Key Terms for Personality Psychology PDF

key terms Status Not started Key terms all chapters Chapter 1: Introduction to Personality Psychology 1.Trait-descriptive adjectives: Words that describe traits, attributes of a person that are reasonably characteristic of the indivi...

key terms Status Not started Key terms all chapters Chapter 1: Introduction to Personality Psychology 1.Trait-descriptive adjectives: Words that describe traits, attributes of a person that are reasonably characteristic of the individual and perhaps even enduring over time. 2.Personality: The set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are organized and relatively enduring and that influence his or her interactions with, and adaptations to, the intrapsychic, physical, and social environments. 3.Psychological traits: Characteristics that describe ways in which people are unique or different from or similar to each other. Psychological traits include all sorts of aspects of persons that are psychologically meaningful and are stable and consistent aspects of personality. 4.Average tendencies: Tendency to display a certain psychological trait with regularity. For example, on average, a high-talkative person will start more conversations than a low-talkative person. This idea explains why the principle of aggregation works when measuring personality. 5.Psychological mechanisms: Similar to traits, except that mechanisms refer more to the processes of personality. For example, most personality mechanisms involve some information-processing activity. A psychological mechanism may make people more sensitive to certain kinds of information from the environment (input), may make them more likely to think about specific options (decision rules), or may guide their behavior toward certain categories of action (outputs). 6.Within the Individual: The important sources of personality reside within the individual—that is, people carry the sources of their personality inside themselves —and hence are stable over time and consistent over situations. key terms 1  7.Organized and Enduring: "Organized" means that the psychological traits and mechanisms for a given person are not simply a random collection of elements. Rather, personality is coherent because the mechanisms and traits are linked to one another in an organized fashion. "Enduring" means that the psychological traits are generally consistent over time, particularly in adulthood, and over situations. 8.Influential Forces: Personality traits and mechanisms are influential forces in people's lives in that they influence our actions, how we view ourselves, how we think about the world, how we interact with others, how we feel, our selection of environments (particularly our social environment), what goals and desires we pursue in life, and how we react to our circumstances. Other influential forces include sociological and economic influences, as well as physical and biological forces. 9.Person-Environment Interaction: A person's interactions with situations include perceptions, selections, evocations, and manipulations. Perceptions refer to how we "see" or interpret an environment. Selection describes the manner in which we choose situations—such as our friends, our hobbies, our college classes, and our careers. Evocations refer to the reactions we produce in others, often quite unintentionally. Manipulations refer to the ways in which we attempt to influence others. 10.Adaptation: A central feature of personality concerns adaptive functioning-- accomplishing goals, coping, adjusting, and dealing with the challenges and problems we face as we go through life. 11.Environment: Environments can be physical, social, and intrapsychic (within the mind). Which aspect of the environment is important at any moment in time is frequently determined by the personality of the person in that environment. 12.Human Nature: The traits and mechanisms of personality that are typical of our species and are possessed by everyone or nearly everyone. 13.Individual Differences: Every individual has personal and unique qualities that make him or her different from others. The study of all the ways in which individuals can differ from others, the number, origin, and meaning of such differences, is the study of individual differences. key terms 2  14.Differences among groups: People in one group may have certain personality features in common, and these common features make them different from other groups. Examples of groups studied by personality psychologists include different cultures, different age groups, different political parties, and people from different socioeconomic backgrounds. The most common group difference studied by personality psychologists concerns differences between men and women. 15.Nomothetic: The study of general characters of people as they are distributed in the population, typically involving statistical comparisons between individuals or groups. 16.Idiographic: The study of single individuals, with an effort to observe general principles as they are manifest in a single life over time. Often results in case studies or psychological biographies. 17.Domain of Knowledge: A specialty area of science and scholarship, where psychologists have focused on learning about some specific and limited aspect of human nature, often with preferred tools of investigation. 18.Dispositional Domain: Deals centrally with the ways in which individuals differ from one another. As such, the dispositional domain connects with all the other domains. In the dispositional domain, psychologists are primarily interested in the number and nature of fundamental dispositions, taxonomies of traits, measurement issues, and questions of stability over time and consistency over situations. 19.Biological Domain: The core assumption of biological approaches to personality is that humans are, first and foremost, collections of biological systems, and these systems provide the building blocks (e. g. , brain, nervous system) for behavior, thought, and emotion. Biological approaches typically refers to three areas of research within this general domain: the genetics of personality, the psychophysiology of personality, and the evolution of personality. 