Exam 1 Study Guide - Dr. Cathy Cox PDF

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Dr. Cathy Cox...

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Psychology of Personality Exam 1 Study Guide CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION TO PERSONALITY Personality  Interested in the individual and how he/she thinks, feels, and behaves and the mechanisms (hidden or not) behind these processes  Are we consciously aware of what we are doing?  On a continuum How personality relates to other areas of psychology  Personality psychology is based on individual differences  Human nature  how are we like all others? o Universal aspects of psychology o What are ALL people like?  Individual differences  how are we like some others? o How and why people differ from each other  The unique life of a single person  how are we like no others? o Individual uniqueness  Must be present across time and situations The scientific method of personality psychology  Is a self-correcting cyclical process  The process of constructing, testing, and refining theories through systematic observations  Theory  hypothesis  systematic observation  compare results to theory  repeat  All research starts with a theory (idea)  Ideas/theories are turned into a hypothesis o Hypothesis: an if-then statement under which you think an event will occur o We test hypotheses, not theories  We systematically observe a situation o Systematic observations: all of the information counts regardless of if it is consistent or inconsistent with our assumptions o This is what makes the process cyclical  The process is self-correcting because we compare the results to the theory and can adjust based on what we find CHAPTER 2: RESEARCH METHODS Experimental research design  Variables are manipulated by the experimenter  Has control over the environment  Uses different conditions  Used to evaluate casual hypotheses  Evaluated how the IV affects the DV  Can have multiple IVs and DVs  Must operationalize the variables

o Defines the variables within the terms of the study  Between subject’s design o Different participants o Exposed to only one condition  Within subjects design o Same participants o Exposed to both or all conditions  Must use random assignment o Equal opportunity to be in either condition o Eliminates individual differences  Problems with experiments o Demand characteristics  Cues in the experimental setting that may affect participant’s behavior o Third variable  Some other variable is influencing the DV o Cover story  Telling the participants something different about what is actually happening o Experimenter bias  Experimenter behaves in a way to elicit a response  Use a blind or double-blind experiment to try to eliminate this o Has low external validity  Can’t be generalized as much o May be unethical o Takes a lot of time  Advantages of experiments o Controls for third variables through random assignment and manipulating the environment o Can establish causality o High on internal validity  Measuring what you’re wanting to measure Correlational research design  The extent to which two variable are associated with each other  Represented by “r” or correlation coefficient  Null is when r = 0 o No relationship between the variables  Problems with correlations o Cant establish causality o Many third variable problems o No control  Advantages of correlations o High external validity  Can generalize to other populations

o Fewer ethical concerns o Easier to get a larger sample o Can study variables that are hard to manipulate Reliability  Extent to which scores on a measure are stable (consistent) and replicable  Test-retest reliability o Are scores consistent across testing times? o Should be at least .70 or .80  Internal reliability o Are the items measuring the same thing? o Correlation among items using Cronbach’s Alpha o Needs to be at least .60 or .70 Validity  Degree to which a measure assesses what it is supposed to assess  Face validity o Measuring what they’re supposed to o Not the ideal way to determine validity  Predictive validity o When a scale is related to an outcome o Ex: GRE  success in grad school  Convergent validity o When a scale correlated with other scales o Liking cats and having a high IQ shouldn’t be correlated  Construct validity o All of the above o All of the validities combined CHAPTER 3: TRAITS What are traits?  Words used to describe a person  Relatively stable tendencies of individuals  Always present across time and situations o Throughout all developmental periods  Helps us to understand and predict behavior Carl Jung’s three trait dichotomies  How we are energized o Extraversion vs. introversion  How we make decisions o Sensing vs. intuition  How we make decisions o Thinking vs. feeling  Myers-Briggs added a fourth trait o How we approach life

