The study of personality amazonaws com
The study of personality: -
Personality = characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in an individual over time and across circumstances (584)
-
Personality trait = a dispositional tendency to act in a certain way over time and across circumstances (584)
-
Gordon Allport published the first major textbook of personality psychology (585)
-
Psychodynamic theory = Freudian theory that unconscious forces like wishes and motives influence behavior (585)
-
Freud believed that most conflict occurs in the unconscious, which is where information cannot be easily retrieved (585)
-
Pre-conscious = content that isn’t currently in awareness but can be brought to awareness (585)
-
Psychosexual stage = developmental stages that correspond to the pursuit of satisfaction of libidinal urges (586)
-
Humanistic approaches emphasize personal experience and belief systems, proposing that people seek personal growth to fulfill their human potential (587)
-
Humanism focusses on phenomenology, self-actualization, and the inherent good in all people (587)
-
Carl Rogers encouraged parents to love their children unconditionally so they could retain their hopes, feelings, and desires rather than abandoning them to achieve parental support (588)
-
Personality types = discrete categories based on global personality characteristics, and we put people in those categories, ex. shy or outgoing (589)
-
We make predictions about people based on these categories, ex. the introvert likes books (589)
-
Trait approach = focusses on the extent to which individuals differ in personality dispositions (589)
-
Hans Eysenck proposed a hierarchical model of personality (590)
-
Specific response level = observed behaviors (590)
-
Habitual response level = repeated behaviors on different occasions (590)
-
Trait = repeated behaviors on many occasions (590)
-
Superordinate traits = introversion/extroversion, emotional stability, psychoticism (590)
-
Emotional stability – the extent to which people’s moods and emotions change (590)
-
Neurotic people experience frequent and dramatic mood swings compared to people who are more stable (590)
-
Psychoticism = aggression, impulsive control, and empathy measure (590)
-
Five factor theory = personality can be described by openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism (590)
-
The big five emerge cross culturally and people’s scores have been shown to predict a variety of behaviors (591)
-
Behaviorism views personality as learned responses to patterns of reinforcement (591)
-
People have cognitive theories (personal constructs) about how the world works based on their experiences and amend those theories based on their observations (592)
-
Behavior is a function of people’s expectation of reinforcement and the values they ascribe to particular reinforcers (592)
-
Some people believe they have the control to bring about rewards while others believe that such control lies in external factors (592)
-
Humans possess personal beliefs, expectations, and thoughts that interact with the environment and shape behavior (592)
-
Behaviorism posits that personality traits often fail to predict behavior; instead, people’s responses are influenced by how they perceive a situation, their emotion response to it, their skills in dealing with challenges, and their anticipation of the outcomes of their behavior (592)
How personality is assessed and what it predicts: -
Allport divided the study of personality into idiographic approaches and nomothetic approaches (594)
-
Idiographic approaches = person centered; focusses on individual lives and how characteristics are integrated into unique persons (594)
-
Nomothetic approaches = focusses on how people vary across common traits (594)
-
Idiographic approaches assume that everyone is unique in the traits that are most central to their personalities (594)
-
Researchers who use idiographic approaches often use case studies or consider human lives as narratives (594)
-
To make sense of things, each person weaves a life story that integrates self-knowledge into a cohesive goal and constructs a personal myth about who they are and how they became who they are (594)
-
Nomothetic approaches focus on common traits like agreeableness and have people rate how agreeable/disagreeable they are on a scale (594)
-
Projective measures = personality tests that examine unconscious processes by having people interpret ambiguous stimuli (595)
-
Objective measures = direct measures of personality, usually based on self-report questionnaires or observer ratings (595)
-
There is a disconnect between how people observe themselves and how they behave, which is why friends’ reports of personality traits are more likely to be accurate than selfreports (596)
-
Situationism = behavior is determined more by situation than personality traits, ex. I might be shy with new people but outgoing with family (596)
-
People tend to be more consistent in their central traits than in their secondary traits (596)
-
Strong situations like job interviews or funerals are more predictive of behavior than personality, but weak situations like parks or parties are less predictive of behavior than personality (597)
-
Interactionists = theorists who believe behavior is determined jointly by underlying dispositions and situations (598)
-
Big five personality traits exist across all cultures, but people from East Asia generally rate themselves lower on extroversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness and higher on neuroticism, and people from Africa generally rate themselves higher on agreeableness and conscientiousness and lower on neuroticism, although these ratings may simply reflect cultural measures of the quantities of these traits (598)
-
