personality Flashcards
What do personality scientists aim to understand?
The psychological processes and structures that contribute to the distinctive functioning of the individual
Definition of personality?
Psychological qualities that contribute to an individual enduring and distinctive patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving
What is the lexical hypothesis?
The first principle states that those personality characteristics that are most important in peoples lives will eventually become a part of their language.
The second states that more important personality characteristics are more likely to be encoded into language as a single word.
What is trait approach?
An individuals characteristic pattern of thought emotion and behaviour together with the psychological mechanisms - hidden or not - behind those patterns.
Key considerations of trait approach?
- Similarities and differences between individuals
- Classification or taxonomy of stable and observable patterns of behaviour
- What individual differences exist on these traits
- Universal framework available for comparison
- Casual determinants
Principles of trait approach?
- Implicit associations between the observable behaviour and internal disposition/s to act
- Traits are only predictive at the level of influencing psychological states that predispose certain actions
- A trait is inferred from a set of observable correlated state
What are the big five words?
openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism
What is situational approach?
Social learning theory highlights that behaviour is a result of observational learning and social reinforcement
5 person variables in situation approach?
competencies, encoding strategies, expectancies, subjective value, self-regulatory systems
What is interactional approach?
Situation and persona are determinants of behaviour
Practitioners need to understand the individuals psychological traits and dynamics of the situation to fully understand the individuals behaviour.
What to consider when measuring personality?
distinguish between an individuals style of behaving (trait) and the situations effect on behaviour.
