Personality and individual differences Flashcards
What did ancient Hippocrates and Galen believe about personality?
That the physical humours or fluids within the body were linked with personality traits
Yellow bile - quick tempered, volatile, aggressive
Blood - enthusiastic, optimistic, social, cheerful
Phlegm - calm, relaxed, slow paced
Black bile - gloomy, pessimistic, sad
Who developed phrenology?
Franz Joseph Gall
What is phrenology?
A pseudoscience that aimed to predict people’s personality by the size, shape and bumps on their skull.
What are the principles of phrenology?
- The brain is divided into 27 independent organs
- Each organ controls an aspect of your personality - pride, vanity, murderous instincts, friendly
- The size of the organ corresponds to the strength of the trait
- The size of the organ is determined by the bumps on the skull
What is personality?
Comes from the latin persona
Involves both internal traits and external expressional style
emotions
behaviours
cognitions
motivations
social tendencies
How do we define personality?
No single definition is acceptable
- Those characteristics of the person that account for consistent patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving - The set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are organised and relatively enduring that influence his or her interactions with, and adaptations to the physical and social environment
Personality is the enduring set or traits and styles that he or she exhibits
What is the psychodynamic theory of personality?
Personality is influenced by our unconscious mind and our childhood experiences
ID - responsible for needs and urges
Superego - ideals and morals
Ego
What is the humanist theory of personality?
Humanists emphasise the importance of free will and he role of each person’s conscious life experiences in personality development
Belief that people are inherently good and people are motivated to pursue things that will help them reach their full potential
What is the behaviourist or social cognition theory of personality?
Our personality is influenced by the associations, rewards and punishments
Social cognition - views personality through the lens of socil interactions and learning. Consider that the environment has a strong influence on our personality and that personality is learnt
What is the trait theory of personality?
Allport and Cattle
This theory does not describe how personality may have developed
Trait theories describe the different facets of personality
What is a trait?
A relatively stable personality characteristic that causes individuals to behave in certain ways
Traits assume characteristics are…
1) Relatively stable overtime, relatively stable across situations
Are traits continuous or categorical
Continuous. You can have more or less of a trait by demonstrating that behaviour more frequently
What is Eysenck’s big three?
Extroversion - introversion
Neuroticism - emotional stability
Psychoticism - ego control - added later
What is Eysenck’s theory of personality?
Argued that personality is linked with physiological substrates in the nervous system and that differences in personality are a result of differing levels of nervous system arousal
Neuroticism
Autonomic arousal (regulates involuntary bodily function)
Extraversion
Cortical arousal ( response for higher order cognitive processes)
What is the Lemon test?
Looks at Reticular activating system
This responds to stimuli like food or social contact - controls how much saliva you produce
What is the baseline activity of the RAS in introverts?
High, only need a small stimulus to produce a large response as introverts are more cortically aroused or stimulated than extraverts.
What is the baseline activity of the RAS in extraverts?
Low, need a much larger stimuli to produce a response
What is the big five?
Personality can be reduced to five core factors, acronym OCEAN
What does each trait on OCEAN represent>
A continuum. Individuals are ranked on a scale between the two extreme ends of five broad dimensions.
What does OCEAN stand for?
Openness - willingness to try new things
Conscientiousness - to regulate their impulse control to engage in goal directed behavours
Extroversion - the tendency and intensity in which someone seeks interaction with their environment
Agreeableness - how people tend to treat relationships with others
Neuroticism - the overall emotional stability of an individual
Criticism of the big five
Doesn’t provide a theory, just describes personality
Doesn’t give specific traits
Demonstrates good cross cultural validity
What did Mischel find?
That only 9% of our behaviour can be explained by our personality so the rest must be the situation
What did Bowers find about personality?
13% of variance in behaviour is explained by persnoality. 10% by situational and 20% is based on interaction between the two
How can we measure personality?
The Barnum effect
What is the Barnum Effect?
A cognitive bias that occurs when individuals believe that generic personality descriptions and statements apply to themselves. Diagnostic - interest blank test. Also known as the Forer effect
Projective tests
Based on the idea that if you give people an ambiguous stimulus and ask them to describe it, their answer will tell you something
The Rorschach test -
People’s descriptions of what they see in inkblots eludes to their personality
Thematic Apperception Test
Involves showing people a series of picture cards depicting a variety of ambiguous characters, scenes and situations. Then asked to tell a story for each picture presented.
What so most personality questionnaires use?
Likert statements
What are informant report questionnaires?
Completed by the people who know the target well, Rate their agreement or disagreement
What are behavioural measures
A person’s personality can be measured by observing their behaviour or the traces of their behaviour
