Personality Flashcards
What is temperament?
Temperament is the genetic component of personality.
What is personality?
Personality is thoughts, feelings and behaviours that make an individual unique.
Describe and evaluate the study by Thomas, Chess and Birch. -Temperament.
Aim: To discover whether ways of responding to the environment remain stable throughout life.
Method: They studies 133 children from infancy to adulthood. The children’s behaviour was observed and their parents interviewed. The parents were asked about the child’s routine and its reactions to change.
Results: They found that the children fell into three categories: ‘easy’, ‘difficult’ and ‘slow to warm up’.
Easy- happy, flexible.
Difficult- demanding, inflexible and cried a lot.
Slow to warm up- didn’t respond well but when comfortable usually happy.
Conclusion: These ways of responding to the environment stayed with the children as the developed. They therefore concluded that temperament is innate.
Evaluation:
Socially desirable answers
Participant variables
Longitudinal
What are monozygotic twins?
What are dizygotic twins?
Monozygotic twins are identical and they came from the same egg that spilt in two.
Dizygotic twins are unidentical twins who came from two separate eggs.
Describe and evaluate Buss and Plomin’s study into temperament.
Aim: To test the idea that temperament is innate.
Method: They studied 228 pairs of monozygotic twins and 172 pairs of dizygotic twins. They rated the temperament of the twins when they were five years old. They looked at three dimensions of behaviour.
- emotionality- how strong the child’s emotional response was.
- activity- how energetic the child was.
- sociability- how much the child wanted to be with other people.
Results: There were closer correlation between the scores of the monozygotic twins than between the dizygotic twins.
Conclusion: Temperament has a genetic basis.
Evaluation:
Not representative of whole population.
Monozygotic twins are treated in similar ways therefore the correlation between the score could be down to their environment and not their genes.
Describe and evaluate Kagan and Snidman’s study into Temperament.
Aim: To investigate whether temperament is down to biological differences.
Method: Kagan and Snidman studies the reactions of fourth month old babies to new situations. For the first minute the baby was places in a a seat with the caregiver nearby. For the next three minutes the caregiver moved out of the baby’s view while the baby was shown different toys.
Results: 20% showed distress and 40% showed little emotion and the rest were in between.
Conclusion: These two temperaments are due to inherited differences in the way the brain responds.
Evaluation:
Used a large sample, easier to generalise.
The baby’s may have acted differently because of the new environment.
Recorded their actions wrong?
Describe and evaluate Eysenk’s study into personality.
Aim: To investigate the personality of 700 service men.
Method: Each soldier completed a questionnaire. Eysenk analysed the results using a statistical technique know as factor analysis.
Results: he identified two dimensions of personality: extroversion-introversion and neuroticism-stability.
Conclusion: Everyone can be placed along these two dimensions of personality. Most people lie in the middle of the scale.
Evaluation: we can only apply the realist to the service men in 1947.
He only describes a limited number of personality types.
The answers people gave could have been based on their mood.
Name characteristics of APD
Lacking remorse
Being deceitful, lying, conning others
Being careless about safety of themselves and others.
Deceive and evaluate Raine et al.
Aim: To support the theory of abnormalities in the prefrontal cortex cause APD.
Method: A group of healthy men had a MRI scan and a group of men with APD had a MRI scan.
Results: The men with APD had an 11% reduction of grey matter in the prefrontal cortex than those who were healthy.
Conclusion: APD is caused by a reduction in the brains grey matter.
Evaluation: They only dos the study with men, cannot be representative to women.
People with APD usually don’t care about others, the people volunteered to take part.
The cause of APD may be more complex than the study suggests.
Describe and evaluate Farrington’s study.
Aim: To investigate the development of offending and antisocial behaviour in males studied from childhood to 50.
Method: The researchers carried out a longitudinal study to the development of anti social and offending behaviour in 411 males. They all loved in deprived, inner city area of London. They studied them from the age of 8 until 50. Their parents and teachers were interviewed. They found out whether any of their family had committed a crime.
Results: 41% of the males were convicted of a least one offence between the ages of 10-50.
Conclusion: Situational factors lead to development of antisocial behaviour.
Evaluation:
Longitudinal
Only males
Inner city of London
