Midterm Exam Flashcards
What is the definition of personality?
- Personality is a dynamic organization inside the person of psychological systems that create the persons characteristic patterns of behavior, thoughts and feelings
How do people use the concept of personality?
- To explain uniqueness (prominent characteristics)
- Explain consistency and continuity of behavior (across time and situations)
- Internal locus of causation
What is the continuous cycle of theory and research?
- Theory suggests prediction for research (self corrective process to improve theories and research) which suggests changes in theory
What is the 5 factor model?
- Extraversion: sociable, talkative, optimistic
- Agreeableness: helpful, trusting, forgiving, warm
- Conscientiousness: organized, neat, persevering
- Emotionality/neuroticism: nervous, tense, depressed
- Intellect/openness to experience: creative, imaginative, broad interest
What is the relation between objective and subjective indicators?
- Objective can predict subjective indicators (people with disease may be more depressed)
- Subjective can predict objective indicators (depressed people may not invest in their health)
Objective and subjective indicators can be somewhat independent: a person may differ in personality such as being more resilient in a break up situation
Why does the average domain specific satisfaction does not necessarily match overall life satisfaction?
- Not all domains are measured
- Some life domains may not be as important to some (adjust weight of importance)
What kind of general principles make humans adjust so well to events and the challenges of life?
- Internal or personality principles such as positive expectations
- There may be qualifying or contextual factors such as age, disease or stressors
What are the 2 ways of how personality could influence quality of life?
- Exposure pathway: personality exposes us to something that determines well being and health, exposure represents a mediation pathway (personality triggers an event which then affects quality of life)
- Reactivity pathway: personality makes us react to something that happens in our lives in a certain way, reactivity represents a moderation pathway (personality determines the extent to which an event affects quality of life)
- These two pathways can occur for the same person
What is the PANAS scale?
- World standard for measuring emotional well being
- Cited a lot, short scale and fits in every protocol
What is the difference between affect, emotion and mood?
- Affect: a positive or negative feeling state that can be more or less intense
- Emotion: an affective state that has a specific object
- Mood: a diffuse affective state that either has no object or that persists and/or generalizes beyond its original object
What are the basic emotions and what are their adaptive purpose?
- Fear = escape
- Anger = fighting
- Sadness = longing; withdrawal
- Disgust = repulsion
- Surprise = reallocation of attention
How is affect balance measure?
- difference between positive and negative affect to measure emotional well being
What are the problems behind the affect balance?
- We don’t know if emotional well being derives from either positive or negative affect
- PA and NA affect may derive from different behaviors
- PA and NA could predict different outcomes
- PA is not necessarily associated with NA
What are the different personality processes?
- Behavioral activation system: go for incentive, left frontal lobe, PA
- Behavioral inhibition system: avoid punishment, right frontal lobe, NA
- behavioral self-regulation: affect depends on perceived progress made towards attaining a goal
What is the self-regulation pathway?
- Affect produced from goal progress => assess progress towards goal => if make progress more than expected then generate positive affect, if make progress less than expected then generate negative affect
What are the categorizations of the different affects?
- Pleasantness vs unpleasantness affect
- Aroused vs non-aroused affect
What is the problem with the PANAS?
- Issues with measuring emotional well being because it is missing low arousal emotions such as sadness and feelings of calmness, it only has high arousal emotions
Why is PA not always adaptive and NA not always maladaptive?
- to react to demanding circumstances: need sadness or anger in dangerous events, effects may depend on context
- learning from conflicts or mistakes: regret an life change
- Extreme levels of PA: cant recognize problems
What is the set-point theory?
- Events and efforts influence happiness but people fall back to set point
What are the traditional well being research?
- Emotional well being: PA and NA, affect balance or separate factors
- Life satisfaction: cognitive component of well being, domain general or specific
What are the criticism of well being research?
- Neglects the basis of positive psychological functioning
- Not theory guided
What is the developmental approach based on?
- Self actualization: becoming best possible version of yourself
- Fully functioning person
- Personal growth
- psycho-social stages
What are the 6 components of well being?
- Self acceptance: positive view about yourself and your past
- Positive relations with others: emphasis on social aspects of life
- Autonomy: regulation of behavior from within
- Environmental mastery: controlling the environment outside the self
- Purpose in life: directedness, intentionality, having meaningful activities
- Personal growth: continue to develop your potential
What are the three components that are strong indicators of outcomes of psychological well being/emotional well being?
- Self-acceptance, environmental mastery and purpose in life
- People who accept their self and their past, successfully master their life challenges and have purpose concerning future goals report high emotional and life satisfaction and low depression
What are the age differences for the components of well beign?
