personality psychology book Flashcards
personality definition in psy
psychological differences between people, differences having to do with thought, emotion, motivation, and behaviour.
ways in which people differ from one another in their typical ways of behaving, thinking, and feeling. These differences often reflect core features of who we are as persons, and are central to our self-concepts.
This understanding of personality often excludes individual differences in intelligence and cognitive ability, although these are also of interest to many personality psychologists.
Temperament definition
aspects of psycholog- ical individuality that are present at birth or at least early in child development, are related to emotional expression, and are presumed to have a biological basis.
Character definition
refers to those personal attributes that are relevant to moral conduct, self-mastery, will-power, and integrity.
how is personality psychology unique`
psychology, the study of personality is distinctive for its focus on human individuality and its concern for the person as a functioning whole. It differs from social psychology, a neighbouring subdiscipline, by emphasizing the contribution that the person’s internal dispositions make to behaviour, rather than the contribution of the person’s external situation or context.
personality trait definition
A major unit for the description of personality is the ‘personality trait’ , an enduring disposition (or tendency) to think, feel, or behave in a particular, patterned way. Traits vary in breadth, some relating to very specific or narrow types of behaviour and others to wide ranges of behaviour, and broader traits may incorporate more specific traits.
Personality psychologists have made efforts to classify the structure of traits for more than 70 years, starting from the thousands of trait words available in everyday language and distilling these, using correlations and factor analysis, into a smaller number of broad trait dimensions.
Correlation definition
how closely related two trait is to each other. their degree of similarity can be help for prediction and prediction accuracy
0.1=55%, 0.3=65%, 0.5= 75%
factor analysis.
factor analysis is a method for finding patterns within a group of correlations
specific traits
Although broad factors play an important role in personality description, many more specific traits have also been the focus of personality research and theory. These specific traits may be more effective in predicting behaviour than broader traits.
Variety in trait psychology
Although the psychology of traits has made major contributions to the study of personality, it has also come under criticism on a variety of fronts. For example, some psychologists have argued that behaviour is not very consistent across different contexts, and that it is therefore determined primarily by the situation in which it occurs rather than by enduring traits. However, traits can predict behaviour well when the behaviour is assessed as aggregate patterns rather than single actions.
Other psychologists have argued that trait dimensions are not culturally universal, and that explaining behaviour with reference to personality is characteristically Western. Research tends to support the view that broad factors are reasonably universal, with a few exceptions. However, there is also evidence of cross-cultural variation in the structure of traits.
personality ‘types’
- Trait psychologists usually assume that individual differences in personality fall along continuous dimensions: they are matters of degree, like height. Although some psychologists have proposed categorical personality ‘types’ , most personality variation is dimensional. •
- It has been controversial whether traits explain behaviour rather than merely describing or summarizing behaviour patterns. However, personality traits can play a role in explaining behaviour in the same, non-circular way that other inferred variables do.
Behavioural genetic research
Behavioural genetic research uses a variety of methods to study the contribution of genetic variation to personality. Family studies examine the extent to which people of different levels of genetic relatedness within families resemble one another, twin studies compare the resemblance of identical and fraternal twins, and adoption studies investigate the extent to which adopted children resemble their biological and adoptive parents.
Result of • Behavioural genetic research
This research consistently finds that the heritability of personality characteristics (i.e., the proportion of their variation that is explained by genes) is between .4 and .5. It also demonstrates that most of the non-genetic contributions to personality are due to ‘non-shared environment’ – influences that are distinctive to individuals rather than shared within families.
Molecular genetic research
attempts to identify the specific genes that influence variation on major personality traits. Although many such genes have now been identified, these typically account for far less variance than one might expect based on findings from behavioural genetics. This may suggest that genetic influences on personality comprise complex interactions between tens or even hundreds of genes. If so, detection of these effects will pose a formidable challenge for this field.
Eysenck’s General Arousal Theory
• Eysenck’s General Arousal Theory of personality suggested that Extraversion was based in the functioning of a reticulo-cortical loop (underlying cortical arousal), while Neuroticism was based in the functioning of a reticulo-limbic loop (underlying emotional arousal). Despite having a profound influence on personality neuroscience, Eysenck’s theory is no longer considered tenable.
Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory
Gray suggested that personality neuroscience should proceed from the ‘bottom up’ , by starting with the major brain systems that seem likely to influence personality. His Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory proposed that three systems, the BAS (reward sensitivity), the FFFS (threat sensitivity) and the BIS (conflict sensitivity), were likely to have an important influence on personality variation.
