Personality Psychology Quiz

Personality Psychology: A Comprehensive Overview

Personality psychology examines personality and its variation among individuals.
Personality is a set of characteristics that influences one's environment, cognition, emotions, motivations, and behaviors in various situations.
Personality is also a pattern of thoughts, feelings, social adjustments, and behaviors persistently exhibited over time that strongly influences one's expectations, self-perceptions, values, and attitudes.
Gordon Allport described two major ways to study personality: the nomothetic and the idiographic.
Major theories include dispositional (trait) perspective, psychodynamic, humanistic, biological, behaviorist, evolutionary, and social learning perspective.
Research in this area is empirically driven or emphasizes theory development, such as that of the psychodynamic theory.
The study of the nature of personality and its psychological development is usually reviewed as a prerequisite to courses in abnormal psychology or clinical psychology.
There are five fundamental philosophical assumptions on which theorists disagree.
Personality type refers to the psychological classification of people into different classes.
Psychoanalytic theories explain human behavior in terms of the interaction of various components of personality.
Behaviorists explain personality in terms of the effects external stimuli have on behavior.
Cognitive theories are theories of personality that emphasize cognitive processes, such as thinking and judging.Overview of Personality Theories and Tests
Various scales and questionnaires have been developed to assess attributional style and locus of control, including those used in health domains.
Counseling aimed at encouraging individuals to design ambitious goals and work towards them has proven to be effective in various settings, including education, workplace, and justice programming.
Walter Mischel's cognitive approach to personality involves considering factors such as encoding of stimuli, affect, goal-setting, and self-regulatory beliefs.
Cognitive-Experiential Self-Theory argues that humans operate by way of two independent information processing systems: experiential and rational.
Personal construct psychology, developed by George Kelly, views people as naive scientists who see the world through a particular lens, based on their uniquely organized systems of construction.
Humanistic psychology emphasizes that people have free will and focuses on subjective experiences of persons.
The evolutionary approach to personality psychology examines how individual personality differences are based on natural selection.
Drive theory posits that personality could be equated with the habitual responses exhibited by an individual, built on secondary, or acquired drives.
Projective tests assume personality is primarily unconscious and assess individuals by how they respond to an ambiguous stimulus, such as an ink blot.
Objective tests involve self-report questionnaires that measure personality traits, such as the Big Five personality traits.
The Big Five personality traits are neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.
Twin studies have been valuable in studying the relationship between genetics and personality, with identical twins demonstrating higher correlations in personality traits than fraternal twins.
DNA-environment interactions are important in the development of personality because this relationship determines what part of the DNA code is actually made into proteins that will become part of an individual.Methods for Assessing Personality
Personality assessment can be done through projective testing or objective testing, with projective testing being less reliable than objective testing.
The Rorschach Inkblot Test involves presenting individuals with inkblots and asking them to describe what they see, with responses being scored based on various factors.
The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) involves presenting individuals with vague pictures and asking them to tell a story based on what they see, with responses being analyzed for common themes.
Objective tests assume personality is consciously accessible and that it can be measured by self-report questionnaires, which have been found to be more valid and reliable than projective tests.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a self-reporting questionnaire based on Carl Jung's Type theory but modified by the MBTI.
Inner experiences are the thoughts and feelings to an immediate phenomenon, and defining personality using inner experiences has been expanding.
Descriptive experience sampling (DES) is an idiographic method used to help examine inner experiences, relying on an introspective technique.
Articulated thoughts in stimulated situations (ATSS) is a paradigm created as an alternative to the TA (think aloud) method, assessing a person's inner thoughts as they verbalize their cognitions.
The experimental method is an experimental paradigm used to study human experiences involved in the studies of sensation and perception, learning and memory, motivation, and biological psychology.
Economists and psychologists have developed a variety of experimental methodologies to elicit and assess individual attitudes where each emotion differs for each individual.
The experimental method does have some complications, and often requires deception, so the ethics of experiments are also brought into question.
Personality assessment can be done through a combination of these methods, but the validity of these methods is still a subject of debate.