128 Questions
What is the purpose of making an indirect assessment of latent attributes in psychological measurement?
To make decisions about individuals, such as education, employment, and stability
What is the main issue with sampling in psychological measurement?
Dealing with non-respondents, dropouts, and volunteers
What is the key problem with representing attributes like neuroticism using numbers in psychological constructs?
The challenge of representing abstract attributes
What distinguishes objective scoring from subjective scoring in psychological measurement?
Objective scoring involves standardized questionnaires, while subjective scoring relies on assessor's judgment
According to Cattell's theory, which type of traits are highly heritable?
Temperament traits
What did Cattell classify as 'attitudes' in his theory?
Overt expressions of interest in things
In Cattell's theory, what are 'surface traits' characterized by?
Being observable and directly measurable
What did Cattell view humans as, in contrast to Freudian determinism?
Rational active agents
According to Allport, which of the following best describes traits?
Rooted in the nervous system and dispose a person towards specific kinds of actions
What is the difference between orthogonal rotation and oblique rotation in factor analysis?
Orthogonal rotation results in uncorrelated factors, while oblique rotation results in correlated factors
What is the difference between temperament and traits?
Temperament is a characteristic reaction pattern present from an early age, while traits are purely contextual
What did Allport emphasize in his approach to identifying unique combinations of traits?
The uniqueness of the individual
Which type of factor analysis is used to identify or create a possible latent construct?
Exploratory factor analysis (EFA)
What does factor loading indicate in factor analysis?
The correlation between an item and a factor
Which type of validity assesses if items appear related to the construct in question?
Content validity
What does Bartlet's test assess in factor analysis?
Factorability
What does construct validity assess in psychometric testing?
If observed attributes are real, considering cultural, procedural, and interpretation biases
What is the purpose of factorial validity in psychometric testing?
To assess the measurement instrument's construct validity, relevant to internal validity
What does convergent validity demonstrate in psychometric testing?
High levels of correlation between related constructs
What does reliability measure in psychometric testing?
The stability of measurement output across time or context
According to the Lexical approach to traits and personality, what does the frequency of trait descriptor indicate?
Importance of specific trait
How many surface traits did Cattell identify in his theory?
36
In Cattell's theory, how many source traits/domains are there (16 PF)?
16
What did Cattell find by the elimination of synonyms?
Less traits
How many ends does each source trait/domain in Cattell's theory have?
2
What is the niche specialization hypothesis?
It suggests that dark traits represent a fast 'life history strategy' with a focus on mating and higher number of offspring.
What is the 6-2-1 Model used for?
It is used for job performance predictions, with different aspects and facets predicting job performance.
What does the Big-5 circumplex model aim to represent?
It aims to represent adjectives for high and low values of the trait, such as extraversion and agreeableness.
What is the method effect theory in the context of personality assessment?
It suggests that people distort their responses to sound good, leading to correlation between domains.
What does the evidence for higher General Factor of Personality (GFP) indicate?
It indicates a positive association for K-strategy over R-strategy, reflecting varying reproductive strategies.
Which model includes honesty/humility as a domain, explaining unaccounted variance in the Big-5 model?
The HEXACO model
What does the Dark Triad include as the three broad domains of personality?
Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy
What does the ideographic approach in personality assessment involve?
Creating individual profiles and overlaps with the nomothetic approach
What represents a tendency to maintain stability and avoid disruption in personality?
Stability, a combination of neuroticism, agreeableness, and conscientiousness
What does triangulating data involve in clinical and criminal screening?
Obtaining data from multiple sources
Which approach to personality focuses on predicting an individual's behavior in a given situation?
Lexical approach
What is the heritability index for conscientiousness?
0.28
Which trait is associated with emotional instability, such as emotional control, stress, and negative affectivity?
Neuroticism
What is the focus of conscientiousness as a personality trait?
Responsibility and the will to achieve
What type of data is included in the factor analysis (FA) for the Big Five personality traits?
L-data, Q-data, and T-data
What is the 6-2-1 Model used for?
Predicting job performance
Which domain is linked most with psychopathy?
Criminality
What does the Big-5 circumplex model aim to represent?
10 circles representing different facets of personality
What is the focus of conscientiousness as a personality trait?
