Personality psychology exam 1
What might be an effect of expectancies in real life?
. to magnify or maintain existing behavioral tendencies
Which of the following statements best describes a social desirability response set?
A bias to pick responses that the respondent believes are expected by society
Why haven't personality psychologists combined all paradigms into "One Big The-ory"?
A theory that tries to explain everything would probably not provide the best explana-tion for any one thing.
Which of the following is true about predicting future behaviors?
Aggregated behaviors are better predicted than specific behaviors
A projective test yields ________ data.
B
The Implicit Association Test (IAT) yields what kind of data?
B. B
Dr. Garcia wants to measure the earliest autobiographical memories of the participants in her project. She would most likely obtain ________ data.
C. S
Which of the following is an expression of Funder's First Law?
Characteristics that are strengths in one sense are weaknesses in other ways.
Which of the following behaviors would be the easiest to predict accurately?
David will generally be on time for work most days next week.
A researcher wants to conduct a significance test for the correlation between extraversion and happiness. What is the null hypothesis in this analysis?
Extraversion is uncorrelated with happiness.
Eysenck's taxonomy has been criticized on which one of these issues?
Eysenck failed to include some important personality traits in his model.
Based on personality development research conducted over the last 40 years, what can we conclude regarding William James's claim that personality is "set like plaster" by age 30?
He was very wrong.
What is one of personality psychology's biggest advantages over other areas of psychology?
It has a mission to account for the psychology of whole persons.
Which conclusion follows from Funder's analysis of the person-situation debate?
One behavioral response does not fit all people in every situation
Which of the following is assessed in the process of convergent validation?
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?
Which of the following does NOT describe a type of person-situation in-teraction?
People generally prefer situations that are pleasant.
Which of the following is a limitation of projective tests?
Projective tests are relatively inefficient and expensive to administer.
Which reason describes why averaged (aggregated) behaviors are more strongly related to personality traits than individual behaviors?
Random variations tend to cancel out when aggregated.
A behavioroid measure is a combination of which two types of data?
S and B
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
Imagine that Sally thinks she can judge Charlie's personality better than Lucy's personality. According to a recent study, which statement is most correct?
Sally will be more accurate in her judgments of Charlie.
_____ is the concept that refers to the idea that a person may act in a certain way only in particular circumstances.
Situational specificity
Which of the following is NOT considered one of the likely reasons that high-expectancy students perform better?
Teachers show an increased willingness to ignore disciplinary problems in these stu-dents.
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 a key strength of longitudinal personality development studies?
They are not biased by the cohort effect.
Which approach is concerned with identifying the number of fundamental individual differences?
Trait
Imagine that a researcher conducts a study and fails to find a statistically significant correlation between exercise and weight loss. However, there is a real associa-tion between exercise and weight loss in the population. What kind of error has this re-searcher made?
Type II
Which of the following psychologists is often credited with starting the person-situation debate?
Walter Mischel
Which of the following illustrates converging criteria that could be used to estab-lish the accuracy of a personality judgment?
You always show up to work on time, and your colleagues say that you are dependable and conscientious.
Personality psychology shares with clinical psychology________.
a common obligation to try to understand the whole person
Reliability is ________ for validity.
a necessary but not sufficient condition
Which of the following is LEAST likely to be considered B data?
a psychologist's interpretation of a participant's responses to an unstructured clin-ical interview
The death of a pet triggers strong emotion in virtually everyone who experiences it and is therefore an example of ____.
a strong situation
Psychologists counteract ____ by intentionally reverse-scoring some of the questionnaire items.
acquiescence
In line with the ________ process, if someone is high on conscientiousness, she will most likely select environments that promote achievement and order.
active person-environment transaction
Roots of personality psychology can be traced to the theater because
actors often portray "characters" or easily recognizable types of people.
Validity is the degree to which a measurement ________.
actually reflects or measures what you think it does
Your grade point average best indicates your average performance in your college classes over time. This illustrates the concept of
aggregation.
The judgments other people make of your personality may affect ________.
all of the above
Mischel stated that correlations between personality traits and behavior were
almost always about .30 or slightly higher
What term describes computer-assisted methods to measure thoughts and feelings that occur during normal daily activities?
ambulatory assessment
What kinds of behaviors by an acquaintance would most likely be re-membered?
an atypical behavior that was emotionally evocative
A case study usually entails
an in-depth assessment.
