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Complete summary of Personality Psychology
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Chapter 1 Personality Psychology- = Understanding the whole person
- Personality = (book def) set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the
individual that is organized and relatively enduring and that influences his or her
interactions with, and adaptations to, the environment (intrapsychic, physical, social
environment)
1. Traits = tendency to act/think a certain way
a. We study traits because the whole person is too complex - “most important” traits
(like the Big Five)
b. The Big Five personality traits are predictive → link to causes (like genes,
evolution) and consequences (divorce, health, longevity)
c. Described using trait-descriptive adjectives
2. Mechanisms = information processing = process of personality
a. Input (info about env) → decision rule (personality) → output (guide beh)
b. Not all traits are active, depends on circumstances
3. Within the individual: - individual differences
4. ...organized and relatively enduring = consistent over time and situations
a. As opposed to state, which passes quickly
b. How they are linked
5. ...influences interactions with environment = no social vacuum but a social context -
effect on life
6. ...adaptations to → adaptive functions
a. = meeting goals, coping with daily errands
b. dysfunctional/functional behaviors
7. ...environment - in the broadest way possible
a. Poses challenges ( physical - solutions, technology; social - closeness,
competing, struggle for belonging, love, esteem)
b. Effective environment = small subset of features that our psy mechanisms direct
us to attend and respond to
- Personality determines behavior, feelings, perceptions of others and ourselves, the
environments we select
Levels of Analysis
Henry Murray
1. Human Nature - how we are like All other people
a. nomothetic - general law that applies to all people; statistical methods
2. Individual/group differences - like Some others
a. This is easiest to study, most people focus on this
b. Ex: Big Five traits
3. Individual uniqueness - like No other
, a. Idiographic research - qualitative
b. Idiographic statistical techniques
c. Emorie Beck: measuring one’s uniqueness over time
Brief History
Ancient China
- Written exams (earliest reports of psychological testing) to test fitness for office
Ancient Greece
- Hippocrates & Galen: Four humours that influence personality
- Plato: childhood personality development
19th century
- Francis Galton - Galton Board, fingerprints (if they are unique for every person, create
database)
- Also eugenics :(
- James Cattell - mental tests and measurements to a large number of individuals to find
patterns
- Alfred Binet:
- 1905: standardized scale of intelligence
- Individual differences in higher order processes - intelligence
- Building blocks for later personality test
William James, Sigmund Freud
- WW1: recruitment, detection of “combat stress” (sensitivity later linked to neuroticism)
- 1932: Scientific Journal: Character and Personality
Gordon Allport - Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (1937)
Domains:
- Dispositional
- Biological
- Intrapsychic = un,conscious mental mechanisms, theory of psychosexual dev
- Cognitive-experiential = cognition and subjective experience
- Social & cultural
- Adjustment = how we cope, adapt, adjust in day to day lives
Theories
- Good ones guide, organize, and help make predictions
- Systematic observations, yield the same conclusions
1. Comprehensiveness
2. Heuristic value = guide new discoveries
3. Testability = requires a degree of precision
4. Parsimony - few premises and assumptions
5. Compatibility & integration across domains & levels - if it violates principles it is flawed
,Chapter 2
Social Sciences → no direct measure is possible, so good research (good measurement) is v.
difficult
- Replication crisis is not applicable to personality psychology due to its solid
measurements
Self-Report Data (S DATA)
- Indiv. Own report of their personality
- Benefits
- Some information is only known by the individual (subjective experience)
- Interview: allows thorough exploration
- Questionnaire: time efficient, large samples, anonymity helps with social
desirability
- Limitations
- People may not respond honestly - social desirability
- May lack accurate self-knowledge
- Experience sampling = answer questions every day for several weeks or longer.
Unstructured S-Data:
- Interview, autobiography → allowing people to go on freely about themselves
- Open questions like the “20 statement test” (TST)
- Useful for exploring central aspects of one’s identity; looking at the order in which
one tells about themselves
- Cross cultural research
- Objective coding schemes are necessary to be able to compare results across multiple
persons → thematic analysis
Structured S Data
- Self report questionnaires with adjectives (yes or no); Likert scales work better than
yes/no
- Multiple items that aim to measure the same construct, combine into a scale
score; using reverse codes
- Mood and in-the-moment feeling can affect performance on questionnaire
- Fluctuations from situation to situation and across time
- Adjusting questionnaire to encompass more nuance
- Experience sampling - diary data
Observer-Report Data
= information provided by someone else about a person
Benefits
- Access to unique social information not attainable through other sources
- Multiple social personalities
- Multiple observers can be used to assess a person
, - Thus establish interrater reliability
Selection of Observers
- Professional personality assessors
- In the lab (controlled setting), but low ecological validity →
- Naturalistic setting (ecological validity)
- People who actually know the target person
- Often better than professional personality assessors at observing natural
behavior
- Observing multiple social personalities
- Observer may be biased however
Test Data
= information provided through standardized tests or testing situations
If people react differently to an identical situation
= situation designed to elicit behaviors that serve as indicators of personality
Limitations
- The Validity of these is questionable (do we measure what we want to measure?)
- Indirect indicators of personality: r time, activity, projection on picture
Implicit tests
- Implicit association test
- Greenwals et al in the 90s.
- Response to self report data that is susceptible to social desirability and social
representation
- Using the IAT one can fix these issues (it is based on Reaction time )
Mechanical Registration Equipment
- Measuring activity levels in children - actigraph
- Found correspondence with observations of teachers ( combination with O Data)
- Relatively free of subjective bias
- However, it is only useful for Some traits
Physiological Data
- Information about a person’s level of arousal, reactivity to stimuli, which can be
indicators of personality
- Ex: Cortisol Awakening Response saliva samples
- Women with BPD have stronger cortisol awakening response compared to
control group
Projective techniques
- “Characteristic way of interpreting ambiguous stimuli” → Ambiguous stimuli that then
describe what you see
- Idiographic approach → particularities of a single person
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