Higher job performance
What does the evidence suggest about emotional deficits in the context of the Dark Triad?
Greater difficulties with emotion regulation
What represents a tendency to maintain stability and avoid disruption in personality?
Conscientiousness
What is the main focus of the situational eight (DIAMONDS) model?
Describing important characteristics of situations
What does the situation contractual model aim to explain?
How personality and situation characteristics interact to influence how people construe and respond to situations
What does interactionism in psychology refer to?
Both traits and situations influencing behavior and interacting
What does the longitudinal research design in psychology involve?
Following a single cohort as they age
What is the main limitation of cross-sectional research design in psychology?
It may lead to cohort differences
What does the situational eight (DIAMONDS) model describe?
Important characteristics of situations
What is the main focus of interactionism in psychology?
Both traits and situations influencing behavior and interacting
What does the situational contractual model aim to explain?
How personality and situation characteristics interact to influence how people construe and respond to situations
Which theory suggests that correlation between personality domains can be influenced by people distorting their responses to sound good?
Method effect theory
What does the Dark Triad in personality comprise of?
Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy
What did Schmitt's meta-analysis reveal about gender differences in Big-5 personality traits?
Small to moderate gender differences in some traits
What is the Jingle-Jangle Jungle fallacy related to in personality traits and measures?
Misconceptions about the similarity or difference between personality traits and measures
What is the key reason to study gender differences in personality?
To understand implications for hiring and diagnostic purposes
What does the person-situation debate involve?
Debate on whether personality determines behavior
Which of the following best describes the trend in narcissism among university students in the USA?
Narcissism has increased
What is the observed trend in neuroticism among middle-aged and older individuals in the USA?
Neuroticism has decreased
What is one of the factors contributing to the increasing neuroticism among university students in the USA?
Increasing education levels
What is the impact of major world events on the timing of major milestones for later-born cohorts?
Major world events have delayed the timing of major milestones
How has the definition of traits, such as conscientiousness, changed in different cohorts?
Conscientiousness has shifted from being a wife to working hard at a job
What is the purpose of the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) in personality research?
To measure personality states at random time points in real-world settings
What does the constancy of the Big-5 refer to in personality psychology?
The consistency of rank-order of people on the Big-5 traits over time
What did the meta-analysis of studies reveal about the stability of personality?
Personality traits remain stable across time and age
What is the Flynn effect in the context of intelligence and personality?
Rising IQ scores possibly due to increasing nutrition and resources
What does Fleeson's conceptualization of personality emphasize?
The fluctuating states and stable traits within the same person
Which model of emotion regulation involves continuous or unconscious regulation at each point along the process of a response?
Modal model of emotion regulation
According to Schachter-Singer's two-factor theory of emotion, what involves the attribution of arousal to a physiological state and then to an emotion?
Appraisal
Which approach to personality development emphasizes that personality develops by pulling towards goals rather than being pushed by the environment?
Humanistic approach
What is the main characteristic of self-actualization, as described by the humanistic psychology perspective?
Full use and exploitation of talents, capacities, and potentialities
According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, what must be satisfied first in order to focus on higher-level growth needs, such as self-actualization?
Lower-level deficit needs
Costa and McCrae suggest that the 5 factors of personality are:
Enduring and stable dispositions with a heritability and biological basis
Eysenck criticizes the broad justifications of the 5-factor model and argues that:
Heritability is not sufficient to determine a biological basis
Plutchik's wheel of emotion and the affect circumplex model propose that emotions:
Have a biological/genetic basis
Arnold's appraisal theory suggests that:
Feelings, expressions, and physiological changes occur at the same time and are caused by appraisals of the situation in terms of personal meaning
Historical theories of emotion, including James-Lange theory, Cannon-Bard theory, and Lazarus' core relational themes, propose different relationships between:
Expressions, feelings, and physiological changes in emotions
According to Carl Rogers' theory, what is the role of the therapist in client-centered therapy?
Facilitate the client's change process
In Skinner's operant conditioning, what is the role of thoughts in shaping behavior?
Thoughts are secondary to the environment
According to Skinner's operant conditioning, what is the relationship between reinforcers and behavior?
Reinforcers should precede the behavior they are reinforcing
What does incongruence between self-concept and ideal-self lead to, according to Carl Rogers' theory?
