Theories of Personality Exam 1

Discriminant Validity

What a measure should not correlate with

Interpersonal Traits

What people do to and with each other. They include temperament traits, such as nervous, gloomy, sluggish, and excitable; character traits, such as moral, principled, and dishonest; material traits, such as miserly or stingy; attitude traits, such as pious or spiritual; mental traits, such as clever, logical, and perceptive; and physical traits, such as healthy and tough.

Predictive Validity

Whether a test predicts criteria external to the test

Trait-descriptive adjectives

Words that describe traits, attributes of a person that are reasonably characteristic of the individual and perhaps even enduring over time.

Adjacency

In Wiggins circumplex model, it indicates how close the traits are to each other on the circumference of the circumplex. Those variables that are adjacent or next to each other within the model are positively correlated.

Bipolarity

In Wiggins circumplex model, traits located at opposite sides of the circle and negatively correlated with each other. Specifying this bipolarity is useful because nearly every interpersonal trait within the personality sphere has another trait that is its opposite.

Counterbalancing

In some experiments, manipulation is within a single group. For example, participants might get a drug and have their memory tested, then later take a sugar pill and have their memory tested again. In this kind of experiment, equivalence is obtained by counterbalancing the order of the conditions, with half the participants getting the drug first and sugar pill second, and the other half getting the sugar pill first and the drug second.

Cross-Cultural Universality

In the lexical approach, cross-cultural universality states that if a trait is sufficiently important in all cultures so that its members have codified terms within their own languages to describe the trait, then the trait must be universally important in human affairs. In contrast, if a trait term exists in only one or a few languages but is entirely missing from most, then it may be of only local relevance.

Synonym Frequency

In the lexical approach, synonym frequency means that if an attribute has not merely one or two trait adjectives to describe it, but rather six, eight, or ten words, then it is a more important dimension of individual difference.

Factor Loadings

Indexes of how much of the variation in an item is "explained" by the factor. Indicate the degree to which the item correlates with or "loads on" the underlying factor

Self-report Data (S-data)

Information a person verbally reveals about themselves, often based on questionnaire or interview. Self-report data can be obtained through a variety of means, including interviews that pose questions to a person, periodic reports by a person to record the events as they happen, and questionnaires of various sorts.

Social Desirability

Socially desirable responding refers to the tendency to answer items in such a way as to come across as socially attractive or likable. People responding in this manner want to make a good impression, to appear to be well adjusted, to be a "good citizen."

Lexical Hypothesis

States that important individual differences have become encoded within the natural language. Over ancestral time, the differences between people that were important were noticed and words were invented to communicate about those differences

Convergent Validity

Whether a test correlates with other measures that it should correlate with

Criterion Validity

Whether a test predicts criteria external to the test

Manipulation

Researchers conducting experiments use manipulation in order to evaluate the influence of one variable (the manipulated or independent variable) on another (the dependent variable).

Generalizability

The degree to which a measure retains its validity across different contexts.

Conscientiousness

The third of the personality traits in the five-factor model, which has proven to be replicable in studies using English-language trait words as items. Known as "responsible," "persevering," etc.

Human Nature

The traits and mechanisms of personality that are typical of our species and are possessed by everyone or nearly everyone.

Situational Specificity

The view that behavior is determined by aspects of the situation, such as reward contingencies.

Organized and Enduring

"Organized" means that the psychological traits and mechanisms for a given person are not simply a random collection of elements. Rather, personality is coherent because the mechanisms and traits are linked to one another in an organized fashion. "Enduring" means that the psychological traits are generally consistent over time, particularly in adulthood, and over situations.

Combinations of Big Five Variables

"Traits" are often examined in combinations. For example, two people high in extraversion would be very different if one was an extraverted neurotic and the other was extraverted but emotionally stable.

Construct Validity

A test that measures what it claims to measure, correlates with what it is supposed to correlate with, and does not correlate with what it is not supposed to correlate with.

Situationism

A theoretical position in personality psychology that states that situational differences, rather than underlying personality traits, determine behavior. For example, how friendly a person will behave or how much need for achievement a person displays will depend on the situation, not the traits a person possesses.

Good Theory

A theory that serves as a useful guide for researchers, organizes known facts, and makes predictions about future observations.

Compatibility and integration across domains and levels

A theory that takes into account the principles and laws of other scientific domains that may affect the study's main subject. For example, a theory of biology that violated known principles of chemistry would be judged fatally flawed.

Individual Differences

Every individual has personal and unique qualities which make them different from others. The study of all the ways in which individuals can differ from others, the number, origin, and meaning of such differences, is the study of individual differences.

Likert rating scale

A common rating scale that provides numbers that are attached to descriptive phrases, such as 0 = disagree strongly, 1 = disagree slightly, 2 = neither agree nor disagree, 3 = agree slightly, 4 = strongly agree.

Test Data (T-Data)

A common source of personality-relevant information comes from standardized tests (T-data). In these measures, participants are placed in a standardized testing situation to see if different people react or behave differently to an identical situation. Taking an exam, like the Scholastic Aptitude Test, would be one example of T-data as a measure used to predict success in school.

Factor Analysis

A commonly used statistical procedure for identifying underlying structure in personality ratings or items. Essentially identifies groups of items that covary with each other, but tend not to covary with other groups of items. This provides a means for determining which personality variables share some common underlying property or belong together within the same group

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

A noninvasive imaging technique used to identify specific areas of brain activity. As parts of the brain are stimulated, oxygenated blood rushes to the activated area, resulting in increased iron concentrations in the blood. The fMRI detects these elevated concentrations of iron and prints out colorful images indicating which part of the brain is used to perform certain tasks.

Projective Techniques

A person is presented with an ambiguous stimulus and is then asked to impose some order on the stimulus, such as asking what the person sees in an inkblot. What the person sees is interpreted to reveal something about his or her personality. The person presumably "projects" his or her concerns, conflicts, traits, and ways of seeing or dealing with the world onto the ambiguous stimulus. The most famous projective technique for assessing personality is the Rorschach inkblot test.

Person-environment Interaction

A person's interactions with situations include perceptions, selections, evocations, and manipulations. Perceptions refer to how we "see" or interpret an environment. Selection describes the manner in which we choose situations—such as our friends, our hobbies, our college classes, and our careers. Evocations refer to the reactions we produce in others, often quite unintentionally. Manipulations refer to the ways in which we attempt to influence others.

Acquiescence

A response set that refers to the tendency to agree with questionnaire items regardless of the content of those items.

Extreme Responding

A response set that refers to the tendency to give endpoint responses, such as "strongly agree" or "strongly disagree" and avoid the middle part of response scales, such as "slightly agree," "slightly disagree," or "am indifferent."

Domain of Knowledge

A specialty area of science and scholarship, where psychologists have focused on learning about some specific and limited aspect of human nature, often with preferred tools of investigation.

Correlational Method

A statistical procedure is used for determining whether there is a relationship between two variables. In correlational research designs, the researcher is attempting to directly identify the relationships between two or more variables, without imposing the sorts of manipulations seen in experimental designs

Five Factor Model

A trait taxonomy that has its roots in the lexical hypothesis. The first psychologist to use the terms "five-factor model" and "Big Five" was Warren Norman, based on his replications of the factor structure suggesting the following five traits: Surgency (or extraversion), Neuroticism (or emotional instability), Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience (or intellect). The model has been criticized by some for not being comprehensive and for failing to provide a theoretical understanding of the underlying psychological processes that generate the five traits. Nonetheless, it remains heavily endorsed by many personality psychologists and continues to be used in a variety of research studies and applied settings.

Repeated Measurement

A way to estimate the reliability of a measure. There are different forms of repeated measurement, and hence different versions of reliability. A common procedure is to repeat the same measurement over time, say at an interval of a month apart, for the same sample of persons. If the two tests are highly correlated between the first and second testing, yielding similar scores for most people, then the resulting measure is said to have high test-retest reliability.

Sociosexual Orientation

According to Gangestad and Simpson's theory of sociosexual orientation, men and women will pursue one of two alternative sexual relationship strategies. The first mating strategy entails seeking a single committed relationship characterized by monogamy and tremendous investment in children. The second sexual strategy is characterized by a greater degree of promiscuity, more partner switching, and less investment in children.

