Personality Psychology

Five-Factor Model

(also called the Big Five) The Five-Factor Model is a widely accepted model of personality traits. Advocates of the model believe that much of the variability in people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can be summarized with five broad traits. These five traits are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.

Honeymoon effect

...The tendency for newly married individuals to rate their spouses in an unrealistically positive manner. This represents a specific manifestation of the letter of recommendation effect when applied to ratings made by current romantic partners. Moreover, it illustrates the very important role played by relationship satisfaction in ratings made by romantic partners: As marital satisfaction declines (i.e., when the "honeymoon is over"), this effect disappears.

Big Five

A broad taxonomy of personality trait domains repeatedly derived from studies of trait ratings in adulthood and encompassing the categories of (1) extraversion vs. introversion, (2) neuroticism vs. emotional stability, (3) agreeable vs. disagreeableness, (4) conscientiousness vs. nonconscientiousness, and (5) openness to experience vs. conventionality. By late childhood and early adolescence, people's self-attributions of personality traits, as well as the trait attributions made about them by others, show patterns of intercorrelations that confirm with the five-factor structure obtained in studies of adults.

Conscientiousness

A personality trait that reflects a person's tendency to be careful, organized, hardworking, and to follow rules.

Agreeableness

A personality trait that reflects a person's tendency to be compassionate, cooperative, warm, and caring to others. People low in agreeableness tend to be rude, hostile, and to pursue their own interests over those of others.

Extraversion

A personality trait that reflects a person's tendency to be sociable, outgoing, active, and assertive.

Openness to Experience

A personality trait that reflects a person's tendency to seek out and to appreciate new things, including thoughts, feelings, values, and experiences.

Neuroticism

A personality trait that reflects the tendency to be interpersonally sensitive and the tendency to experience negative emotions like anxiety, fear, sadness, and anger.

Factor analysis

A statistical technique for grouping similar things together according to how highly they are associated.

Narrative identity

An internalized and evolving story of the self designed to provide life with some measure of temporal unity and purpose. Beginning in late adolescence, people craft self-defining stories that reconstruct the past and imagine the future to explain how the person came to be the person that he or she is becoming.

Facets

Broad personality traits can be broken down into narrower facets or aspects of the trait. For example, extraversion has several facets, such as sociability, dominance, risk-taking and so forth.

Continuous distributions

Characteristics can go from low to high, with all different intermediate values possible. One does not simply have the trait or not have it, but can possess varying amounts of it

The Age 5-to-7 Shift

Cognitive and social changes that occur in the early elementary school years that result in the child's developing a more purposeful, planful, and goal-directed approach to life, setting the stage for the emergence of the self as a motivated agent.

Theory of mind

Emerging around the age of 4, the child's understanding that other people have minds in which are located desires and beliefs, and that desires and beliefs, thereby, motivate behavior.

Personality traits

Enduring dispositions in behavior that show differences across individuals, and which tend to characterize the person across varying types of situations.

Personality

Enduring predispositions that characterize a person, such as styles of thought, feelings and behavior.

Validity

Evidence related to the interpretation and use of test scores. A particularly important type of evidence is criterion validity, which involves the ability of a test to predict theoretically relevant outcomes.

Big Five

Five, broad general traits that are included in many prominent models of personality. 1.neuroticism (those high on this trait are prone to feeling sad, worried, anxious, and dissatisfied with themselves), 2.extraversion (high scorers are friendly, assertive, outgoing, cheerful, and energetic), 3.openness to experience (those high on this trait are tolerant, intellectually curious, imaginative, and artistic), 4.agreeableness (high scorers are polite, considerate, cooperative, honest, and trusting), and 5.conscientiousness (those high on this trait are responsible, cautious, organized, disciplined, and achievement-oriented).

Redemptive narratives

Life stories that affirm the transformation from suffering to an enhanced status or state. In American culture, redemptive life stories are highly prized as models for the good self, as in classic narratives of atonement, upward mobility, liberation, and recovery.

High-stakes testing

Settings in which test scores are used to make important decisions about individuals. For example, test scores may be used to determine which individuals are admitted into a college or graduate school, or who should be hired for a job. Tests also are used in forensic settings to help determine whether a person is competent to stand trial or fits the legal definition of sanity.

Ego

Sigmund Freud's conception of an executive self in the personality. Akin to this module's notion of "the I," Freud imagined the ego as observing outside reality, engaging in rational though, and coping with the competing demands of inner desires and moral standards.