- Increase in environmental mastery, positive relations with other and autonomy (young adulthood and midlife)
- Stability: self acceptance
- Decline of purpose in life and personal growth
Why does purpose in life decrease with age?
- Less opportunities for future related goal pursuits
- Different aspects of purpose: having foals and how much people value their goals
- Number of goals may decline but not necessarily how much people value the goals they pursue
How to improve successful aging?
- Provide opportunities for future goal pursuits and purpose for the elderly
- Strengthen those personality processes that facilitate the engagement with new and meaningful goals
What is Bob Emmons definition of personal striving?
- Represents what people are characteristically aiming to accomplish through their behaviors
What are the adaptive values of goals?
- Goals structure our lives for long term and day to day basis
- Goals give us purpose
What is the feedback loop for goal?
- Negative feedback loop
- E.i., you have a goal of visiting friend in USA, input function is when the person looks at bank account and there’s not much money, so it creates negative discrepancy
- The negative discrepancy gives output function such as asking parents for money, this might affect on the environment where the parent gives part of the money so there’s still negative discrepancy but creates new input functioning that gets compared to goal
- Multiple rounds of negative feedback loops up until goal is obtained
What is the hierarchy of goals?
- System concepts: be goals, ideal self
- Principles: be goals, be thoughtful
- Programs: do goals, prepare dinner
- Sequences: motor control goals, slice broccoli
Which two dimensions can goals be compared?
- Importance and probability of success
What is the difference between ideographic and nomothetic personal strivings?
- Ideographic: characteristic set for each person
- Nomothetic: can be observed across people
- Strivings are both ideographic and nomothetic
- Traits are only nomothetic
What was the study done by Emmons and Diener?
- Method: assess personal striving with questionnaire, completed forms at 4 random times each day over a 3 week period
- Measure personal striving: SS give list of 15 personal striving, and rate striving on different dimension (value, importance, probability of success and past attainment)
- DV= PA and NA and life satisfaction
- goal approach to personality can explain a considerable proportion of variance in indicators of quality of life more than trait approach
What are the conflict among personal strivings?
- When one personal striving interferes with the achievement of another personal striving
What is the causal role of cognition in emotion?
- Sufficient: thoughts are capable of producing emotion
- Necessary: emotions can not occur without some kind of thought
What was the experimental evidence shown by Lazarus et al.,?
- 1 group = control
- 2 group = told that people in gruesome film were only actors (denying reality)
- 3 group = told to take analytical approach to gruesome film (judge success in promoting safety)
- DV = physiological arousal while watching film
- two experimental groups showed less physiological arousal than control group
- Appraisals that distort significance of stressful events can reduce the ability of those events to produce stress reactions
What are the characteristics of the cognitive theory of stress and coping?
- understanding emotional life as an interaction between a person and the environment
- Experience of stress implies process
- Process consists of causal antecedent (person goal & traits/environment of demands resources and constraints), mediating processes (primary & secondary appraisal and coping) and immediate (affect, physiological changes) and long term effects (well being, health, social functioning)
What are appraisals?
- Concerns implications of info for ones well being
- Primary appraisal: appraisal of motivational relevance of what happens (threat, harm)
- Secondary appraisal: appraisal of actions that can be taken to improve the troubled person-environment interaction
How was coping perceived in Lazarus model?
- Coping as a mediator
- Measured specific situations
- two modes of coping: problem and emotion focused
What is problem focused coping?
- Altering the troubled person environment relationship
- Planful problem solving, confrontive coping, seeking social support
What is emotion focused coping?
- Managing the emotional distress
- positive reappraisal (found new faith), self control, escape-avoidance
If a person has favorable belief about his/her ability to overcome problems should be able to do what?
- less likely to encounter problems as threatening
- more likely to experience challenge
- more likely to use effective coping strategies
What are the relations between appraisals and coping?
- primary appraisal: when stakes are high there should be a mobilization of coping activity
- Secondary appraisal: encounters appraised as changeable (problem focused coping), encounters requiring acceptance (emotion focused coping)
How are optimist compared to pessimists?
- Compared in explaining the causes of negative events
- As more time limited (stable-unstable)
- Narrow in their effects (global-specific)
- External to the self (internal-external)
How do we measure dispositional optimism?
- Life orientation test (LOT)
- Had optimism, pessimism and coping
- Problems: optimisms and coping items and so makes it difficult to examine coping as a mediator, includes optimism and pessimism items (is someone who is not optimistic necessarily pessimistic?)
- Revision of LOT = LOT-R
How does optimism relate to quality of life?
- Optimism predict SWB
- Optimism predicts objective well being (recovery after surgery, pessimism predicted mortality in cancer patients)
How do optimist cope compared to pessimists?