Aggregation

Adding up or averaging several single observations, resulting in a better measure of a personality trait than a single observation of behavior. Implies that personality traits refer to average tendencies in behavior, how people behave on average.

Heuristic Value

An evaluative scientific standard for assessing personality theories. Theories that steer scientists to important new discoveries about personality are superior to those that fail to provide this guidance

Personality-descriptive nouns

As described by Saucier, personality-descriptive nouns differ in their content emphases from personality taxonomies based on adjectives and may be more precise. In Saucier's 2003 work on personality nouns, he discovered eight factors, including "Dumbbell," "Babe/Cutie," "Philosopher," "Lawbreaker," "Joker," and "Jock. "

Random Assignment

Assignment in an experiment that is conducted randomly. If an experiment has manipulation between groups, random assignment of participants to experimental groups helps ensure that each group is equivalent

Multiple Social Personalities

Each of us displays different sides of ourselves to different people—we may be kind to our friends, ruthless to our enemies, loving toward a spouse, and conflicted toward our parents. Our social personalities vary from one setting to another, depending on the nature of relationships we have with other individuals.

Theories

Based on systematic observations that can be repeated by others and that yield similar conclusions.

Environment

Can be physical, social, and intrapsychic (within the mind). Which aspect of the environment is important at any moment in time is frequently determined by the personality of the person in that environment

Psychological Traits

Characteristics that describe ways in which people are different from each other. Psychological traits include all sorts of aspects of persons that are psychologically meaningful and are stable and consistent aspects of personality.

Dispositional Domain

Deals centrally with the ways in which individuals differ from one another. Connects with all the other other domains. In the dispositional domain, psychologists are primarily interested in the number and nature of fundamental dispositions, taxonomies of traits, measurement issues, and questions of stability over time and consistency over situations.

Orthogonality

Discussed in terms of circumplex models, orthogonality specifies that traits that are perpendicular to each other on the model (at 90 degrees of separation, or at right angles to each other) are unrelated to each other. In general, the term "orthogonal" is used to describe a zero correlation between traits.

Differential Psychology

Due to its emphasis on the study of differences between people, trait psychology has sometimes been called differential psychology in the interest of distinguishing this subfield from other branches of personality psychology (Anastasi, 1976). Differential psychology includes the study of other forms of individual differences in addition to personality traits, such as abilities, aptitudes, and intelligence.

Response Sets

The tendency of some people to respond to the questions on a basis that is unrelated to the question content. Also known as noncontent responding

Case Study Method

Examining the life of one person in particular depth, which can give researchers insights into personality that can then be used to formulate a more general theory that is tested in a larger population. They can also provide in-depth knowledge of a particularly outstanding individual. Case studies are useful when studying rare phenomena, such as a person with a photographic memory or a person with multiple personalities—cases for which large samples would be difficult or impossible to obtain.

Statistical Approach

Having a large number of people rate themselves on certain items, and then employing a statistical procedure to identify groups or clusters of items that go together. The goal of the statistical approach is to identify the major dimensions or "coordinates" of the personality map.

The HEXACO Model

Honesty-Humility Emotionality Extraversion Agreeableness Conscientiousness Openness to Experience

Theoretical Constructs

Hypothetical internal entities useful in describing and explaining differences between people

Life-Outcome Data (L-Data)

Information that can be gleaned from the events, activities, and outcomes in a person's life that are available to public scrutiny. For example, marriages and divorces are a matter of public record. Personality psychologists can sometimes secure information about the clubs, if any, a person joins; how many speeding tickets a person has received in the last few years; whether the person owns a handgun. These can all serve as sources of information about personality.

Adaptation

Inherited solutions to the survival and reproductive problems posed by the hostile forces of nature. Adaptations are the primary product of the selective process. "reliably developing structure in the organism, which, because it meshes with the recurrent structure of the world, causes the solution to an adaptive problem"

Rank Order Stability

Maintaining one's relative position within a group over time.

Inter-rater Reliability

Multiple observers gather information about a person's personality, then investigators evaluate the degree of consensus among the observers. When different observers agree with one another, the degree of inter-rater reliability increases. When different raters fail to agree, the measure is said to have low inter-rater reliability.