Men and women’s self-reports tend to correspond to stereotypes about empathy and assertiveness in men and women (599)
-
Gender differences in personality are most blatant in North America in Europe, although this may be because women in Canada taking these tests are comparing themselves to both men and women while women in Africa taking these tests are comparing themselves only to other women (599)
Biological bases of personality: -
Extroversion, neuroticism, openness to experience, and agreeableness can be assessed in animals, although conscientiousness seems to be a fairly human trait, and has only been observed among chimps (602)
-
The fact that animals show basic personality traits suggests that these traits are biological and passed on through genes (604)
-
Identical twins have much more similar personalities than fraternal twins (604)
-
Even twins raised apart are very similar in big five personality traits (604)
-
Siblings who were adopted are not much more similar in personality than two random strangers (604)
-
Adopted children’s personalities are not similar to their adoptive parents’ (605)
-
Temperament = biologically based tendencies to feel or act in certain ways (606)
-
Life experiences may alter personality traits but temperaments represent the innate biological structures of personality (606)
-
Activity level, emotional intensity, and sociability are considered temperaments (606)
-
Temperament at age three predicts personality structure and a variety of behaviors in early adulthood (606)
-
Girls’ temperaments during early childhood are more calm and controlled while boys are more active and impulsive (607)
-
Infants can be classified as inhibited or uninhibited, and inhibition as an infant is a significant predictor of shyness later on (607)
-
Hans Eysenck believed differences in cortical arousal produce the behavioral differences between extroverts and introverts (607)
-
Extroverts constantly seek additional arousal by meeting new people or attending parties while introverts avoid arousal by preferring quiet, solitary activities (608)
-
Eysenck proposed that introverts’ arousal is always above their optimal level so they don’t want more arousal, while extroverts’ arousal is always below their optimal level so they want more of it (608)
-
Research has demonstrated that extroverts perform better in noisy settings (608)
-
Zuckerman described the arousal-based trait of sensation-seeking as similar to extroversion and caused by a neurochemical deficiency that motivates them to seek arousal through adventures (608)
-
Jeffrey Gay proposed that personality is rooted in motivational functions that evolved so the organism can respond to reinforcement and punishment (608)
-
Behavioral approach system = brain system involved in pursuit of rewards – the “go” system (608)
-
Behavioral inhibition system = brain system sensitive to punishment and inhibits behavior that might lead to danger or pain – the “stop” system (608)
-
Extroverts are more sensitive to rewards while introverts are more sensitive to punishment (608)
-
The BIS is associated with activity in the frontal lobes which help inhibit inappropriate social behavior (608)
-
Introversion is associated with greater activation of the frontal lobes (609)
-
Evolution has allowed for many strategies that are differentially adaptive so people have different personality traits that may work in different situations (609)
-
Human groups whose members possess diverse skills also have a selective advantage over other human groups (609)
-
As people age, they tend to grow more agreeable and conscientious and less neurotic, extroverted, and open to new experiences, although generally personality traits remain consistent (611)
-
Basic tendencies = dispositional traits determined largely by biology and are thus very stable (612)
-
Characteristic adaptations = adjustments to situational demands (612)
Our knowledge of our own personalities: -
George Herbert Mead came up with the objectified self – the I who does the knowing and the me who is known (614)
-
Self-awareness leads us to act more in accordance with our values (614)
-
Self-awareness is dependent on the frontal lobe (615)
-
Information about the self is processed deeply, thoroughly, and automatically, as opposed to information about others (615)
-
Self-schema = interconnected knowledge about the self so we can sort through which things are relevant (615)
-
The middle of the frontal lobe is more active when we are asked questions about ourselves than about questions that don’t pertain to ourselves (616)
-
Working self-concept = the immediate experience of the self at any given time (616)
-
When people consider who they are, they often emphasize characteristics that make them distinct from others, ex. in a roomful of men I am female, in a roomful of Christians I am Jewish (616)
-
Self-esteem = evaluative aspect of self-concept (616)
-
Mark Leary proposed that self-esteem monitors the likelihood of social exclusion (617)
-
Self-esteem then acts as a sociometer, a monitor of social acceptance or rejection (617)
-
Self-esteem may also provide meaning for individuals by reducing anxiety about their mortality (618)
-
Self-esteem then develops from a person’s belief that he is living up to criteria valued in his culture (618)
-
Self-esteem is not related to objectively better outcomes (618)
-
Self-evaluative maintenance = people feel threatened when someone close to them outperforms them on a task they find personally relevant (620)
-
Social comparison = people evaluate themselves by contrasting themselves with other people (621)
-
People with high self-esteem tend to make comparisons with people worse off than themselves and people with low self-esteem make comparisons with people better off (621)
-
Self-serving bias = people tend to take credit for success but blame external factors for failure (621)
