An extensive summary of the key terms and their descriptions/explanations of all chapters 1-20 of the book. Written for the course Personality psychology / Persoonlijkheidspsychologie at the RUG.
Personality Psychology
1 Introduction to Personality Psychology
Personality Defined
trait-descriptive adjectives:
Words that describe traits; attributes of a person that are reasonably characteristic of the individual
and perhaps even enduring over time.
personality:
The set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are organised and relatively
enduring and that influence his or her interactions with, and adaptations to, the environment (including
the intrapsychic, physical and social environment).
psychological traits:
Characteristics that describe ways in which people are unique or different from or similar to each
other. Psychological traits include all sorts of aspects of persons that are psychologically meaningful
and are stable and consistent aspects of personality.
average tendencies:
Tendency to display a certain psychological trait with regularity. For example, on average, a high-
talkative person will start more conversations than a low-talkative person. This idea explains why the
principle of aggregation works when measuring personality.
psychological mechanisms:
Similar to traits, except that mechanisms refer more to the processes of personality. For example,
most personality mechanisms involve some information-processing activity. A psychological
mechanism may make people more sensitive to certain kinds of information from the environment
(input), may make them more likely to think about specific options (decision rules) or may guide their
behaviour towards certain categories of action (outputs).
within the individual:
The important sources of personality reside within the individual -that is, people carry the sources of
their personality inside themselves- and hence are stable over time and consistent over situations.
organised and enduring:
‘Organised’ means that the psychological traits and mechanisms for a given person are not simply a
random collection of elements. Rather, personality is coherent because the mechanisms and traits are
linked to one another in an organised fashion. ‘Enduring’ means that the psychological traits are
generally consistent over time, particularly in adulthood, and over situations.
influential forces:
Personality traits and mechanisms are influential forces in people’s lives in that they influence our
actions, how we view ourselves, how we think about the world, how we interact with others, how we
feel, our selection of environments (particularly our social environment), what goals and desires we
pursue in life, and how we react to our circumstances. Other influential forces include sociological and
economic influences, as well as physical and biological forces.
person-environment interaction:
A person’s interactions with situations include perceptions, selections, evocations and manipulations.
Perceptions refer to how we ‘see’ or interpret an environment. Selection describes the manner in
which we choose situations -such as our friends, our hobbies, our college classes and our careers.
Evocations refer to the reactions we produce in others, often quite unintentionally. Manipulations refer
to the ways in which we attempt to influence others.
adaptations:
Inherited solutions to the survival and reproductive problems posed by the hostile forces of nature.
,Adaptations are the primary product of the selective process. An adaptation is a ‘reliably developing
structure in the organism, which, because it meshes with the recurrent structure of the world, causes
the solution to an adaptive problem’.
environment:
Environments can be physical, social and intrapsychic (within the mind). Which aspect of the
environment is important at any moment in time is frequently determined by the personality of the
person in that environment.
Three Levels of Personality Analysis
1. Human nature (like all others):
The traits and mechanisms of personality that are typical of our species and are possessed
by everyone or nearly everyone.
2. Individual and group differences (like some others):
individual differences:
Every individual has personal and unique qualities that make him or her different from others.
The study of all the ways in which individuals can differ from others, the number, origin and
meaning of such differences, is the study of individual differences.
group differences:
People in one group may have certain personality features in common, and these common
features make them different from other groups. Examples of groups studied by personality
psychologists include different cultures, age groups, political parties and people from different
socioeconomic backgrounds. The most common group difference studied by personality
psychologists concerns differences between men and women. For example, in the realm of
physical development, females go through puberty on average two years earlier than males.
At the other end of life, men in the USA tend to die seven years earlier than women. These
are sex differences in development.
3. Individual uniqueness (like no others):
nomothetic:
The study of general characters of people as they are distributed in the population, typically
involving statistical comparisons between individuals or groups.
idiographic:
The study of single individuals, with an effort to observe general principles as they are
manifest in a single life over time.
Then and Now
Six Domains of Knowledge about Human Nature
domain of knowledge:
A speciality area of science and scholarship, where psychologists have focused on learning about
some specific and limited aspect of human nature, often with preferred tools of investigation.
- dispositional domain:
Deals centrally with the ways in which individuals differ from one another. As such, the
dispositional domain connects with all the other domains. In the dispositional domain,
psychologists are primarily interested in the number and nature of fundamental dispositions,
taxonomies of traits, measurement issues and questions of stability over time and consistency
over situations.
- biological domain:
The core assumption of biological approaches to personality is that humans are, first and
foremost, collections of biological systems, and these systems provide the building blocks
(e.g. brain, nervous system) for behaviour, thought and emotion. Biological approaches
typically refer to three areas of research within this general domain: the genetics of
personality, the psychophysiology of personality and the evolution of personality.
psychophysiology:
, The branch within psychology that is concerned with the physiological bases of psychological
processes, including personality. Psychophysiological phenomena that are studied are
cortical arousal and neurotransmitters, cardiac reactivity, strength of the nervous system, pain
tolerance, circadian rhythms (whether you are a morning or night person), and the links
between hormones, such as testosterone, and personality.