20.Intrapsychic Domain: This domain deals with mental mechanisms of personality, many of which operate outside the realm of conscious awareness. The predominant theory in this domain is Freud's theory of psychoanalysis. This theory begins with fundamental assumptions about the instinctual system—the sexual and aggressive forces that are presumed to drive and energize much of human activity. The intrapsychic domain also includes defense mechanisms such as repression, denial, and projection. key terms 3  21.Cognitive-Experiential Domain: This domain focuses on cognition and subjective experience, such as conscious thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires about oneself and others. This domain includes our feelings of self, identity, self- esteem, our goals and plans, and our emotions. 22.Social and Cultural Domain: Personality affects, and is affected by, the social and cultural context in which it is found. Different cultures may bring out different facets of our personalities in manifest behavior. The capacities we display may depend to a large extent on what is acceptable in and encouraged by our culture. At the level of individual differences within cultures, personality plays itself out in the social sphere. One important social sphere concerns relations between men and women. 23.Adjustment Domain: Personality plays a key role in how we cope, adapt, and adjust to the ebb and flow of events in our day-to-day lives. In addition to health consequences of adjusting to stress, certain personality features are related to poor social or emotional adjustment and have been designated as personality disorders. 24.Good Theory: A theory that serves as a useful guide for researchers, organizes known facts, and makes predictions about future observations. 25.Theories and Beliefs: Beliefs are often personally useful and crucially important to some people, but they are based on leaps of faith, not on reliable facts and systematic observations. Theories, on the other hand, are based on systematic observations that can be repeated by others and that yield similar conclusions. 26.Scientific Standards for Evaluating Personality Theories: Comprehensiveness, Heuristic Value, Testability, Parsimony, and Compatibility and Integration Across Domains and Levels. 27.Comprehensiveness: One of the five scientific standards used in evaluating personality theories. Theories that explain more empirical data within a domain are generally superior to those that explain fewer findings. 28.Heuristic Value: An evaluative scientific standard for assessing personality theories. Theories that steer scientists to important new discoveries about personality are superior to those that fail to provide this guidance. key terms 4  29.Testability: The capacity to render precise predictions that scientists can test empirically. Generally, the testability of a theory is dependent upon the precision of its predictions. If it is impossible to test a theory empirically, the theory is generally discarded. Chapter 2: Personality Assessment, Measurement and Research Design 1.Self-Report Data (S-Data): Information a person verbally reveals about themselves, often based on questionnaire or interview. Self-report data can be obtained through a variety of means, including interviews that pose questions to a person, periodic reports by a person to record the events as they happen, and questionnaires of various sorts. 2.Structured and Unstructured: Self-report can take a variety of forms, ranging from open-ended questions to forced-choice true or false questions. Sometimes these are referred to as unstructured (open-ended, such as "Tell me about the parties you like the most") and structured ("I like loud and crowded parties"; answer true or false) personality tests. 3.Likert Rating Scale: A common rating scale that provides numbers that are attached to descriptive phrases, such as 0 = disagree strongly, 1 = disagree slightly, 2 = neither agree nor disagree, 3 = agree slightly, 4 = strongly agree. 4.Experience Sampling: People answer some questions, for example, about their mood or physical symptoms, every day for several weeks or longer. People are usually contacted electronically ("beeped") one or more times a day at random intervals to complete the measures. Although experience sampling uses self- report as the data source, it differs from more traditional self-report methods in being able to detect patterns of behavior over time. 5.Observer-Report Data (O-Data): The impressions and evaluations others make of a person whom they come into contact with. For every individual, there are dozens of observers who form such impressions. Observer-report methods capitalize on these sources and provide tools for gathering information about a person's personality. Observers may have access to information not attainable through other sources, and multiple observers can be used to assess each individual. Typically, a more valid and reliable assessment of personality can be achieved when multiple observers are used. key terms 5  6.Inter-Rater Reliability: Multiple observers gather information about a person's personality, then investigators evaluate the degree of consensus among the observers. When different observers agree with one another, the degree of inter- rater reliability increases. When different raters fail to agree, the measure is said to have low inter-rater reliability. 7.Multiple Social Personalities: Each of us displays different sides of ourselves to different people—we may be kind to our friends, ruthless to our enemies, loving toward a spouse, and conflicted toward our parents. Our social personalities vary from one setting to another, depending on the nature of relationships we have with other individuals. 8.Naturalistic Observation: Observers witness and record events that occur in the normal course of the lives of their participants. For example, a child might be followed throughout an entire day, or an observer may record behavior in the home of the participant. Naturalistic observation offers researchers the advantage of being able to secure information in the realistic context of a person's everyday life, but at the cost of not being able to control the events and behavioral samples witnessed. 9.Test-Data (T-Data): A common source of personality-relevant information comes from standardized tests (T-data). In these measures, participants are placed in a standardized testing situation to see if different people react or behave differently to an identical situation. Taking an exam, like the Scholastic Aptitude Test, would be one example of T-data as a measure used to predict success in school. 10.Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI): A noninvasive imaging technique used to identify specific areas of brain activity. As parts of the brain are stimulated, oxygenated blood rushes to the activated area, resulting in increased iron concentrations in the blood. The fMRI detects these elevated concentrations of iron and prints out colorful images indicating which part of the brain is used to perform certain tasks. 11.Projective Techniques: A person is presented with an ambiguous stimulus and is then asked to impose some order on the stimulus, such as asking what the person sees in an inkblot. What the person sees is interpreted to reveal something about his or her personality. The person presumably "projects" his or her concerns, conflicts, traits, and ways of seeing or dealing with the world onto the key terms 6  ambiguous stimulus. The most famous projective technique for assessing personality is the Rorschach inkblot test. 12.Life-Outcome Data (L-Data): Information that can be gleaned from the events, activities, and outcomes in a person's life that are available to public scrutiny. For example, marriages and divorces are a matter of public record. Personality psychologists can sometimes secure information about the clubs, if any, a person joins; how many speeding tickets a person has received in the last few years; whether the person owns a handgun. These can all serve as sources of information about personality. 13.Reliability: The degree to which an obtained measure represents the "true" level of the trait being measured. For example, if a person has a "true" IQ of 115, then a perfectly reliable measure of IQ will yield a score of 115 for that person. Moreover, a truly reliable measure of IQ would yield the same score of 115 each time it was administered to the person. Personality psychologists prefer reliable measures so that the scores accurately reflect each person's true level of the personality characteristic being measured. 14.Repeated Measurement: A way to estimate the reliability of a measure. There are different forms of repeated measurement, and hence different versions of reliability. A common procedure is to repeat the same measurement over time, say at an interval of a month apart, for the same sample of persons. If the two tests are highly correlated between the first and second testing, yielding similar scores for most people, then the resulting measure is said to have high test-retest reliability. 15.Response Sets: The tendency of some people to respond to the questions on some basis that is unrelated to the question content. Sometimes this is referred to as noncontent responding. One example is the response set of acquiescence or yea saying. This is the tendency to simply agree with the questionnaire items, regardless of the content of those items. 16.Noncontent Responding: The tendency of some people to respond to the questions on some basis that is unrelated to the question content. One example is the response set of acquiescence or yea saying. This is the tendency to simply agree with the questionnaire items, regardless of the content of those items. 17.Acquiescence: A response set that refers to the tendency to agree with questionnaire items, regardless of the content of those items. (Also known as yea- key terms 7  saying). 18.Extreme Responding: A response set that refers to the tendency to give endpoint responses, such as "strongly agree" or "strongly disagree" and avoid the middle part of response scales, such as "slightly agree," "slightly disagree," or "am indifferent." 19.Social Desirability: Socially desirable responding refers to the tendency to answer items in such a way as to come across as socially attractive or likable. People responding in this manner want to make a good impression, to appear to be well adjusted, to be a "good citizen." 20.Forced-Choice Questionnaire: Test takers are confronted with pairs of statements and are asked to indicate which statement in the pair is more true of them. Each statement in the pair is selected to be similar to the other in social desirability, forcing participants to choose between statements that are equivalently socially desirable (or undesirable), and differ in content. 21.Validity: Refers to the extent to which a test measures what it claims to measure. 22.Face Validity: Refers to whether the test, on the surface, appears to measure what it is supposed to measure. 23.Predictive Validity: Refers to whether the test predicts criteria external to the test. Therefore, it also sometimes called Criterion Validity. 24.Convergent Validity: Refers to whether a test correlates with other measures that it should correlate with. 25.Discriminant Validity: Often evaluated simultaneously with convergent validity. It refers to what a measure should not correlate with. 26.Construct Validity: Whether a test that measures what it claims to measure, correlates with what it is supposed to correlate with, and does not correlate with what it is not supposed to correlate with. 27.Theoretical Constructs: The idea that almost all of the personality variables useful to psychologists in describing and explaining differences between people, like intelligence and extraversion, are abstractions. 28.Generalizability: The degree to which a measure retains its validity across various contexts. key terms 8  29.Experimental Methods: Typically used to determine causality—to find out whether one variable influences another variable. Experiments involve the manipulation of one variable (the independent variable) and random assignment of subjects to conditions defined by the independent variable. 30.Manipulation: Researchers conducting experiments use manipulation in order to evaluate the influence of one variable (the manipulated or independent variable) on another (the dependent variable). 31.Random Assignment: Assignment in an experiment that is conducted randomly. If an experiment has manipulation between groups, random assignment of participants to experimental groups helps ensure that each group is equivalent. 32.Counterbalancing: In some experiments, manipulation is within a single group. For example, participants might get a drug and have their memory tested, then later take a sugar pill and have their memory tested again. In this kind of experiment, equivalence is obtained by counterbalancing the order of the conditions, with half the participants getting the drug first and sugar pill second, and the other half getting the sugar pill first and the drug second. 33.Statistically Significant: Refers to the probability of finding the results of a research study by chance alone. The generally accepted level of statistical significance is 5 percent, meaning that, if a study were repeated 100 times, the particular result reported would be found by chance only 5 times. 