Personality

Question 1

How does Allport (1961) describe personality?

Answer 1

“a dynamic organisation, inside the person, of psychophysical systems that create the person’s characteristic patterns of behaviour thoughts and feelings”

Question 2

What is Personality?

Answer 2

• dynamic -> adaptive, organised intenal system (impact of the experiences we have growing up)
• interaction of body and mind (we behave in certain ways because of the cognition and emotions we have in a particular context which are guided by our personality)
• relatively stable part of a person (fundamental building blocks of personality stay the same overtime, although may be tempered by the environment, the underlying trait will stay stable throughout your life span)
• some theorists argue you can unlearn, learned aspects of your personality
• personality influences a range of human experiences (influences decisions that we make/put ourselves in)

Question 3

Can we directly measure / observe personality?

Answer 3

No -> unable to draw inferences

Question 4

If we do measure personality indirectly, what are some methods that can give us data provided by the individual

Answer 4

• projective tests
• implicit measures
• self-report measures

Question 5

What are self-report measures not useful for?

Answer 5

children -> instead ask teachers/parents to report child’s personality instead

Question 6

What are some methods where people can indirectly measure the personality of others?

Answer 6

• Known others
• Behavioural observations
• Perception of faces by unknown others

Question 7

What is ‘Perception of faces by unknown others’?

Answer 7

making initial judgements of people’s personality based on first approach/looking at an individuals face

Question 8

How do projective tests measure personality?

Answer 8

• ambitious stimuli presented to an individual who provides a response to the stimuli (asked to response in a particular manner)
  ^ yes this to try and tease personality -> by responding to something ambitious, this response will give you an insight into parts of your personality
• can also provide information about underlying emotions/thoughts, inner conflicts

Question 9

Which two projective tests can prove information about underlying emotions, thoughts and inner conflicts?

Answer 9

• Rorschach Inkblot
• Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

Question 10

What is the Roschach Inkblot Test?

Answer 10

Inkblots can be employed to elicit responses determined by the peculiarities of perception which are supposedly dependent upon the underlying structure of the personality.

Question 11

What is the Thematic Appreciation Test [TAT] (developed by Henry Murray)

Answer 11

30 grayscale pictures, each containing a dramatic event or critical situation. Individuals are asked what is happening in this picture such as
* relationships between people ((are they getting on fine? Are there any problems? -> trying to ask questions to tease out parts of personality and whether this will reflect an individuals personality))
* feelings of people in picture

Stories are constructed which reflect individual personalities and experiences

Question 12

What are the main criticisms of Projective Tests?

Answer 12

• lack of reliability (individuals come up with different conclusions -> there’s no consensus among experts)
• lack of validity
• Weak predictive power (e.g. can’t predict aggressive behaviour)
• Lack of convergence with psychometrically sound tests
• Lack of determining differences between people with mental illness and those without

Question 13

What are projective tests better for?

Answer 13

therapy ‘ice-breakers’ -> they get you talking, get an insight into how you are feeling / mindset

Question 14

Name two types of implicit personality measures

Answer 14

1. Implicit Association Test
2. Emotional Stroop Test

Question 15

Describe the Implicit Association Test

Answer 15

• aims to tap into our automatic associations
• measures whether the subject responds faster to when certain categories are combined versus other combinations of categories (how quickly you respond to different things)
• you will be asked to associate a adjective / verb / etc with ‘me’ or ‘not me’

Question 16

what does it mean if you quickly pair a word with who you are?

Answer 16

it’s likely you believe it is part of your personality, because of the quick response association with themselves

Question 17

what is one advantage of the implicit association tests?

Answer 17

it’s difficult for people to ‘fake good’ or malinger while doing this procedure

Question 18

What is the emotional stroop test?

Answer 18

• requires a person to look at a list of words an say the colour of the ink in which the word is printed
• some words represent possible sources of concern or anxiety
• the assumption is that the task will be more difficult and the pauses of the subject will be longer when trying to say the colour of the words that relate to your areas of concern/stress/frustration

Question 19

what happens when you take longer to say a word?

