Summary

Psychology of Personality - Summary, Tilburg University (9)

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Course
Psychology Of Personality

Institution
Tilburg University (UVT)

Book
Personality Psychology 2e ed

A summary of the course Psychology of Personality and I got a 9 with this summary. The summary consists of the lectures of professor van Scheppingen and the chapter 1-8, 10, 11 13, 14, 15,16, 18, 19 of the book "Personality Psychology" from Larsen, Buss, Wismeijer and Song. The summary also incl...

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Summarized whole book? No
Which chapters are summarized? Chapter 1 - 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19
Uploaded on March 25, 2021
Number of pages 41
Written in 2020/2021
Type Summary

personality
psychology
personality psychology
psychology of personality
persoonlijkheid
psychologie
tilburg
larsen
buss
wismeijer
song
summary
9
grade nine

Book Title:Personality Psychology 2e ed

Author(s):Randy J. Larsen, David M. Buss

Edition:januari 2013
ISBN:9780077145644
Edition:1

Summary
Psychology of Personality - Summary
Summary
Samenvatting Personality Psychology, ISBN: 9780077145644 Psychologie Van Het Persoonlijke (TPP07)
Summary
Samenvatting Persoonlijkheidsleer en -Onderzoek Jaar 1.5 Psychologie

Institution
Tilburg University (UVT)
Education
Psychology [EN]
Course
Psychology Of Personality

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Chapter 1: Introduction to Personality Psychology
Personality Defined
 Personality = set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are
organized and relatively enduring and that influence his interactions with, and adaptions to,
the intrapsychic, physical, and social environments.
 Psychological traits = describe people, explain behaviour, and predict future behaviour.
 Psychological mechanisms = processes of personality. Three essential ingredients: inputs,
decision rules and outputs.
 Organized = mechanisms and traits are linked to one another in a coherent fashion.
 Enduring = psychological traits and mechanisms are consistent over time.
 Influential forces = personality traits and mechanisms have an effect on people’s lives.
 Person-environment interaction = interactions with situations include perceptions,
selections, evocations, and manipulations.
 Adaption = personality concerns adaptive functioning (coping, adjusting, accomplishing).
 Environment = intrapsychic, physical, and social environment.
Three Levels of Personality Analysis
 Human nature
o Nomothetic research = statistical comparisons of individuals or groups.
 Individual and group differences
 Individual uniqueness
o Idiographic research = focuses on a single subject.
Six Domains of Knowledge about Human Nature
 Domain of knowledge = delineates the boundaries of researchers’ knowledge, expertise and
interests.
 Dispositional domain deals with ways in which individuals differ from one another.
 Biological domain: humans are collections of biological systems, and these systems provide
the building blocks for behaviour, thought and emotion. Three areas: genetics,
psychophysiology, and evolution.
 Intrapsychic domain deals with mental mechanisms of personality.
 Cognitive-experiential domain focuses on cognition and subjective experience. Knowledge of
ourselves, intelligence, goals we strive for, and emotions.
 Social and cultural domain: personality is influenced by social, cultural, and gendered
positions in the world.
 Adjustment domain refers to the fact that personality plays a key role in how we cope with,
adapt, and adjust to the events in our daily lives.
Personality Theories
 A good theory fulfils three purposes in science:
o Provides a guide for researchers
o Organizes known findings
o Makes predictions
 Five scientific standards for evaluating personality theories:
o Comprehensiveness – explain most or all known facts.
o Heuristic value – guides researchers to important new discoveries.
o Testability – make precise predictions that can be empirically tested.
o Parsimony – contains few premises or assumptions.
o Compatibility and integration across domains and levels – consistent with what is
known in other domains.
A brief history
 Ancient China (2200 B.C) – earliest report of psychological testing, fitness for office
 Ancient Greece (450 B.C) – Hippocrates and Galen: Four Humors, Plato: childhood personality
development.

,  Renewed interest in 19th
o Francis Galton and James Cattell – individual differences, eugenics
o Alfred Binet – scale of intelligence, individual differences in high order processes
o William James and Sigmund Freud – ideas, but no empirical research on individual
differences in character
o Focus on testing personality  WW 1: Recruitment, detection of “combat stress”
(PTSS)
 Start of an organized scientific discipline
o 1932: scientific journal “Character and Personality”
o 1937, the real starting point: Publication of “Personality: A Psychological
Interpretation”, by Gordon Allport

