Module 45 (Personality Structure)

Question 1

Personality

Answer 1

describes the unique patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that distinguish a person from others

Question 2

Building blocks of personality

Answer 2

traits, motives, and narrative identity

Question 3

Personality traits

Answer 3

-characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors
-openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism

Question 4

Lexical hypothesis

Answer 4

all important and socially relevant personality differences become encoded in language

Question 5

Openness to experience

Answer 5

intellectual curiosity, aesthetic sensitivity, creative imagination

Question 6

Conscientiousness

Answer 6

organization, responsibility, productiveness

Question 7

Extraversion

Answer 7

sociability, assertiveness, energy level

Question 8

Agreeableness

Answer 8

compassion, respect, trust

Question 9

Neuroticism

Answer 9

anxiety, depression, emotional volatility

Question 10

Motives

Answer 10

what people desire for themselves, can be broad or specific

Question 11

Broad motives

Answer 11

-Achievement, power, affiliation
-Get along, get ahead, find personal meaning

Question 12

Specific/Individualized motives

Answer 12

Life goals (high status career), personal strivings (make life easier for family), personal projects (apply to graduate school)

Question 13

Narrative identity

Answer 13

-a person’s story of how they became the person that they are
-More individualized (“idiographic) than trait and motive approaches
-Not a comprehensive list of facts and events; involves narrative choices

Question 14

How do researchers measure individual differences in personality

Answer 14

personal assessment, self-report questionnaires, informant reports, structured interviews, behavioral observations, experience samplings, reaction time measures, neuroimaging, hormone levels, behavioral responses, open-ended questions, implicit measures, memory tasks

Question 15

Personal assessment

Answer 15

process of evaluating oneself or one’s actions, abilities, or qualities

Question 16

Self-report questionnaires

Answer 16

-Validated personality questionnaires
-Benefits: easy to administer, people have full access to their own behaviors, thoughts, and feelings

Question 17

Informant reports

Answer 17

-Romantic partner, friend, family member
-Benefits: provide outside perspective, can aggregate across multiple informants
-Moderate self-other agreement
-Little evidence for self-enhancement effect

Question 18

Structured interviews

Answer 18

-Trained interviewers
-Divide your life into chapters and to recount key scenes; an early memory, a high point, a low point, a turning point
-Trained coders apply validated coding schemes to these narratives
-Structure, Motivational and affective themes, Autobiographical reasoning

Question 19

How to decide best assessment method

Answer 19

Consider which is closer to “truth,” do benefits of using trait approaches that can be applied to everyone outweigh the specificity of more idiographic or individualized approaches like narratives, “objective” measures of personality