Answer 19

word is some level of concern to you/produces some level of anxiety i.e. negative words may cause a level of anxiety -> individual may have more negative personality

Question 20

Mogg et al. (1993) looked at emotional stoop task and anxiety disorder. 20 patients with anxiety disorder and 18 controls were show positive, negative and neutral words. What was found?

Answer 20

Patients with anxiety took longer to say colour of negative word than controls
* 21ms average for anxiety patients versus 2ms for control)

Question 21

How are personality questionnaires developed?

Answer 21

• questionnaire with many items
• items are analysed statistically for ‘clusters’ of items (factor analysis) -> if they measure similar things, they will cluster together as they all measure the same kind of trait (i.e. 4 different questions about extroversion) and give it a factor rating (similar to correlation) -> the higher the number, the better measure to whatever you’re measuring
• each cluster measures a personality trait

Question 22

What are some examples of classical personality inventories?

Answer 22

• MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, now MMPI-2-RF) 567 Items (reading 567 sentence and rating but the scale tends to be cherry picked so they only choose sentences with scales that are similar to what they are wishing to measure), 51 Scales - used in clinical processes/job screening processes
• 16PF, 185 Items, 16 factors
• EPQ-R (Eysenck Personality Questionnaire), 100 Items, 4 Factors
• NEO-PI-R: 240 Items, 5 Factors, 30 Scales

Question 23

What are some examples of the items from HEXACO-60 which measures 6 different types of personality?

Answer 23

Honesty-Humility: Having a lot of money is not especially important to me

Emotionality: I sometimes can’t help worrying about little things

Extraversion: In social situations, I’m usually the one who makes the first move

Agreeableness: I tend to be lenient in judging other people

Conscientiousness: People often call me a perfectionist
Openness: I like people who have unconventional views

Question 24

What are advantages of self-report instruments?

Answer 24

cost and time-effective
- online tools (i.e. Qualtrics now exist)

Question 25

What are disadvantages of self-report instruments?

Answer 25

You rely on the information people are
* willing to give (beware of impression management)
* might lie on these scales
* able to give (beware of self-deception -> might believe they act in a certain way when they actually don’t, causing the result to be invalid)

Question 26

Oosterhoff and Todorov (2008) got participants to freely describe 66 faces, and then looked at which trait descriptions were most frequent (lexical hypothesis). What were these top 10 adjectives used for rating faces?

Answer 26

Attractive, Unhappy, Sociable, Emotionally Stable, Mean, Boring, Aggressive, Weird, Intelligent, Confident

Question 27

Oosterhoff & Todorov (2008 looked at the Two factor model of traits from faces. They conducted factor analysis to see what people would assume if they clustered adjectives together. They came up with two factors that influence behaviour. What are these?

Answer 27

1. Trustworthiness (Do they want to help or hurt me?)
2. Dominance (Can they help or hurt me?)
   ^ decisions we have to make in order to determine our safety (if we don’t feel safe, we’ll change our behaviour to try and alter that)

Question 28

Sutherland et al. (2013) updated this into the Three Factor Model of Traits From Faces. What were these 3 factors?

Answer 28

1. Trustworthiness/approachability
2. Dominance
   3, Youthful-attractiveness

Question 29

What are the advantages and disadvantages of judging personality?

Answer 29

• Judging stranger’s personality may not be accurate
• Judging others’ personality doesn’t always match their own self-rated perceptions
• Face perception models may be more useful in everyday life to explain own behaviours (explain why we behave in a certain way everyday- i.e. why we cross the street when we see someone we feel unsafe near/threatened by)

Question 30

What is the definition of a culture?

Answer 30

‘a set of shared meanings which provide a common frame of reference for a human group to make sense of reality, coordinate their activities in collective living and adapt to the external environment’ (Chiu & Hong, 2006)

Question 31

How do collectivistic cultures often perceive personality?

Answer 31

malleable

Question 32

How do individualistic cultures often perceive personality?

Answer 32

fixed

Question 33

What are two issues with personality research?

Answer 33

Etic and Emic Approach

Question 34

What is the Etic approach?

Answer 34

compare ‘universal’ personality constructs across cultures.