34.Correlational Method: A statistical procedure for determining whether there is a relationship between two variables. In correlational research designs, the researcher is attempting to directly identify the relationships between two or more variables, without imposing the sorts of manipulations seen in experimental designs. 35.Correlation Coefficient: Researchers are interested in the direction (positive or negative) and the magnitude (size) of the correlation coefficient. Correlations around. 10 are considered small; those around. 30 are considered medium; and those around. 50 or greater are considered large (Cohen & Cohen, 1975). 36.Directionality Problem: One reason correlations can never prove causality. If A and B are correlated, we do not know if A is the cause of B, or if B is the cause of A, or if some third, unknown variable is causing both B and A. key terms 9  37.Third Variable Problem: One reason correlations can never prove casuality. It could be that two variables are correlated because some third, unknown variable is causing both. 38.Case Study Method: Examining the life of one person in particular depth, which can give researchers insights into personality that can then be used to formulate a more general theory that is tested in a larger population. They can also provide in-depth knowledge of a particularly outstanding individual. Case studies are useful when studying rare phenomena, such as a person with a photographic memory or a person with multiple personalities—cases for which large samples would be difficult or impossible to obtain. 39.criterion validity: Whether a test predicts criteria external to the test. Chapter 3: Traits and Trait Taxonomies 1.Lexical Approach: The approach to determining the fundamental personality traits by analyzing language. For example, a trait adjective that has many synonyms probably represents a more fundamental trait than a trait adjective with few synonyms. 2.Statistical Approach: Having a large number of people rate themselves on certain items, and then employing a statistical procedure to identify groups or clusters of items that go together. The goal of the statistical approach is to identify the major dimensions or "coordinates" of the personality map. 3.Theoretical Approach: The theoretical approach to identifying important dimensions of individual differences starts with a theory, which then determines which variables are important. The theoretical strategy dictates in a specific manner which variables are important to measure. 4.Lexical Hypothesis: States all important individual differences have become encoded within the natural language 5.Synonym Frequency: In the lexical approach, synonym frequency means that if an attribute has not merely one or two trait adjectives to describe it, but rather six, eight, or ten words, then it is a more important dimension of individual difference. 6.Cross-Cultural Universality: In the lexical approach, cross-cultural universality states that if a trait is sufficiently important in all cultures so that its members have codified terms within their own languages to describe the trait, then the trait must key terms 10  be universally important in human affairs. In contrast, if a trait term exists in only one or a few languages but is entirely missing from most, then it may be of only local relevance. 7.Factor Analysis: A commonly used statistical procedure for identifying underlying structure in personality ratings or items. Factor analysis essentially identifies groups of items that covary (i. e. , go together or correlate) with each other, but tend not to covary with other groups of items. This provides a means for determining which personality variables share some common underlying property or belong together within the same group. 8.Factor Loadings: Indexes of how much of the variation in an item is "explained" by the factor. Factor loadings indicate the degree to which the item correlates with or "loads on" the underlying factor. 9.Sociosexual Orientation: According to Gangestad and Simpson's theory of sociosexual orientation, men and women will pursue one of two alternative sexual relationship strategies. The first mating strategy entails seeking a single committed relationship characterized by monogamy and tremendous investment in children. The second sexual strategy is characterized by a greater degree of promiscuity, more partner switching, and less investment in children. 10.Interpersonal Traits: What people do to and with each other. They include temperament traits, such as nervous, gloomy, sluggish, and excitable; character traits, such as moral, principled, and dishonest; material traits, such as miserly or stingy; attitude traits, such as pious or spiritual; mental traits, such as clever, logical, and perceptive; and physical traits, such as healthy and tough. 11.Adjacency: In Wiggins circumplex model, adjacency indicates how close the traits are to each other on the circumference of the circumplex. Those variables that are adjacent or next to each other within the model are positively correlated. 12.Bipolarity: In Wiggins circumplex model, traits located at opposite sides of the circle are negatively correlated with each other. Specifying this bipolarity is useful because nearly every interpersonal trait within the personality sphere has another trait that is its opposite. 13.Orthogonality: Discussed in terms of circumplex models, orthogonality specifies that traits that are perpendicular to each other on the model (at 90 degrees of separation, or at right angles to each other) are unrelated to each key terms 11  other. In general, the term "orthogonal" is used to describe a zero correlation between traits. 14.Five-Factor Model: A trait taxonomy that has its roots in the lexical hypothesis. The first psychologist to use the terms "five-factor model" and "Big Five" was Warren Norman, based on his replications of the factor structure suggesting the following five traits: Surgency (or extraversion), Neuroticism (or emotional instability), Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience (or intellect). The model has been criticized by some for not being comprehensive and for failing to provide a theoretical understanding of the underlying psychological processes that generate the five traits. Nonetheless, it remains heavily endorsed by many personality psychologists and continues to be used in a variety of research studies and applied settings. 