Week 22: Personality

Question 1

Agreeableness

Answer 1

personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be compassionate, cooperative, warm, caring; people low in this tend to be rude, hostile, and to care more about themselves than others

Question 2

Conscientiousness

Answer 2

a personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be careful, organized, hardworking, to follow rules

Question 3

Continuous distributions

Answer 3

characteristics can go from low-high, w all different intermediate values possible; one doesn’t simply have the trait/not have it, they can have varying amounts of it

Question 4

Extraversion

Answer 4

personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be sociable, outgoing, active, assertive

Question 5

Facets

Answer 5

broad personality traits can be broken down into narrower facets/aspects of the trait; ex. extraversion has several facets, like sociability, dominance, risk-taking

Question 6

Factor Analysis

Answer 6

statistical technique for grouping similar things together according to how highly they’re associated

Question 7

HEXACO Model

Answer 7

alternative to the Factor-Five model; includes six traits, five of which are variants of traits included in the Big Five:
H - honesty-humility (unique to hexaco)
E - emotionality
X - extraversion
A - agreeableness
C - conscientiousness
O - openness

Question 8

Independent

Answer 8

two characteristics/traits separate from one another - a person can be high on one and low on the other, vice-versa; some correlated traits relatively independent in that although there’s a tendency for a person high on one to also be high on the other (not always the case)

Question 9

Lexical Hypothesis

Answer 9

idea that the most important differences between people will be encoded in the language that we use to describe people; if we want to know which personality traits are most important, we can look to the language that people use to describe themselves/others

Question 10

Neuroticism

Answer 10

personality trait that reflects the tendency to be interpersonally sensitive, and the tendency to experience negative emotions like anxiety, fear, sadness, anger

Question 11

Openness to Experience

Answer 11

personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to seek out/to appreciate new things, including thoughts, feelings, values, experiences

Question 12

Personality

Answer 12

enduring predispositions that characterize a person, like styles of thought, feelings, behaviour

Question 13

personality traits

Answer 13

enduring dispositions in behaviour that show differences across people, and which tend to characterize the person across varying types of situations

Question 14

Person-situation debate

Answer 14

historical debate about the relative power of personality traits as compared to situational influences on behaviour; situationist critique, which started the person-situation debate, suggested that people overestimate the extent to which personality traits are consistent across situations

Question 15

absolute stability

Answer 15

consistency in the level or amount of a personality attribute over time

Question 16

Active person-environment transactions

Answer 16

when people actively choose/change parts of their environment to fit their needs/desires

Question 17

Age effects

Answer 17

differences in personality between groups of different ages that are related to maturation and development instead of birth cohort differences

Question 18

Attraction

Answer 18

a connection between personality attributes and aspects of the environment that occurs because individuals w particular traits are drawn to certain environments

Question 19

Attrition

Answer 19

when people stop participating in a group/job/study

Question 20

Birth cohort

Answer 20

people born in a particular year/span of time

Question 21

Cohort effects

Answer 21

differences in personality that are related to historical/social factors unique to individuals born in a particular year

Question 22

Corresponsive principle

Answer 22

the idea that personality traits often become matched w environmental conditions such that an individual’s social context acts to accentuate and reinforce their personality attributes

Question 23

Cross-sectional study/design

Answer 23

a research design that uses a group of individuals w different ages (and birth cohorts) assessed at a single point in time

Question 24

cumulative continuity principle

Answer 24

the generalization that personality attributes show increasing stability w age/experience

Question 25

differential stability

Answer 25

consistency in the rank-ordering of personality across two/more measurement occasions

Question 26

Evocative person-environment transactions

Answer 26

when who you are/how you act causes others/your surroundings to respond in a certain way; friendly person might evoke warm responses in another

Question 27

Group level

Answer 27

focus on summary statistics that apply to aggregates of people when studying personality development; ex. is considering whether the average score of a group of 50 year olds is higher than the average score of a group of 21 year olds when considering a trait like conscientiousness