The concept of aggregation suggests that traits are
average tendencies.
The Barnum effect refers to the tendency to
believe vague generalities about one's own personality.
One critique of personality psychology is that it "pigeonholes" people. What does "pigeonholing" someone mean?
categorizing and labeling people
Correlation cannot provide any information about
causality.
According to a new theoretical model for personality change, if individuals ________, the trait change will follow.
change the relevant behaviors
When gathering data or clues about personality, the best policy is to ________.
collect as many clues as possible
What is the best approach to test construction?
combination of all three approaches
A good judge of personality seems to be high in ________.
communion
Allen has just begun his first professional job. Allen will most likely display an in-crease in which trait?
conscientiousness
Integrity tests administered in employment screening provide good measures of ________.
conscientiousness
The ________ method is NOT a basic method for constructing objective personality tests.
consensus validation
An assumption made by all trait theories is that there is a degree of ____ in personality over time.
consistency
In simple language, questions about reliability concern ________, whereas questions about validity concern ________.
consistency; accuracy
The field of personality have been criticized for ___.
containing too many independent areas of investigation
The field of personality have been criticized for ____.
containing too many independent areas of investigation
Mischel used _____ to study the size of the relationship between personality and behavior and between behaviors across situations.
correlation coefficient r
Dr. Low is interested in studying the relation between mood and will-ingness to help a stranger. Every participant in her study completes a mood-rating ques-tionnaire and is then given an opportunity to donate money to a homeless stranger. Dr. Low is using a(n) ________ design.
correlational
Individuals who are open to experience tend to be
creative
For trait psychologists, any meaningful way in which people _____ may potentially be identified as a personality trait.
differ from each other
People in one group may have certain personality features in common, and these common features make that group of people distinct from other groups. This means that personality can be observed by studying ___.
differences among groups
Trait psychology is sometimes also called _____ psychology.
differential
When evaluated as psychometric instruments, most projective tests ________.
do not fare very well
Discriminant validity is established when a test
does not correlate with measures of unrelated constructs.
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
If you were to fully develop a personality test without even looking at the item content, you would be using the ________ method of test construction.
empirical
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 nondepressed 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 nondepressed groups answered differently. You are using a(n) ________ method of test construction.
empirical
Which of the following approaches to test construction is the most atheo-retical?
empirical
According to Dan McAdams, the narrative theme of "agency" organizes the life story around ________.
episodes of challenging oneself and then accomplishing one's goals
A form of person-situation interaction is ____.
evocation
The idea that certain personality traits may elicit specific responses from the environment is known as ___.
evocation
Which of the following is another term for behavioral confirmation?
expectancy effect
Which design is best suited for addressing the third-variable problem?
experimental
Because each kind of data has limitations, personality psychologists should ________.
gather as much data as possible
Which of the following characteristics is NOT associated with conscientiousness?
high IQ
a person who tends to happy and experience positive affect in life would have this combination of five factor traits:
high extraversion and low neuroticism.
Trait psychologists are most interested in
how people are different from each other.
The factor analytic technique of test construction is designed to________.
identify groups of test items that seem to be alike
When doing research, personality psychologists most often focus on ____.
individual and group differences in personality
Luciano is a risk-taker and enjoys riding motorcycles and driving fast cars. He enjoys taking physical risks compared to Nicole who shuns physical risks and takes extreme precautions even when crossing the road. This scenario illustrates the dimension of ____.
individual differences
The trait approach focuses exclusively on ________.
individual differences
____ tests are designed to predict a tendency toward theft or other forms of counterproductive behaviors in work settings, such as absenteeism.
integrity
Walter Mischel and his 1968 book Personality and Assessment are note-worthy because this work ________.
is credited with starting the person-situation debate by claiming that traits are not as important as situational factors in behavioral prediction
The best sort of personality change ________.
is slow and steady
The human nature level of personality analysis addresses how every human is
like all others.
Andersen (1984) found that the quality of information affected the accuracy of personality judgments. According to the results of this study, information obtained from which actions would most likely lead to a social impression that corresponds to the target's self-assessment?
listening to the target describe his or her thoughts and feeling
Andersen (1984) found that the quality of information affected the accuracy of personality judgments. According to the results of this study, information obtained from which actions would most likely lead to a social impression that corresponds to the target's self-assessment?
listening to the target describe his or her thoughts and feelings
_____ refer to examinations of the same group of individuals over time.
longitudinal studies
The major difference between the experimental and correlational meth-ods is that in the experimental method the presumed causal variable is ________, whereas in the correlational method the same variable is ________.
manipulated; measured
The intentional use of certain tactics to coerce, influence, or change others is known as ____.
manipulation
What is a primary goal of the trait approach to personality?
measuring and conceptualizing individual differences
A variable that affects the relation between two other variables is known as a ________.
moderator
A worrier would likely score high on the trait of
neuroticism.
