Trait Appraoch (Chapter 5)

Question 1

What is the Single-trait approach?

Answer 1

Focusing on one particular trait of interest and learning as much as possible and asking “what do people like that do?”
What behaviours does this trait cause?

Question 2

What is the Many-trait approach?

Answer 2

Works from the opposite direction, begining with the question “what does that?”
Focusing on a particular behaviour and investigating its corrolates with as many different personality traits as possible in order to explain the basis of the behaviour.

Question 3

What is the Essential-trait approach?

Answer 3

Narrowing the list of thousands of trait terms to the ones that really matter, the traits that are the most improtant

Question 4

What are the Big 5 Traits?

Answer 4

Extraversion
Neuroticism
Conscientiousness
Agreeableness
and Openess

Question 5

What is the Typological Approach?

Answer 5

The research strategy that focuses on identifying types of individuals. Each type is characterized by a particular pattern of traits.

Question 6

By looking at density distributions, it is clear that…

Answer 6

Behaviours and states are not always the same as a persons level of a trait. They vary over time and sometims span the entire range of a scale used to assess the trait

Question 7

What is the difference between high-self monitors and low-self monitors

Answer 7

High-self monitors are different between their inner and outer selves, they perform differently in different settings

Others who are the same outside as they are inside (setting doesnt matter) are low-self monitors

Question 8

On the self-monitoring test, who would be a high and low monitor?

Answer 8

A score of 11 or more is high-self monitoring, 10 or below implys low self-monitoring

Question 9

What are low self-monitors like?

Answer 9

More consistent regardless of the situation, their more judgeable, self directed, honest, and/or insensitive and stubborn

Question 10

What are High self-monitors like?

Answer 10

Less judgeable, adaptable, popular, sensitive, two faced, lacks integrity

Question 11

What is Narcisism?

Answer 11

People who may be charming, attractive, and even charasmatic, but also have a high degree of self-regard and neglect of concern for others

Question 12

What is the difference between people with high self-esteem and narcissists?

Answer 12

People with high self-esteem feel good about themselces without feeling superior to anyone else. Narcissists feel superior to others but may not feel good about themselves

Question 13

What are two theories on why narcissists are the way they are?

Answer 13

1) They deal with life / defend themselves unrealistically by means such as bragging, that is ultimately unsuccessful

2) They have a general failure to control impulses and delay gratification

Question 14

What do some people beleive to be the reason narcicism is getting more common?

Answer 14

Because of cultural trends such as awarding trophies, giving presents to every child at a birthday and telling everybody that their “special”
The emergence of a “generation me” with too much self-esteem for their own good

Question 15

What is the California Q-set?

Answer 15

A set of 100 descriptive items that covers the personality domain. Each phrase describes an aspect of personality that might be improtant for characterizing a particular individual

Question 16

How does Q-sorting work for the California Q-set??

Answer 16

Raters express judgements of eprsonality by sorting the items into nine categories ranging from highly uncharacteristic (category 1) of the person being described, highly characteristic (category 9), and neither characteristic or uncharacteristic (category 5)

Question 17

What is the most improtant advantage of Q-sorting?

Answer 17

It forces the judge to compare all of the items directly against each other. The judge is also restricted to identifying only a few items as being most important

Question 18

A study was done to find out of vocabulary had anything to do with personality, explain the study

Answer 18

Each participant underwent a 1-hour life history interview. The interview was recorded and questions were deleted leaving just the answers. The asnwers were trasncribed into computer files containing thousands of words used by each participant. The words were analyzed by a computer program called “Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count” (LIWC).

They also gathered personality ratings of each participant from people who knew them well (I-data)

Question 19

What were the findings of the personality and vocabulary correlation study?

Answer 19

People who used a relatively large number of certainty words (absolutely, exact, guarantee, sure, truly) were described by their aquaintances as intelligent, verbally fluent, a person whos turned for advice, and generous.

People who used the words rearely were more likely were described as emotionally bland, exploitative, and repressive

Question 20

Psychologists Jack and Jeanne Block assessed the personalities of a group of children in nursery school. Almost 20 years later, the same children completed a measure of their political beliefs. What did they find?

Answer 20

Children who gew into political conservatives were likely to have been described as feeling guilty, anxious, and unable to handle stress well.

Those who grew into liberals were more likely to have been described years earlier as resourceful, independant, self-reliant, and confident

Question 21

Why is the California Q-Set used in the many trait approach?

Answer 21

Because it allows researchers to examine how 100 phrases or aspects of traits are related to specific behaviours or beliefs

Question 22

Henry Murray theorized 20 traits that were central to understanding personality, what were they and what were they called?

Answer 22

He called them needs, his list included needs for agression, autonomy (self-government), exhibition, order, play, sex, and so on.

Question 23

Psychologists Jack and Jeanne Block proposed just two essential characteristics of personality, what were they?

Answer 23

1) Ego resiliance (or psychological adjustment)
2) Ego control (or impulse control)

Question 24

A fundamental idea behind these constructs (from Henry Murray and Jack and Jeanne Block) is the Freudian concept that people constantly experience needs and impulses ranging from sexual drives to the desire to eat doughnuts. What are the two types of people you can be?

Answer 24

Overcontrolled people = those high in the ego-control dimension who inhibit these impulses

Undercontrolled people = low in ego control who are more prone to act on them immediately

Question 25

Factor analysis involves correlating every measured variable with every other variable. The result is a ____________ ________.

Answer 25

Correlation Matrix

Correlation matrices can quickly get very large

Question 26

After doing factor analysis, Catel concluded that 16 traits were essential. Psychologists thought this was too much. What were to alternatives created?

Answer 26

Hans Eysenck made a factor analytic proposal for the essential traits of personality and identified 3: Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Psychoticism (blend of agressivemess, creativity, and impulsiveness)

Auke Tellegen updated Eysencks system with the Multidimentional Personality Questionaire which organized around three “super factors” called: positive emotionality, negative emotionality, and constraint

Question 27

What does the Lexical hypothesis say?

Answer 27

It says that the important aspects of human life will be labeled, and that if something is truly important and universal, many words for it will exist in all languages

Question 28

What is an implication of the Big 5?

Answer 28

The big five are related to each other
eg. Agreeableness, conscientoudsness, and neuroticism go together to form one facotr sometimes labeled as “stability”

Question 29

Some psychologists have argued that there is really just one underlying trait of personality, what is it?

Answer 29

General Factor of Personality = the general factor combines all five in the desirable direction: High extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openess, and low neuroticism

Question 30

Who was one of the first to theorize about how extraverts might be different from introverts?

Answer 30

Hans Eysenck