lecture 2 - intro to personality

Question 1

what is personality?

Answer 1

• regularities in affect, behaviour and cognition
• a person’s typical mode of response
• our identity and reputation

Question 2

what are the three levels of personality proposed by McAdams and Pals?

Answer 2

Level 1: dispositional traits which refers to broad descriptors of stable patterns of affect, behaviour and cognition. these are relatively decontextualised and serve as an initial sketch of the person.

Level 2: characteristic adaptations which refers to an individual’s particular life circumstances. this is HIGHLY contextual.

Level 3: life narratives which refers to the story we’ve constructed about who we are. this is a rich account.

Question 3

who proposed the Lexical Hypothesis? (early trait catalogues; around 18,000 terms)

Answer 3

Allport and Odbert (1936)

Question 4

why was factor analysis established?

Answer 4

developed by Spearman and Thurstone to explore the structure of mental abilities

Question 5

what is the significant work of Cattell?

Answer 5

cattell reduced Allport and Odbert’s list through many varies techniques (including factor analysis) down to 16 Personality Factors

Question 6

what were some of the problems with Cattell’s work?

Answer 6

1. subjectivity
2. poor replicability
3. redundancy (correlations among many of the 16 factors were very high proving them not to be very distinct)

Question 7

who argued for a “Big Five” model?

Answer 7

Goldberg and his colleagues

Question 8

what are The Big Five traits?

Answer 8

openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism