Week 3 Lecture 5 - narrow personality traits Flashcards
What is the hierarchy of personality description?
- personality description can vary on different levels
- lower level facets, trait level, higher level 2 traits, 1 general personality factor
What was Digman’s Alpha and Beta factors?
Alpha = stability
- High stability was made up of high agreeableness, high conscientiousness and low neuroticism
Beta = plasticity
- high plasticity was made up of high extraversion and high openness
- meaningful higher level of personality description
- believed that trait levels (big 5) were not entirely independent
What is Musek General Personality Factor (Big 1)?
- Captures common variance across all of the Big 5 traits
- combination of positive traits –> e.g., socially desirable, social effectiveness, meets trails of life
- may be a response artefact –> measure of how ppts respond in socially desirable ways on questionnaires
What is the hierarchy of personality description similar to?
- a microscope
- measuring personality at different levels of description is like choosing how closely to zoom in
What is the Bandwidth-Fidelity Dilemma?
- trade-off between breadth and accuracy of prediction
Broader, higher-level descriptors:
- predict more behaviours
- lower accuracy
Narrower, lower-level descriptors:
- predict fewer behaviours
- more accurate
-Which approach you choose should depend on your overall goal
What do lower-level descriptors do?
- provide narrower, richer descriptions
- are stronger predictors of specific behaviours
Paunonen & Ashton had 717 students complete the Big 5 scale.
What did they do, find and conclude?
- looked at correlations between final grades and pre-selected big factors and “lower level” traits
- found that lower level traits were more strongly correlated with final grades than the chosen factors
- different levels become more/less appropriate depending on behaviour in question
- broader behaviours should be viewed on a trait level but specific behaviours may be better viewed on a facet level
What are holistic models of entire personality?
- aim for simple model of entire personality space
- fewer, broader traits
What are narrow models of specific part(s) of personality?
- focus on part of personality relevant to specific behaviour
- specific, narrow traits
What are the criteria for authoritarianism?
- Preference for unambiguous, familiar routines.
- Strong views on crime and punishment.
- Respect for institutions.
- Uncritical acceptance of authority in society.
- Reluctance to introspect.
- Belief that pleasure is wrong.
What evidence is there for authoritarianism as a personality trait rather than attitude?
- Bouchard et al. (2003): Evidence for heritability of conservatism from twins reared apart (twin study design)
- Amodio et al. (2007): Conservatism associated with decreased neural response to supressing a habitual response in Go/No-Go task (and lower response accuracy).
- authoritarianism is seen as partly genetic with some biological basis in the brain suggesting it is a part of stable personality
What is the go / no-go task?
- Clap your hands every time you see the letter M (Go trials).
- Make no response when you see the letter W (No-Go trials)
- Brain activity during No-Go trials reflects neural response to signals that require a non-routine response
What is the continuity hypothesis?
there is no discontinuity between ‘normality’ and (mental) illness
Based on the continuity hypothesis, what should we be able to find?
- personality traits in non-clinical populations that are related to psychosis
- traits are normally distributed e.g., more depressive tendencies = more likely to develop depressive disorder
What is schizotypy?
- correlated items based on clinical descriptions of schizophrenia.
- Reflects genetic/biological vulnerability to psychosis.
What is the Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings (O-LIFE)?
- Based on factor analysis of several measures of psychosis-related symptoms
- 4 factors
What are the 4 factors of O-LIFE?
- unusual experiences
- cognitive disorganisation
- introvertive anhedonia
- impulsive nonconformity
What is unusual experiences (O-LIFE)?
- Related to perceptual distortions, hallucinations, and magical thinking.
- e.g., Are your thoughts sometimes so strong you can almost hear them?
What is cognitive disorganisation (O-LIFE)?
- Related to cognitive difficulties, sense of purposelessness, anxiety etc.
- e.g., Are you sometimes so nervous that you are blocked?
What is introvertive anhedonia (O-LIFE)?
- Related to lack of enjoyment from social sources, and dislike of intimacy.
- e.g., Are you much too independent to really get involved with people?
What is impulsive nonconformity (O-LIFE)?
- Related to impulsive and disinhibited behaviour.
- e.g., Do you ever have the urge to break or smash things?
What is an example of a measure of schizotypy?
- Raine (1991): Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ)
- Items developed to capture the nine features of schizotypal personality disorder (DSM-III-R)
What evidence is there for the validity of schizotypy?
Steel, Hemsley & Jones (1996) (based on Stroop test):
- 3 conditions –> baseline condition, Stroop condition (distractor word unrelated to next ink colour), Priming condition (distractor word predicts next ink colour)
- negative priming makes answering next item harder as it inhibits that word
- found reduced negative priming in high schizotypy scores
- in Sz, cognitive inhibition is reduced as people with Sz show smaller NP effect due to the brain being less effective at inhibiting the colour name in the Stroop condition
- therefore there is a smaller difference between the Stroop condition and the Priming condition as less inhibition in the first place means less additional interference in the NP condition
- same is found for trait schizotypy
What is negative priming?
- a measure of cognitive inhibition
- is reduced in Sz
How is a negative priming effect calculated?
priming - Stroop scores
What is a summary of Machiavelli’s principles?
- Better to be feared than loved.
- Trust no one.
- Make decisions for the benefit of the group, with the absence of morality. The ends justify the means.
- Be cunning and strong.
- Make friends with powerful people.
- Importance of how you appear to be.
Christie and Geis developed the Mach scales to describe what?
the manipulative “Machiavellian” personality
What is Christie and Geis’ Mach-IV?
- 20 items on a Likert-type response
Split into 3 main factors: - Tactics –> e.g.,
The best way to handle people is to tell them what they want to hear - Views –> e.g.,
Generally speaking, men won’t work hard unless forced to do so - Morality –> e.g.,
All in all, it is better to be humble and honest than important and dishonest (-ve)
A series of studies were conducted to validate the Mach-IV scale
Give an example of one
- Confederates encouraged participant to cheat on experimental task
- Amount of eye contact with experimenter measured following accusation of cheating
- hypothesised that individuals high in M would be better at maintaining eye contact after like –> study results confirmed this
What is the Dark Triad?
- Three overlapping, yet distinct, ‘dark’ personality traits relating to social malevolence, coldness, aggressiveness, self-promotion and duplicity
-Psychopathy, Narcissism and Machiavellianism
What is Narcissism?
- Feelings of grandiosity, superiority, dominance, self-focus and entitlement.
- Subclinical measure of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
What is Psychopathy?
- Nonclinical features of psychopaths.
- Impulsivity and thrill-seeking.
- Superficial charm, manipulative.
- Low empathy, remorse and guilt.
What do correlations between the dark triad suggest?
moderate correlations suggesting that are related but distinct / independent
What does the “dirty dozen” measure of the dark triad suggest?
- 12 items
- further evidence that these 3 traits are independent from each other and worthy of investigation in their own right
What has the dark triad been associated with?
- Preference for short-term relationships
- ‘Night-time’ chronotype
- Cruelty to animals
- Attractiveness to others
- suggestion that “sadism” may also be a factor to include making the triad a tetrad
How does the Dark triad correlate with other Big trait models?
- moderate correlations with the Big 5 suggesting that the Dark Triad cannot be fully accounted for by any one of these factors
- Shared ‘dark triad’ variance correlates up to -.94 with Honesty/humility on the HEXACO model –> suggests that Big 5 model may need to include a 6th factor
