Psychology of personality
Week 1, introduction, and personality traits
Course information:
- Group assignment 20% due dec 8
- Exam 80%
- Ipip.ori.org for assignment
Personality defined:
- Depending on who you ask, personality has a wide variety of meanings and differences
(traits, motives, interests, abilities, identity)
- The currently dominant perspective on personality focuses on character or personality traits:
relatively stable characteristics that affect our behaviors, emotions and thought patterns
Two definitions:
1, personality is the se of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are
organized and influences interactions and adaptations
2, characteristic sets of behavior, cognitions, and emotional patterns that evolve from
biological and environmental factors.
- Traits: characteristic ways of thinking feeling and behaving that we have
- Mechanisms: the process of personality, consists of input, decision rules and outputs
- Organized: some traits are different than others
- Relatively enduring: relatively consistent over situations and enduring
- Influences: traits and mechanisms can influence lives, influenced how we think act and feel.
- Perceptions: how we see or interpret and environment
- Selection: the manner in which we choose situations to enter
- Evocations: the reactions we produce in others
- Manipulations: the ways in which we intentionally attempt to influence others
- Adaptations: unique way of approaching the world
- Intrapsychic environment: within the mind, not only the objective environment but also our
interpretation
3 goals and levels of personality research:
- Nomothetic approach (universal) and idiographic approach (unique)
- Human nature (nomo), individual and group differences (in between) , individual
uniqueness(idio)
- Personality psychology is in the middle usually
- Goals:
1. Describing: ex: how do people differ
2. Explain: why do they differ
3. Apply: what are the consequences
Traits:
- Words that describe traits, attributes
- When we talk about personality, we use labels or ‘types’
the reality: personality traits differences between humans are continuous and normally
distributed
- Types are artificial categorizations
- How do you identify the most important personality traits? 3 main ways:
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, 1. Theoretical approach: based on theoretical considerations important traits are identified,
described, structured, and measured four temperaments (Hippocrates &Galen)
purely philosophical theories don’t exist in psychology, they are always based on
some observations
but large difference of quality of theories
2. External approach: comparing groups of people and finding differences
also known as empirical criterion-keying
rarely done
MMPI (Hathaway and McKinley)
difference need to be statistically tested
3. Lexical approach: starts with lexical/sedimentation hypothesis: all important individual
differences have become encoded within the natural language over time
trait terms are important for people in communicating with others
two criteria for identifying important traits:
1, Synonym frequency (number of trait adjectives to
describe the same attribute)
2, Cross-cultural universality (the more important an
individual difference is in human transactions, the
more languages will have a term for it)
Lexical approach:
1)Collect personality descriptive adjectives from exhaustive dictionary
2) Reduce the number to a measurable amount (e.g., remove
synonyms, rare, complicated words)
3) Collect self-report data on adjectives:
4) Analyze response patterns (i.e., correlations) with factor analysis
5) Label the factors
Big five:
- Extraversion: active social engagement
Gregarious, sociable, active, cheerful, assertive
Introverted, shy, quiet, passive
- Agreeableness: prosocial, communion orientation
Friendly, helpful, kind, altruistic, cooperative
Cold, cynical, aggressive, quarrelsome
- Conscientiousness: goal oriented impulse control, organization
Diligent, organized, self-controlled, reliable, accurate
Lazy, careless, distracted, unorganized
- Neuroticism: negative and instable emotionality
Anxious, fearful, stressed, irritable, depressive, volative
Relaxed, stable, robust, self-confident
- Openess for Experiences: mental depth, broadness, creativity, curiosity
Creative, curious, intellectual, innovative, artistic
Conventional, conservative, uninterested
- Ashton and Lee added Honesty-Humility
- Traits can be organized from broad to narrow (trait domains, aspects, facets, nuances)
- Strengths of the big five model:
somewhat comprehensive
provides structure
good predictor of life outcome
- Weaknesses of the big five model:
certain language, so could not be the same in other cultures
have no explanation of their causes, purely descriptive
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, Normal vs maladaptive levels:
- Maladaptive are extreme and can even be dangerous, you have maladaptive low, normal
low, normal high, maladaptive high.
- applies to the big five
what are traits?
- Traits are deep underlying psychological/neurological entities
- They casually affect our affect (emotions), behavior, cognition and desires (ABCD’s)
- Similarity of big five structures across cultures suggests that they are determined by our
biology
However:
not clear what exact causes are
we cannot directly measure traits
- Traits have an effect on out ABCD’s does not define
varies from situation to situation
- Traits represent our general ways of feeling, thinking, and behaving, but at any given
moment this is also affected by the current situation
- Adapting is normal, and always showing the same behavior can be maladaptive (personality
disorders)
Traits and states:
- Personality states: how you behave act or think how you want in this specific moment
- What you behave on average is most likely your trait level (not deterministic, not always
friendly)
- Behaving out of character (comfort zone) for prolonged amounts of time is effortful and can
lead to negative side effects
- Mostly normal distributed
- Traits can be a biological anchor
Neurological attempts at explanation:
- Research still ongoing measures are constantly changing
- Eyesenck’s PEN model:
focus on three domains: Psychoticism, Extraversion, Neuroticism (was developed before
the Big Five dominance (1990))
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