Psychology of Personality Mid Term

A recent review of the entire literature on social psychology concluded that the situational effect was about ________.

.20

The greatest amount of personality change occurs in which of the following age brackets?

20-25

What minimum sample size is encouraged to increase statistical power?

200

I have a correlation coefficient of r = .40 between taking my personality course and achieving a high GPA. By creating a BESD, I found that approximately 70% of people who take my course would have a high GPA. According to the BESD, approximately what percentage of people taking my course wouldn't have a high GPA?

30

Which of the following is a typical high r value in personality psychology?

4

Who's been shown to have the most behavioral stability?

50- to 70-year olds

What measurement item did I use as reference to demonstrate the concept of reliability?

A Scale

According to the text, ________ describes a context where social norms tend to restrict what people do.

A strong situation

Lisa has a choice to attend a small college in Omaha or a large university in New York City. Her decision to attend the college in Omaha is an example of:

Active person-environment transaction

The process by which a person seeks out compatible environments and avoids incompatible ones is called ________.

Active person-environmental transaction

Validity is the degree to which a measurement ________.

Actually reflects or measures what you think it does

To run studies on cohort effects, one must keep ________ constant.

Age

What is one of the setbacks of using cross-sectional design to investigate personality development?

Age effects are confounded with cohort effects

Which of the following is true about predicting future behaviors?

Aggregated behaviors are better predicted than specific behaviors.

Dr. Grant is creating a new measure of shyness, and she decides to include more than one item in her scale. She believes that using multiple items will lead to a more reliable measure. Dr. Grant is following which principle of measurement?

Aggregation

Increasing the number of items on a test makes it a better instrument according to which principle?

Aggregation

Recent research on the good judge of personality indicates that the good judge is ________.

Agreeable

A construct is...

An intangible concept that cannot be directly perceived

According to the lecture, who often behaves confidently because of how others treat them?

Attractive people

Which of the following is NOT one of the components of authoritarianism?

Authoritarian fascism

Which of the following traits is NOT featured in the Dark Triad?

Authoritarianism

Judgments of your personality by others ________.

Both reflect who you are and can influence what you are like

According to a new theoretical model for personality change, if individuals ________, the trait change will follow.

Change the relevant behaviors

If timeliness is a criterion for conscientiousness, but you then report a correlation between timeliness and conscientiousness, you have committed what logical fallacy?

Circular reasoning

Seeking or positively interpreting data that verifies one's own existing opinions or beliefs while ignoring or minimizing data that refutes those beliefs is called ______

Confirmation bias

According to psychologist Frank Sulloway, firstborns are more ________ compared to later borns.

Conscientious

A long life is associated with what trait?

Conscientiousness

Which trait has been consistently linked to a range of health outcomes?

Conscientiousness

Which trait positively impacts one's spouse's job success

Conscientiousness

According to the text, ________ does not seem to significantly improve as judges acquire more information, whereas ________ does seem to improve considerably.

Consensus; accuracy

Which of the following criteria is not part of the Realistic Accuracy Model?

Consistency

A research strategy that involves gathering as many different measurements as you can of a particular construct and determining if those measurements correlate is called ________.

Construct validation

The statement "There is no such thing as objective reality, only human ideas or perceptions of reality" would most likely be made by a ________. The statement "The absence of perfect, infallible criteria for truth does not force us to conclude that all interpretations of reality are equally likely to be correct" would most likely be made by a ________.

Constructivist; critical realist

According to Cronbach and Meehl's (1955) terminology, psychological attributes such as intelligence and sociability are examples of ________, whereas an IQ test and extraversion questionnaire are both examples of specific tests or measurements

Constructs

Which of the following factors was NOT included as potentially affecting the outcome of general or targeted interventions on personality change?

Cost

Which of the ARCH typology researchers teaches at Rutgers-Camden?

Daniel Hart

Which of the following behaviors would be the easiest to predict accurately?

David will generally be on time for work most days next week

What does DIF stand for?

Differential Item Functionality

The primary criterion for item selection in the empirical method of test construction is determining whether the item ________.

Discriminates between two known groups

Given Snyder's description of self-monitoring, you would expect someone who is low in self-monitoring to be ________ than someone high in self-monitoring.

Easier to judge

What were the names of the essential traits that Block and Block investigated?

Ego control, ego resiliency

The ______ method derives questions that don't have much face validity.

Empirical method

This method of test construction derives questions from testing them on pre-defined groups of people.

Empirical method

Faking responses in order to influence test results is most difficult on ________ constructed tests.

Empirically

Which of the following is NOT a form of scientific rigor?

