Personality Flashcards
What is personality?
A concept used to explain the consistency and distinctiveness of a person. Made up of personality traits.
What is consistency as it pertains to personality?
The stability in a person’s behaviour over time and across different situations.
What is distinctiveness as it pertains to personality?
The behavioural differences among people reacting to the same situation.
What is a personality trait?
A durable disposition to behave in a particular way in a variety of situations.
What are the supposedly 5 bipolar personality factors?
- Openness to experience
- Conscientiousness
- Extraversion
- Agreeableness
- Neuroticism
What superficial traits do high scorers in openness to experience have?
Curiosity, flexibility, vivid fantasy, imaginativeness, artistic sensitivity, and unconventional attitudes. Tolerant of ambiguity, don’t need closure. Fosters liberalism. Key determinant of political views.
What superficial traits do high scorers in conscientiousness have?
Diligent, disciplined, well-organized, punctual, dependable. Fosters diligence and dependability, easy to resist temptation.
Riley.
What superficial traits do high scorers in extraversion have?
Outgoing, sociable, upbeat, friendly, assertive, gregarious. Happier than other people. Positive outlook on life. Scoring high on this and conscientiousness makes for success.
What superficial traits do high scorers in agreeableness have?
It’s kind of vague. Trusting, cooperative, modest, straightforward. Easy to talk to.
What superficial traits do high scorers in neuroticism have?
Anxious, hostile, self-conscious, insecure, vulnerable. High scores correlate with psychological disorders.
What are some life aspects that high scores often correlate with?
Specific aspects of behaviour, implicit life outcomes, success in relationships, career success, feelings of subjective well being, health and morality rates, socioeconomic status.
What are the two broad categories for measuring personality?
Personal inventories and projective techniques.
What are some examples of personal inventories?
Self reports, Minnesota Multi-phasic Personality Inventory version 2 (MMPI2), the 16 personality factor questionnaire, the NEO personality inventory.
What are self reports?
A series of answers to a questionnaire that asks people to indicate the extent to which sets of statements or adjectives accurately describe their own behaviour or mental state.
What does the Minnesota Multi-phasic Personality Inventory involve?
It measures 10 traits using over 500 statements, high scores indicate possibility of psychological disorders.
What was the MMPI designed for?
Detecting mental disorders.
What is the difference between NEO and 16PF?
NEO uses 5 traits instead of 16.
What are the advantages to self-reports?
They provide an objective and precise estimate of a person’s personality, and they are well grounded on extensive comparative data and info obtained from respondents.
What are the disadvantages to self-reports?
They are only as accurate as the information respondents provide, they are susceptible to deliberate deception, social desirability bias, and response sets (giving up on the test).
What method is employed to get over the biases of self-reports?
Lie-scales, where one question is repeated in different ways in order to determine if they are lying.
What are projective tests?
Tests that ask participants to respond to vague, ambiguous stimuli in ways that may reveal the subject’s needs, feelings, and personality traits.
What is the Rorschach Test?
A series of 10 inkblots are given to respondents and they are asked to describe what they see.
What is the thematic apperception test?
A series of pictures of simple scenes are presented to individuals, who are then asked to tell stories about what is happening in the scenes, and what the characters are feeling.
What is the projective hypothesis?
The theory that ambiguous material can serve as a blank screen onto which people project their characteristic concerns, conflicts, and desires.
What are the advantages of projective tests?
They are not transparent to respondents, and the indirect approach may reveal especially sensitive information about the unconscious.
What are the disadvantages of projective tests?
It is also susceptible to some forms of deception. The scientific evidence is also not impressive, as it is plagued by inconsistent scoring and subjective interpretation.
What are the advantages of internet personality tests?
Easy to complete, low labour costs, data can flow right into interpretive software, you can get additional data that you can’t get from pen and paper tests (if they changed their answer).
What are some disadvantages of personality tests?
Cannot be used for hiring tests, security is an issue for tests with closely guarded questions.
What are the three main psychodynamic theories?
Freud’s psychoanalytic, Jung analytical psychology, and Adler’s individual psychology.
What are the three components of the unconscious according to Freud?
The id, the ego, and the superego.
What are the three levels of awareness according to Freud?
Unconscious, preconscious, and conscious.
At what age does the ego develop full control over the id?
Age 5.
What are defence mechanisms?
Largely unconscious reactions that protect a person from unpleasant emotions such as anxiety and guilt.
What does repression involve?
Keeping distressing thoughts and feelings buried in the unconscious.
What does projection involve?
Attributing one’s own thoughts, feelings, or motives to another person.
e.g., a woman who doesn’t like her boss thinks she does, but also thinks he boss doesn’t like her.
What does displacement involve?
Diverting emotions (usually anger) from it’s original target to a substitute target.
What does reaction-formation involve?
Behaving in a way that is directly opposite of how you feel.
What does regression involve?
A reversion to immature patterns of behaviour.
e.g., an adult throwing a temper tantrum when he doesn’t get his way.
What does rationalization involve?
Creating false but plausible excuses to justify a behaviour.
What does identification involve?
Bolstering self-esteem by forming an imaginary alliance with some person or group.
What does sublimation involve?
When someone channels unconscious, unacceptable impulses into socially accepted, even admired, behaviour.
What does Freud believe the foundation of an individual’s personality is?
The psychosexual stages and how we deal with fixations and urges.
What are the five psychosexual stages?
Oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital.