Lecture 2: Observing personality - traits and stories

Question 1

Lexical hypothesis

Answer 1

The original hypothesis (Allport, 1936) leading to the Big Five or OCEAN model.
1) Those personality characteristics that are important to a group of people will eventually become a part of that group’s language.
2) more important personality characteristics are more likely to be encoded into language as a single word.
3) Principal Component Analysis of the covariance-structure of traits can be used to extract the most important aspects of variation in a population.

Question 2

OCEAN/Big 5

Answer 2

Opennes, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism.

Question 3

Big 3

Answer 3

Model of continuity from temperamental traits to personality, including:
1. Positive Emotionality (PEM); well-being, social closeness, achievement, social potency
2. Negative Emotionality (NEM); stress reactivity, alienation, aggression
3. Constraint (CON); harm avoidance, control, traditionalism, absorption

Question 4

Trait realism

Answer 4

One can define a trait as an inferred organismic (psychological, psychobiological) structure underlying an extended family of behavioral dispositions. These dispositions are not meant to be viewed as generalized action tendencies, but as inclinations to behave in certain ways in a set of trait-relevant situations.

Question 5

Situationism

Answer 5

Cannot predict behaviour on the basis on traits, more based on the situation. This strong position is no longer compatible with the evidence. A weaker version may be maintained.

Question 6

Person-specific distributions

Answer 6

Fleeson: Traits are best regarded as person-specific distributions of certain behaviors or states-of-mind. Thus they indicate the likelihood of such states and behaviors over a certain time-period.

Question 7

Network stability

Answer 7

Persistent and pervasive personality patterns emerge from network-interactions between a large number of small personality-related components.

Question 8

Stability in the performance of the actor

Answer 8

McAdams: the self as social actor, encompassing semantic representations of traits, social roles, and other features of self that result in and from repeated performances on the social stage of life. In this perspective trait stability is thus a stability in the typical social, interactional performances that our intensely social lives consist of.

Question 9

Agency

Answer 9

Existence of an organism as an individual; self-protection, self-assertion, and self-expansion; formation of separations; urge to master
- self-mastery
- status/victory
- empowerment
- achievement/responsibility

Question 10

Communion

Answer 10

Participation of the individual in some larger organism of which they are a part of; manifests itself in the sense of being at one with other organisms; lack of separations; contact, openness, union
- love/friendship
- dialogue
- unity/togetherness
- caring/help

Question 11

What are the 4 options of interpreting covariance structures (not mutually exclusive)

Answer 11

1. Trait realism and temperament
2. Situationim
3. Network stability
4. The self as an actor

Question 12

What are the Temperament Big 3 of the Infant Behavior Questionnaire

Answer 12

1. Surgency; approach, vocal reactivity, high intensity pleasure, smile and laughter, activity level
2. Negative affectivity; sadness, distress to limitation, falling reactivity
3. Orienting/regulation capacity; cuddliness, low intensity pleasure, duration of orienting, soothability

Question 13

what are 2 parts of personality functioning

Answer 13

• self (identity, self-direction)
• interpersonal (empathy, intimacy)

Question 14

what is the method for studying covariance patterns

Answer 14

1. take a large list of trait words in a language (from dictionaries)
2. use a method to derive principal components on these traits
3. arrive at a factor structure of 5 to 7 factor

Question 15

what is the solution to interpreting covariance structures

Answer 15

step 1: evidence for situations –> people act very differently on. different occasions
step 2: evidence for persons –> people act very similar from one week to the next
step 3: both are correct –> traits are best regarded as person-specific distributions of the certain stated-of-mind and behaviors, they indicate the likelihood of such states over a certain time period; they’re quite stable (personality); the specific outcomes at any particular moment vary a great deal (situationism)