Ensuring that policy is influenced by one's study results

Which dimension of personality assessed by the Narcissistic Personality Inventory appears to be the one most responsible for obnoxious and arrogant behavior?

Entitlement/exploitativeness

According to Dan McAdams, the narrative theme of "agency" organizes the life story around ________.

Episodes of challenging oneself and then accomplishing one's goals

The Big Five were found through which trait approach?

Essential

A researcher using factor analysis to identify basic traits is likely to favor the ________ approach.

Essential-trait

Self-fulfilling prophecies are more technically known as ________.

Expectancy effects

Which design is best suited for addressing the third-variable problem?

Experimental

Objective tests feature ______ questions about personality.

Explicit

Young people with life-threatening illnesses appear to shift their goals from ________ to ________.

Exploration; emotional well-being

People tend to blame negative experiences on ________ rather than recognizing the role of ________.

External factors; their own personality

Participants in a recent study were shown and then asked to judge composite faces from targets who scored extremely low or extremely high on personality dimensions. Which two traits had the highest levels of accuracy for both female and male targets?

Extraversion and agreeableness

What are the names of lower-level traits included in the Big Five?

Facets

This method of test construction creates question categories based on the correlations between them.

Factor analytic method

The ______ method depends on having a representative set of ____ when a questionnaire is tested whereas the _______ method depends on having a representative set of __________ when a questionnaire is tested.

Factor analytic; questions; empirical; people

(True or False) I will always get a reliable measurement when I measure something tangible like someone's head.

False

(True or False) Meditation has been found to help individuals become more compassionate and altruistic people.

False

(True or False) Only accurate personality judgments matter in either personality research or the social world.

False

(True or False) Only situations can have an effect on personality, not people.

False

(True or False) Our mean-level stability demonstrates our stability in remaining different from other people.

False

(True or False) Projective tests are no longer used.

False

(True or False) Psychologists can always be trusted to make well validated personality assessments.

False

(True or False) Significance testing only applies to testing the results of experimental studies.

False

(True or False) The trait approach compares people's trait scores to an absolute trait score.

False

(True or False) You need to administer the same personality measures across different time points or you won't be able to test personality stability.

False

(True or False) You need to employ cross-sectional research to study personality stability.

False

(True or False) Your textbook author hopes that a comprehensive theory of personality will soon be found to explain individuals.

False

What is one way to test construct validation?

Find correlations across different sources of data [e.g., S, I, L, B]

The most important advantage of Q-sorting is that it ________. Forces the judge to compare all the items directly against each other

Forces the judge to compare all the items directly against each other

Because each kind of data has limitations, personality psychologists should ________.

Gather as much data as possible

What did I suggest as the first step to take after gathering one's research data?

Graph the data before running statistical analysis

As a child, Jay was always bouncing off the walls at his parent's social gatherings. As an adult, he is the life of every party. This is an example of ________.

Heterotypic continuity

Which of the following is NOT a basic aspects of childhood temperament?

Heterotypic continuity

People who adjust their behavior to best fit the situation are called ________, and people whose behavior does not change to fit the situation are called ________.

High self-monitors; low self-monitors

Which trait describes people who are psychologically well adjusted and tend to be religious?

Honesty-humility

The technical meaning of reliability refers to ________.

How much measurement error is present in your assessment instrument

What does the phenomenological approach focus on?

How one feels about and experiences the world

What trait does the HEXACO taxonomy add that the Big Five doesn't have?

Humility

The factor analytic technique of test construction is designed to________.

Identify groups of test items that seem to be alike

The idea that people seek to develop a stable sense of who they are and then strive to act consistently with this self-view is consistent with the ________.

Identity development principle

The trait approach focuses exclusively on ________.

Individual differences

What intervention has been developed to (temporarily) change levels of narcissism?

Individuals were told to practice perspective taking and empathy.

Adding more questions to an objective test can increase:

Inter-item reliability

What are the two primary criteria for evaluating personality judgments?

Interjudge agreement and behavioral prediction

All projective tests ________.

Involve stimuli with no clear meaning

I have a correlation coefficient of r= -.70. Describe the correlation.

It is strong and negative.

What's the acronym for the software that will tally participants word use?

LIWC

What kind of sample can improve generalizability of study findings?

Large randomized sample

Someone who is ________ is likely to express his or her personality consistently from one situation to the next

Low in self-monitoring

The major difference between the experimental and correlational methods is that in the experimental method the presumed causal variable is ________, whereas in the correlational method the same variable is ________.

Manipulated; measured

A researcher seeks to understand the reasons that a person uses drugs. Which approach is the researcher most likely to adopt?