If a test consists of a list of True/False questions and is graded using a computer-scored answer sheet, then it is a(n) ________.
objective test
What term refers to personality inventories that are designed to measure a wide range of traits?
omnibus inventories
According to recent evidence, results from longitudinal studies and cross-sectional studies about personality traits are ________.
only slightly different
Which of the Big Five traits appears to have the most inconsistency in terms of cross-cultural replication?
openness
One problem with the lexical strategy is that ___.
personality is conveyed through different parts of speech
Characteristics that describe ways in which people are different from each other are known as ____.
personality traits
The processes by which people respond to, seek out, and create environments that are compatible with their personalities are called ________.
personality-environment transactions
Which of the following is NOT part of the psychological triad?
psychological health
The basis of the ________ method of test construction is to come up with items that seem directly, obviously, and logically related to what it is you wish to meas-ure.
rational
What is the most common method of test construction?
rational
Funder notes that the person who is most talkative at a party is also likely to be the most talkative at the department of motor vehicles (DMV). Which of the fol-lowing terms describes this principle?
relative consistency
The reason that objective tests include so many items is to increase the ________ of the test.
reliability
If you can get the same answer repeatedly, then your measure is ________.
reliable
Responding to items of a personality test in a manner that is unrelated to the characteristics being assessed is an example of a(n) _____.
response set
A person who feels very good after receiving a compliment, but very bad after being insulted, would sore high on measures of
self-esteem variability.
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
Mischel is most associated with
situationalism
Mischel thought that _____ were most important in determining behavior.
situations
Walter Mischel suggested that personality psychologists should shift their focus of explaining behavior to ____.
situations
Cattell's taxonomy included _____ traits
sixteen
Cattell's taxonomy included _____ traits.
sixteen
The tendency to answer items in such as way as to come across as generally attractive or likable refers to the response set of ____.
social desirability
A limitation of Hans Eysenck's personality taxonomy is that ___.
some important traits may be missing
Implicit personality theories are essentially
stereotypes.
Which of the following does NOT fall within the biological approach?
subjective experience
A psychologist administering the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) asks respondents to ________.
tell stories about pictures that the psychologist shows them
A major disadvantage of L data is ________.
that the data are influenced by multiple factors besides just personality
The number between -1 and +1 that indexes the linear association between any two variables is called ________.
the correlation coefficient
Vince is watching his school's team play in the championship basketball game. He is wildly cheering his team on to victory, talking to everyone around him, even though they are strangers, and shouting at the referees for making bad calls on his team. From psychologist Walter Mischel's perspective, Vince is primarily behaving due to
the extremely strong effects of the immediate situation.
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
Personality assessment refers to ________.
the measurement of any characteristic pattern of behavior, thought, or emotion
What is a well-known issue with cross-sectional methodology?
the possibility that differences in childhood social environment is determining differ-ences between age groups
In a series of studies about intellectual expectancies, Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) found that schoolchildren randomly identified as "bloomers" showed an average IQ in-crease of about 15 points by the end of the school year. These studies demonstrated ________.
the power of expectancies
The ____ approach deals centrally with the ways in which individuals differ from one another.
trait
The task of an employer who attempts to identify dependable, conscientious, and hard-working job applicants is similar to the task of the ________ psychologist, who at-tempts to identify and assess individual differences.
trait
Narcissists seem to ________ the positive consequences of changing themselves.
underestimate
In observing human behavior, it is impossible to ________.
understand everything about a person all at once
What is a primary goal of the biological approach to personality?
understanding the heritability of behavior and personality
he generalizability of their findings
validity
As described in the text, according to some motivation researchers, the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) measures ________, whereas questionnaire-based measures predict ________.
what people want; how motives are expressed
Vicki has been your friend for several years. Generally she is a very friendly, outgoing, and sociable person. Based on what you know about Vicki's personality you predict that she
will be as friendly, outgoing, and sociable as she is now in the future.
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