 Judging vs. perceiving  Criticized because traits aren’t “this or that” Gordon Allport  Father of personality psychology  Came up with a list of over 4,500 traits Cattell  Used Allport’s list to develop 16 factors  Described on a continuum  No replication  Too many factors/traits still Hans Eysenck’s PEN model  Came up with three major traits of interest o Psychoticism  testosterone o Extraversion  nervous system arousal o Neuroticism  autonomic nervous system  Advantages of PEN model o Correlational research support o Highly reliable and valid  Disadvantages of PEN model o Research shows more than three traits o Other traits show heritability  Personality is 50% genes and 50% environment Big Five  Considered the gold standard  Established by Costa, McCrae, Goldberg, and others  OCEAN o Optimism o Conscientiousness o Extraversion o Agreeableness o Neuroticism  Big Five traits are super traits  Isolated event  habit  subtrait  supertrait  Disadvantages of the Big Five o Doesn’t always translate to other cultures o Some researchers propose a sixth factor of humility/honesty o May promote stereotypes instead of diversity o Describes people, not the underlying processes  What causes someone to have that trait? o No established causality for the traits CHAPTER 9: PERSONALITY OVER TIME/DEVELOPMENT Development

 Both continuity and change Temperament  Biologically based individual differences that emerge early in life  Often associated with emotionality  Easy to observe  Over time, temperament solidifies into personality  Shown to have moderate stability (just a little change) with individual differences early on  There is more evidence for stability as we age  Many models of temperament overlap with Big Five traits o Very prominent by adolescence o Overall, temperament may predict personality Trait stability  Personality isn’t completely “set like plaster”  Traits are stable dispositions across time and situations  Research shows personality doesn’t show dramatic changes over time  Only 64% of people change in certain traits over time o We think we change more than we actually do Personality consistency  Mean-level changes o Shifts in average scores with age  Rank-order consistency o Comparing someone to the average person of the same age  See smaller changes over time, not large ones Person/situation debate  Do people behave based on their personality or the situation they’re in?  Ex: kids cheating at soccer don’t cheat in school Strong situation debate  People give up individualism to conform with society  Examples o Asch’s conformity study o Milgram’s obedience study o Zimbardo’s prison study Aggregate approach  Personality can predict behavior over the long term  Ex: the success of an athlete is not determined based on one game  Averaging and summing together a set of behaviors CHAPTER 4: GENES AND PERSONALITY Heritability  The extent to which individual differences in a trait are due to differences in genes  Personality can be heritable  Heritability quotients refer to a group of people and not a single person

 Genes have an impact on personality as a whole Family studies  Share 50% of genes with parents and siblings  Share 25% with grandparents, aunts, and uncles  Share 12.5% with first cousins  A trait is highly heritable if people with more genetic overlap are more similar than those with less of a genetic overlap o You should be more similar to your parents and siblings than extended family  Not the best research because you can’t manipulate the shared and nonshared environment Twin studies  Monozygotic (MZ) twins  identical  Dizygotic (DZ) twins  fraternal  Personality is about 50% determined by genetics  High genetic component  MZ twins score more similarly on the Big Five  High environmental component  DZ twins score more similarly on the Big Five o Only share half of DNA Adoption studies  Compare traits between parents (biological and adopted) and child  Best design is MZ twins raised apart  Genetic component o Child is more similar to the biological parent(s)  Environmental component o Child is more similar to the adopted parent(s) Influences on personality  Genetic influences o Individuals inherit about 40% of genes from their parents o Whatever is not received from genetics is considered the environmental factors  Shared environment o Environmental effects shared by a family o Examples  Parenting style  Neighborhood  Resources o Accounts for about 5% of personality  Nonshared environment o Environmental effects not shared by a family o Effects that are unique to the individual o Examples  Injuries  Friends  Hobbies  Activities

o Accounts for about 35% of personality Conclusions  All personality traits are at least partially heritable  The effect of being raised in the same family (5%) is smaller than the effect of genes (40%)  Much of the variance in personality is not due to genes (40%) OR shared experiences (5%) because it is strongly influenced by unique individual experiences that make up the nonshared environment (35%)...