Personality Disorders and Lexical Hypothesis

Personality Disorders

• The 10 personality disorders are categorized into three clusters: Cluster A (paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal), Cluster B (antisocial, borderline, histrionic, narcissistic), and Cluster C (avoidant, dependent, obsessive-compulsive).

The Lexical Approach

• The lexical hypothesis states that all important individual differences are already encoded within the language.
• The approach yields two criteria for identifying important traits: synonym frequency and cross-cultural universality.
• Synonym frequency refers to the presence of many words to describe a trait, such as dominant, bossy, assertive, and powerful.
• Cross-cultural universality refers to the existence of a term for an important individual difference in multiple languages.

Gordon Allport's Personal Approach

• According to Allport, we are not prisoners of childhood conflicts and past experiences, but are guided more by the present and our view of the future.
• Personality is the dynamic organization of psychological systems, meaning it is constantly changing and growing.
• Personality is psychophysical, meaning it is composed of both mind and body functioning together as a unit.

Cattell's 16 Personality Factors

• Cattell's work improved upon Allport's by identifying a continuum of personality traits, where each person contains all 16 traits to a certain degree.
• The 16 traits were derived from the lexical approach, which started with Allport and Odbert's identification of 18,000 trait terms.

The Five-Factor Model

• The five-factor model was originally based on a combination of the lexical and statistical approaches.
• The lexical approach was used to identify 171 clusters of personality traits, which were then reduced to five factors through factor analysis.

Eysenck's Hierarchical Model of Personality

• The three main traits identified by Eysenck are extraversion–introversion (E), neuroticism–emotional stability (N), and psychoticism (P).
• Each trait sits at the top of its own hierarchy, with narrower traits branching out from them.
• Neuroticism (N) consists of traits such as anxious, guilty, lacking self-esteem, tense, and shy, and is characterized by emotional instability.
• Psychoticism (P) consists of traits such as aggressive, egocentric, creative, impulsive, lacking empathy, and antisocial.

This quiz covers the 10 personality disorders, including Cluster A, B, and C personalities, as well as the lexical hypothesis, which suggests that individual differences are encoded in language.