15.Extraversion: The first fundamental personality trait in the five-factor model, a taxonomy which has proven to be replicable in studies using English-language trait words as items. Some of the key adjective markers for Extraversion are "talkative," "extraverted" or "extroverted," "gregarious," "assertive," "adventurous," "open," "sociable," "forward," and "outspoken." 16.Social Attention: The goal and payback for surgent or extraverted behavior. By being the center of attention, the extravert seeks to gain the approval of others and, in many cases, through tacit approval controls or directs others. 17.Agreeableness: Agreeableness is the second of the personality traits in the five-factor model, a model which has proven to be replicable in studies using English-language trait words as items. Some of the key adjective markers for Agreeableness are "good-natured," "cooperative," "mild/gentle," "not jealous." 18.Conscientiousness: The third of the personality traits in the five-factor model, which has proven to be replicable in studies using English-language trait words as items. Some of the key adjective markers for Conscientiousness are "responsible," "scrupulous," "persevering," "fussy/tidy." 19.Emotional Stability: The fourth of the personality traits in the five-factor model, which has proven to be replicable in studies using English-language trait words as items. Some of the key adjective markers for Emotional Stability are "calm," "composed," "not hypochondriacal," "poised." key terms 12  20.Intellect-Openness: The fifth personality trait in the five-factor model, which has proven to be replicable in studies using English-language trait words as items. Some of the key adjective markers for Openness are "creative," "imaginative," "intellectual." Those who rate high on Openness tend to remember their dreams more and have vivid, prophetic, or problem-solving dreams. 21.Combinations of Big Five Variables: "Traits" are often examined in combinations. For example, two people high in extraversion would be very different if one was an extraverted neurotic and the other was extraverted but emotionally stable. 22.Personality-Descriptive Nouns: As described by Saucier, personality- descriptive nouns differ in their content emphases from personality taxonomies based on adjectives and may be more precise. In Saucier's 2003 work on personality nouns, he discovered eight factors, including "Dumbbell," "Babe/Cutie," "Philosopher," "Lawbreaker," "Joker," and "Jock. " 23.The HEXACO Model: The HEXACO model is an alternative to the Five-Factor Model. The HEXACO model includes six traits, five of which are variants of the traits included in the Big Five (Emotionality [E], Extraversion [X], Agreeableness [A], Conscientiousness [C], and Openness [O]). The sixth factor, Honesty-Humility [H], is unique to this model. 24.Honesty-Humility: trait people think is missing from Big Five Chapter 4:Theoretical and Measurement Issues in Trait Psychology 1.Differential Psychology: Due to its emphasis on the study of differences between people, trait psychology has sometimes been called differential psychology in the interest of distinguishing this subfield from other branches of personality psychology (Anastasi, 1976). Differential psychology includes the study of other forms of individual differences in addition to personality traits, such as abilities, aptitudes, and intelligence. 2.Consistency: Trait theories assume there is some degree of consistency in personality over time. If someone is highly extraverted during one period of observation, trait psychologists tend to assume that she will be extraverted tomorrow, next week, a year from now, or even decades from now. key terms 13  3.Rank Order Stability: Maintaining one's relative position within a group over time. Between ages 14 and 20, for example, most people become taller. But the rank order of heights tends to remain fairly stable because this form of development affects all people pretty much the same. The tall people at 14 fall generally toward the tall end of the distribution at age 20. The same can apply to personality traits. If people tend to maintain their position on dominance or extraversion relative to the other members of the group over time, then we say that there is high rank order stability to the personality characteristic. Conversely, if people fail to maintain their rank order, we say that the group has displayed rank order instability or rank order change. 4.Situationism: A theoretical position in personality psychology that states that situational differences, rather than underlying personality traits, determine behavior. For example, how friendly a person will behave or how much need for achievement a person displays will depend on the situation, not the traits a person possesses. 5.Person-Situation Interaction: The person-situation interaction trait theory states that one has to take into account both particular situations (e. g. , frustration) and personality traits (e. g. , hot temper) when understanding a behavior. 6.Aggregation: Adding up or averaging several single observations, resulting in a better (i. e. , more reliable) measure of a personality trait than a single observation of behavior. This approach implies that personality traits refer to average tendencies in behavior, how people behave on average. 7.Situational Specificity: The view that behavior is determined by aspects of the situation, such as reward contingencies. 8.Strong Situation: Certain situations that prompt similar behavior from everyone. 9.Situational Selection: A form of interactionism that refers to the tendency to choose or select the situations in which one finds oneself. In other words, people typically do not find themselves in random situations in their natural lives. Instead, they select or choose the situations in which they will spend their time. 10.Evocation: A form of person-situation interaction discussed by Buss. It is based on the idea that certain personality traits may evoke consistent responses from the environment, particularly the social environment. key terms 14  11.Manipulation: Researchers conducting experiments use manipulation in order to evaluate the influence of one variable (the manipulated or independent variable) on another (the dependent variable). 12.Average Tendencies: Tendency to display a certain psychological trait with regularity. For example, on average, a high-talkative person will start more conversations than a low-talkative person. This idea explains why the principle of aggregation works when measuring personality. 