Week 9-Personality:Trait Models

Question 1

What’s the trait approach to personality: Wilhelm Wundt

Answer 1

■ Psychologists placed people into categories depending on their personality type (e.g., extrovert
OR introvert).
■ Wilhelm Wundt changed the categorical types of personality into trait dimensions.
■ German Physiologist; founding father of modern day psychology.
■ Opened the very first laboratory dedicated to Psychology in 1879.
■ Classified personality according to two dimensions: mood stability and strength of emotions.
■ People were placed along these
dimensions, rather than being placed in one category.

Question 2

What’s the trait approach to personality? defining personality traits

Answer 2

■ “a trait is a dimension of personality used to categorize people according to the degree to which they manifest a particular characteristic” (Burger, 1997).
■ Two assumptions underlie trait theory:
1. Traits are relatively stable over time.
2. Traits show stability across situations.
■ Personality traits also influence behaviour.
■ Personality traits are continuous dimensions; people can be placed along the dimension depending on
how much of the trait they possess.

Question 3

What are trait theorists interested in?

Answer 3

■ Trait theorists are interested in typical group behaviour.
– e.g., how people high in aggression typically behave in a debate.
■ Interested in making comparisons among people
– e.g., compare the behaviour of a group of people high
(vs. low) in aggression in a debate.
■ BUT trait theorists have little to say about personality change and tend to be academic psychologists.

Question 4

What’s William Sheldon’s theory of somatotypes?

Answer 4

 Sheldon (1899-1977) was an American Psychologist and founding figure of trait psychology.
 Described personality according to somatotypes based on physique and temperament.
 After surveying thousands of people, Sheldon (1970) concluded that there are 3 basic types of physique:
 Endomorphy
 Mesomorphy
 Ectomorphy
 Using correlational techniques, he showed that each
body type was associated with a particular temperament.

Question 5

What are the early lexical approaches to personality?

Answer 5

■ Early researchers used dictionaries to identify/count the nr of words that describe personality traits.
■ Sir Francis Galton (1884) provided the first documented
source of a dictionary/thesaurus used to elicit words describing personality.
■ Lexical hypothesis – the personality traits and differences that are the most important to people become a part of their language as single terms/trait descriptors.
■ Frequency of use correspond with importance.
■ Nr of words in a language that refer to each trait predict how important that trait is in describing personality.

Question 6

Who’s Gordon Allport?

Answer 6

■ Lexical researchers counted the terms used, identified synonyms, and produced lists of these words.
■ One of the first psychologists to produce such a list was Gordon Allport.
■ Allport and Odbent (1936) identified 18,000 words; 4,500 described personality traits.
■ Published the first psychology text on personality traits in 1921;
Personality Traits: Their Classification and Measurement.
■ Adopted a unified approach to personality; how traits come together produces the uniqueness of people.
■ These traits produce a unified personality capable of evolution and change.
■ Adopted a positive view of humans; humans are rational, creative, active, self-reliant, and capable of change.

Question 7

What’s Allport’s personality traits in terms of the idiographic and nomothetic approach?

Answer 7

■ Allport (1961) suggested that the nomothetic approach allows the identification of common personality traits.
– Saw common traits as ways of classifying groups of people.
– Did not find comparisons based on common traits useful.
■ Allport (1961) suggested that the idiographic approach allows the identification of the personal
disposition of the individual.
– Represents the unique characteristics of each person.
– Found this to be a useful approach towards developing a real understanding of personality.

Question 8

Allport (1961) further described what three types of personality traits?

Answer 8

1. Cardinal traits
   – Single traits that dominate an individual’s personality and heavily
   influence behaviour.
2. Central traits
   – 5-10 traits that best describe an individual’s personality.
3. Secondary traits
   – Concerned with an individual’s preferences; not a core component of personality.
   – Become apparent in certain situations.

Question 9

Who’s Raymond Cattell?

Answer 9

■ Cattell (1905-1998) was keen to apply empirical methods (factor analysis) to discover the basic structure of personality.
■ Existing list of traits should be reduced to a smaller nr that would represent the basic structure of personality.
■ Identified a range of traits; became interested in how traits
and situational variables interact to influence behaviour.
■ Distinguished between constitutional traits (genetically determined traits) and environmental-mold traits (traits that are the result of environmental experiences).
■ Developed multiple abstract variance analysis (MAVA) to calculate the influence that genetic/environmental factors have in the development of a personality trait

Question 10

Cattell (1965) defined what three types of traits?