Chapter 2: Personality Assessment, Measurement and Research Design
Sources of Personality Data
 Self-report data (S-data) = information a person reveals
o Unstructured = open-ended, structured = closed questions
o Likert rating scale = a 7-poin rating scale
o Projective tests – unreliable and subjective?
o Limitations: lying or lack accurate self-knowledge
 Observer-report data (O-data) = gathering information with observation
o Inter-rater reliability = degree of agreement among observers
o Selection of observers
 Professional personality assessors who do not know the participants.
 Use individuals who actually know the target participants.
 Multiple social personalities can be assessed.
 May be biased in ways  unnoticed, leads to erroneous conclusions
o Natural observation = observers witness and record events that occur in the normal
course of the lives of their participants.
o Artificial observation = experimenters can instruct participants to perform a task and
then observe how individuals behave in these constructed settings.
 Test data (T-data) = information comes from standardized tests
o Idea: see if different people react differently to an identical situation.
o Limitations: participants guess what it’s about, are you testing the right variable,
researcher can influence participants
o Some aspects of personality can be assessed through mechanical recording devices.
o Using physiological data, people cannot fake.
o Projective techniques = person is given a standard stimulus and asked what he sees.
 Idea: the person ‘projects’ his concerns, conflicts, traits etc. onto the
ambiguous stimulus.
 Life-outcome date (L-data) = information that can be gleaned from the events, activities and
outcomes in a person’s life that are available to public scrutiny.
o Personality characteristics represent only one set of causes of life outcomes.
 Issues in personality assessment
o Interpretations of links among sources of personality data depends heavily on the
research questions.
o If same results are found with two data sources, then researchers van have greater
confidence in the credibility of those findings.
 Triangulation = combine methods to study one phenomenon
o Aggregation = process of adding up, or averaging, several single observations,
resulting in a better measure of a personality trait than a single observation.

,  Longer questionnaires are more reliable and valid.
Evaluation of Personality Measures
 Reliability = degree to which an obtained measure represents the true level of the trait being
measured.
o Repeated measurement: test-retest reliability (over time), internal consistency
reliability (between items on the same test).
o Internal-rater reliability
 Response sets/non-content responding = tendency of some people to respond to questions
on a basis that is unrelated to the question content.
o Acquiescence = yes saying
o Extreme responding = tendency to give endpoint responses
o Social desirability = answer items to come across as socially attractive or likeable.
 Two views: error/distortion and should be minimized and valid part of other
desirable personality traits.
 Social desirability test: when you score high, no longer in research
 Developing questionnaires that are less susceptible to this type of responding.
 Pose questions that are experienced as less threatening.
 Forced-choice questionnaire
 Validity = extent to which a test measures what it claims to measures
o Face validity = whether the test appears to measure what it is supposed to measure.
o Predictive/criterion validity = whether the test predicts criteria external to the test.
o Convergent validity = whether a test correlates with other measures that it should
correlate with.
o Discriminant validity = whether a test does not correlate with other measures that it
should not correlate with.
o Construct validity = test that measures what it claims to measures correlates with
what it is supposed to correlate with, and does not correlate with what it is not
supposed to correlate with.
 Encompasses all other forms of validity
 Reliability without validity, no reliability no validity
 Generalizability = degree to which the measure retains its validity across various contexts.
Development of Measurement Instruments
 Conceptual definitions = what is measured.
 Focus group = groups of people that are representative for the population at which the
instrument is targeted.
Research Design in Personality
 Experimental methods = used to determine causality.
o Random assignment
o Counterbalancing = mixing up the sequences.
o Different conditions are significantly different
 Sample size, mean, standard deviation, t-test, p-value: statistically significant.
 Correlational studies = statistical procedure is used for determining whether or not there is a
relationship between two variables.
o Correlation coefficient
o Correlation can never prove causality: directionality problem and third variable
problem
 Case studies = examining life of one person in depth
o Great details, insights that formulate general theory, studying rare phenomena.
o Limitations: most important findings cannot be generalized.

, Chapter 3: Traits and Trait Taxonomies
What is a Trait? Two Basic Formulations
 Traits to be internal causal properties of persons that affect over behavior and remain present
even when particular behaviors are not actually expressed.
 Traits are descriptive summaries of overt behavior; no assumptions about internality or
causality.
 Personality coherence = precise behavioral manifestations of a trait do not remain the same.
 Traits = represent typical behavior of a person over prolonged periods of time.
 States = vary across time and situations, and can therefore be regarded as within-subject
variations of behavior.
The Act Frequency Formulation of Traits
 Act frequency approach = starts with notion that traits are categories of acts. A trait is a
descriptive summary of general trend in person’s behavior – how often does that person
usually show behavior that fall within that specific category.
o Three key elements:
 Act nomination = procedure designed to identify which acts belong in which
categories
 Prototypicality judgment = identifying which acts are most central to each
trait category.
 Recording of act performance = securing information on the actual
performance of individuals in their daily lives.
o Limitations: context of situation, failures and covert acts that are not observable.
o Strengths: identifying behavioral regularities, cultural differences/similarities, identify
domains in which it provides insight in personality (self-report or observable), predict
important outcomes.
Identification of the Most Important Traits
 Lexical approach = all traits are listed and defined in the dictionary form the basis of the
natural way of describing differences between people.
o Lexical hypothesis = all important individual differences have become encoded within
the natural language.
o Two criteria for identifying important traits:
 Synonym frequency = if an attribute has not merely one or two trait
adjectives to describe it, then it is a more important dimension of individual
difference.
 Cross-cultural universality = if a trait is sufficiently important in all cultures
that its members have codified terms to describe it, then the trait must be
universally important in human affairs.
o Limitations: meaning is not clear, some words are ambiguous, personality is more
than adjectives.
 Statistical approach = uses factor analysis to identify major personality traits.
o Pool of personality items  large number of people rate themselves on the items 
using statistical procedure to identify groups of items.
o Goal: to identify the major dimensions of personality map.
o Factor analysis = identifies groups of items that covary but tend not to covary with
other groups of items.
 Factor loadings = indicate the degree to which the item correlates with
underlying factor.
o Limitation: if important personality trait is left out, it will not show up in results.

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