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