Identity

Sometimes used synonymously with the term "self," identity means many different things in psychological science and in other fields (e.g., sociology). In this module, I adopt Erik Erikson's conception of identity as a developmental task for late adolescence and young adulthood. Forming an identity in adolescence and young adulthood involves exploring alternative roles, values, goals, and relationships and eventually committing to a realistic agenda for life that productively situates a person in the adult world of work and love. In addition, identity formation entails commitments to new social roles and reevaluation of old traits, and importantly, it brings with it a sense of temporal continuity in life, achieved though the construction of an integrative life story.

HEXACO model

The HEXACO model is an alternative to the Five-Factor Model. The HEXACO model includes six traits, five of which are variants of the traits included in the Big Five (Emotionality [E], Extraversion [X], Agreeableness [A], Conscientiousness [C], and Openness [O]). The sixth factor, Honesty-Humility [H], is unique to this model.

Autobiographical reasoning

The ability, typically developed in adolescence, to derive substantive conclusions about the self from analyzing one's own personal experiences.

Reliability

The consistency of test scores across repeated assessments. For example, test-retest reliability examines the extent to which scores change over time.

Self-esteem

The extent to which a person feels that he or she is worthy and good. The success or failure that the motivated agent experiences in pursuit of valued goals is a strong determinant of self-esteem.

Letter of recommendation effect

The general tendency for informants in personality studies to rate others in an unrealistically positive manner.

Reflexivity

The idea that the self reflects back upon itself; that the I (the knower, the subject) encounters the Me (the known, the object). Reflexivity is a fundamental property of human selfhood.

Lexical hypothesis

The lexical hypothesis is the idea that the most important differences between people will be encoded in the language that we use to describe people. Therefore, if we want to know which personality traits are most important, we can look to the language that people use to describe themselves and others.

Person-situation debate

The person-situation debate is a historical debate about the relative power of personality traits as compared to situational influences on behavior. The situationist critique, which started the person-situation debate, suggested that people overestimate the extent to which personality traits are consistent across situations.

The "I"

The self as knower, the sense of the self as a subject who encounters (knows, works on) itself (the Me).

The "Me"

The self as known, the sense of the self as the object or target of the I's knowledge and work.

Self as autobiographical author

The sense of the self as a storyteller who reconstructs the past and imagines the future in order to articulate an integrative narrative that provides life with some measure of temporal continuity and purpose.

Self as social actor

The sense of the self as an embodied actor whose social performances may be construed in terms of more or less consistent self-ascribed traits and social roles.

Self as motivated agent

The sense of the self as an intentional force that strives to achieve goals, plans, values, projects, and the like.

Self-enhancement bias

The tendency for people to see and/or present themselves in an overly favorable way. This tendency can take two basic forms: defensiveness (when individuals actually believe they are better than they really are) and impression management (when people intentionally distort their responses to try to convince others that they are better than they really are). Informants also can show enhancement biases.

Sibling contrast effect

The tendency of parents to use their perceptions of all of their children as a frame of reference for rating the characteristics of each of them. More generally, this effect causes parents to exaggerate the true extent of differences between their children. This effect represents a specific manifestation of the more general reference group effect when applied to ratings made by parents.

Reference group effect

The tendency of people to base their self-concept on comparisons with others. For example, if your friends tend to be very smart and successful, you may come to see yourself as less intelligent and successful than you actually are.

Projective hypothesis

The theory that when people are confronted with ambiguous stimuli (that is, stimuli that can be interpreted in more than one way), their responses will be influenced by their unconscious thoughts, needs, wishes, and impulses. This, in turn, is based on the Freudian notion of projection, which is the idea that people attribute their own undesirable/unacceptable characteristics to other people or objects.

Social reputation

The traits and social roles that others attribute to an actor. Actors also have their own conceptions of what they imagine their respective social reputations indeed are in the eyes of others.

Implicit motives

These are goals that are important to a person, but that he/she cannot consciously express. Because the individual cannot verbalize these goals directly, they cannot be easily assessed via self-report. However, they can be measured using projective devices such as the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT).

Independent

Two characteristics or traits are separate from one another-- a person can be high on one and low on the other, or vice-versa. Some correlated traits are relatively independent in that although there is a tendency for a person high on one to also be high on the other, this is not always the case.