Week 3 Personality Flashcards
What is personality?
The distinctive and relative ways of thinking, feeling and acting that characterises an individual and their responses to experiences
What are the behaviours of personality?
Components of identity
Perceived by internal factors
Perceived by organisation and structure, they’re put together in a meaningful way
What are the 5 major approaches of personality theories?
Trait Biological Social cognitive Psychoanalytic Humanistic
What are the definitions of trait?
An observed tendency to behave a particular way. E.g shy, friendly
Inferred or hypothesised underlying pattern of internal processes that generates a behavioural tendency
What did allport and odbert do with a dictionary?
Compiled a list of 18,000 adjectives used to describe personality and distinguish traits
The list was reduced to 4-5000 trait names indicating stable personality traits
What did Raymond Catell do with allport and odberts list?
He used factor analysis to group together those adjectives on the list that were highly correlated with or another
How many personality factors did Raymond Catell identify? And what are they?
1. Warmth Reasoning Emotional stability Dominance Liveliness Rule consciousness Social boldness Sensitivity Vigilance Abstracted was Privateness Apprehension Openness to change Self reliance Perfectionism 16. Tension
What is the dominant trait theory today?
The big 5 personality factors by Mccrae and Costa
Extraversion Conscientiousness Openness Neuroticism Agreeableness
What theory did Han Eysenck put forward for the biological approach?
He tried to explain the differences in personality and behaviour through brain functioning.
His theory focused on temperaments. His 3 dimensions of personality were Introversion VS extraversion Neuroticism VS stability Psychoticism VS Socialisation
What is ARAS?
Ascending reticular activation system
Cortical excitation and inhibition
It is the neurological physiological basis for explaining the difference between introversion and extraversion
Introverts have a higher cortical arousal, higher ARAS arousal. They become aversive because it goes past the threshold of cognitive arousal
Extroverts have lower ARAS arousal
What is the VB system?
Visceral brain system mediates emotional activation of the autonomic nervous system
High VB : neuroticism
Low VB : stability
(Emotional stability)
What does Eysenck say about psychoticism in relation to genes?
Psychoticism is determined by a large number of genes
These genes are supposed to play a role in determining both that a person will evidence psychotic traits and a person will suffer a fully developed psychosis
Is it true that MZ twins have higher correlations than DZ twins when reared apart?
Yes
What’s a limitation of the biological approach?
Personality is not due to nature alone, nurture can be a factor that influences any research on biology
Projective tests of personality
Thematic Apperception Test
Rorschach Test
