Key Terms in Personality Psychology (Chapters 1-5)

Key Terms in Personality Psychology (Chapters 1-5)

• Trait-descriptive adjectives: Words that describe enduring personality traits.

• Personality: The organized set of psychological traits and mechanisms (consistent patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior) within an individual that shape interactions and adaptations to environments.

• Psychological traits: Characteristics that describe how people are unique or different from one another; they are relatively consistent over time.

• Average tendencies: A person's tendency to behave in certain ways with a certain degree of regularity. This concept is vital to understanding how the principle of aggregation works effectively in evaluating personality.

• Psychological mechanisms: Similar to traits but describe the processes within personality; they involve information processing, decision-making and output (behavior)

• Within the individual: Personality resides within the person, influencing how they behave in various situations in a fairly consistent manner.

• Organized and enduring: Personality traits and mechanisms are linked to each other and are generally stable over time and across different environments.

• Influential forces: Personality traits and mechanisms directly affect how individuals relate with the world around them, their views of themselves, and their behaviors.

• Person-environment interactions: Personality encompasses a person's perceptions of situations, interactions with various environments, influence on others, and their impact on the way others respond.

• Adaptation: A central feature of personality; it focuses on how people adjust to life's challenges, complete goals, cope, and adjust.

• Environment: Includes physical, social, and intrapsychic factors, all of which are influenced by individual personalities.

• Human nature: Common traits and mechanisms that are shared by all or nearly all people.

• Individual differences: Ways in which people vary from each other; these differences can result from factors like culture, age, and social and political beliefs.

• Differences among groups: Ways in which personality characteristics differ between cultural groups, age groups, and others.

• Nomothetic: The study of general characteristics of people in a population. Often involves statistical comparisons between individuals or groups.

• Idiographic: The study of individual cases and individual differences. Examines general principles of personality within an individual's lifetime.

• Domain of knowledge: A specific area within psychology used to understand a specific aspect of human behavior.

• Dispositional domain: Examines behavioral differences between individuals, focusing on traits, taxonomies, measurement techniques, and individual consistency over time and circumstances.

• Biological domain: This domain of personality examines the biological basis of behavior examining the influences of genetics, biology and evolution on personality.

• Intrapsychic domain: Focuses on internal mental mechanisms, often unconscious motivations, and processes, such as Freud's psychoanalysis

• Cognitive-experiential domain: Explores thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires, including conscious experience, and how they shape behavior.

• Social and cultural domain: Examines the significant impact of social and cultural values on personality.

• Adjustment domain: Looks at how individuals manage, adapt, and cope with life challenges, often with consideration of health consequences.

• Good theory: A theory that explains existing data, generates testable predictions, helps researchers guide explorations and organize data.

• Scientific Standards for evaluating personality theories: Includes characteristics like comprehensiveness, heuristic value, testability, parsimony, and compatibility across domains.

• Self-Report Data (S-Data): Information provided by the individual about themselves.

• Structured and unstructured: Different formats for self-report instruments differing in structure and format.

• Likert rating scale: Used in psychological instruments, to measure attitudes or opinions.

• Experience Sampling: Frequent, short assessments of feelings, thoughts, or behavior in a variety of settings.

• Observer-Report Data (O-Data): Information reported about an individual from others who know the person.

• Inter-rater reliability: The correspondence between different observers' ratings of the same person.

• Multiple Social Personalities: Our behavior can vary considerably depending on the social context and our relationships with various people.

• Life-Outcome Data (L-Data): Information about the real world events and behaviors of individuals.

• Reliability: The consistency of a measurement.

• Repeated Measurement: A method to gauge reliability by assessing a measurement multiple times over a period of time.

• Response Sets: Answers unrelated to question content showing tendencies to agree or disagree regardless of question specifics.

• Noncontent Responding: Refers to answers unrelated to question content

• Extreme Responding: A response bias involving giving only extreme answers (e.g., always agreeing or disagreeing).

• Social Desirability: A tendency to give answers that reflect favorably on the individual.

• Forced-choice questionnaire: A forced choice between 2 similar or equal statements.

• Validity: The extent to which a measurement accurately represents the characteristic it is intended to measure.

• Face Validity: A superficial assessment of validity.