Depression and low self-esteem
Which theory suggests that individuals are motivated to maintain positive group identity to protect self-esteem and protect the ingroup?
Social identity theory
What is the link between lower cognitive ability and right-wing ideologies?
Lower cognitive ability is linked to right-wing ideologies
What strategy aims to reduce automatic expression of racial bias through repeated exposure to positive minority group exemplars?
Counter-stereotype imaging
Based on the text, which theory suggests that children of authoritarian parents are more likely to develop prejudiced attitudes?
Social cognitive theory
Which measure of racial prejudice has been criticized for its susceptibility to deliberate faking and poor behavioral predictability?
Implicit Association Test (IAT)
According to the MODE model, what moderates the relationship between attitude-behavior and implicit-explicit measures?
Motivation and opportunity to control prejudice
What is proposed by Dovidio and involves consciously advocating egalitarian views while unconsciously adhering to social norms to appear not racist?
Aversive racism
What type of racism involves consciously advocating egalitarian views while unconsciously adhering to social norms to appear not racist?
Aversive racism
What is one of the determinants and constituents of personality according to the text?
Observational learning
What is the term used to describe the belief that one can recover from posttraumatic stress, as mentioned in the text?
Coping self-efficacy
What is described as a cognitive efficiency strategy that can lead to oversimplification and problematic outcomes?
Racial prejudice
What is the factor that is emphasized as a better predictor of overall performance than cognitive ability alone, according to the text?
Academic self-efficacy
According to Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory, what is the most important factor in the interaction between cognition, behavior, and environment?
Cognition
What is Bandura's 4-step model of observational learning?
Attend, Remember, Reproduce, Motivation
In Bandura's Self-Efficacy theory, what does 'self-efficacy' refer to?
Perceived abilities
What is the main difference between Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory and Skinner's Behaviorism?
Skinner emphasized environmental determinism, Bandura emphasized reciprocal determinism
Which tactic of social influence involves making a request and immediately offering bonuses or discounts?
Scarcity
What did Aronson and Gonzalez's 'jigsaw cooperative classroom' aim to reduce?
Prejudice
What does extended contact involve in the context of intergroup contact?
Knowing ingroup members that have outgroup friends and learn positive attributes
What is the main focus of Allport's Contact Hypothesis?
Facilitating interaction between racial groups to reduce prejudice
Which strategy in prejudice reduction involves subgroup identity and common ingroup identity?
Integration strategy
What did Allport add as the 5th condition to his Contact Hypothesis?
Time
What is the main difference between Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory and Skinner's Behaviorism?
Bandura's theory emphasizes the interaction of cognition, behavior, and environment, while Skinner's theory focuses solely on behavior and environment.
What does Bandura's 4-step model of observational learning involve?
Attend, Remember, Reproduce, Motivation due to reinforcement of accurate reproduction
What is Bandura's concept of self-efficacy primarily based on?
Perceived abilities in a particular area and the level of confidence impacting behavior
What does Bandura's concept of reciprocal determinism emphasize?
The complex interaction of personal, environmental, and behavioral factors, each weighing differently
What are the determinants and constituents of personality, according to the text?
Self-efficacy and reciprocal determinism
What is the most significant factor influencing the likelihood of learning behavior from a model, as per the text?
Characteristics of the model
What is emphasized as a key enhancer of coping self-efficacy in the text?
Manage stress levels
What does Dovidio's meta-analysis reveal about the association between stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination?
Stereotype prejudice =.25
What is the main implication of the failed replications of the basic findings in the replication of hot vs cold pack (Bargh)?
Need for direct replication
What is the main feature of controlled processing in the context of self-regulation?
Intentional
What is the key factor in replenishing ego depletion, as demonstrated in Baumeister’s experiment?
Glucose intake before task 2
What is the main purpose of inducing/priming affect?
To study the impact of mood on memory
What is the conclusion drawn from the study about positive affect and judgement errors?
Positive affect leads to increased judgement errors due to reduced information processing capacity
What is the primary focus of Bower’s Affect Priming Model?
Studying the spread of activation in affect nodes
What is the main finding regarding the influence of weather on judgements, as per the study by Schwarz and Clore?
Weather only influences judgements when explicitly asked about
What is the primary measure used for assessing affect in the context of inducing/priming affect?
Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS)
Which social influence tactic involves making a small request before making a larger request?
The foot-in-door tactic
What does the Ben Franklin effect suggest about the formation of friendships?
Friends are made through cooperative acts
In what type of situation are people more likely to comply with experts or authority figures?
Ambiguous situations
Which cognitive style involves seeking mental efficiency and protection of self-image?
Cognitive miser
What are the automatic nonconscious processes that can affect thoughts, feelings, and behaviors?
Stereotyping, confirmation bias, and priming
What does social priming involve?
Influencing judgments and responses without awareness
Study Notes
Understanding Psychometric Testing
- Standardization transforms scale scores into universal indexes like IQ, used for comparison between individuals, groups, and other scales.
- Validity in psychometric testing refers to the degree to which an instrument measures what it claims to measure, affected by biases and errors in test construction and conclusions.
- Construct validity assesses if observed attributes are real, considering cultural, procedural, and interpretation biases.
- Testing can have both positive and negative impacts, such as labeling and not being a holistic approach.
- Validity assumptions determine population norms and have limitations, examples include Z-scores and t-scores.
- Construct validity examines if constructs have a coherent theoretical foundation, relevant to internal and external validity.
- Operationalization is the process of generating operational definitions that allow for empirical assessment, such as mental health defined by symptoms in the DSM-V.
- Factorial validity is a type of construct validity focused on the measurement instrument, relevant to internal validity.
- Convergent validity demonstrates high levels of correlation between related constructs, while discriminant validity shows lower levels of correlation between unrelated constructs.
- Criterion-related validity assesses the degree to which a test correlates to or predicts a theoretical representation of the construct.
- Structural validity ensures that scores represent the content area they claim to represent, avoiding ceiling and floor effects.
- Reliability measures the stability of measurement output across time or context, explained by classical test theory and assessed through variance and reliability index.
Understanding the Big Five Personality Traits
- The Big Five personality traits are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.
- The traits were developed by Costa and Mcrae, who found 5 domains, unlike Cattell's proposed 16.
- The Big Five traits are based on factor analysis (FA) and include L-data (life recorded data), Q-data (questionnaire data), and T-data (test data).
- The lexical approach to personality focuses on how to predict an individual's behavior in a given situation.
- The heritability index for neuroticism is 0.31, while for extraversion, it is 0.36, and for agreeableness, it is 0.28.
- Neuroticism is associated with emotional instability, such as emotional control, stress, and negative affectivity.
- Extraversion is linked to social impact, positive affect, and includes facets like warmth, activity, and cheerfulness.
- Agreeableness is related to maintaining positive relations with others, including trust, altruism, and compliance.
- Conscientiousness is about responsibility and the will to achieve, with facets like competence and self-discipline.
- The Big Five traits have been applied cross-culturally, and there are different approaches to developing the traits within each culture.
- The Big Five traits have been used for profiling, and the heritability index for conscientiousness is 0.28.
- The lexical hypothesis describes behavior using adjectives, and the Big Five traits have good temporal stability and internal consistency.
Personality and Gender Differences
- Evolutionary fitness of personality traits influences the correlation between domains such as extraversion and agreeableness.
- Individual differences in reproductive strategies are linked to varying levels of general psychometric factor (GPF) with higher GPF associated with K-strategy over R-strategy.
- Method effect theory suggests that correlation between domains can be influenced by people distorting their responses to sound good, including impression management and self-deceptive enhancement.
- The Dark Triad comprises narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, with differences observed between men and women in various personality traits.
- Traits outside common models include self-efficacy, self-esteem, locus of control, need for cognition, and empathy.
- The Jingle-Jangle Jungle fallacies refer to misconceptions about the similarity or difference between personality traits and measures.
- Meta-analysis by Schmitt on Big-5 reveals small to moderate gender differences, such as women scoring higher on enthusiasm and men scoring higher on assertiveness.
- Social roles, social modeling, social reinforcement, evolutionary psychology theory, and artefactual explanations are linked to gender differences in personality.
- Reasons to study gender differences in personality include implications for hiring and diagnostic purposes.
- Narrative reviews and meta-analyses provide different perspectives on gender differences in personality, with the former lacking a structured approach and the latter offering a systematic search for research findings.
