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Personality theory & assessment summary
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Summary of the lecture notes and examples from personality theory & assessment, includes summary of almost the whole book used in 2017.
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1Personality Theory & Assessment Summary
Exam: Wednesday 30 t h of May, 2018
INDEX
1. Introduction: What is Personality Psychology? 2
2. Personality Assessment, Measurement and Research Design 4
PART I. The Dispositional Domain (Ch. 3-5) 6
3. Types or Dimensions? 6
4. Theoretical and Measurement Issues in Trait Psychology 9
5. Group Personality and Personality Change 11
PART II. The Biological Domain (Ch. 6-8) 12
6. Heritability 12
7. Biological Substrates and Indicators 16
8. Evolution 18
PART III. The Intrapsychic Domain (Ch. 9-10) 20
9. Psychoanalytic Approaches to Personality (Freud) 20
10. Motives and Personality 22
PART IV. The Cognitive/Experiential Domain (Ch. 11-14) 26
11. Cognitive Topics in Personality 26
12. Intelligence 28
13. Emotion and Personality 30
14. Approaches to the Self 33
PART V. The Social and Cultural Domain (Ch. 15-17) 35
15. Personality and Social Interaction 35
16. Sex, Gender and Personality 36
17. Culture and Personality 38
PART VI. The Adjustment Domain (Ch. 18) 40
18. Stress, Coping, Adjustment and Health 40
This summary includes (almost) everything from the lectures & the book
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This summary is made by a student!
Studying from it and relying on it for 100% is your own responsibility.
THANKS & GOOD LUCK!! J
J YOU CAN DO IT !!!! CA
, 2
Introduction: What is Personality Psychology?
Start with an example of instrument à Twenty statements test
- How do we assess our own personality? There are 3 main aspects
o Evaluation (positive/negative)
o Group identity (using nouns; e.g. female, student)
o Personality traits (using adjectives; tall, ambitious)
Two approaches/traditions
- Nomothetic à the scientific approach
- Idiographic à the “mental healthcare” approach, focusing on one individual
What do personality psychologists study?
There are 3 levels of research
1. Human nature
2. Individual and group differences
3. Individual uniqueness
LEVEL 1 – HUMAN NATURE
How people are like all other people
- E.g. all humans have a social need/need to belong (but at different levels)
- Do only humans have personalities?
o NO! Also in other species, like monkeys, mice, even worms!
§ E.g. study Gosling et al. – Dogs: we can describe dog’s personalities to the same extent of
accuracy as we describe other people
LEVEL 2 – INDIVIDUAL & GROUP DIFFERENCES
How people are like some other people
- E.g. boys are usually more aggressive than girls = differences between groups
o Shows in number of prisoners in 2015 (NL) = 16 (male) VS 1 (female)
- Also differences between gender in expressing violence
LEVEL 3 – INDIVIDUAL UNIQUENESS
How people are like no other people
- Some characteristics make an individual unique and like no one else
- E.g. Stormy Daniels – she had an affair with Trump
o Is a prostitute, but also produced 65 adult films (she is very smart)
§ This makes her “like no one else”
- Everyone has their “unique” autobiography
Personality theories (2)
- Entity theory – human traits (like personality) are fixed, it is impossible to change them (nature)
- Incremental theory – human traits are not fixed but are malleable to a great extent (nurture)
This is also an important question to answer for your future: people who support the incremental theory
usually work in fields like training (e.g. getting criminals back in to society), people who support the entity
theory often work in fields like selective psychology/assessment.
SO…. DOES PERSONALITY EXIST?
- Depends on which theory you support
- Walter Mischel (1968): No! à “there is a very weak correlation between an individual’s behavior in
one situation and an individual’s behavior in another situation”
, 3
Important question to answer.. what is personality? What is personality?