• Much of westernised personality research takes this approach (i.e. five universal traits that can describe someone’s personality- but this has been westernised massively - building a theory/personality model based on one particular culture and applying it to everyone’s culture while assuming its going to work in the same way for everyone)

Question 35

What is the Epic Approach?

Answer 35

examines personality constructs specific to culture – ‘bottom-up’ approach (more of a qualitative approach to see what happens in culture/what is valued in a specific culture - which can lead to very different findings)

Question 36

Where are personality assessments often developed and what’s the issue with this?

Answer 36

Using developed using westernised samples
* adapting items / scales for different cultures can be difficult because we need to consider other aspects that aren’t just simply translating it

Question 37

What are some issues with using personality questionnaires cross culturally?

Answer 37

• translation issues
• response bias has been found to be stronger in some cultures than others [i.e. asian samples go often to the mid-point - moderating their responses to what they believe is the norm behaviour of the group]
• social desirability affects interpretation of items in scales
• assume a level of literacy and / or technology competency (likert scales) [some cultures may not be conceptualised and therefore you may not get any data that is useful because it didn’t may sense to the respondent in the first place)

Question 38

How can these issues with personality traits be addressed? There are several checks we can do to ensure different versions of the test are measuring personality consistently. What are these?

Answer 38

• Linguistic equivalence
• Construct equivalence
• Psychometric equivalence
• Psychological or cultural equivalence

Question 39

What are Linguistic Equivalence?

Answer 39

making sure the literature meaning of the item is not lost when you translate it into the second culture -> ensuring the literal meaning of the item is conveyed similarly across cultures

Question 40

How can you ensure linguistic equivalence?

Answer 40

employing a billinguistic translator who will engage in back-translation process to make sure the meaning has not been lost
* Translators need to be familiar with the nuances of both languages - and be able to spot errors in back-translation

Question 41

Why may literature get lost?

Answer 41

Some language may lack the vocabulary to accurately reflect the language in original measure
* isiXhosa – no words for ‘morality’, ‘intentions’ ‘jittery’ (vocabulary in the NEO-PI-R) - will need to rewrite it so it makes sense in the other language

OR

MMPI-2 ‘I feel blue’ - meaning of emotional state reflected in this item could be lost in translation

Question 42

What is Construct Equivalence?

Answer 42

• ensuring the generalisability of the personality trait being examined is the same across cultures

Question 43

How can you ensure Construct Equivalence?

Answer 43

When running analyses to find constructs (or factors), if this equivalence has been met, you would expect the same items to cluster together and represent the same construct (in both cultures samples - if you don’t, you know there’s an issue going on there and the data you are using would be false)

Question 44

Why might the construct get lost?

Answer 44

the concept is not found within the culture

Cheung et al (2008) found no ‘Openness’ factor in Chinese culture
Social * Potency/Expansiveness factor found instead when developing the CPAI-2 (Chinese Personality Inventory) - other traits that replace it instead

Question 45

What is Psychometric Equivalence?

Answer 45

ensuring similar psychometric properties of a scale across cultures (e.g. reliability, item-scale correlation) –> ensuring is the same across sample
* Driven by individual items included in each factor (i.e. individual items measuring each of the traits
* Cheung et al (2003) found Chinese non-clinical sample scored significantly higher than American non-clinical sample, Chinese clinical sample scored even higher. Adjusting ‘norm’ to culture, addressed this issue
* We require Scalar equivalence to be able to measure personality consistently across cultures

Question 46

How can we ensure Psychometric Equivalence?

Answer 46

Culture-specific norms may need to be developed (to fit with westernised cultures – change needed to adjust the norm/itensity so they seem the same across the cultures)

Question 47

What is Scalar equivalence?

Answer 47

scores from a measure express same intensity of trait across cultures

Question 48

What is psychology equivalence?

Answer 48

• ensures individual items on a scale have similar meanings across cultures to represent real experiences
• Example item from MMPI : refers to superstition about walking on cracks in the pavement/sidewalk

Question 49

How to ensure Psychological Equivalence

Answer 49

When translated appropriately, evidence shows items can be used effectively across cultures (i.e. some things are relevant in other cultures like superstition)
* Culture nuisances across both cultures must be understood in order to establish psychological equivalence