PYSU3332- personality Flashcards
What is personality?
The way an individual behaves towards us and towards other people.
A characteristic way of feeling, thinking, perceiving and acting.
What are the 2 major theoretical approaches to personality theory?
- General process theories: focus on the general process by which personality develops
- Structural / descriptive theories: emphasize individual differences
General Process Theories: Outline
Focus on the general process in which personality develops:
- Freud: 5 psychosexual phases of development
- Bandura: development of personality through interactions with others (social rewards, and imitation)
- Maslow: develops through 5 levels of needs
Structural/descriptive theories: outline
Emphasize individual differences - i.e. trait theories (measurement plays a large role)
- Cattell: adequately describe individual difference by looking at how people vary on 16 primary factors
- Eysenck: people’s position on 2 orthogonal constructs (introversion-extraversion, unstable-stable)
- Guildford: developed factor analysis
- 5 Factor Model: differences on 5 factors of personality (openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism)
What is a trait?
A predisposition to respond to situations in a consistent way - not directly observable from behaviour, but can be used to predict behaviour.
Traits are descriptive, not explanatory - and they are not necessarily stable over long periods of time.
- i.e. found that there is higher stability in extraversion, neuroticism and conscientiousness
What a nomothetic view?
Trait theories assume there is a set of dimensions of personality on which all people can be placed (i.e. the big 5).
- Responses from individausl are understood in context of responses from a large group of people.
- The uniqueness of individuals is captured by scores on a set of traits - a profile.
What is an idiographic view?
A standard set of traits cannot describe the richness of an individual’s personality.
- an individual’s behaviour may not be organized according to a particular trait
- a single set of traits cannot be relevant to all individuals
- a different set of traits may be required to describe each person
What are the standard ways to measure personality?
- Self-report
- Observation
What are self-report inventories?
A set of items are selected and marked by the individuals so as to be descriptive of the self.
Include items about the individual’s thoughts, feelings, attitudes and/or behaviours.
They possess psychometric properties:
- measure (assign a number)
- standardized norms
- reliability and validity of test score is assessed
What are the types of SRI response formats?
- Absolute: each item judged independently (either on a dichotomous or likert scale)
- Comparative / forced choice (choose the more relevant item)
What are the advantages of SRIs?
- easy to construct and to establish norms
- can be administered to groups and individuals
- requires little training for administration and scoring
- time and cost effective
- can be used in variety of applied settings
What are the disadvantages of SRIs?
Self-report assumes that the respondent:
- can be accurate (self-deception)
- will be accurate (fake good / bad) –> the context that these texts are given may influence them to respond in a socially desirable manner
Outline response tendencies
Response tendency: is the way in which a test-taker answers items on the test, regardless of the content of the items.
- Acquiescence: agreeing with the item regardless of what they truly believe (so therefore we need to include items that are both positive and negative for the same trait)
- Non-acquiescence: disagreeing with the item regardless of what they truly believe
- Socially desirable responding: tendency to see oneself in a favourable light –> impression management or self-deception –> we can use forced choice items to minimize this
- Overcautious approach: choosing middle options on response scales
- Extremes in responding: endorsing items in an unusual or uncommon way
What is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory?
MMPI: by Hathaway and McKinley (1943)
- designed to aid psychiatric diagnosis (DSM had not been invented yet)
- developed using an empirical method
- was administered using 2 groups - psychiatric patients with a particular diagnosis and patients without that diagnosis –> and kept the items that discriminated between the two groups
How did the MMPI-2 and MMPI2-Restructured form differ?
MMPI-2
- revision: because we had the DSM at this point, the MMPI2 was reframed as a measure of major patterns of personality
MMPI-2-Restructured
- developed restructured clinical scales