Answer 10

1. Ability traits
   ― How well you deal with a situation reach your goal in that situation.
2. Temperament traits
   ― Individual differences in the styles people adopt when pursuing
   goals.
3. Dynamic traits
   ― Motivate and energise behaviour.
   ― Three types: attitudes, sentiments, and ergs.

Question 11

What are Cattell’s three dynamic traits?

Answer 11

A. Attitudes
― Hypothetical constructs that express our particular interests in
people/objects in specific situations.
― Help to predict how we will behave in a specific situation.
B. Sentiments
― Complex attitudes that include our opinions/interests that help determine how we feel about people or situations.
C. Ergs
― Innate motivators and drives.
― Cause us to recognize and attend to some stimuli more readily than others, and to seek satisfaction of our drives.

Question 12

What did Cattell further distinguish between?

Answer 12

1. Common traits
   ― Traits shared by many people (e.g., sociability).
2. Unique traits
   ― Rare traits that emphasise the uniqueness of humans.
   ― Specialised interests that motivate us to pursue related activities
   Cattell argued that people are unique because each person has
   a different mixture of different common traits.

Question 13

How did Cattell (1950) make an important distinction between
surface traits and source traits?

Answer 13

1. Surface traits:
   ― Collections of trait descriptors that cluster together in many individuals and situations.
   ― When measuring a person on each of these traits, their scores on each will be correlated with all the others.
2. Source traits:
   ― Underlying traits identified by factor analysis.
   ― Responsible for the observed variance in the surface traits.

Question 14

What do surface and source traits relate to?

Answer 14

 Surface traits relate to the overt behaviours people display.
 A source trait is responsible for the behaviours people display
(i.e., the surface traits).
 Being high in the source trait extraversion causes you to display
behaviours that are more sociable and to have more hopeful attitudes etc.

Question 15

Cattell used what various approaches to uncover the source traits?

Answer 15

 Cattell used factor analysis of huge data sets; identified 16 major source factors and claimed that they represent the basic structure of personality.
 The Sixteen Personality Factor (16PF) questionnaire was developed as a measurement tool

Question 16

Who’s Hans Eysenck?

Answer 16

■ Hans Eysenck (1916-1997) was a German Psychologist.
■ Published ~ 45 books and hundreds of papers; founded the
journal Personality and Individual Differences.
■ When beginning his work in personality, he recognised two
schools within psychology:
– Theory development with no emphasis on evaluating them
with empirical evidence.
– Experimental psychologists with no interest in individual differences.
■ Stressed that these schools needed to be integrated.
■ His goal became to identify the main dimensions of personality, devise means of measuring them, and test them using experimental quantitative procedures.

Question 17

What’s Eysenck’s supertraits?

Answer 17

■ Defined personality as the way a person’s character, temperament, intelligence, physique, and nervous system are organised.
■ Traits are relatively stable, long-lasting characteristics of the individual.
■ Used factor analysis to develop a hierarchical model of personality types.
■ Observed habitual responses at the bottom level of his model; typical behaviours that come together to make up personality types.
■ Used factor analysis of large samples to identify three supertraits (personality types) that he claimed make up the basic structure of personality.

Question 18

What are Eysenck’s (1965) three types of supertraits making up the
basic structure of personality?

Answer 18

1. Extraversion: sociability.
2. Neuroticism: emotional stability.
3. Psychoticism: severe psychopathology.

Question 19

What’s extroversion?

Answer 19

■ Extraverts are sociable and impulsive people who like excitement and whose orientation
is towards external reality.
■ Introverts are quiet, introspective people who are oriented towards inner reality and who prefer a well-ordered life.

Question 20

What are neurotics like?

Answer 20

Neurotics are emotionally unstable; display an anxiety or fear level that is disproportionate to the reality of the situation.

Question 21

What are psychotics like?

Answer 21

■ Psychotics are insensitive to others, hostile, cruel, and inhumane with a strong need to upset others.
■ The Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) was developed to measure these 3 supertraits and their 27 underlying traits (9 underlaying traits for each
supertrait).

Question 22

What’s the research evidence for Eysenck’s types: Extraversion

Answer 22

■ Extraverts prefer to socialise compared to introverts, and they like louder music and brighter colours (Eysenck, 1965).
■ Extraverts are more likely to engage in risky behaviours such
as smoking, gambling, drinking, skipping school, and sexual
activities (Eysenck, 1965; Jiang, Huang, & Tao, 2018).
■ Because of their need for variety, extraverts have more career and job changes, and they change relationship partner more often (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1975).