13.Infrequency Scale: A common method for detecting measurement technique problems within a set of questionnaire items. The infrequency scale contains items that most or all people would answer in a particular way. If a participant answered more than one or two of these unlike the rest of the majority of the participants, a researcher could begin to suspect that the participant's answers do not represent valid information. Such a participant may be answering randomly, may have difficulty reading, or may be marking his or her answer sheet incorrectly. 14.Faking: The motivated distortion of answers on a questionnaire. Some people may be motivated to "fake good" in order to appear to be better off or better adjusted than they really are. Others may be motivated to "fake bad" in order to appear to be worse off or more maladjusted than they really are. 15.False Negative & False Positive: There are two ways for psychologists to make a mistake when making decisions about persons based on personality tests (e. g. , when deciding whether or not to hire a person, to parole a person, or that the person was lying). When trying to decide whether a person's answers are genuine or faked, the psychologist might decide that a person who was faking was actually telling the truth (called a false positive). Or they might conclude that a truthful person was faking. This is called a false negative. 16.Barnum Statements: Generalities or statements that could apply to anyone. A good example is the astrology column published in daily newspapers. 17.Integrity Tests: Because the private sector cannot legally use polygraphs to screen employees, some companies have developed and promoted questionnaire measures to use in place of the polygraph. These questionnaires, called integrity tests, are designed to assess whether a person is generally honest or dishonest. 18.Personnel Selection: Employers sometimes use personality tests to select people especially suitable for a specific job. Alternatively, the employer may want key terms 15  to use personality assessments to de-select, or screen out, people with specific traits. In both cases an employer is concerned with selecting the right person for a specific position from among a pool of applicants. 19.Negligent Hiring: A charge sometimes brought against an employer for hiring someone who is unstable or prone to violence. Employers are defending themselves against such suits, which often seek compensation for crimes committed by their employees. Such cases hinge on whether the employer should have discovered dangerous traits ahead of time, before hiring such a person into a position where he or she posed a threat to others. Personality testing may provide evidence that the employer did in fact try to reasonably investigate an applicant's fitness for the workplace. 20.Female Underprediction Effect: On average, college entrance exam scores underpredict grade point average for women relative to men. Women tend to do better in college than one would predict from their entrance exam scores. 21.Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964: A specific section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that requires employers to provide equal employment opportunities to all persons, regardless of sex, race, color, religion, or national origin. 22.Griggs v. Duke Power: Prior to 1964, Duke Power Company had used discriminatory practices in hiring and work assignment, including barring blacks from certain jobs. After passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Duke Power instituted various requirements for such jobs, including passing certain aptitude tests. The effect was to perpetuate discrimination. In 1971 the Supreme Court ruled that the seemingly neutral testing practices used by Duke Power were unacceptable because they operated to maintain discrimination. This was the first legal case where the Supreme Court ruled that any selection procedure could not produce disparate impact for a group protected by the Act (e. g. , racial groups, women). 23.Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures: The purpose of the guidelines is to provide a set of principles for employee selection that meet the requirements of all federal laws, especially those that prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. They provide details on the proper use of personality tests and other selection procedures in employment settings. key terms 16  24.Ward's Cove Packing Company v. Atonio: Ward's Cove Packing Co. was a salmon cannery operating in Alaska. In 1974 the non-White cannery workers started legal action against the company, alleging that a variety of the company's hiring and promotion practices were responsible for racial stratification in the workplace. The claim was advanced under the disparate impact portion of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. In 1989 the Supreme Court decided on the case in favor of Ward's Cove. The court decided that, even if employees can prove discrimination, the hiring practices may still be considered legal if they serve "legitimate employment goals of the employer." This decision allowed disparate impact if it was in the service of the company. This case prompted Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which contained several important modifications to Title VII of the original act. Most important, however, the new act shifted the burden of proof onto the employer by requiring that it must prove a close connection between disparate impact and the ability to actually perform the job in question. 25.Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins: A Supreme Court case in which Ann Hopkins sued her employer, Price Waterhouse, claiming that they had discriminated against her on the basis of sex in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, on the theory that her promotion denial had been based on sexual stereotyping. The Supreme Court accepted the argument that gender stereotyping does exist and that it can create a bias against women in the workplace that is not permissible under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. By court order Ann Hopkins was made a full partner in her accounting firm. 26.Disparate Impact: Any employment practice that disadvantages people from a protected group. The Supreme Court has not defined the size of the disparity necessary to prove disparate impact. Most courts define disparity as a difference that is sufficiently large that it is unlikely to have occurred by chance. Some courts, however, prefer the 80 percent rule contained in the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures. Under this rule, adverse impact is established if the selection rate for any race, sex, or ethnic group is less than four-fifths (or 80 percent) of the rate for the group with the highest selection rate. 27.Race or Gender Norming: The Civil Rights Act of 1991 forbids employers from using different norms or cut-off scores for different groups of people. For example, it would be illegal for a company to set a higher threshold for women than men on their selection test. key terms 17  28.Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA): The ADA states that an employer cannot conduct a medical examination, or even make inquiries as to whether an applicant has a disability, during the selection process. Moreover, even if a disability is obvious, the employer cannot ask about the nature or severity of that disability. 29.Right to Privacy: Perhaps the largest issue of legal concern for employers using personality testing is privacy. The right to privacy in employment settings grows out of the broader concept of the right to privacy. Cases that charge an invasion-of-privacy claim against an employer can be based on the federal constitution, state constitutions and statutes, and common law. 30.Job Analysis: When assisting a business in hiring for a particular job, a psychologist typically starts by analyzing the requirements of the job. The psychologist might interview employees who work in the job or supervisors who are involved in managing the particular job. The psychologist might observe workers in the job, noting any particular oral, written, performance, or social skills needed. He or she may also take into account both the physical and social aspects of the work environment in an effort to identify any special pressures or responsibilities associated with the job. Based on this job analysis, the psychologist develops some hypotheses about the kinds of abilities and personality traits that might best equip a person to perform well in that job. 31.Myers-Brigg Type Indicator (MBTI): One of the most widely used personality tests in the business world. It was developed by a mother-daughter team, Katherine Briggs and Isabel Myers, based on Jungian concepts. The test provides information about personality types by testing for eight fundamental preferences using questions in a "forced-choice" or either/or format. Individuals must respond in one way or another, even if their preferences might be somewhere in the middle. Although the test is not without criticism, it has great intuitive appeal. 32.Psychological Types: A term growing out of Carl Jung's theory implying that people come in types or distinct categories of personality, such as "extraverted types." This view is not widely endorsed by academic or research-oriented psychologists because most personality traits are normally distributed in the population and are best conceived as dimensions of difference, not categories. 33.Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI): A questionnaire measure of personality based on the Big Five model but modified to emphasize the assessment of traits key terms 18  important in the business world, including the motive to get along with others and the motive to get ahead of others. 34.Density Distributions of States: refers to the idea that traits are distributions of states in a person's life over time, and the mean of that distribution is the person's level of the trait 35.Overt and Covert Integrity Measures: Both are self-report measures of integrity used in business and industry. Overt measures include questions directly related to past violations of workplace integrity, such as absenteeism or theft. Covert measures include questions that are indirectly related to integrity, such as questions about personality traits that are correlated with workplace integrity, such as conscientiousness. Chapter 5: Personality Dispositions over Time: Stability, Coherence and Change 1.3 Levels of Analysis: Population Level, Group Differences Level, Individual Differences Level 2.Age Effects: Caused by the increasing of age of individuals 3.Alcoholism & Emotional Disturbance: - Men earlier rated high on neuroticism developed a serious emotional problem (alcoholism) later in life Alcoholic men had lower impulse control scores than those who had developed an emotional problem 4.Autonomy, Dominance, Leadership, Ambition: - Men in management have a decreased amount of ambition as they become more realistic in their view of the company, but dominance, leadership, achievement and autonomy all increased over time Sensation Seeking 5.Changes in Self-Esteem from Teen to Adult: - Self Esteem in boys increases from high school onward but in girls there is a decrease Variable self-esteem suggests a fragile self-value More sensitive & dependent on the feedback of others key terms 19  6.Cohort Effects: Everyone experiencing the same effects across time (Ex: Baby Boomers) 7.Competence: - Study of women show a sharp increase of competence (self- assessed) Their husbands remained high on this trait as well 8.Conceptual Issues: Personality Development which consists of Rank Order Stability, Mean Level Stability, Personality Coherence, Personality Change 9.Education, Academic Achievement & Dropping Out: - Among students with high SAT scores, the impulsive individuals had lower GPA's Impulsive individuals were more likely to flunk out of college Those with high impulsivity have less progress in their work and lower financial security Path Analysis & Life Course Health & Longevity 10.Example of Stability: - Type A behaviour Big Five traits aggressive behaviour shyness dependency hyperactivity 11.Feminity: - Study of women show a consistent drop in femininity from age 40 to age 50 12.Flexibility & Impulsivity: - Study of Architects 13.Group Differences Level: Developmental processes that apply to a particular group 14.Health & Longevity: Traits that predict long life: High Conscientiousness Extraversion (positive emotionality) key terms 20  Low Hostility 15.Independence and Traditional Roles: 4 groups were compared from ages 21 - 43: Group 1: Married homemakers with children Group 2: Working mothers with children Group 3: Divorced mothers Group 4: Non-mothers Independence was found to increase in groups 2, 3 and 4 and showed no increase in group 1. 