Many-trait

________ generally refers to the traits that help a person to fulfill socially important adult roles such as being a spouse, a parent, or a worker.

Maturity

Linda is taking an intelligence test. During the test, the teachers walk through the halls and chat loudly with each other. Due to these distractions, Linda scores lower on the test than she would have if she had been able to concentrate fully. The influence of the teachers' chatting is an example of ________.

Measurement error

According to a recent study, a ________ amount of stress throughout one's life leads to a(n) ________ in cardiovascular reactivity.

Moderate; decrease

Which trait is associated with positive first impressions but more negative impressions in longer-term relationships?

Narcissism

Which of the Situational 8 DIAMONDS variables did I highlight as enabling behavior to be informative?

Negativity

According to one survey mentioned in the textbook, what trait did the greatest number of people report wanting to change?

Neuroticism

According to your professor, are there any benefits to having personality assessments in the workplace?

No

____ tests are more likely to use score sheets than ______ tests.

Objective; projective

What term refers to personality inventories that are designed to measure a wide range of traits?

Omnibus inventories

Which of the Big Five traits appears to be the most complex and difficult to grasp?

Openness

Personality trait measurements are typically made on a(n) ________ scale.

Ordinal

What was the term used to describe traits that are perpendicular in visual space and thus uncorrelated with each other?

Orthogonal

Fast and Funder (2008) found that using words like guarantee was correlated .21 with has a high aspiration for self. Which of the following is a correct interpretation of this finding?

Participants who used the word guarantee were slightly more likely to also have high aspirations.

A fundamental problem for the trait approach is that ________.

People are inconsistent

What is the example of expectation effects I provided during the lecture?

People can draw expectations about someone's behavior based on their experience with similar others

According to the text, what paradox is central to the study of personality development?

People change throughout their lives yet fundamental personality traits maintain rank-order stability in relation to others in their age group.

Which of the following statements is the best representation of Funder's first "law"?

People don't know a lot about Emily because she doesn't share a lot about herself, but she's a good listener.

Which of the following does NOT describe a type of person-situation interaction?

People generally prefer situations that are pleasant

What did your professor warn might occur if there's a lack of knowledge on a topic that's not investigated?

People will fill the void with assumptions.

Age-based changes in personality among a population can also be called

Personality development

Researchers must use clues to personality in their research because________.

Personality is something hidden that resides inside an individual

What are the Big Three traits according to Auke Tellegen?

Positive emotionality/negative emotionality/constraint

What is the correct definition of the p-value?

Probability that the observed result occurred by chance given that the null hypoth

Many moderating variables affect the ability of a personality judgment/assessment to match a criterion measure of personality. Which of the following is NOT a moderating variable?

Properties of a target's reliability

What is another name for ego resiliency?

Psychological adjustment

What is the study of carefully measuring psychological properties or characteristics?

Psychometrics

Which of the following is NOT one of the Big Five?

Psychoticism

What were the issues raised by the items from the RWA scale?

Questions were multi-barreled; Questions were assessing both authoritarianism and conservativism

At the heart of aggregation is the idea that ________.

Random errors cancel each other out

What is the most common method of test construction?

Rational

Which of the following test construction methods creates measures with the greatest face validity?

Rational method

Richard is an extravert and finds himself miserable at parties. His response is an example of a(n)________ person-environment transaction.

Reactive

What is the best way for a researcher to judge the face validity of items on a measure?

Read and consider the content of the items.

Jasmine is afraid that her lack of diligence and timeliness will cause her to get fired from her job. According to the text, what is the first thing she must do to increase her level of conscientiousness?

Recognize her specific problem areas and want to change

If you can get the same answer repeatedly, then your measure is ________.

Reliable

What is replication?

Running the same study on different samples of people

A test created using the rational method yields what kind of data?

S

B - T =

S

People you come in contact with are categorized under:

S

Your responses to the personality test item ÒI am an intelligent personÓ would be ________ data, whereas your score on an intelligence test that reflects the number of problems you got right would be ________ data.

S; B

Heterotypic continuity combines stability and change by:

Showing consistency of personality through different but related behaviors at various ages

High rank-order stability indicates that if I were shyer than most of my peers as a young kid, I'll be _____ than most of my peers as an adult.

Shyer

Research regarding the person-situation debate indicates that ________ are relevant to how people will act under specific circumstances and that ________ are better for describing how people act in general.

Situational variables; personality traits

In his book, Personality and Assessment, Mischel argued that behavior can be most accurately predicted from ________

Situations

According to the text, what trait refers to individual differences in the willingness to engage in sexual relations with minimal acquaintanceship?

