Topic 2a - Narrow Personality Traits Flashcards
What is the Hierarchy of Personality Description? - Digman 1997 / Revelle
- General Personality Factor (Big One)
- Alpha factor (stability)
- Beta factor (plasticity)
What is the General Personality Factor (Big One)?
- Represents tendency to be emotional and extraverted
- Common variance across all big 5 traits
- Positive and social desirability aspects
- Extent someone is equipped to survive, grow, reproduce
What is the Alpha Factor and Beta Factor?
- Alpha represents stability : Agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism
- Beta represents plasticity : Extraversion and openness
What is the Bandwidth-Fidelity Dilemma? - Cronbach & Gleser, 1965
A trade off between breadth and accuracy of personality predictions
Broader, higher level descriptors (big 5) = predict more behaviours but with low accuracy
Narrower, lower level descriptors (facets) = predict fewer behaviours with high accuracy
Paunonem & Ashton, 2001 study (grades and personality) - lower level descriptors (facets). What did they do?
- 717 students completed big 5 scale
- Correlations between grades and pre selected big 5 traits and lower level facets
- Conscientiousness and Openness traits required to predict grades
- Facet level of conscientiousness = need for achievement
- Facets level of openness = need for understanding
What did the lower level descriptor study find? - grade predictor
- Facet level of conscientiousness (need for achievement) was a bigger predictor to final grade than the whole trait
- Facet level of openness (need for understanding) was a predictor to final grade but the trait openness as a whole was not a significant predictor
What are more Narrow Personality Traits?
- Authoritarianism
- Schizotypy
What is Authoritarianism?
- Preference for unambiguous and familiar routines - rigid and inflexible
- Strong views on crime and punishment
- Respect for institutions and authority
What did Bouchard et al. 2003 identical twins study show?
Identical twins reared apart showed similarity in their conservatism
What did Amodio et al. 2017 find about conservatism? - Go/no go task
It is associated with decreased neural responses to suppressing habitual response in Go/No go tasks
Neural activity indicates sensitivity to detect signals in changes of behaviour
Smaller response = high levels of conservatism (less sensitive to detecting signals that indicate change in behaviour) - made more errors on this task
What is the continuity hypothesis?
There is no discontinuity between normality and mental illness.
Rather than there being categorical differences between someone with mental health issues or not there is a CONTINUUM - Cooper, 2002
What is Schizotypy?
Personality disorder seen within the general pop. without MH problems - variations of Schizophrenic symptoms that reflect normal behaviours and personality traits - reflects genetic and biological vulnerability to psychosis
What are the 4 factors that measure Schizotypy? O-LIFE factor analysis
- Unusual Experiences - perceptual distortions, hallucinations E.G are your thoughts often so strong you can almost hear them?
- Cognitive Disorganisation - sense of purposelessness, anxiety and intrusive thoughts even when concentrating
- Introvertive Anhedonia - lack of enjoyment or pleasure from social interactions - dislike of intimacy, too independent
- Impulsive nonconformity - impulsive, urges, binging
What is included on the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire? - 9 features of this personality disorder - Raine, 1991
- Ideas of reference (do you feel like people are talking about you?
- Excessive social anxiety (uneasy talking to people)
- Odd beliefs / magical thinking (telepathy)
- Unusual perceptual experiences (seen or heard things)
- Odd or eccentric behaviour
- No close friends
- Odd speech (rambling)
- Constricted affect (lack of emotional expression)
- Suspiciousness
What is the validity of Schizotypy?
- No universal measure
- Conceptual validity - cognitive inhibition in schizophrenia also seen less in people with high schizotypy trait E.G negative priming
What is the modified Stroop task to measure cognitive inhibition? - Steel et al. 1996
3 conditions
- Baseline (naming the colour of the ink without a word)
- Stroop (naming the colour of the ink with a word)
- Priming (distracter word predicts the next ink colour)
What did the modified Stroop task to measure cognitive inhibition find? - Steel et al. 1996
In general pop - priming condition is harder to complete (word has been inhibited)
The difference between the stroop and priming condition = size of negative priming effect, bigger difference shows greater amount of cognitive inhibition
- People with Schizophrenia have less cognitive inhibition (smaller difference between stroop and priming)
- Low trait Schizotypy trait shows bigger difference between stroop and priming = more cognitive inhibition
- High trait Schizotypy trait shows less difference between stroop and priming = less cognitive inhibition
What is Machiavellianism - Machiavelli
- Gaining and maintaining power
- Better to be feared than loved
- Trust no one
- Make decisions for benefit of the group without morality
- Make friends with powerful people
- Links to manipulative personality
What are some questions on the Christie & Geis (1970) Mach scale?
‘One should take action only when sure it is morally right’ - if disagree = high MACH
‘It’s hard to get ahead without cutting corners’ = if agree = high MACH
‘Better to be humble and honest than important and dishonest’ - if disagree = high MACH
What is the link between Machiavellianism and lying?
High in machiavellian trait = better at lying and feel less shame about it, better at maintaining eye contact after lying accusation
What are the DARK TRIAD traits - Machiavelli
Machiavellianism
Psychopathy
Narcissism
What is Narcissism?
Self absorbed, require attention, don’t help others, feel superior and dominant
- Want admiration, attention, prestige
- Correlates with extraversion
What is Psychopathy?
Good at getting people on side, impulsive, superficial charm, manipulative, low empathy
- Lack remorse, insensitive, cynical
What are dark triad traits linked with?
- Preference for short term relationships
- Night owls
- Cruel to animals
- Attractive and charming
- Cheating
- Not correlated with the big 5 traits
