Lecture 2: Observing personality Flashcards
Core concepts: Lexical hypothesis OCEAN / Big 5 Big 3 Trait realism Situationism Person-specific distributions Network stability Stability in the performance of the actor Agency Communion
What is the lexical hypothesis?
- Those personality characteristics that are important to a group of people will eventually become a part of that group’s language.
- More important personality characteristics are more likely to be encoded into language in many words.
- Principle Component Analysis of the covariance-structure of traits can be used to extract the most important aspects of variation in a population.
What are traits?
Words in natural language to describe individual characteristics
What is the method for studying covariance patterns?
- Large list of trait words in language
- Method to derive principal components or factors
- Factor structure of 5-7 factor
What is important when interpreting covariance?
Why is it common to find 5/6/7 principal components in lexical studies?
Reasoning behind covariance between traits
Persistence (consistency over time)
Pervasiveness (consistency over situations)
Trait realism
Traits seen as inferred organismic structure underlying behavioural dispositions. Seen as inclinations to behave in certain ways in situations than generalized action tendencies. For example one trait is related to a biopsychological stem which results in other related adjectives
What is a realist trait perspective on the big three?
Positive emotionality= wellbeing, social closeness, achievement, social potency
Negative emotionality= stress reactivity, alienation, aggression
Constraint= harm avoidance, control, traditionalism, absorption
Realist perspective on temperament big 3 infant behaviour questionnaire
Surgency= approach, vocal reactivity, high intensity pleasure, smile and laughter, activity level, perceptual sensitivity
Negative affectivity= sadness, distress to limitation, fear and falling reactivity
Orienting/regulation capacity= cuddliness, low intensity pleasure, duration of orienting, soothability
Situationism
That the situation does not imply a certain trait which argues that generalized behavioural consistencies have not been demonstrated. But has been found to be no longer compatible with evidence
What is the solution for situationism?
- Look for evidence for situations as people can act very differently on different occasions
- Evidence for people as they can act similar from one week to another
- See that both are correct due to person specific distributions
Person-specific distributions
Traits are certain states-of-mind and behaviours which indicate the likelihood of states over a certain time period. These can be stable but specific outcomes at any moment can vary (situationism)
What is network stability?
- Interactions of particular acts, feelings, thoughts
- Give rise to covariance between
them - Resulting in generalized patterns
- And broad traits
Stability in the performance of the actor
The self as a social actor which includes semantic representations of traits, social roles and other features which result in repeated performance on the social stage of life. Includes persona and appearance to others.
How does the self as an actor lead to stable characteristics?
Perceived reactions and self judgement-> actions-> perception and judgement by others -> reactions by others
What is the goal of CBP (verhalen bank psychiatrie)?
- Creating a scientific database of interviews on experiences of mental health and mental health care
- Developing new methods for analyzing these narratives
- Initiate possibilities for improving mental health care
- Creating educational material for students in mental
health care - Working against taboo and stigma
- Offering comfort, strength and inspiration to fellow patients
What was the method used?
- 138 narratives of (ex) patients , people in their network ,
and workers in mental health care. - Transcripts of the interviews are kept private in a scientific database
- From these transcripts narratives are written by an editor and then revised on the basis of input from the
interviewer and the person being interviewed - These are published online and can be freely used
- In this course we use two narratives from this database