Lecture 1 - Course introduction and core personality methods Flashcards
Personality
The set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are organised and relatively enduring and that influences his or her interactions with, and adaptions to, the intrapsychic, physical, and social environments.
Psychological traits
Characteristics that describe the average tendencies of the ways in which people are unique or different from or similar to each other. These include all sorts of aspects of people that are psychologically meaningful.
Psychological mechanisms
Similar to traits, except that mechanisms refer to the processes of personality, for example, information-processing activity.
McAdam’s 3 levels
Level 1: Trait description; Level 2: Description of goals, motives, and plans; Level 3: Personal narrative.
Paul Meehl’s claim about clinical versus mechanical prediction
Clinical prediction: It is a prediction made by an individual who uses one’s own judgment.
Mechanical prediction: It requires no expert judgment to make prediction that are 100 percent reproducible one they are developed.
Self-report data
Information an individual verbally reveals about themselves, often based on a questionnaire or interview.
Informant/observer-report data
Information in the form of the impressions and evaluations others make of an individual with whom they come into contact.
Behavioral/test-report data
Information from a standardized testing situation where participants are placed to see if they react or behave differently in an identical situation.
Life outcome data
Information that can be gleaned from the events, activities, and outcomes in an individual’s life that are available to public scrutiny.
Validity
The measurement of whether a construct measures what is is supposed to measure.
Construct validity
The degree to which a measurement captures a specific construct.
Face validity
The degree to which a measurement appears (at face value) to measure what i claims to. It is the least sophisticated measure of validity.
Predictive/criterion validity
The degree to which a measurement accurately predicts a criterion that will occur in the future.
Convergent validity
The degree to which the measure obtained with a certain instrument can predict the measures obtained on other measurement.
Discriminant validity
The degree to which a measurement that is supposed to be unrelated to another instrument is indeed unrelated.
