Personality Flashcards
What is personality defined as?
Personality is the unique way in which each individual thinks, acts and feels throughout life.
What is character defined as?
Character refers to value judgments made about a person’s morals or ethical behaviour.
What is temperament defined as?
Temperament refers to the biologically innate and enduring characteristics with which each person is born, such as irritability or adaptability.
What is personality comprised of?
Both character and temperament are vital parts of personality, however they do not fully define personality.
Each adult personality is a combination of temperaments and personal history of social networks, family, culture, environment and the time during which they grew up.
What are the two main approaches to studying personality?
The dispositional approach (descriptive) and the process approach (explanatory).
What is the dispositional approach of studying personality?
Focuses on describing relatively stable personality characteristics by focusing on temperaments, traits and types, which are then used to predict behaviour and to detect similarities or differences.
It is merely descriptive and does not explain why an individual has such personality characteristics.
What is the process approach of studying personality?
It explains how personality develops and changes in terms of internal mental processes (e.g. motivation, emotions, perceptions), development, and social interactions.
Stems from 3 major perspectives: psychodynamic, behavioural and socio-cognitive, and humanistic.
How can temperaments change or vary?
Temperaments can vary based on differences in brain functions, structures and balance of neurotransmitters. They can also change over-time due to self-regulation and regulation of reactivity.
Is shyness an example of a temperamental change?
Yes, it is due to self-regulation which may be caused by negative experiences in social interaction.
What are traits in personality?
Traits are a consistent, enduring way of thinking, feeling, or behaving.
What are trait theories?
They are used to describe the key characteristics that make up human behaviour in an effort to predict future behaviour.
What is Gordon Allport’s multidimensional trait theory?
Allport believed that about 200 traits were wired into the nervous system to guide one’s behaviour and each person’s collection of traits was unique.
What is a personality inventory?
A personality inventory is a questionnaire that has a standard list of questions that only requires certain specific answers, such as “yes”, “no,” and “can’t decide.”
One issue that personality inventories face is that it is a form of self-report, what issue can be seen from this?
As they are still a form of self-report which may lead to the responses being distorted truths or lies, due to the social desirability bias.
Why are personality inventories more objective and reliable than projective tests?
The standard nature of the questions and the lack of open-ended answers make these assessments far more objective and reliable than projective tests.
What is a personality projective test?
Projective tests are personality assessments that present ambiguous visual stimuli to the client, the client then responds with their interpretation of the visual stimuli.
How did Raymond Cattell categorise personality traits?
Surface traits (Personality characteristics easily seen by other people)
Source traits (Basic traits that underlie surface traits, forming the core of one’s personality)
What is Raymond Cattell’s 16 personality factor theory?
Cattell used factor analysis (a technique to look for grouping and commonalities in numerical data) to identify 16 source traits (or trait dimensions) amongst 100s of individuals. Cattell then developed the bipolar scale where opposing traits were placed at each end of the scale.
What is the Five-Factor Model or the Big-Five personality inventory?
The Big Five personality traits are a set of five broad personality dimensions that are used to study personality.
What are the five personality dimensions in the Big Five personality inventory?
Openness (Imagination, feelings, actions, ideas)
Conscientiousness (Competence, self-discipline, thoughtfulness, goal-driven
Extraversion (Sociability, assertiveness, emotional expression)
Agreeableness (Cooperative, trustworthy, good-natured, teamwork-driven)
Neuroticism (Emotional instability)
Can one personality dimension of the Big Five model predict another?
No, they are interdependent.
What is the MMPI-2?
The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory is designed to detect abnormal behaviour or abnormal thinking patterns in personality.
It is typically used in clinical settings for psychological disorders or for psychological resilience for vocational guidance or job screening.
How does the MMPI-2 measure tendencies towards psychological disorders?
It uses a true/false questionnaire to measure 10 clinical traits.
What is MBTI?
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a personality inventory which simplifies human personalities into 16 distinct types.
These types resemble traits, however they exist as distinct categories and not as continuous dimensions. This means that an individual would align to characteristics of one type and not the other.
What is the Barnum-Forer effect?
A common psychological phenomenon whereby individuals give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically to them, yet which are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people.
How does the Barnum effect apply to the MBTI personality inventory?