Question 23

What’s the research evidence for Eysenck’s types: Neuroticism (He et al., 2019)

Answer 23

■ Aim: explore the relationship between neuroticism and night eating, and the mediating role of psychological distress.
■ Method: 578 college students were assessed on the Eysenck
personality questionnaire short scale (e.g., “Are you a worrier?”),
the night eating questionnaire (e.g., “When you get up in the middle of the night, how often do you snack?”), and the depression anxiety stress scale.
■ Key finding: neuroticism was significantly and positively related
to night eating. This relationship was partially mediated by psychological distress.
■ Potential implication: the treatment and intervention for night eating may benefit from our attention to personality traits
such as neuroticism and psychological distress

Question 24

What’s the research evidence for Eysenck’s types?

Answer 24

■ The primary factors have been found in 24 countries in women and men, and in children and adults.
– Eysenck concluded that the three-factor structure has a genetic basis and represents the basic structure of personality.
■ Longitudinal studies have showed that the three-factor personality structure is stable across time.
■ High level of support for Eysenck’s theory; the neuroticism and extraversion scales have proved to be particularly good & reliable measures psychometrically.
■ But, the psychoticism scale is more problematic, with much lower internal reliability statistics.

Question 25

What’s Costa and McCrae’s Big Five model?

Answer 25

■ Researchers increasingly agree that five supertraits make up the basic structure of personality.
■ Those described by Costa and McCrae (1992) are most widely used (i.e., Big Five Factors):
– Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.
– Measured with the Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness Personality Inventory (NEO-PI).
■ The Big Five model is a data-derived hypothesis.

Question 26

What are the different forms of the NEO-PI?

Answer 26

– NEO-PI-R = Form R is for observer ratings and is phrased in the third person.
– NEO-PI-S = Form S is for self-reports and is phrased in the first person.
■ Consists of 240 items that measure the Big Five factors (Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness), and 30 specific traits, or facets, that define the factors (6 facets for each trait).
■ Questions are rated on a 5-point scale, anchored at “strongly agree” and “strongly disagree.”
■ It takes 30 to 40 minutes to complete the full questionnaire

Question 27

What’s openess?

Answer 27

■ This factor refers to the individual having an openness to new experiences.
■ Characteristics of showing intellectual curiosity,
divergent thinking, and willingness to consider new
ideas and active imagination.
■ People with high scores are unconventional and
independent thinkers.
■ People with low scores are conventional and prefer the familiar to the new.

Question 28

What’s Conscientiousness?

Answer 28

■ This factor describes our degree of self-
discipline and control.
■ People with high scores are determined,
organised, and plan for events in their lives.
■ People with low scores are careless, easily
distracted from their goals and undependable.

Question 29

What’s Extraversion?

Answer 29

■ This factor is a measure of the individual’s sociability.
■ People with high scores (i.e., extraverts) are sociable, energetic, optimistic, friendly and assertive.
■ People with low scores (i.e., introverts) are reserved, independent, and even-paced.

Question 30

What’s Agreeableness?

Answer 30

■ This factor relates to characteristics of the individual that are relevant for social interaction.
■ People with high scores are trusting, helpful, soft-
hearted, and sympathetic.
■ People with low scores are suspicious, antagonistic, unhelpful, sceptical, and uncooperative.

Question 31

What’s Neuroticism?

Answer 31

■ This factor measures an individual’s emotional
stability and personal adjustment.
■ People with high scores experiences wide mood
swings and they are unstable in their emotions.
■ People with low scores are calm, well adjusted and not prone to extreme maladaptive emotional states.

Question 32

What’s the research evidence for the Big Five
model? e.g., Boyle, 1989; Conn & Rieke, 1994;
McCrae & Costa, 1989; McCrae et al., 2000)

Answer 32

■ High level of support for the Big Five model; many agree that the five factors represent the universal structure of personality.
■ Factor analysis of the scores on the MBTI has found support for a five- factor structure.
■ The five-factor model is compatible with Catell’s 16-factor measure and Eysenck’s 3-factor measure.
– The latest version of the 16PFI even allows scoring on the Big Five!
■ The NEO-PI-R (and other versions) has been translated into several languages, and the same five factor structure has been replicated.
■ The five factors have been found in different languages, ages of people, and races.
■ Longitudinal studies have found that the observed personality differences are stable over time and have genetic basis.