- Personality – the set of traits and mechanisms within Individual differences …
the individual that are organized and relatively enduring § Physical (height, attractiveness)
and that influence ones’ interactions with, and § Psychological
adaptations to, the intrapsychic, physical, and social o Intellectual (knowledge, skills)
environment. o Non-intellectual
ELABORATING on the definition: § Fleeting (emotions, feelings)
1. “The set of psychological traits.. characteristics that § Enduring
describe ways in which people are different from • Specific (habits, attitudes)
each other • General: Personality
o they describe the average tendencies of a
person
2. ..and mechanisms..
o mechanisms – the processes of personality – involve cognitive processes that entail an
information-processing activity
3. ..within the individual.. something a person carries with him or herself over time and situations
4. ..that are organized and relatively enduring..
o organized – the traits & mechanisms are not simply random, they are linked in a coherent
fashion
o enduring – traits & mechanisms stay consistent over time
5. ...and influence.. personality traits and mechanisms can have an effect on people’s lives
6. ..ones interactions with.. including perceptions, selections and evocations and manipulations
7. ..and adaptations to..
o adaptation – a central feature of personality concerns adaptive function – accomplishing
goals, coping, adjusting and dealing with the challenges and problems we face as we go
through life
8. ..the intrapsychic, physical, and social environment.”
- Personality = temperament = character
- Important to make distinct from intelligence!!!
- Personality expression/expression of traits differs per culture
Trait hierarchy
Traits are arranged in a hierarchy
Example of the trait conscientiousness ------------------->
Facets (of this trait) – diligence & organization
Contextualized facets - what do these traits look like in
specific contexts?
Behavioral facets – what kind of behavior does the
combination of this trait + environment activate?
Back to Mischel… Does Personality exist?
- Mischel did a study among students – compared cross-situational consistency of conscientiousness
across 19 behaviors
o Again lack of consistency à Personality does not exist
- BUT! Jackson & Paunonen (1985) did reanalysis
o Divided 19 behaviors into 2 groups – high correlation (.50!) between the 2 groups!!!
, 4
o Conclusion: with single behaviors you cannot predict other single behaviors, BUT with clusters of
behaviors you can predict other clusters of behavior!
§ WHY? Because only 1 behavior is very unreliable & almost impossible to use as a predictor
- SO here: YES, personality does exist: “as the summary of a large number of related behaviors, with
which similar behaviors can be predicted, and which emerges in interaction with the environment”
6 domains of knowledge (also set-up of the book)
I. The dispositional domain
o Deals centrally with the ways in which individuals differ from one another
o Cuts across all other domains
II. The biological domain
o Genetics, psychophysiology and evolution
III. The intrapsychic domain
o Deals with mental mechanisms of personality, many of which operate outside of conscious
awareness
IV. The cognitive/experiential domain
o Focuses on cognition and subjective experience
V. The social and cultural domain
o Assumes that: personality affects and is affected by the social and cultural context
VI. The adjustment domain
o Refers to the fact that personality plays a key role in how we cope with, adapt and adjust to
the events in our day-to-day lives
There are 5 scientific standards for evaluating personality theories
1. Comprehensiveness – does the theory explain all of the facts and observations within this domain?
2. Heuristic value – does the theory provide a guide to important new discoveries about personality?
3. Testability – can we test the theory empirically?
4. Parsimony – does the theory contain few premises and assumptions (parsimony) or many (lack of
parsimony)?
5. Compatibility & integration across domains and levels
Personality Assessment, Measurement and Research Design
Sources of personality data
- Self-report Data (S-Data)
o Main reason to use: individuals have most access to info about themselves that is inaccessible to
anyone else (self-esteem, fears, fantasies etc.)
o 2 variants of questions
§ Unstructured – open-ended, e.g. “Tell me about the parties you like the most”
§ Structured – more closed, e.g. “I like loud and crowded parties” à True/False, or rank on
scale
- Observer-report Data (O-Data)
o Advantages: can report e.g. on impression a person makes on others, social reputation, multiple
observers for one individual (inter-rater reliability!) > can assess multiple social personalities (we
all display different sides of ourselves to different people)
o Disadvantages: biased because of intimate relationships
o Naturalistic observation – observers witness and record events that occur in the normal course
of the lives of their participants
o Artificial observation – observers witness and record events that occur within experimenter-
generated situations
- Test Data (T-Data)
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