The MBTI’s description of the personality types are rather vague and may apply to a wide range of individuals.
What are behavioural genetics?
Behavioural genetics is a field of study devoted to discovering the genetic bases for personality characteristics.
What is heritability?
Heritability is how much some trait within a population can be attributed to genetic influences.
What have twin studies determined with regards to personality factors?
Monozygotic twins (twins that share 100% of genetic material) were more similar in intelligence, leadership, empathy and assertiveness.
There were also studies that showed the big-five personality factors of monozygotic twins were believed to be about 25% to 50% inherited.
What are the limitations of the dispositional approach for studying personality?
It portrays personality as fixed and static rather than a dynamic process that can undergo changes with developmental change, it oversimplifies describing personality with a limited number of dimensions.
It also only describes behaviour, however does not fully explain the full range of temperaments and personality traits.
How can self-fulfilling prophecy apply to the dispositional approach in studying personality?
When an individual is given a label, others and themselves might hold expectations based on their label, making it difficult to change behaviours or thinking
What are the strengths of the dispositional approach for studying personality?
Evidence from studies of temperament and heritability of personality traits that support the validity of considering dispositions.
It can explain individual differences given similar environments and also has the ability to predict behaviour in common situations (e.g. in jobs).
What are the 4 main perspectives of personality?
Psychodynamic, behavioural, humanistic and trait.
What are the main tenets of the psychodynamic perspective of personality?
People change over time
Past experiences shape who we are
We are not always aware of why we do the things we do
What is the psychodynamic perspective of personality?
Focuses on the role of the unconscious mind in the development of personality, development of abnormal behaviour and psychological disorders.
What is the behavioural perspective of personality?
It is based on theories of learning (operant & classical conditioning) and focuses on the effect of the environment on behaviour, and includes aspects of social cognitive theory.
It also studies how interactions with others and personal thought processes influence learning and personality.
What is the humanistic perspective of personality?
It focuses on the role of each person’s unique conscious life experiences and choices, and how they influence personality.
What is the trait perspective of personality?
Concerned with the characteristics themselves, much like the dispositional approach.
How did Sigmund Freud’s history shape his perspective?
As Freud was born and raised in Europe during the Victorian Age, there was a period of sexual repression. Freud’s focus with sexual explanations for abnormal behaviour seems more understandable in light of his cultural background and that of his patients.
Sigmund Freud believe that the mind was divided into three parts, what were these 3 parts called?
The unconscious, preconscious and the unconscious.
What is the unconscious stage according to Sigmund Freud?
Information not easily or voluntarily brought into consciousness, it was thought to be a part of the mind that remains hidden at all times. For example, manifest content in dreams.
What is the preconscious stage according to Sigmund Freud?
Information is available but not brought to conscious awareness yet, the information was believe to be just beneath the surface of awareness.
What is the conscious stage according to Sigmund Freud?
Information that is easily available and in one’s immediate awareness, it also has interactions with the outside world.
Sigmund Freud believed that personalities were divided into three parts, what are the names of these three parts?
Id, superego and ego.
What is the id of the personality according to Sigmund Freud?
It is the first and most primitive part of personality, it exists in the unconscious awareness and is the pleasure-seeking, amoral part of personality existing at birth.
It contains basic biological drives such as hunger, thirst, self-preservation and sex.
What is the pleasure principle?
It is the principle by which the id functions; the desire for immediate satisfaction of needs without regard for consequences.
What is the superego of the personality according to Sigmund Freud?
It exists in all stages of consciousness and acts as a moral core or conscience, differentiating between right and wrong. It also produces guilt, or moral anxiety, depending on how acceptable behaviour is.
What is the ego of the personality according to Sigmund Freud?
Essentially the executive director between the id and the superego, it engages with reality and is rational and logical under the reality principle.
It attempts to satisfy the demands of the id in ways that does not lead to negative consequences taking consideration of the restrictions put by the superego.
According to Sigmund Freud, what happens when the id and superego is conflicted?
Anxiety is created when the id or superego is conflicted and when it gets out of hand, psychological disorders may develop.
What are psychological defence mechanisms?
Psychological defence mechanisms are ways of dealing with anxiety through unconsciously distorting one’s perceptions of reality.
