Personality Flashcards
Social psychology vs personality psychology
Social: tends to examine the sort of things that stay stable across personalities
Personality: the opposite of that - the things about the person that remains stable across those situations –> “enduring patterns of thought, feeling, motivation and behaviour that are expressed in different circumstances”
What is personality?
- how a person’s thoughts and actions interact with and shape reciprocally the conditions of their lives
- people choose their environments –> people affect their environments –> in return, these environments affect the stable ways in which a person thinks about and approaches the world
Issues and questions in personality research
- what are the basic elements of personality? to what extent is personality stable across time and across situations
- structure of personality
- personality processes
- individual differences in personality
- causal contributions of biology, culture, history to personality development
- the effect of situation; reciprocal forces
- the impact of personality on important aspects of life such as relationships
Research approaches to personality:
- clinical approach
- correlational approach
- experimental approach
Clinical approaches to personality research
INFO
Focus: involves the systematic, in-depth research of individuals
Methods: observation and self-report
Significant researchers: Charcot, Janet, Morton Prince, Freud, Murray
STRENGTHS
- does not assume that everyone has the same degree of insight into their own functioning
- observes a great variety of phenomena
- considers the functioning of a whole person
- generates new hypotheses
LIMITATIONS
- difficult for others to confirm observations
- may be difficult to formulate lab-style tests of hypotheses
- hard to replicate with questionnaires (tends to distrust self-report)
Correlational approaches to personality research
INFORMATION
Focus: establishes associations between sets of measures on which people have been found to differ (not studying persona as a whole but relationships between elements) –> are there basic groups of characteristics on which people differ?
Methods: measurements based on self-report and factor analysis
Significant researchers: Galton, Gordon Allport (5 Factor model of personality)
Assumes: trait is fundamental unit of personality
Aim: sought periodic table of elements of personality
STRENGTHS
- self-report is easy to use on large groups, cost effective
- compares an individual to the average via numerical scores (clinical utility)
LIMITATIONS
- correlational does not equal causation
- factor analysis has subjective elements
- self reports are subject to biases and errors (self deception, social desirability)
Experimental approaches to personality research
INFORMATION
Focus: involves systematic manipulation of variables to establish causal relationship and general laws
Methods: experimental manipulation and direct experimental control
Significant Researchers:
- Wundt (how do changes in stimuli influence changes in experience / phenomenal consciousness?)
- Ebbinghaus (laws of memory)
- Pavlov
- Skinner
STRENGTHS
- close to scientific ideal
- no need to worry about whether subject knows truth about self or is telling truth as does not rely on self-report
LIMITATIONS
- difficult to bring important features of personality into the lab
- not in the context of a whole person
- participants bring own expectations into the lab
- experiment is a social situation
What was freud looking at (clinical approach)
- tried to explain hysteria
- examined ambivalence (conflicting feelings and motives) , self-defeating behaviour, compromise formations, defence mechanisms
Temperament (genetic approach)
- has a significant genetic component and strong claims for consistency across the life span
- temperament variables include: inhibition to the familiar, impulsivity, reactivity
Temperament: inhibition to the unfamiliar
- includes shyness, anxiety when faced with novel stimuli
- found in about 10% of children (manifests in crying, being upset, etc with unfamiliar stimuli)
Temperament: impulsivity
Zuckerman:
- stimulus hungry people
- issues of impulsivity (liveliness, risk-taking, impulsive behaviour, non-planning) and sensation seeking (thrill, adventure, seeks novel and intense stimuli, disinhibition, boredom susceptibility, evolutionary advantage)
- places sensation seeking in the limbic system rather than the cortex
- dopamine seen as driving sensation seeking
- serotonin seen as inhibiting sensation-seeking
Temperament: reactivity
- Strelau
- low reactive work well when the job requires a high deree of precision, there is a high price for mistakes, etc
- high reactives: have sensitive nervous systems, react strongly to changing, high levels of demand
Heritability
- heavily influenced by genes
- researchers have looked for similar levels of a trait in identical twins reared apart and compared those levels to those found in twins reared together
- some researchers that some traits are more heritable than others:
- -> IQ / openness is most heritable
- -> extraversion, neuroticism is somewhat heritable
- -> conscientious, agreeableness is least heritable
Trait Approaches to Personality
- very dominant approach
- assumes that all people have enduring characteristics or traits and personality can best be described as a set of these characteristics
- example include: extraversion, levels of warmth, impulsiveness, conscientiousness, anxiety, trust
- assumption in trait models: these characteristics occur in every individual at levels that can be mapped on a continuum normally distributed across the general population
- introduced by Gordon Allport
- Raymond Cattell listed 16 distinct traits
- Costa and McCrae did the the Five Factor Model (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism)
The nomothetic approach
- assumes that levels of particular traits occur on a continuum from low to high in all people, and are normally distributed
idiographic approach
- emphasises the uniqueness of the individual (rather than comparing individual scores to a wider norm)