Personality Flashcards
Personality today is thought of as a psychological construct
What does this mean?
Psychological constructs are hypothesised not observed but the resulting behaviour must the measurable and stable over time . Personality is thought of as a mental concept that influences behaviour via the mind body interaction.
What are the three essential steps for Cronbach and Meehl (1955) in establishing a valid psychological construct?
- Devise a construct and then describe behaviours that make it up and how they are related.
- Find a way to measure the characteristics
3 Test the relationships for correlations
What is the aim of personality theory?
1 To explain the motivational basis of behaviour
2 define basic nature
3 give categorisations of how individuals behave
How did Freud view human nature
Innately self destructive and aggressive
How did Carl Rogers view human nature
Benign! Driven by positive motives towards growth and self acceptance.
Is Freud’s psychoanalytical theory scientific
He believed it was although his own transference and counter transference theories mean that the emotional detachment requisite for scientific experiments is absent
Allport 1961 Definition of personality
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A dynamic organisation Inside the person
Of psychophysical systems
That create the person’s Characteristic patterns of behaviour
Thoughts and feelings
What are Lee Cronbach and Paul Meehl famous for?
Measured psychological concepts. 1955 paper about validating psychological constructs in personality tests ie how reliably can we predict behaviour
What are the three steps to validate psychological construct according the Cronbach and Meehl (1955)
- Describe characteristics of the PsyCon and how they are related to each other and the PsyCon
- Develop ways of measuring the characteristics of the PsyCon
- Find correlations between the characteristics exhibited in individuals
What are ‘developmental’ theories?
How do people become who they are? Developmental theories look at things like when personality become fixed. Can it be changed? Developing these theories helps to find ways of changing behaviour.
Heritability v environment
Heritability is a statistic used in breeding and genetics works that estimates how much variation in a phenotypic trait in a population is due to genetic variation among individuals in that population. So it looks at how far genetics cause differences within a trait. The concept of heritability applies only to traits that differ between individuals. If a trait exists in precisely the same form across all individuals, it may be inherited, but it cannot be heritable.”[3]
Why do we study personality, what are the aims?
- To explain why people do what they do = motivation
- Basic nature?
- Categorise and describe behaviour
- Measure personality
- Understand how personality develops
- Develop interventions to change behaviour
- Assess effects of heredity v environment
What is the derivation of the word personality?
From the Latin persona meaning mask
He did a meta study on definitions and found 50. He thought we needed consensus on the definition which would describe individual differences without judging that uniqueness (
What’s the difference between idiographic and nomothetic approaches to studying personality?
Idiographic = Greek idios = private or personal
So you study one person
Nomothetic comes fro the Greek = law
So you look at a particular variable in large groups and produce averages or norms and use personality questionnaires
Who said in 2000 that there is a finite number of personality variables with an underlying common structure and uniqueness is derived from the mix?
Charles Carver and Michael Scheier
