Personality Flashcards
Personality:
A person’s characteristic
thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors
Personality trait:
A pattern of thought,
emotion, and behavior that is relatively consistent over time and across situation
Temperaments:
Biologically based tendencies to feel or act in certain way
Three personality characteristics considered temperament
Activity level
Emotionality
Sociability
The gene-environment correlation phenomenon
Genes and environment affect not only behavior but also each other.
Even if genes and environments are unrelated to start with, they become complementary over time because of decisions people make.
Trait approach:
Focuses on how individuals differ in personality dispositions
Five-factor theory:
The idea that personality can be described using five factors:
(1) openness to experience, (2) conscientiousness, (3) extraversion, (4) agreeableness, and (5) neuroticism
Biological trait theory:
Initially proposed that personality traits had two major dimensions: introversion/ extraversion and emotional stability
Humanistic approaches:
Approaches to studying personality that emphasize how
people seek to fulfill their potential through greater self-understanding
Self-actualization:
people seek to fulfill their potential for personal growth
through greater self understanding
Trait approach vs humanistic approach
The trait approach describes people in terms of their relative standing on an arbitrarily long series of attributes.
Humanistic approaches emphasize personal experience, belief systems, the uniqueness of the narrative of each human life, and the inherent goodness of each person.
Consistent themes that help people make sense of their personal narratives:
Redemption, contamination, meaning-making
Rank-order stability
Lack of change in where a person stands on the trait relative to other people
Personality assessment procedures include
Measures of unconscious processes; life history data; behavioral data; self reports; and descriptions from friends, relatives, or both
Idiographic approaches
Person-centered approaches to studying personality; focus is on individual lives and how various characteristics are integrated into unique persons
