Personality Flashcards
Definition of personality
Set of behavioural, emotional and cognitive tendencies that people display over time and across situations, and that distinguish us from one another
This depends on states, traits and situations
What is the “trait theory”?
There is a manageable set of underlying personality dimensions.
How can we measure personality?
Through
- Observation
- Interview
- Inventory/Questionnaire (factor analysis and big 5 personality dimensions)
What’s factor analysis?
Analyzes patterns of correlation to extract factors that underlie the correlations. Results in a big five personality inventory.
List the big 5 labels
(OCEAN) Openness Conscientiousness Extraversion Agreeableness Neuroticism
When is neuroticism high? Give examples
More attention towards threats in environment
More stress when negative surprises
Higher divorce rate
More susceptible to depression and anxiety
High extraversion. Give examples
Attends parties, more popular.
Identified as leader
Lives and works with more people
Less disturbed by sudden loud noises or intense stimuli
Examples of high agreeableness
More willing to lend money
Higher school grades
Fewer arrests as an adult
Examples of high openness
More likely to major in humanities
Change careers midlife
Perform better in job training programs
Play a musical instrument
Examples of high conscientiousness
More sexually faithful to spouses
Higher job ratings
Smoke/drink less, drive more safely, less alzheimer’s risk
Play musical instrument
What did twin studies show in the big five questionnaire?
For each big Five trait, the correlations for monozygotic twins were higher than for dizygotic twins. For monozygotic twins, it does not matter whether they are raised in the same/different families.
Name 3 ways to measure personality
- Twin studies (nature/ nurture)
Projective tests: - Rohrschach inkblots
- Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)- story about pic
What are some problems with projective tests?
Too often misclassify normal people as pathological
Not culturally fair/normed
Inter-rater reliability
Who’s Sigmund Freud?
- 1856-1939
- Viennese Neurologist
- Private practice to treat “nervous disorders”
- main determinants of personaliry: Biological drives and childhood experiences
Give 4 important lessons of Freud on this topic
- Psychodynamic approach (understanding psychological forces that drive behaviour)
- Personality tests
- Most influential theory on personality
- Iceberg
Describe the 3 levels of awareness proposed by Freud
- Conscious: Actual awareness
- Preconscious: Easy to retrieve knowledge
- Unconscious: difficult to retrieve feeling and memories
Describe our personality structure according to Freud
- Id (Raw biological urges, pleasure principle)
- Ego (Decision maker, reality principle/pragmatism)
- Superego (Moral component, ego ideal)
Personality dynamics and conflicts
Id and Superego interfere and lead to a conflict, causing neurotic anxiety and defensive behaviour
What’s defensive behaviour?
Satisfy the id to fool the superego. Examples:
- Dreams
- Freudian slips
- Humor
- Defense mechanism
Name 7 Defense mechanisms
- Denial
- Repression (frightening memories, blocks or distorts memory)
- Projection (i desire you becomes you desire me, angry at others because angry at yourself)
- Reaction formation (doing exact opposite of what urges tell you)
- Displacement (boss yells at you, you can’t do the same cause he is older so you yell at your son, who is younger)
- Rationalisation (of stupid actions)
- Intellectualisation and isolation of affect (somebody dies you think of why this could be a good thing/distance yourself emotionally)
Freud and psychotherapy
Resolves internal conflicts by bringing them to the surface.
Psychodynamic vs social-cognitive theories
Psychodynamic: Instinctive, unconscious motives
Social-cognitive: General beliefs about the world. Learned from social environment, both conscious and unconscious. Predicting human behaviour, not global life choices.
Describe Julian Rotter’s theory of “Belief viewed as personality traits”
Belief or luck affects behaviour and performance. (Work harder and improve vs did not work much and no improvement)
It is often unclear how much control we have in life (eg studying = good grade, or eating healthy and exercising = no heart attack)
Locus of control (internal vs external)
Give 3 examples of locus of control
- There is rarely ever an “unfair test” for a well prepared student, OR many times exam questions are unrelated to course work, so that studying is really useless.
- Success is a matter of hard work, luck has nothing to do with it. OR Getting a job depends mainly on being in the right place at the right time.
- I am almost certain that I can make plans work OR it is not always wise to plan too far ahead because many things turn out to be a matter of luck.