Sociosexuality

According to various principles of personality development, our minds and social circumstances generally work together to _______ our personality.

Stabilize

According to psychological standards, a p-value of .01 implies:

Statistical significance

While NHST refers to _______, BESD refers to __________.

Statistical significance, effect size

If test scores decrease as anxiety increases, then ________.

Test scores and anxiety are negatively correlated

The purpose of research is to _____.

Test theories

Which of the following were not presented as alternative essential traits to the Big Five?

The Dark Triad

What was the issue with Verhulst, Eaves & Hatemi's (2012) findings?

The correlations were mismatched or backwards

What contributes to causal uncertainty between two variables?

The dependent variable may have caused the independent variable., one may not have manipulated the independent variable but another unknown third variable which caused change in the dependent variable and the independent and dependent variables may influence each other.

Many psychologists tend to use college students as participants in their research and then assume that what they learn applies to people in general. However, this common practice may limit ________.

The generalizability of their findings

Over the last 10 years, Victor has become more agreeable, conscientious and emotionally stable. What principle best describes Victor's development?

The maturity principle

If a psychologist describes a research result as statistically significant, what does he or she typically mean?

The result is unlikely to have occurred by chance.

What is motivated reasoning?

The tendency of pre-held goals or beliefs to bias or hinder processing of new information

Which of the following reasons does NOT contribute to greater personality stability among older adults?

Their genes are changing less in old age

What piece of evidence suggests that age is NOT a determining factor in the desire to change one's personality?

There is little to no correlation between participants' age and their self-reported desire to change

What is a key strength of longitudinal personality development studies?

They are not biased by the cohort effect.

What do personality and clinical psychology have in common?

They both try to understand the whole person

What is one reason mentioned by the research article authors that leads psychology researchers to fall prey to false or exaggerated interpretations?

They want recognition and esteem.

What was notable about Verhulst, Eaves & Hatemi's (2012) sample?

They were twins

In one study, researchers found that personality trait scores from the same people measured 10 years apart correlated between r = .60 and r = .90.

This is evidence for personality stability

Which of the following is NOT a purpose of research?

To prove the existence of phenomena

According to the textbook, the goal of a scientific education is ________.

To question what is known and how to find out what is not yet known

What is Eysenck's construct of psychotism theoretically associated with?

Tough-mindedness

The ________ approach to personality usually assumes that all people can be characterized by points on a continuous score of measurement; the ________ approach to personality suggests that people might differ in kind more than in degree.

Trait; typological

(True or False) Case studies are not generalizable.

True

(True or False) One's personality trait levels can influence the degree to which life experiences enable one to undergo personality change.

True

Imagine that a researcher conducts a study and finds a statistically significant correlation between eating pizza and aggression. However, there is no real association between eating pizza and aggression in the population. What kind of error has this researcher made?

Type I

Christina had a self-proclaimed "perfect childhood." According to the text, what might Christina face later in life?

Unpreparedness for difficult times

Which of the following was NOT a potentially problematic issue with Block & Block's (2006) study of personality and political orientation?

Use of I versus S data at two assessment points

Which of the following is an aspect of the ÒgoodÓ trait with regard to judgment?

Visibility

Projective tests are often better equipped than objective tests to investigate:

What someone is thinking or feeling outside their awareness

If everybody read, interpreted, and answered an item in exactly the same way, then that item ________.

Would not be very useful for the assessment of individual differences

What is one of the stated rewards of acknowledging replication failures and other research inconsistencies in published work?

You can improve theory

Which of the following is an example of interjudge agreement in the context of accuracy judgments?

Your friends ratings of your extraversion converge with your parents ratings

Using McAdams' model of personality, when one begins to outline one's goals, one achieves being an:

agent

What you do may be influenced by how you see yourself and how you are seen by others. This means that your self-perceptions and others' perceptions have

causal force

Recent research using the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to study shyness indicates that ________.

controlled aspects of shyness can be predicted using S data, but uncontrolled or spontaneous aspects can be more accurately predicted using B data

While trends in behavioral stability vary by age,

individuals also show differences in behavioral stability among their cohort

A variable that affects the relation between two other variables is known as a

moderator

"No one is going to see Julia in the same way. I don't see why we need to compare our assessments of her." The person who made this statement probably ascribes to:

social constructivism

The earliest form of personality is

temperament

In a study of social expectancies, Snyder, Tanke, and Berscheid (1977) found that if male participants were shown a photograph of an attractive woman and told they would be interacting with her by telephone, the female participant they actually spoke with Was rated by other people as behaving in a

warm, humorous, and friendly manner

Which of the following is personality psychology most centrally interested in:

what makes people different