• Predictive Validity: The test's ability to predict future behavior

• Convergent Validity: The degree to which a measure correlates with other measures of similar constructs.

• Discriminant Validity: The degree to which a measure does not correlate with measures of dissimilar constructs.

• Construct Validity: The overall validity of a test to measure what is intended.

• Theoretical Constructs: Abstractions used to represent intangible and abstract concepts.

• Generalizability: The degree to which test results can be generalized to other populations, settings, and time periods.

• Experimental Methods: Involves manipulating variables to determine causality.

• Manipulation: Researchers deliberately change one variable.

• Random Assignment: Participants are assigned to conditions randomly.

• Counterbalancing: Used to ensure that all conditions have equal chances to be presented first.

• Statistically Significant: Results that are unlikely to be due to chance alone.

• Correlational Method: Studies the relationship between variables without manipulating them.

• Correlation Coefficient: A measure of the strength and direction of a relationship between two variables.

• Directionality Problem: Difficulty in determining cause-effect when variables are correlated.

• Third-Variable Problem: When a 3rd unmeasured variable is influencing an apparent correlation.

• Case Study Method: In-depth examinations of individuals.

• Lexical Approach: Determine personality traits by analyzing language.

• Statistical Approach: Identify personality traits by analyzing the interrelationships between items.

• Theoretical Approach: Identify traits based on existing theories.

• Lexical Hypothesis: Most important aspects of personality are encoded in language.

• Synonym Frequency: Common words for a trait indicate its importance.

• Cross-Cultural Universality: If a trait is expressed in different cultures, it's likely to be important.

• Factor Analysis: A statistical method to identify underlying dimensions of personality.

• Factor Loadings: Indicate the relationship between each item with an underlying factor.

• Sociosexual Orientation: Mating strategies (committed relationships vs. promiscuity).

• Interpersonal Traits: Traits that pertain to how individuals interact with each other.

• Adjacency: Traits located closer together in a circumplex model are related / correlated with each other.

• Bipolarity: Opposite traits are located on opposite sides of a circumplex model / inversely related (correlated).

• Orthogonality: Traits are unrelated when perpendicular in a circumplex model.

• Five-Factor Model, HEXACO model: Commonly used taxonomies of personality traits (characteristics measured repeatedly and consistently in various contexts).

• Extraversion: A personality trait that refers to a person's sociability, assertiveness, and emotional expression.

• Agreeableness: A personality trait that indicates how kind, cooperative, and compassionate a person is. (Related to trusting other people)

• Conscientiousness: A personality trait that describes how dependable, organized, and achievement-oriented a person is.

• Intellect-Openness: (or openness to experience): A personality trait that refers to how open a person is to new ideas, experiences, and perspectives.

• Personality-Descriptive Nouns: Different ways of describing personality through phrases; not adjectives.

• Density Distribution: Represents a person's trait levels at different points in time.

• Overt and Covert Integrity Measures: Self-reports assessing honesty or integrity (explicit measures vs. more subtle ones).

• Levels of Analysis: Levels of analysis in psychological studies (population-level, group-level, and individual level).

• Age Effects: Changes over time due to aging processes.

• Cohort Effects: Changes over time due to generational experiences.

• Rank Order Stability: Maintaining relative positions in a group over time (e.g., in terms of height, personality traits).

• Situationism: The role of situations in determining behavior, with little to no role from personality traits.

• Person-situation interaction: Behavior results from interplay of both personal characteristics and situational factors.

• Aggregation: Averaging multiple observations to obtain a more reliable estimate of a trait.

• Situational Specificity: Behavior varies significantly across different situations.

• Strong Situations: Situations that evoke similar behavior from most people.

• Situational Selection: Tendency to choose situations that match one's personality/traits.

• Evocation: Certain traits can induce reactions from others (evoking specific behavior response).

• Manipulation: Changing variables to study their effects.

• Reliability, Validity, Response Sets: Methods to assess the accuracy and reliability of psychological tests.

Test your understanding of key concepts in personality psychology from Chapters 1-5. This quiz covers important terms like psychological traits, mechanisms, and average tendencies that define individual personalities. Perfect for students looking to reinforce their knowledge in this subject area.