- The person-situation debate involves dispositionism, which suggests that personality determines behavior, and situationalism, which argues that the situation determines behavior.
- The personality coefficient accounts for a small to moderate effect and about 9% of behavior differences, while the situation accounts for a much lower percentage.
Personality Traits and Emotions in Psychology
- Longitudinal study shows an increase in conscientiousness at each life stage, with only small significance in 20s/30s.
- Longitudinal and cross-sectional studies reveal different effects for dominance and vitality in extraversion, with a small significant effect of dominance and a negative effect for vitality.
- Agreeableness increases at each life stage with only small significance in 50s/60s, according to longitudinal and cross-sectional studies.
- Neuroticism decreases at all life stages, with only small significance in 20-40s in longitudinal and cross-sectional studies.
- Openness increases earlier in life and decreases later in longitudinal studies, while cross-sectional studies show all decreasing.
- Costa and McCrae suggest the 5 factors are enduring and stable dispositions with a heritability and biological basis.
- Eysenck criticizes the broad justifications of the 5-factor model and argues that heritability is not sufficient to determine a biological basis.
- Emotions are suggested to have a biological/genetic basis, as proposed by Plutchik's wheel of emotion and the affect circumplex model.
- Emotions occur in a sequence over time giving rise to components like appraisal, physiological changes, action tendencies, internal experience, and expressions.
- Arnold's appraisal theory suggests that feelings, expressions, and physiological changes occur at the same time and are caused by appraisals of the situation in terms of personal meaning.
- Coping potential appraisals, normative significance appraisals, and other types of appraisals are part of the transactional model of stress and coping in psychology.
- Historical theories of emotion include James-Lange theory, Cannon-Bard theory, and Lazarus' core relational themes, which propose different relationships between expressions, feelings, and physiological changes in emotions.
Types of Racism and Measuring Racial Prejudice
- There are three types of racism: blatant (overt) racism, subtle (covert) racism, and aversive racism
- Aversive racism is proposed by Dovidio and involves consciously advocating egalitarian views while unconsciously adhering to social norms to appear not racist
- Measuring racial prejudice involves two developmental stages: early learning of cultural stereotypes and evaluation of stereotype validity in respect to own beliefs
- McConahay’s explicit measures include the Modern racism scale (MRS) and the Old-fashioned racism scale (OFRS), but they have limitations such as confounding prejudice and political conservatism
- Implicit measures, like the Implicit Association Test (IAT), aim to measure unconscious attitudes and have been criticized for their susceptibility to deliberate faking and poor behavioral predictability
- Social desirability bias leads people to report more socially acceptable answers, and it is more prevalent in explicit measures
- The MODE model, proposed by Fazio and Olson, suggests that motivation and opportunity to control prejudice moderate the relationship between attitude-behavior and implicit-explicit measures
- There is a tendency for dependency and hatred of parents to lead to displacement of unacceptable impulses into hostility towards minority groups
- Implicit and explicit measures will correlate when individuals have low motivation and opportunity to control prejudice
Social Cognition and Automatic Processes
- Social cognition involves uncertainty and is influenced by factors like gender, upbringing, region, and political views.
- Memory and past experiences can influence our judgments.
- Scarcity leads to the perception of value and desirability.
- Competing goals in social cognition include mental efficiency and protection of self-image.
- Cognitive styles such as consistency seeker, naive scientist, cognitive miser, and motivated tactician influence decision-making.
- Confirmation bias contributes to echo chambers and filter bubbles in social media.
- The motivated tactician approach involves choosing between default/automatic and more controlled processes based on motivation and situation.
- The activated actor considers the role of the environment in behavior and is influenced by situational cues.
- Automatic nonconscious processes like priming, implicit bias, and stereotyping affect thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
- Priming involves exposure to stimuli that influence judgments and responses without awareness.
- Social priming influences ambiguous information and can be affected by variables like gender schema.
- Research has shown mixed results in experiments related to social priming, with some studies showing significant effects and others showing no significant difference.
Test your knowledge of psychometric testing with this quiz covering topics such as standardization, validity, impacts of testing, assumptions, operationalization, and reliability. Learn about different types of validity and the importance of ensuring that scores represent the intended content area.
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