Week 5

Question 1

Define Personality?

Answer 1

The underlying, relatively stable, psychological structure and processes that organise human experience and shape a person’s activities and reactions to the environment (Lazarus & Monat, 1979)

Question 2

What is the Trait Approach?

Answer 2

• Personality is comprised of a collection of characteristics (traits)
• Traits determine behaviour
• Traits can be quantified and measured
• Traits evolve over time

Question 3

What is Cattell’s Trait Theory (1945)?

Answer 3

• Lexical theory; meaning we can attach words to every critical aspect of human personality
• Examined traits in series of factor analytic studies and concluded that there are 16 basic or source traits underlying 4 surface traits

Question 4

What is Eysenck’s Trait Theory (1944)?

Answer 4

• Individuals high in neuroticism tend to be tense, anxious and depressed
• Extroverts are more sociable and impulsive than introverts
• This is because introverts have higher levels of cortical arousal than extroverts so they do not need to seek external stimulation
• In 1978 he added a 3rd personality factor termed psychoticism: assesses the predisposition to suffer psychotic breakdown - aggressive, egocentric, antisocial tendencies

Question 5

What four components were used by Eysenck (1952) to identify personality types?

Answer 5

Extrovert/Introvert and Stable/unstable

Question 6

What is the five factor model?

Answer 6

Norman (1963) obtained evidence for 5 personality factors:

• Openness
• Conscientiousness
• Extraversion
• Agreeableness
• Neuroticism

Goldberg (1990 and 1993) supported this structure

Question 7

What is an Iceberg Profile of mood and who came up with this idea?

Answer 7

• Morgan (1980)
• Identified superior performance in sport as medium-high levels of vigour, and medium-low levels of tension, depression, anger, fatigue and confusion.

Question 8

What is an Everest Profile of mood and who came up with this idea?

Answer 8

• Terry (1995)
• Identified superior performance in sport as having really high levels of vigour and really low levels in tension, depression, anger, fatigue and confusion.

Question 9

What are advantages of Trait Theory?

Answer 9

• Significant progress in identifying major factors of personality
• Strong evidence that heredity plays a role in producing individual differences in personality
• 80% of individual differences in neuroticism are due to heredity; Eysenck and Prell (1951) found correlation between identical twins was 0.85 whereas only 0.22 for dizygotic twins
• Trait approach adheres to scientific methodology and yields testable hypotheses

Question 10

What are disadvantages of Trait Theory?

Answer 10

• no explanation for changes in personality over time
• Mischel (1968) argued that the central weakness stems from the assumption of cross-situational consistency (people should behave in a reasonably similar ways in different situations)
• Mischel concluded that the correlation between personality and behaviour rarely exceeds 0.30