Personality = characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable in an individual over time and across circumstances (584)
-
Personality trait = a dispositional tendency to act in a certain way over time and across circumstances (584)
-
Gordon Allport published the first major textbook of personality psychology (585)
-
Psychodynamic theory = Freudian theory that unconscious forces like wishes and motives influence behavior (585)
-
Freud believed that most conflict occurs in the unconscious, which is where information cannot be easily retrieved (585)
-
Pre-conscious = content that isn’t currently in awareness but can be brought to awareness (585)
-
Psychosexual stage = developmental stages that correspond to the pursuit of satisfaction of libidinal urges (586)
-
Humanistic approaches emphasize personal experience and belief systems, proposing that people seek personal growth to fulfill their human potential (587)
-
Humanism focusses on phenomenology, self-actualization, and the inherent good in all people (587)
-
Carl Rogers encouraged parents to love their children unconditionally so they could retain their hopes, feelings, and desires rather than abandoning them to achieve parental support (588)
-
Personality types = discrete categories based on global personality characteristics, and we put people in those categories, ex. shy or outgoing (589)
-
We make predictions about people based on these categories, ex. the introvert likes books (589)
-
Trait approach = focusses on the extent to which individuals differ in personality dispositions (589)
-
Hans Eysenck proposed a hierarchical model of personality (590)
-
Specific response level = observed behaviors (590)
-
Habitual response level = repeated behaviors on different occasions (590)
-
Trait = repeated behaviors on many occasions (590)
-
Superordinate traits = introversion/extroversion, emotional stability, psychoticism (590)
-
Emotional stability – the extent to which people’s moods and emotions change (590)
-
Neurotic people experience frequent and dramatic mood swings compared to people who are more stable (590)
-
Psychoticism = aggression, impulsive control, and empathy measure (590)
-
Five factor theory = personality can be described by openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism (590)
-
The big five emerge cross culturally and people’s scores have been shown to predict a variety of behaviors (591)
-
Behaviorism views personality as learned responses to patterns of reinforcement (591)
-
People have cognitive theories (personal constructs) about how the world works based on their experiences and amend those theories based on their observations (592)
-
Behavior is a function of people’s expectation of reinforcement and the values they ascribe to particular reinforcers (592)
-
Some people believe they have the control to bring about rewards while others believe that such control lies in external factors (592)
-
Humans possess personal beliefs, expectations, and thoughts that interact with the environment and shape behavior (592)
-
Behaviorism posits that personality traits often fail to predict behavior; instead, people’s responses are influenced by how they perceive a situation, their emotion response to it, their skills in dealing with challenges, and their anticipation of the outcomes of their behavior (592)
How personality is assessed and what it predicts: -
Allport divided the study of personality into idiographic approaches and nomothetic approaches (594)
-
Idiographic approaches = person centered; focusses on individual lives and how characteristics are integrated into unique persons (594)
-
Nomothetic approaches = focusses on how people vary across common traits (594)
-
Idiographic approaches assume that everyone is unique in the traits that are most central to their personalities (594)
-
Researchers who use idiographic approaches often use case studies or consider human lives as narratives (594)
-
To make sense of things, each person weaves a life story that integrates self-knowledge into a cohesive goal and constructs a personal myth about who they are and how they became who they are (594)
-
Nomothetic approaches focus on common traits like agreeableness and have people rate how agreeable/disagreeable they are on a scale (594)
-
Projective measures = personality tests that examine unconscious processes by having people interpret ambiguous stimuli (595)
-
Objective measures = direct measures of personality, usually based on self-report questionnaires or observer ratings (595)
-
There is a disconnect between how people observe themselves and how they behave, which is why friends’ reports of personality traits are more likely to be accurate than selfreports (596)
-
Situationism = behavior is determined more by situation than personality traits, ex. I might be shy with new people but outgoing with family (596)
-
People tend to be more consistent in their central traits than in their secondary traits (596)
-
Strong situations like job interviews or funerals are more predictive of behavior than personality, but weak situations like parks or parties are less predictive of behavior than personality (597)
-
Interactionists = theorists who believe behavior is determined jointly by underlying dispositions and situations (598)
-
Big five personality traits exist across all cultures, but people from East Asia generally rate themselves lower on extroversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness and higher on neuroticism, and people from Africa generally rate themselves higher on agreeableness and conscientiousness and lower on neuroticism, although these ratings may simply reflect cultural measures of the quantities of these traits (598)
-
Men and women’s self-reports tend to correspond to stereotypes about empathy and assertiveness in men and women (599)
