite of naturalistic observation?
Artificial setting (where things are set op and not naturel)
What is test data (T-data)?
Standardized test. The idea is to see if different people react different in the same setting.
What is projective technique?
A person is given a standard stimulus and asked what he or she sees. Ambiguous (tvetydig) stimuli.
What is a benefit with physiological data?
People can’t lie. An eyeblink is an eyeblink.
What is life outcome data (L-data)?
Information that can be gleaned from the events, activities and outcomes in a person’s life that are available.
What is internal consistency reliability?
If the items within a test all correlate with each other, it has a high internal consistency reliability.
What is inter-rater reliability?
When more observers have seen the same thing.
What is acquiescene?
The tendency to agree with everything on the questionnaire regardless of the question.
What is extreme responding?
When you always choose the endpoint responses.
What is social desirability?
When you answer what comes across as socially acceptable.
A way to avoid social desirability?
Forced-choice questionnaire.
This means that you ask questions/statements that are very similar, so people have to choose what fits them mostly.
Which method is used to determine causality?
Experimental methods.
What is the “directionality problem” with correlation studies?
If A and B correlates, we will never know if A is the cause of B or B is the cause of A.
What is the “third variable problem” with correlation studies?
Two variables might be correlated because a third, unknown, variable is causing both.
