Midterm 1

Question 1

What are the three central components of personality?

Answer 1

1. traits
2. states
3. acts

Question 2

trait

Answer 2

what a person is really like
consistent across situations.
stable over time
longer duration
internal cause: I am cool

Question 3

states

Answer 3

what the person feels, experiences, or thinks.
situation specific, short term, covert/ private
external cause: you made me angry

Question 4

acts

Answer 4

what the person is doing or is trying to do
situation specific
short term
overt/ public/ observable
internal cause ( often intensional): I want to go cray!

Question 5

three other categories of individual differences

Answer 5

1. physical appearance
2. social effects and evaluations( boring, fearsome, attractive, horrible,)
3. talents and skills ( great dancer, high IQ)

Question 6

Define personality

Answer 6

personality represents those characteristics of a the person that describe and account for consistent patterns of feeling, thinking, and behaving

Question 7

5 issues personality theories should address

Answer 7

1. structure (traits, qualities that define a person)
2. process (motives that account for behavior)
3. growth and history (background)
4. psychopathology ( cope with stress)
5. change ( can personality change?)

Question 8

what are the three processes?

Answer 8

1. pleasure/ hedonic
2. growth/ self-actualization ( mature psychologically and realize potential)
3. cognitive ( understand and predict events in the world)

Question 9

what is measurement?

Answer 9

describing phenomena ( speed, weight, personality) often in quantitative ( number ) form

Question 10

repeated measurement vs. single item test

Answer 10

single measurement is unreliable

ex: girlfriend in lab had 100 test tubes to measure ( oviduct story)

Question 11

principle of aggregation

Answer 11

get many items ( or observations) and average them to a single score.
ex: exams,
100 questions, one test score
oviduct story: 100 test tubes, take average of one
GPA average of all our grades

We do this to combat the effects of chance

Question 12

multiple perspectives of personality

Answer 12

use different data sources/methods

ex: LOTS

Question 13

L-O-T-S

Answer 13

data source of personality psychology
L: life data ( info from person’s life story)
O: Observer data ( parents, friends, teachers)
T: Test data ( test)
S: Self-data ( response to questionnaires)

Question 14

reliability

Answer 14

the extend to which our measurement is stable, dependable, and can be replicated

Question 15

what are the 4 major types of reliability indexes?

Answer 15

1. test-retest
     across time, sample 1/2, same results when taken at different times
2. parallel test/ alternate form
    across test
3.split half/ internal consistency
    across items
4. interjudge agreeement
   across observers
   4 different observers look at something