Naturalistic Observations

Observers witness and record events that occur in the normal course of the lives of their participants. For example, a child might be followed throughout an entire day, or an observer may record behavior in the home of the participant. Offers researchers the advantage of being able to secure information in the realistic context of a person's everyday life, but at the cost of not being able to control the events and behavioral samples witnessed.

Beliefs

Often personally useful and crucially important to some people, but they are based on leaps of faith, not on reliable facts and systematic observations.

Comprehensiveness

One of the five scientific standards used in evaluating personality theories. Theories that explain more empirical data within a domain are generally superior to those that explain fewer findings

Third Variable Problem

One reason correlations can never prove casuality. It could be that two variables are correlated because some third, unknown variable is causing both.

Directionality Problem

One reason correlations can never prove causality. If A and B are correlated, we do not know if A is the cause of B, or if B is the cause of A, or if some third, unknown variable is causing both B and A.

Experience Sampling

People answer some questions, for example, about their mood or physical symptoms, every day for several weeks or longer. People are usually contacted electronically ("beeped") one or more times a day at random intervals to complete the measures. Although experience sampling uses self-report as the data source, it differs from more traditional self-report methods in being able to detect patterns of behavior over time.

Differences Among Groups

People in one group may have certain personality features in common, and these common features make that group of people different from other groups

Social and Cultural Domain

Personality affects, and is affected by, the social and cultural context in which it is found. Different cultures may bring out different facets of our personalities in manifest behavior. The capacities we display may depend to a large extent on what is acceptable in and encouraged by our culture. At the level of individual differences within cultures, personality plays itself out in the social sphere. One important social sphere concerns relations between men and women.

Adjustment Domain

Personality plays a key role in how we cope, adapt, and adjust to the ebb and flow of events in our day-to-day lives. In addition to health consequences of adjusting to stress, certain personality features are related to poor social or emotional adjustment and have been designated as personality disorders

Influential Forces

Personality traits and mechanisms are influential forces in people's lives in that they influence our actions, how we view ourselves, how we think about the world, how we interact with others, how we feel, our selection of environments (particularly our social environment), what goals and desires we pursue in life, and how we react to our circumstances. Other influential forces include sociological and economic influences, as well as physical and biological forces.

Theoretical Approach

The theoretical approach to identifying important dimensions of individual differences starts with a theory, which then determines which variables are important. The theoretical strategy dictates in a specific manner which variables are important to measure.

Statistically Significant

Refers to the probability of finding the results of a research study by chance alone. The generally accepted level of statistical significance is 5 percent, meaning that, if a study were repeated 100 times, the particular result reported would be found by chance only 5 times.

Correlation Coefficient

Researchers are interested in the direction (positive or negative) and the magnitude (size) of the correlation coefficient. Correlations around 0.10 are considered small; those around 0.30 are considered medium; those around 0.50 or greater are considered large

Structured and Unstructured

Self-report can take a variety of forms, ranging from open-ended questions. unstructured - "tell me about the parties you like the most" structured - "I like loud and crowded parties: true or false"

Psychological Mechanisms

Similar to traits, except that mechanisms refer more to the processes of personality. For example, most personality mechanisms involve some information-processing activity. A psychological mechanism may make people more sensitive to certain kinds of information from the environment (input), may make them more likely to think about specific options (decision rules), or may guide their behavior toward certain categories of action (outputs).

Average Tendencies

Tendency to display a certain psychological trait with regularity. For example, on average, a high-talkative person will start more conversations than a low talkative person. This idea explains why the principle of aggregation works when measuring personality

Forced-Choice Questionnaire

Test takers are confronted with pairs of statements and are asked to indicate which statement in the pair is more true of them. Each statement in the pair is selected to be similar to the other in social desirability, forcing participants to choose between statements that are equivalently socially desirable (or undesirable), and differ in content.

Lexical Approach

The approach to determining the fundamental personality traits by analyzing language. For example, a trait adjective that has many synonyms probably represents a more fundamental trait than a trait adjective with few synonyms.

