Personality psychology
Hoofdstuk 1
Trait-descriptive adjectives: adjectives that can be used to describe characteristics of people
(features of personality)
Personality: the set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are
organized and relatively enduring and that influence their interactions with, and adaptations
to, the intrapsychic, physical and social environments
psychological traits: characteristics that describe ways in which people are different from
each other
traits describe the average tendencies of a person
❖ Useful for 3 reasons
➢ to describe people and help understand the differences in dimensions among
people
➢ they help explain behavior
➢ they can help predict future behavior
■ research on traits asks 4 kind of questions:
● How many traits are there?
● How are the traits organized?
● what are the origin of the traits?
● what are the correlations and consequences of traits?
Psychological mechanisms: similar to traits but refers more to the processes
❖ most times involves an information processing activity
❖ 3 essential ingredients:
➢ Inputs (psychological mechanism might make people more sensitive
to certain kind of information from the environment)
➢ decision rules (may make them more likely to think about specific
options)
➢ outputs (may guide their behavior toward certain categories of actions)
Within the individual: personality is something they carry with them over time and from one
situation to the next
Organized: psychological traits and mechanisms for a given person are not simply a random
collection of elements. they are organized as they are linked together
influential forces of personality means the traits and mechanisms can have effect on
people’s lives, how we act, how we feel, how we view ourselves, how we think about the
world, how we interact with others, how we select our (social) environments, what goals and
desires we pursue in life, and how we react to circumstances
person-environment interactions:
➔ interactions with situations include:
◆ perceptions
◆ selections (in which we choose situations to enter)
◆ evacuations (the reactions we provoke in others, mostly unintentionally)
◆ manipulations ( the ways win wich we intentionally attempt to influence others
intrapsychic environment (intrapsychic = within the mind) living with your dreams, memories,
desires, fantasies and a collection of private experiences we live with each day
,Whether individuals should be studied nomothetically (as individuals instances of general
characteristics that are distributed in the population)
● typically involves statistical comparisons of individuals or groups, requiring samples
of participants on which to conduct research
● typically applied to identify universal hum characteristics and dimensions of
individuals or group differences
or idiographically: as single unique cases (literally: the description of one)
● typically focuses on a single person, trying to observe general principles that are
manifest in a single life over time
● often results in case study of psychological biography of a single person
1. The human nature 2. the level of 3. The individual
level / universals individuals and uniqueness level /
group-differences / uniqueness
particulars
Like all others Like some others Like no others
ex. Need to belong, capacity ex. Variation in need to Unique way of expressing
for love belong (individual themselves
difference)
ex. Men more aggressive
than women (group
difference)
6 domains of knowledge: is a specialty area of science and scholarship in which
psychologists have focused on learning about something specific and limited aspects of
human nature
1. dispositional domain (born with and how they develop over time)
2. biological domain (refers to genetics, psychophysiology ((ex. hormones,
nervous system functioning)), and evolution)
3. intrapsychic domain (processes within one's mind, in subconscious and
thereby closely linked to Sigmunds Freuds psychoanalytic theory)
4. cognitive- experiential domain (by personal and private thoughts, feelings,
desires, beliefs, and other subjective experiences)
5. social and cultural domain (by social, cultured and gendered positions in the
world)
6. adjustment domain (adjustment of adaptations that people make to the
inevitable challenges of life)
a good theory meets these 3 requirements:
1. provides a guide for researchers
2. organize and explains known findings, and
3. makes predictions
5 scientific standards for evaluating personality theories
1. comprehensiveness (good job of explaining and preferably more empirical findings)
2. heuristic value (guides to make more discoveries)
3. testability (precision of predictions and can be tested empirically)
, 4. parsimony (=few premises and assumptions, or many = lack of parsimony)
5. compatibility and integration across domains and levels (a theory about one domain
has to be compatible with the already existing theories in the other domains)
Hoofdstuk 3
Trait-descriptive adjectives: words that describe traits, attributes of a person that are
reasonably characteristic for them and perhaps enduring over time.
Traits are also called dispositions
some psychologists believe traits cause behavior while others use it to describe behavior
● traits as internal causal properties: presumed to be internal in the sense that
individuals carry their desires, needs and wants from one situation to the next.
Also causal (they explain behavior, internal desire influences her external
behavior)
○ capacities remain present even when particular behavior is not
expressed
○ formulation of traits as internal causal properties, differs radically from
an alternative description that merely sees traits as merely descriptive
summaries of actual behavior
● traits as purely descriptive summaries: proponents of this alternative
formulation define traits simply as descriptive summaries od attribute of
persons; they make no assumptions about internality or causality
○ psychologists who endorse this have explored the implications of this
formulation in a program of research called the ‘’act frequency
approach’’
■ act frequency approach involves 3 key elements:
● act nomination (=procedure designed to identify which
acts belong in which trait categories)
● prototypically judgment (second step involves
identifying which acts are most central to or prototypical
of each trait category)
● Recording Act Performance (third step consists of
securing information on the actual performance of
individuals in their daily life, can be on thoughts too ex.
suicidal ideation is good predictor for depression)
Criticism on act frequency approach because it does not specify how much context should
be included in the description of a trait-relevant act, also because there are traits not
observable (yet) due to failure or situations (Ex. someone might be courageous but has
never been in a dangerous situation)
Also used to predict salary, job success, rate of promotions/ acts of ‘’mate guarding’’ which
predicts violence in relationships/ acts of deception in social situations
3 fundamental approaches have been used to identify important traits
➔ Lexical approach (all traits listed and defined in the dictionary)
, ➔ statistical approach (uses factor analysis, or similar statistical procedures, to identify
major personality traits)
➔ theoretical approach (relies on theories to identify important traits)
lexical hypothesis: all important individual differences have become encoded within the
natural language
lexical approach yields 2 criteria for identifying most important traits
● synonym frequency
● cross- cultural universality
factor analysis: identifies groups of items that covary but do no covary with other groups of
items
adjective rating Factor 1 (extraversion) Factor 2 (ambition) etc..
humorous .66 .06
amusing .65 .23
factor loading: (the numbers underneath the factors.) indicate the degree in which the item
correlates with or loads on the underlying factor
factor analysis tells us that hard-working, productive and determined all covary sufficiently
that they can be considered a single trait
Eysenk’s hierarchical model of personality, most strongly rooted in biology as he believed
the model of traits were highly heritable and had a likely psychophysical foundation
➔ 3 main traits were extraversion-introversion (E), neuroticism-emotional stability (N)
and psychoticism (P) easily remembered as: PEN
◆ Neuroticism includes anxious, irritability, guilty, lacking self-esteem, tense,
shy, and moody. tends to be a worries, frequently anxious and depressed,
trouble sleeping and a wide array of psychosomatic symptoms. overreactivity
to negative emotions, stay angry longer and are less forgiving. they
experience more arousal over the stresses in everyday life, tend to express
more dissatisfactions with romantic relationships
◆ High in psychoticism traits include aggressive, cold, egocentric, impersonal,
impulsive, antisocial, unempathetic, creative, though-minded. impulsivity and
lack of empathy co-occur in individuals. can be cruel and have a history with
animal cruelty, both verbally and physically aggressive with loved ones. likes
to make fools of other people. preference violent films. more likely sexual
predators. could be labeled with antisocial personality or psychopathic
personality
Dark triad: psychopathy, narcissism and machiavellianism.
there are 2 aspects of the biological underpinnings of Eysenck’s personality system:
heritability and identifiable physiological substrate
limitations taxonomy: many other traits also show moderate heritability and
may have missed some traits