-
Gender differences in personality are most blatant in North America in Europe, although this may be because women in Canada taking these tests are comparing themselves to both men and women while women in Africa taking these tests are comparing themselves only to other women (599)
Biological bases of personality: -
Extroversion, neuroticism, openness to experience, and agreeableness can be assessed in animals, although conscientiousness seems to be a fairly human trait, and has only been observed among chimps (602)
-
The fact that animals show basic personality traits suggests that these traits are biological and passed on through genes (604)
-
Identical twins have much more similar personalities than fraternal twins (604)
-
Even twins raised apart are very similar in big five personality traits (604)
-
Siblings who were adopted are not much more similar in personality than two random strangers (604)
-
Adopted children’s personalities are not similar to their adoptive parents’ (605)
-
Temperament = biologically based tendencies to feel or act in certain ways (606)
-
Life experiences may alter personality traits but temperaments represent the innate biological structures of personality (606)
-
Activity level, emotional intensity, and sociability are considered temperaments (606)
-
Temperament at age three predicts personality structure and a variety of behaviors in early adulthood (606)
-
Girls’ temperaments during early childhood are more calm and controlled while boys are more active and impulsive (607)
-
Infants can be classified as inhibited or uninhibited, and inhibition as an infant is a significant predictor of shyness later on (607)
-
Hans Eysenck believed differences in cortical arousal produce the behavioral differences between extroverts and introverts (607)
-
Extroverts constantly seek additional arousal by meeting new people or attending parties while introverts avoid arousal by preferring quiet, solitary activities (608)
-
Eysenck proposed that introverts’ arousal is always above their optimal level so they don’t want more arousal, while extroverts’ arousal is always below their optimal level so they want more of it (608)
-
Research has demonstrated that extroverts perform better in noisy settings (608)
-
Zuckerman described the arousal-based trait of sensation-seeking as similar to extroversion and caused by a neurochemical deficiency that motivates them to seek arousal through adventures (608)
-
Jeffrey Gay proposed that personality is rooted in motivational functions that evolved so the organism can respond to reinforcement and punishment (608)
-
Behavioral approach system = brain system involved in pursuit of rewards – the “go” system (608)
-
Behavioral inhibition system = brain system sensitive to punishment and inhibits behavior that might lead to danger or pain – the “stop” system (608)
-
Extroverts are more sensitive to rewards while introverts are more sensitive to punishment (608)
-
The BIS is associated with activity in the frontal lobes which help inhibit inappropriate social behavior (608)
-
Introversion is associated with greater activation of the frontal lobes (609)
-
Evolution has allowed for many strategies that are differentially adaptive so people have different personality traits that may work in different situations (609)
-
Human groups whose members possess diverse skills also have a selective advantage over other human groups (609)
-
As people age, they tend to grow more agreeable and conscientious and less neurotic, extroverted, and open to new experiences, although generally personality traits remain consistent (611)
-
Basic tendencies = dispositional traits determined largely by biology and are thus very stable (612)
-
Characteristic adaptations = adjustments to situational demands (612)
Our knowledge of our own personalities: -
George Herbert Mead came up with the objectified self – the I who does the knowing and the me who is known (614)
-
Self-awareness leads us to act more in accordance with our values (614)
-
Self-awareness is dependent on the frontal lobe (615)
-
Information about the self is processed deeply, thoroughly, and automatically, as opposed to information about others (615)
-
Self-schema = interconnected knowledge about the self so we can sort through which things are relevant (615)
-
The middle of the frontal lobe is more active when we are asked questions about ourselves than about questions that don’t pertain to ourselves (616)
-
Working self-concept = the immediate experience of the self at any given time (616)
-
When people consider who they are, they often emphasize characteristics that make them distinct from others, ex. in a roomful of men I am female, in a roomful of Christians I am Jewish (616)
-
Self-esteem = evaluative aspect of self-concept (616)
-
Mark Leary proposed that self-esteem monitors the likelihood of social exclusion (617)
-
Self-esteem then acts as a sociometer, a monitor of social acceptance or rejection (617)
-
Self-esteem may also provide meaning for individuals by reducing anxiety about their mortality (618)
-
Self-esteem then develops from a person’s belief that he is living up to criteria valued in his culture (618)
-
Self-esteem is not related to objectively better outcomes (618)
-
Self-evaluative maintenance = people feel threatened when someone close to them outperforms them on a task they find personally relevant (620)
-
Social comparison = people evaluate themselves by contrasting themselves with other people (621)
-
People with high self-esteem tend to make comparisons with people worse off than themselves and people with low self-esteem make comparisons with people better off (621)
-
Self-serving bias = people tend to take credit for success but blame external factors for failure (621)