Question 28

Heterotypic stability

Answer 28

consistency in the underlying psychological attribute across development regardless of any changes in how the attribute is expressed at different ages

Question 29

Homotypic stability

Answer 29

consistency of the exact same thoughts, feelings, behaviours across development

Question 30

Hostile attribution bias

Answer 30

the tendency of some individuals to interpret ambiguous social cues and interactions as examples of aggressiveness, disrespect, or antagonism

Question 31

Individual level

Answer 31

a focus on individual level stats that reflect whether individuals show stability/change when studying personality development

Question 32

Manipulation

Answer 32

when someone uses their personality traits (like being outgoing/controlling) to adjust the things/environment around them

Question 33

Maturity principle

Answer 33

the generalization that personality attributes associated w the sucesful fulfillment of adult roles increase w age/experience

Question 34

Person-environment transactions

Answer 34

the interplay between individuals and their contextual circumstances that ends up shaping both personality/environment

Question 35

Reactive person-environment transactions

Answer 35

when people react to what's happening around them, like adjusting their behaviour based on the environment they're in

Question 36

Selection

Answer 36

a connection between personality attributes and aspects of the environment that occurs whenever individuals w particular attributes choose particular kinds of environments

Question 37

Stress reaction

Answer 37

the tendency to become easily distressed by the normal challenges of life

Question 38

Transformation

Answer 38

the term for personality changes associated w experience/life events

Question 39

Big Five

Answer 39

5 broad general traits that are included in many prominent models of personality: 1. neuroticism 2. extraversion 3. openness to expeirence 4. agreeableness 5. conscientiousness

Question 40

Honeymoon effect

Answer 40

tendency for newly married individuals to rate their spouses in an unrealistically positive manner; represents a specific manifestation of the letter of recommendation effect when applied to ratings made by current romantic partners; illustrates the very important role played by relationship satisfaction in ratings made by romantic partners: as marital satisfaction declines, the effect disappears

Question 41

High-stakes testing

Answer 41

settings in which test scores are used to make important decisions about individuals; ex. test scores for college, tests in forensic settings

Question 42

Implicit motives

Answer 42

these are goals that are important to a person, but that they cannot consciously express; because individual can't verbalize goals directly, cannot be easily assessed via self-report; can be measured using Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

Question 43

Letter of recommendation effect

Answer 43

the general tendency for informants in personlaity studies to rate others in an unrealistically positive manner; tendency is due a pervasive bias in personality assessment: in the large majority of published studies, informants are people who like the person they are rating (ex. often friends/family) and therefore are motivated to depict them in a socially desirable way; term reflects a similar tendency for academic letters of recommendation to be overly positive and to present the referent in an unrealistically desirable manner

Question 44

Projective hypothesis

Answer 44

the theory that when people are confronted w ambiguous stimuli, their responses will be influenced by their unconscious thoughts, needs, wishes, impulses; in turn based on the Freudian notion of projection, which is the idea that people attribute their own undesirable/unacceptable characteristics to other people/objects

Question 45

reference group effect

Answer 45

the tendency of people to base their self-concept on comparisons w others

Question 46

Reliability

Answer 46

consistency of test scores across repeated assessments

Question 47

Self-enhancement bias

Answer 47

the tendency for people to see and/or present themselves in an overly favourable way; tendency can take two basic forms; defensiveness and impression management; informants also can show enhancement biases; general form of this bias has been called the letter-of-recommendation effect, which is the tendency of informants who like the person they're rating (ex. friends, relatives) to describe them in an overly favourable way

Question 48

Sibling contrast affect

Answer 48

the tendency of parents to use their perceptions of all of their children as a frame of reference for rating the characteristics of each of them; more generally, the effect causes parents to exaggerate the true extent of differences between their kids; effect represents a specific manifestation of the more general reference group effect when applied to ratings made by parents