Testability

The capacity to render precise predictions that scientists can test empirically. Generally, it is dependent upon the precision of its predictions. If it is impossible to test a theory empirically, the theory is generally discarded

Biological Domain

The core assumption of biological approaches to personality is that humans are, first and foremost, collections of biological systems, and these systems provide the building blocks (e.g., brain, nervous system) for behavior, thought, and emotion. Biological approaches typically refers to three areas of research within this general domain: the genetics of personality, the psychophysiology of personality, and the evolution of personality.

Reliability

The degree to which an obtained measure represents the "true" level of the trait being measured. For example, if a person has a "true" IQ of 115, then a perfectly reliable measure of IQ will yield a score of 115 each time, for that person.

Face Validity

The extent to which a test measures what it claims to measure

Parsimony

The fewer premises and assumptions a theory contains, the greater this is. This does not mean that simple theories are always better than complex ones. Due to the complexity of the human personality, a complex theory - that is, one containing many premises - may ultimately be necessary for adequate personality theories.

Intellect-Openness

The fifth personality trait in the five-factor model, which has proven to be replicable in studies using English-language trait words as items. Known as "creative," "imaginative," "intellectual." Those who rate high in this tend to remember their dreams more and have vivid, prophetic, or problem-solving dreams.

Extraversion

The first fundamental personality trait in the five-factor model, a taxonomy which has proven to be replicable in studies using English-language trait words as items. Known as "talkative," "sociable," "open", etc.

Scientific standards for evaluating personality theories

The five key standards are comprehensiveness, heuristic value, testability, parsimony and compatibility and integration across domains and levels

Emotional Stability

The fourth of the personality traits in the five-factor model, which has proven to be replicable in studies using English-language trait words as items. Known as "calm," "composed," "not hypochondriacal," "poised."

Social Attention

The goal and payback for surgent or extraverted behavior. By being the center of attention, the extravert seeks to gain the approval of others and, in many cases, through tacit approval controls or directs others.

Within the Individual

The important sources of personality reside within the individual—that is, people carry the sources of their personality inside themselves—and hence are stable over time and consistent over situations.

Observer-Report Data (O-Data)

The impressions and evaluations others make of a person whom they come into contact with. For every individual, there are dozens of observers who form such impressions. Observer-report methods capitalize on these sources and provide tools for gathering information about a person's personality. Observers may have access to information not attainable through other sources, and multiple observers can be used to assess each individual. Typically, a more valid and reliable assessment of personality can be achieved when multiple observers are used.

Person-Situation Interaction

The person-situation interaction trait theory states that one has to take into account both particular situations (e. g. , frustration) and personality traits (e. g. , hot temper) when understanding a behavior.

Agreeableness

The second of the personality traits in the five-factor model, a model which has proven to be replicable in studies using English-language trait words as items. Known as "good natured," "cooperative," etc.

Personality

The set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are organized and relatively enduring and that influence his or her interactions with, and adaptations to, the environment.

Nomothetic

The study of general characters of people as they are distributed in the population, typically involving statistical comparisons between individuals or groups.

Idiographic

The study of single individuals, with an effort to observe general principles as they are manifest in a single life over time.

Intrapsychic Domain

This domain deals with mental mechanisms of personality, many of which operate outside the realm of conscious awareness. The predominant theory in this domain is Freud's theory of psychoanalysis. This theory begins with fundamental assumptions about the instinctual system—the sexual and aggressive forces that are presumed to drive and energize much of human activity. The intrapsychic domain also includes defense mechanisms such as repression, denial, and projection.

Cognitive-Experiential Domain

This domain focuses on congnition and subjective experience, such as conscious throughts, feelings, beliefs and desires about one self and others. This domain includes our feelings of self, identity, self-esteem, our goals and plans, and our emotions

Consistency

Trait theories assume there is some degree of this in personality over time. If someone is highly extraverted during one period of observation, trait psychologists tend to assume that she will be extraverted tomorrow, next week, a year from now, or even decades from now

Experimental Methods

Typically used to determine causality—to find out whether one variable influences another variable. Experiments involve the manipulation of one variable (the independent variable) and random assignment of subjects to conditions defined by the independent variable.