Personality Traits Flashcards
What does diagnosing people as personality “types” encourage?
Dichotomous and polarized thinking, where individuals are categorized as either being or not being a type.
What was Carl Jung’s concept of personality types?
Introverted types focus on internal knowledge (the self), while extraverted types focus on external knowledge (the world).
What are Jung’s four functions of personality?
Sensing (perception), Thinking (logic), Intuiting (unconscious insights), and Feeling (evaluation/judgment).
How did Myers and Briggs expand on Jung’s ideas?
They added Judging vs. Perceiving and mixed in Introversion vs. Extraversion to create the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).
What are some criticisms of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)?
It lacks reliability, validity, comprehensiveness, and independence among traits.
What is a major reliability issue with the MBTI?
Test-retest reliability is poor, meaning individuals often get different results over time.
How do traits differ from types in personality theory?
Traits are dimensions of personality on which individuals vary, rather than fixed categories.
What does the Lexical Hypothesis propose?
Important aspects of personality are reflected in language.
What are Allport’s three types of traits?
Cardinal traits (defining traits, rare), Central traits (key traits in most individuals), and Secondary traits (situation-specific traits).
What defines trait stability?
Traits are personal, stable over time, consistent across similar situations, and potentially universal.
What is factor analysis (FA) used for in personality psychology?
To identify patterns among personality descriptors and reduce data into key indicators of traits.
What is a potential issue with factor analysis findings?
Results may be unsurprising or biased if input data is constrained to favor specific outcomes.
What are Raymond Cattell’s 16 Personality Factors (16PF)?
A trait model based on factor analysis of representative items, identifying 16 distinct dimensions of personality.
What are Hans Eysenck’s “Big Two” traits?
Introversion-Extraversion and Emotional Stability (later expanded to include Psychoticism in the PEN model).
What are the five traits in Costa and McCrae’s Five-Factor Model (FFM)?
Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.
What is HEXACO, and how does it expand on the Big Five?
A model adding a sixth trait, Honesty-Humility, to the Big Five traits.
What is the comprehensiveness claim of the FFM?
It relates most personality traits to one or more of the five factors but doesn’t claim to measure every individual difference exhaustively.
What is meant by “rank-order stability”?
The relative standing of an individual’s trait scores compared to peers remains stable over time.
What factors can influence individual personality change?
Context effects, life-changing events, trauma, and conditions like dissociative identity disorder.
How do life stages typically affect personality traits on average?
People tend to increase in traits like conscientiousness and decrease in neuroticism with age.
How does the DSM-V approach personality disorders?
With a hybrid dimensional-categorical model, diagnosing disorders based on specific traits and broad dimensions.
What are some traits included in DSM-V personality psychopathology?
Negative affectivity, detachment, antagonism, disinhibition vs. compulsivity, and psychoticism.
