Unit 2 Flashcards
A Personality Trait
describes a person’s typical style of thinking, feeling, and acting in different kinds of situations and at different times
• measured over a continuum, in a continuous stretch, from low to high
• hypothetical concept
• some psychologists view them as purely descriptive summaries of behaviour without thinking about were they came from or why a person acts that way
• some see them as internal, causal properties, and view a trait as a capacity that is present even when the trait is not being directly expressed
Idiographic approach to understanding personality
the goal is to understand the personality of a single individual with all of the quirks or idiosyncrasies and characteristics that make a person unique
• uses many variables to describe the personality of a single individual in great detail
• specific - trait is more unique to a single individual
• psychologist starts with what a single person think is important about themselves
-central traits, secondary traits, cardinal traits
central traits
- are traits that are of major importance in understanding the person
- they are the 5 or 10 traits that someone who use to describe you
secondary traits
• are traits of lesser importance, less consistently displayed, seldom displayed,
or only slightly revealed so that only a very close friend might notice them
cardinal traits
- an unusual person may have one and only one trait that describes him or her. such single traits that completely dominate a personality
- these traits are so pervasive and extremely influential that practically every aspect of a person’s life is touched by this “ruling passion” or “master sentiment”
nomothetic approach
• the goal is to discover universals (concepts that can apply to everyone) by identifying
traits that an describe all people or that can be applied to any person
• identifies few key variables that can describe the personality of many people
• general - trait is universal or applicable to other people
• there are three different ways to identify the most meaningful and applicable words to
describe personality
-theoretical approach, lexical approach, measurement approach
• once the basic traits have been identified by one of these methods, psychologists use
statistical techniques, such as factor analysis, to verify and validate that they have indeed found important traits.
theoretical approach
sometimes personality psychologists start with a theory or even common wisdom about human personality that leads to a theory
lexical approach
• personality traits explores a particular language and identifies the number of
synonyms that describe personality
measurement approach
• discovering important aspects of personality and trying to measure personality
factor analysis
• a statistical technique that mathematically identifies a meaningful underlying structure among a set of variables
• is a statistical method used to describe variability among observed, correlated variables in terms of a potentially lower number of unobserved variables called factors.
• the pattern of correlations will tell us which variables go together or correlate with each other and which variables don’t seem to fit. then the computer uses complex matrix algebra to try to re-create this pattern of correlations from a combination of one or more mathematical equations. the result of all this combining and weighting of participants’ responses is the formation of factors. a small number of these factors are usually able to re-create the variations among responses in our data set almost as well as all of the original answers themselves
-eigenvalue
-factor loadings
• Factor Analysis reduces the information in a model by reducing the dimensions of the
observations.
• can be used to simplify the data
eigen value
• each factor can explain a certain amount of variation, called variance, in answers between
participants
• from the eigenvalues, we calculate factor loadings
factor loadings
• an estimate of how strongly each question fits into a given factor • can interpret factor loadings like correlations
• when we do a factor analysis, the first factor that emerges generally accounts for the greatest amount of variation in the data
- because it is mathematically derived there is no guarantee that the factor makes any sense
- at this stage a researcher might move around the factors to find which questions go together the best (called rotating the factors)
- only changes which questions cluster together
Eysenck’s Three Factor Model of Personality
• experiments to identify and describe key differences between people
• Based on the results of factor analyses of responses on personality questionnaires he
identified three dimensions of personality:
-psychoticism
extraversion
neuroticism
• these three super factors form the basis of Eysenck’s PEN model of personality
• these traits are continuous
narrow traits
more specific
associated with each of these factors
