Persoonlijkheidspsychologie
Personality Psychology – Domains of Knowledge about Human Nature
Third edition
Chapter 1
Personality traits = adjectives that can be used to describe characteristics of people
Personality = the set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are
organized and relatively enduring and that influence his or her interactions with, and
adaptations to, the intrapsychic, psychical and social environ ments
Psychological traits = characteristics that describe ways in whcih people are different from
each other
Psychological thrats are useful for at least three reasons:
- They can help describe people
- They help explain behaviour
- They can help predict furutre behaviour
Thus… useful in describing, explaining and predicting differences between individuals
Psychological mechanisms = are like traits, except that the term “mechanisms” refers more
to the processes of personality
They have three essential ingredients: inputs, decision rules and outputs
Within the individual = personality is something a person carries with him or herself over
time and from one situation to the next
Organized = the psychological traits and mechanisms, for a given person, are not simply a
random collection of elements. Rather, personality is organized because the mechanisms
and traits are linked to one another in a coherent fashion
Enduring = somewhat consistent over situations or time
Influentioal forces = personality traits and mechanisms can have an effect on people’s lives
Person-environment interaction =
Interactions with situations include:
- Perceptions {how we ‘see’ or interpret and environment}
- Selections {describes the manner in which we choose situations to enter – how
we choose our friends, hobbies, university classes and careers}
- Evocations {the reactions we produce in others, often quite unintentionally}
- Manipulations {ways in which we intentionally attempt to influence others
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,Adaptions = conveys the notion that a central feature of personality concerns adaptive
functioning – accomplishing goals, coping, adjusting and dealing with the challenges and
problems we face as we go through life
Environment: physical, social and intrapsychic
At a psychological level, our fears of heights, snaked, spiders and strangers help us avoid or
safely interect with these environmental threats to our survival
Our social environment also poses adaptive challenges
Intrapsychic = means “within the mind”. We all have memories, dreams, desires, fantasies
and a collection of private experiences that we live with each day
From among the potentially infinite dimensions of the environments we inhavit, our
‘effective environment’ represents only the small subset of features that our psychological
mechanisms direct us to attend and respond to.
Self-esteem = how good or bad we feel about ourselves at any given moment
Personality can be analysed at three different levels:
1. Like all others (the human nature level)
- Need to belong
- Capacity for love
2. Like some others (the level of individual and group differences), and
- Variation in need to belong
- Men more psychically aggressive than women
3. Like no others (the individual uniqueness level)
- Karel’s unique way of expressing his anger
- Feline’s unique way of expressing her curiosity
Human nature = the traits and machanisms of personality that are typical of our species and
are possessed by everyone or nearly everyone
Individual differences = ways in which each person is like some other people (e.g. extraverts,
sensation seekers
Group differences = people in one group may have certain personality features in common,
and these common features make that group of people different from other groups {for
example: different age groups, different political parties}
Men-women differences:
Females go through puberty, on average, two years earlier than males
Men in France, Finland and Spain tend to die seven years earlier than women
Men are typically more physically aggressive than women
Cultural or ethnic group differences
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, One goal of personality psychology is to understand why certain aspects of personality are
differentiated along group lines, such as understanding how and why women are different
from men and why persons from one culture are different from persons from another
culture.
Nomothetic research = typically invloves statistical comparisons of individuals or groups,
requiring samples of subjects on which to conduct research.
This kind of research is applied to identify universal human characterustics and
dimensions of individual or group differences
Idiographic research = typically focuses on a single subject, trying to observe general
principles that are manifest in a single life over time
Sigmund Freud: psychic structure ID, EGO and SUPEREGO
Psychosexual development universal stages
Domain of knowledge = a speciality area of science and scholarship, in which psychologists
have focused on learning about some specifik and limited aspects of human nature
Field of personality =
- Traits the person is born with or develops (dispositional domain)
- Biological events (biological domain)
- Conflicts with the person’s own mind (intrapsychic domain)
- Personal and private thoughts, feelings, desires, beliefs and other subjective
experiences (cognitive experiential domain)
- Social, cultural and gendered positions in the world (social and cultural domain)
- The adjustments that the person must make to the inevitable challenges of life
(adjustment domain)
Dispositional domain = deals centrally with the ways in which individuals are disposed to
behave, and why these dispositions differ from one another
intrested in the number and nature of fundamental dispositions
goal: identify and measure the most important ways in which individuals are disposed to
differ from one another
Biological domain = humans are, first and foremost, collections of biological systems, and
these systems provide the building blocks for behaviour, thought and emotion
refers to three areas =
Genetics: to what degree is personality heritable?
Psycho-physiology: researchers summarize what is known about the basis of personality in
terms of nervous system functioning
Evolution: how evolution may have shaped human psychological functioning
Intrapsychic domain = deals with mental mechanisms of personality, many of which operate
outside of counscious awareness
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