Personality Exam 1

According to the text, what is the best approach to test construction?

A combination of the rational method, the factor analytic method, and the empirical method.

Reliability is ________ for validity.

A necessary but not sufficient condition

The situationist argument holds that _________________.

A thorough review of the literature revels that there is a limit to how well one can predict behavior from personality. Situations are more important than personality traits for determining behavior. Our everyday intuitions about people are fundamentally flawed.

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

Aggregation

Which of the following is NOT an example of interactionism?

An agreeable person is generally a good team player.

A projective test yields _____ data.

B

Reaction times to photographs

B data

Are there differences in neurotransmitter expression between people?

Biological

Which of the following is an ethical issue involved in the research process?

How research findings are used, which research topics are studied, how truthful researchers are when describing their work.

A therapist's description of her client

I data

The number of times someone has been arrested

L data

Which of the following is an objective test?

MMPI

Funder writes that there are good reasons why personality psychologists have distinct theories versus One Big Theory. Which is NOT one of those reasons?

One Big Theory would undermine the smaller theories.

How does unconscious conflict affect well-being?

Psychoanalytical

Your own responses to the statement "I consider myself a nervous person"

S data

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

S; B

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

The result is unlikely to have occurred by chance.

According to the text, which of the following is NOT one of the conditions that must hold for an S data personality test to accurately measure an attribute of personality?

The test must contain both positively and negatively worded items.

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

Which of the following psychologists is often credited with starting the person-situation debate?

Walter Mischel

Validity is the degree to which a measurement ___________.

actually reflects or measures what you think it does

The trait approach, the behaviorist approach, and the psychoanalytic approach ____________.

address different sets of questions about human psychology

The most important and generally useful way to enhance reliability is to _____________.

aggregate your measurements

According to the text, the purpose of personality traits is to predict __________.

behavior in the long term

Personality is an individual's characteristic patterns of __________.

behavior, emotion, and thought

Dr. Low is interested in studying the relation between mood and willingness to help a stranger. Every participant in her study completes a mood-rating questionnaire and is then given an opportunity to donate money to a homeless stranger. Dr. Low is using a(n) ________ design.

correlational

The trait approach is based on empirical research that is mostly from _____.

correlational studies

Imagine that you want to develop a test to measure depression. You gather a set of 100 potential test items and ask a sample of people diagnosed with clinical depression and a sample of non-depressed people to respond to the items. For your final version of the test, you decide to keep only the 15 items that the depressed and non-depressed groups answered differently. You are using a(n) __________ method of test construction.

empirical

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

empirically

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

experimental

Factor analysis can __________.

identify groups of items that go together

The trait approach focuses exclusively on _______________.

individual differences

What is the big disadvantage of the case study method?

it is not generalizable

How do rewards affect social behavior?

learning

The purpose of a basic approach (or paradigm) is to ________.

limit inquiry to certain kinds of observations and patterns

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

What is a primary goal of the trait approach to personality?

measuring and conceptualizing individual differences

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

omnibus inventories

A fundamental problem for the trait approach is that ________.

people are inconsistent

Personality psychology and clinical psychology overlap most often when approaching which topic?

personality disorders

How do people from individualist cultures differ from others?

phenomenological

Which of the following is one of the basic approaches to personality?

psychoanalytic

Which of the following is NOT part of the psychological triad?

psychological health

Dr. Akita is designing a test to measure sociability. She writes items that seem directly and obviously related to sociability, such as "I like to go to parties" and "I enjoy the company of other people." Dr. Akita is using the ________ method of test construction.

rational

Jane recently completed a new test that was designed to measure her IQ. She took the test twice and each time received the same score. The test administrator told her that her scores indicate she is extremely intelligent. However, Jane scored well below average when she completed the Stanford-Binet and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS), two well-established intelligence tests. Based on this pattern of results, it appears that the new measure of IQ was a ________.

reliable but no valid measure of intelligence

Which of the following sampling methods affords a researcher the greatest generalizability?

selecting participants using a random telephone dialing system

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 variable; personality traits

If test scores decrease as anxiety increases, then ________.

test scores and anxiety are negatively correlated

Personality assessment refers to _____________.

the measurement of any characteristic pattern of behavior, thought, or emotion.

What characteristics of individuals predict health?

trait