- Optimist use more problem-focused coping (persistence, planful actions) in controllable situations
- Optimists use more emotion focused focused coping (acceptance, positive re-appraisal) in uncontrollable situation
What is control?
- Control belief: internal control, self-efficacy, attribution
- Control strategies: active investment of cognitive and behavioral resources aimed at attaining important life goals and managing experiences of failure
What is the difference between control and coping?
- Control strategies: more preventative, plans as to goals, take action to achieve goal
- Coping: acceptance or moving on, goal oriented in the sense if plans don’t go the way you planned, emotional acceptance
How could a lifespan approach inform theories of personality?
- Personality processes could have different adaptive values across the lifespan
- Age could determine the use of different personality processes
- Individuals with certain personality profiles may benefit in young adulthood and suffer in old age
What are the differences between primary and secondary control>
- Primary control: targets the external world, attempts to achieve immediate effects in the environment
- Secondary control: targets the self, aimed at optimizing a persons motivation and emotion
What are the two requirements for successful development
- Selectivity: choosing different options, selectively investing resources into attaining objectives
- Compensation of failure: Humans are sensitive to failure, need of cognitive and behavioral resources to compensate failure experiences
What are the compensations of secondary control?
- Self protection: social comparison, attributions
- Disengagement: letting go of unattainable goal (disengagement), turning towards new objectives
What are the three optimization heuristics that support choice of adaptive goals and control processes?
- Good match with opportunities
- Support long-term primary control capacity
- Help maintain some diversity in life
What are the different expectations?
- Expectations: likelihood or probability judgments about future related behaviors and outcomes
- Self efficacy expectations: expectation about self
- Outcome expectancies: certain behaviors results in event
- General expectations: expect an event to occur
- Generalized expectations: expectations on all different domains
What are fantasies:
- Experiences of images depicting future events
- Appear in the stream of thought
- Can be positive or negative
What are the differences between expectations and fantasies?
- Positive expectations take past facts into account, motivates to implement desired future, prepares for upcoming obstacles, prepares and planning
What is adaptive action?
- Needed to attain a desired future
- Effort, planning, preparing for and overcoming obstacles
- Thoughts that facilitate effective action are adaptive
- Thoughts that interfere with effective action are maladaptive
What were the findings for finding a job after graduate school?
- Ask student to write down image fantasies that they already had with respect to transition to work
- Measured # of job offers and application and salary two years later
- Positive expectations predicted # of job offers and higher salary after graduation
- Fantasies showed negative effects; positive fantasies led to less job offers and few applications
- Positive expectations and negative fantasies create more motivation for achieving desired outcomes
What were the findings for establishing a romantic relationship?
- Comparing fantasies of scenarios and expectations to get involved with crushee
- Measured intimate relationship success and confession of love 5 months later
- Positive expectations showed positive effect on having intimate relationship with crushee
- Positive fantasies less likely that something would happen, reduce confessions of feelings toward crush
What is the hedonic and pleasure principle?
- Hedonic principle: avoid pain and approach pleasure
- Pleasure principle, law of effect (Thorndike), reinforcement (Skinner), pleasure and reality principle (Freud)
What is the regulatory focus?
- Hedonic principle should operate differently when serving different needs
- Nurturance-related (promotion focus): presence and absence of positive outcomes
- Security related (prevention focus): presence and absence of negative outcomes
How do we approach pleasure and avoid pain?
- Approach pleasure: reducing discrepancies by finding matches
- Avoiding pain: reducing discrepancies by avoiding mismatches
Why is pursuing an unattainable goal problematic?
- People invest their time and energy in futile endeavors and experience accumulated failure
- People do not pursue other important and attainable goals which may have long-term implications for their quality of life
What are the pathways to well being and health?
- When you have goal related problem, that can lead to emotional distress, biological problems and physical illness and this can have a feedback loop
- Unless you self regulate after seeing there is goal related problems, then you wont have that feedback loop of issues
How do we deal with difficulties in goals?
- When opportunities to achieve goal are good, then you pursue goal
- When opportunities are poor, then need to disengage from goal and reengage to different goal
What is goal adjustment?
- Disengagement from unattainable goal: reduction of effort and withdrawal of commitment
- Prevents accumulated failure experience and provides resources for other activities
- Reengagement in alternative goals: identification of goals, commitment to goals and pursuit of goals
- Creates purpose in life and reduces thoughts and feelings about failure
What are the adaptive values of depressive symptoms?
- Depressive mood may have evolved in humans to cope with situation related to danger, loss or wasted effort
- It may facilitate abandonment of futile goals and guide the selection of adaptive behavior
