Lecture 8: Personality, Strength & Virtues Flashcards
(30 cards)
What is personality psychology and its relationship with positive psychology?
- Enormous breadth (personality psych expands from genes to culture)
- A strong base for positive psychology. Applications to clinical psychology (tends towards the negatives, but there wasn’t a relative neglect for positive psychology which makes it a good base e.g., differences in happiness, creativity etc.)
How are people like all other people?
- Basic Needs and capacities: SDT, language
- SDT: everyone has these basic needs and everyone needs to meet these needs (competence, relatedness, autonomy)
How are people like some other people?
- Individual & group differences; trait, gender, etc
How are people like no others?
Individually unique quirks, life stories (defining moments that impact future behaviours and well-being), projects
Where does personality come from?
Evolution, Genes, prenantal experience, temperament, and development
How does personality come from evolution?
Adaptive problems form our personalities, one thing humans are really good at that is different from animals is cooperation
How does personality come from genes?
Heritability, but not immutable. Environment does play a role.
How does personality come from prenatal experience?
Potentially important to personality. Even twins, have different prenatal experiences (sharing a womb can even differ)
How does personality come from early temperament?
- Infants have individual differences that are relatively stable. Early temperamental features are the building blocks of personality features. Temperament evokes responses from the environment (crying baby might get picked up more)
How does personality come from development?
- In families, cultures, places, & random events (growing up in a noisy place might mean that you need that simulation, whereas growing up in a quiet environment might mean that noises and people overwhelm/distract you)
- Processes of evocation, selection, etc.
Maturation, increasing cognitive complexity
What is big about the big 5?
- These are BIG (broad)
- Think of these like a map of personality (traits come together to from the big five traits, facets of extraversion)
- Heritability (40-50%), physiological correlates
- Stability over time (rank order stability) yet room for change
- Predict important life outcomes (things that matter in life are predicted by these big five traits, e.g., divorce, health & longevity)
Are traits dimensional?
Yes, most people are in the middle. not strictly extraverted or intraverted
Are traits variable or consistent?
Both: Traits are variable, yet consistent. it is best to think of personality traits as dimensions of difference, rather than types or black-and-white categories. Moreover, most people tend to be moderate on most traits.
- There is moment to moment variation, sometimes extraverts are quiet, sometimes introverts are loud.
- Both introverts and extraverts are experiencing the full range of interversion and extraversion, however you can see mean differences (introvert mean ~40 and extroververt mean = 60)
- When we aggregate over many moments and collect average over tiem, we see clear differences in personality traits. However, personality psych is lousy at distinguishing moment-moment traits.
What are other individual differences (things that aren’t traits but still describe similarities or differences among people)
- Needs or motives (vs. universal versions)
- Goals (things we are working towards)
- Interests
- Self-concept (through self report, e.g., am I satisfied with my life? Someone else might say something different about your self concept and this is assessed by peer reports)
- Values
- Attachment style (good relationships vs. bad relationships)
- Abilities (musical ability, athletic ability etc.)
- Character strengths (positive psychology individual differences)
How are these other individual differences different compared to traits?
- Usually more specific or clearly defined
- Usually assumes causes or consequences
- Yet may overlap part of what’s included in trait
What is personality?
Personality refers to the individual, internal characteristics that produce regularities in thoughts, feelings, and actions.
How can traits be a personality process?
- Genes
- Physiology (e.g., BAS) Dopamine has to do with approach motivation, somehow extraverts have more of that and a more sensitive behavioral activation system (extraverts pursue things vigorously)
- Sociable/reward behaviour (cause & effect). Selection (selecting environments e.g., pub vs. home), evocation (evoking a different kind of environment make environment more or less conducive), manipulation (studies: finish the story e.g., john is sitting with his head on a desk… extraverts take that in a positive direction
- Cognitive biases (e.g., memory, homophones)
- Self regulation (mood)
- Culture (US/ western society really values extraversion but not all cultures do )
What is a state vs. a trait?
Traits refer to average tendencies over time. They are inside people, i.e., the long-term inclinations that people carry with them to each situation. Yet, in each moment, we have thoughts, feelings, and behaviours that can vary quite a bit; these are states. States are temporary and sensitive to the immediate context; they are short-term units
What are the jingle and jangle fallacies?
- Jangle= The jangle fallacy is thinking that two nearly identical things are different because they have different names. For example, some have argued that conscientiousness and grit are so similar that having two separate names is more confusing than helpful
- Jingle= the jingle fallacy is thinking that two actually different things are the same because they share a name. For example, optimism has been measured in two different ways: 1) with questionnaires about general future
expectations (e.g., ‘in uncertain times, I usually expect the best) or 2) by coding the way people explain the reasons for good and bad events (e.g., as being due to internal vs. external or controllable vs. uncontrollable reasons)
What are positive psychology’s unit of personality?
- Strengths and virtues
- Background: Similar to general arguments for positive psychology, Addresses the 2nd pillar of positive individual differences,
Assumes virtue & character essential to the good life (cf aristotle & eudaimonia)
What are the potential benefits and important differences between the DSM and the VIA system?
Potential benefits of both:
- Common language
- Directs research and assessment
- Provides a map for other institutions
Important differences
- Categories vs. dimensions (fall somewhere along a spectrum)
- Number of constructs (DSM has 700ish, the character strengths list has 24)
- (aspires to)greater validity, more universal
How can we define strengths?
- Morally valued (positive* criteria of positivity)
How do strengths compare to traits?
- Similar as units (Relative stability, consistency. Role for situations, nurturing)
- Similar hierarchical conceptual structure (Broad virtues, narrower strengths; big scope)
- Content differs (?) Exclusively positively/valued (e.g., there is no character strength like neuroticism whereas personality traits include negative traits. The big 5 can become extreme in such a way that they produce personality disorders or are problematic), some extras (the goal of the big five was to be comprehensive but character strengths reflects some areas that the big five didn’t hit)?
How was the strengths list developed?
- Discussion among psychologists
- Consulted philosophers lists
- Consulted literature & pop culture
- Consulted institutions (e.g., boy scouts)
- Looked across cultures (might find things that are idiosyncratically considered in one culture but this would not be included on the list because they were looking for universality)
- Hoping for universal agreement (except situational themes)
- Criteria are ‘family resemblance’ (should meet most criteria, not perfect), debatable