- intrapsychic domain:
This domain deals with mental mechanisms of personality, many of which operate outside the
realm of conscious awareness. The predominant theory in this domain is Freud’s theory of
psychoanalysis. This theory begins with fundamental assumptions about the instinctual
system -the sexual and aggressive forces that are presumed to drive and energize much of
human activity. The intrapsychic domain also includes defence mechanisms such as
repression, denial and projection.
- cognitive-experiential domain:
This domain focuses on cognition and subjective experience, such as conscious thoughts,
feelings, beliefs and desires about oneself and others. This domain includes our feelings of
self, identity, self-esteem, our goals and plans, and our emotions.
- social and cultural domain:
Personality affects, and is affected by, the social and cultural context in which it is found.
Different cultures may bring out different facets of our personalities in manifest behaviour. The
capacities we display may depend to a large extent on what is acceptable in and encouraged
by our culture. At the level of individual differences within cultures, personality plays itself out
in the social sphere. One important social sphere concerns relations between men and
women.
- adjustment domain:
Personality plays a key role in how we cope with, adapt and adjust to the ebb and flow of
events in our day-to-day lives. In addition to health consequences of adjusting to stress,
certain personality features are related to poor social or emotional adjustment and have been
designated as personality disorders.
The Role of Personality Theory
good theory:
A theory that serves as a useful guide for researchers, organises known facts and makes predictions
about future observations.
theories and beliefs:
Beliefs are often personally useful and crucially important to some people, but they are based on
leaps of faith, not on reliable facts and systematic observations. Theories, on the other hand, are
based on systematic observations that can be repeated by others and that yield similar conclusions.
Standards for Evaluating Personality Theories
- comprehensiveness: (explains most or all known facts).
Theories that explain more empirical data within a domain are generally superior to those that
explain fewer findings.
- heuristic value: (guides researchers to important new discoveries).
Theories that steer scientists to important new discoveries about personality are superior to
those that fail to provide this guidance.
- testability: (makes precise predictions that can be empirically tested).
The capacity to render precise predictions that scientists can test empirically. Generally, the
testability of a theory is dependent upon the precision of its predictions. If it is impossible to
test a theory empirically, the theory is generally discarded.
- parsimony: (contains few premises or assumptions).
The fewer premises and assumptions a theory contains, the greater its parsimony. This does
not mean that simple theories are always better than complex ones. Due to the complexity of
, the human personality, a complex theory -that is, one containing many premises- may
ultimately be necessary for adequate personality theories.
- compatibility and integration across domains and levels: (consistent with what is known
in other domains; can be coordinated with other branches of scientific knowledge).
A theory that takes into account the principles and laws of other scientific domains that may
affect the study’s main subject. For example, a theory of biology that violated known
principles of chemistry would be judged fatally flawed.
Is There a Grand Ultimate and True Theory of Personality?
2 Personality Assessment, Measurement and Research Design
Sources of Personality Data
- self-report data (S-data):
Information a person verbally reveals about themselves, often based on questionnaire or
interview. Self-report data can be obtained through a variety of means, including interviews
that pose questions to a person, periodic reports by a person to record the events as they
happen, and questionnaires of various sorts.
unstructured:
Open-ended questions in personality tests.
structured:
Forced-choice true or false questions in personality tests.
Likert rating scale:
A common rating scale that provides numbers that are attached to descriptive phrases, such as
0=disagree strongly, 1=disagree slightly, 2=neither agree nor disagree, etc.
experience sampling:
People answer some questions, for example about their mood or physical symptoms, every day for
several weeks or longer. People are usually contacted electronically one or more times a day at
random intervals to complete the measures. Although experience sampling uses self-report as the
data source, it differs from more traditional self-report methods in being able to detect patterns of
behaviour over time.
- observer-report data (O-data):
The impressions and evaluations others make of a person with whom they come into contact.
For every individual, there are dozens of observers who form such impressions. Observer-
report methods capitalise on these sources and provide tools for gathering information about
a person’s personality. Observers may have access to information not attainable through
other sources, and multiple observers can be used to assess each individual. Typically, a
more valid and reliable assessment of personality can be achieved when multiple observers
are used.
inter-rater reliability:
Multiple observers gather information about a person’s personality, then investigators evaluate the
degree of consensus among the observers. When different observers agree with one another, the
degree of inter-rater reliability increases. When different raters fail to agree, the measure is said to
have low inter-rater reliability.
multiple social personalities:
Each of us displays different sides of ourselves to different people -we may be kind to our friends,
ruthless to our enemies, loving toward a spouse and conflicted toward our parents. Our social
personalities vary from one setting to another, depending on the nature of relationships we have with
other individuals.
naturalistic observation:
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