Psychology: Personality Traits Quiz

Personality

• Personality is a set of psychological traits and mechanisms within a person, organized and relatively enduring, influencing interactions and adaptations to environments (intrapsychic, physical, social).
• Trait descriptive adjectives are words describing traits, characteristics reasonably typical and enduring.
• Psychological traits describe how people differ or are similar, including stable and consistent aspects of personality.
• Within the individual means the sources of personality are internal, stable, and consistent across situations.
• Traits are average tendencies to display a trait regularly; for example, talkative people have more conversations.
• Mechanisms are personality processes influencing information processing, involving inputs, decision rules, and outputs (e.g., optimism: input = failure, decision rule = find positives, output = persist).
• Personality is organized; its mechanisms are interconnected.
• Personality endures; traits are stable over time.
• Personality influences actions, self-view, worldviews, interactions, emotions, environment selection, goals, and reactions to circumstances.
• Person-environment interaction involves perceptions, selections, evocations, and manipulations.
• Adaptation refers to inherited solutions to survival and reproductive challenges.
• Environment includes physical, social, and intrapsychic aspects, with environment importance determined by the person's personality.

Challenges to Personality Theory

• Personality can change through changing perceptions, selecting certain situations, evoking reactions from others, and manipulating others.
• Situations can alter personality expression.
• Stability across time and across situations are examined.

Levels of Personality Analysis

• Human nature: Universal traits and mechanisms shared by all people (e.g., Freud's psychoanalytic theory).
• Group differences: Ways groups differ from each other.
• Individual uniqueness: Personal, unique qualities of individuals. Studied nomothetically (population-level comparisons) or idiographically (in-depth individual studies).

Grand Theories of Personality

• Attempt a universal account of human nature and physiological processes.

Contemporary Research in Personality

• Focuses on individual and group differences across various domains.
• Specializations arise in particular domains of interest to researchers.

Six Domains of Knowledge

• Dispositional: Describes individual differences, focusing on the number, nature, and consequences of fundamental dispositions. Seeks to identify and measure individual differences' origins and development.

• Biological: Emphasizes the biological systems contributing to behavior, thoughts, and emotions (e.g., behavioral genetics, psychophysiology, evolutionary influences).

• Intrapsychic: Focuses on mental mechanisms, often unconscious, linked to psychoanalysis (e.g., repression, denial, projection).

• Cognitive-experimental: Examines thought processes, subjective experiences (conscious ideas, feelings, beliefs, desires), the self, and goals.

• Social and cultural: Considers how personality is affected by, and affects, culture and social context. Group and individual differences within cultural contexts are analyzed.

• Adjustment: Evaluates personality's role in coping, adapting, and adjusting to everyday life events, and links personality with health-related behaviors, coping mechanisms, and adjustment problems.

• Good theory: A useful guide, organizes facts, and predicts observations.

Sources of Personality Data

• Observer-report data (O-data): Information from others, potentially providing access to otherwise unavailable information (e.g., using professionals, acquaintances, naturalistic observations, artificial settings). Can be biased due to relationships with the target.
• Self-report data (S-data): Information from questionnaires or interviews. Includes unstructured and structured (Likert scale) formats and experience sampling. Valuable for measuring complex behaviors in realistic settings but can be prone to biases like social desirability or lack of self-knowledge.
• Test data (T-data): Data from standardized tests (designed situations) to measure responses and relate them to personality types. Can be biased by the test subjects trying to guess what to do.
• Life-outcome data (L-data): Information from publicly observable, relevant life events/activities/outcomes. Useful for assessing personality's impact on success.

Issues in Personality Assessment

• Combining data sources for better results.
• Evaluating measures focusing on reliability (accuracy and consistency) and validity (measuring what it intends to). Includes types of validity (face, predictive, convergent, discriminant, construct) and generalizability.
• Response sets: Tendencies to respond in ways unrelated to content (acquiescence, extreme responding).

Research Designs in Personality

• Experimental: Manipulates variables to determine causality; controls for other factors.
• Correlational: Identifies relationships; does not prove causality (directionality and third-variable problems).
• Case studies: In-depth examinations of a single individual; useful for generating hypotheses but not generalizable.

Chapter 3

• Trait descriptive adjectives describe traits and attributes of a person recurring over time.

• Three fundamental questions guide trait study: conceptualization, identification of key traits, and comprehensive taxonomy formulation.

• Trait as internal causal properties: Traits are internal and cause behavior.

• Traits as descriptive summaries: Traits summarize characteristics without assuming internality or causality.

• Three approaches to identifying important traits:

  • Lexical: Frequency and cross-cultural universality of trait terms suggest importance.
  • Theoretical: Theory-driven identification of important traits.
  • Statistical: Factor analysis identifies major dimensions of personality.

• Eysenck's hierarchical model: Three supertraits (Extraversion-Introversion, Neuroticism-Emotional Stability, Psychoticism). Hierarchical structure places traits within a nested system from broad to specific. Has biological underpinnings (e.g., Psychoticism and testosterone levels).

• Circumplex taxonomies: Interpersonal traits arranged in a circle; adjacency (positive correlations) and bipolarity (negative correlations) are key.

• Big Five model: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, Openness-Intellect (most replicated personality taxonomy). Includes a continuum for measurement.

• Empirical evidence strongly supports the Big Five model as replicable across different samples, languages, time periods, and formats.

• HEXACO model extends the Big Five by adding Honesty-Humility.

Chapter 5

• Personality development examines continuities, consistencies, and stabilities over time.
• Rank order stability: Maintaining individual position in a group over time.
• Mean level stability: Consistent average levels of traits or characteristics over time.
• Mean level change: Changes in average group levels of traits or characteristics over time.
• Personality stability is moderate during infancy, increases with maturation, and is higher over short timeframes.
• Agreeableness and Conscientiousness tend to increase with time,
• Openness, Extraversion, and Neuroticism decline with time until 50.
• Personality change occurs but is often related to cohort effects (societal times).
• Personality coherence refers to how personality is related to outcomes over time, such as marital stability, divorce, and health consequences.