16.Individual Differences Level: Developmental processes that apply to a particular individual 17.Individuals with variable self-esteem are more...: - vulnerable to stressful life events become depressed 18.Longitudinal Studies of Effects: - Age Effects, Period Effects, Cohort Effects 19.Marital Stability, Satisfaction & Divorce: - Personality coherence is the effect of personality on behaviour Neuroticism, lack of impulse control of the husband and neuroticism of the wife were strong predictors of divorce 20.Mean Level Stability: Mean consistency or change of the population on a trait 21.Mean Level Stability in Adulthood: - The Five Factor model of personality shows fairly consistent mean level stability over time Openness, Extraversion & Neuroticism gradually decrease with time (after age 30) Conscientiousness & Agreeableness gradually increase with time (after age 30) 22.Path Analysis & Life Course: - Shows relationships among variables and is based on multiple regression analysis Can show how steps in life can predict things later in life key terms 21  23.Period Effects: The effects of a time or era in history 24.Personality Change: - Personality in adulthood is different from childhood because of new self-awareness Can be caused by major events, or new environments Basic underlying personality dimensions are likely to remain stable 25.Personality Coherence: The trait stays the same but its manifestation may change 26.Personality Coherence Over Time: - Marital Stability, Satisfaction & Divorce Alcoholism & Emotional Disturbance Education, Academic Achievement & Dropping Out Predicting Personality Change Itself 27.Personality Development: The continuities, consistencies and stabilities in people over time, and the ways in which people change over time 28.Personality Development: Continuity and Change in people over time 29.Personality Stability Over Time: Consists of Temperament in infancy, Stability during childhood, Rank order stability in adulthood and Mean level stability in adulthood 30.Population Level: Developmental processes that apply to everyone 31.Predicting Personality Change Itself: - If you marry someone who is similar to you, do you tend to remain stable over time? Similar married couples show the most personality stability (1970 - 1981) Those married to spouses least similar to themselves show the most personality change 32.Rank Order Stability: Maintenance of an individual's position in a group on a trait 33.Rank Order Stability in Adulthood: - Results on normed tests indicate rank order stability of traits Personality stability seems to increase with each decade of life and peak in the fifties key terms 22  34.Sensation Seeking: - Increases from childhood to adolescence, peaks at late adolescence and then decreases Ex: Parachute jumping 35.Stability Coefficents: Correlations between the same measures taken at two different points in time 36.Stability during Childhood: More traits emerge and tend to be moderately stable Stability Coefficients Longitudinal studies indicates that measures taken earlier on can predict personality later in life 37.Stability of Temperament in Infancy: - Stable individual differences emerge early in life Moderate levels of stability over time during the first year of life Levels tend to increase with maturity (9-12) Temperaments: differences that emerge in infancy, linked to emotional stability and arousability 38.Study of Architects: - Shows a decrease in impulsivity & flexibility over a 25 year span People tend to reign in their impulses and become more fixed in their ways as they age 39.Temperaments include: (1) Activity level (2) Smiling & Laughing (3) Fear (4) Distress to Limitations (5) Soothability (6) Duration of Orientation Chapter 6: Genetics and Personality 1.Active Genotype-Environment Correlation: Occurs when a person with a particular genotype creates or seeks out a particular environment. 2.Adoption Studies: Studies that examine the correlations between adopted children and their adoptive parents, with whom they share no genes. These correlations are then compared to the correlations between the adopted children and their genetic parents, who had no influence on the environments of the key terms 23  children. Differences in these correlations can indicate the relative magnitude of genetic and environment contributions to personality traits. 3.Dizygotic (DZ) Twins: (also called fraternal twins) Twins who are not genetically identical. They come from two eggs that were separately fertilized ("di" means two; so dizygotic means "coming from two fertilized eggs"). Such twins share only 50 percent of their genes with their co-twin, the same amount as ordinary brothers and sisters. Fraternal twins can be of the same sex or of the opposite sex. 4.DRD4 Gene: A gene located on the short arm of chromosome 11 that codes for a protein called a dopamine receptor. The function of this dopamine receptor is to respond to the presence of dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter. When the dopamine receptor encounters dopamine from other neurons in the brain, it discharges an electrical signal, activating other neurons. 5.Environmentalist View: Environmentalists believe that personality is determined by socialization practices, such as parenting style and other agents of society. 6.Environmentality: The percentage of observed variance in a group of individuals that can be attributed to environmental (nongenetic) differences. Generally speaking, the larger the heritability, the smaller the environmentality. And vice versa, the smaller the heritability, the larger the environmentality. 7.Equal Environments Assumption: The assumption that the environments experienced by identical twins are no more similar to each other than are the environments experienced by fraternal twins. If they are more similar, then the greater similarity of the identical twins could plausibly be due to the fact that they experience more similar environments rather than the fact that they have more genes in common. 8.Eugenics: The notion that the future of the human race can be influenced by fostering the reproduction of persons with certain traits, and discouraging reproduction among persons without those traits or who have undesirable traits. 9.Family Studies: Family studies correlate the degree of genetic overlap among family members with the degree of personality similarity. They capitalize on the fact that there are known degrees of genetic overlap between different members of a family in terms of degree of relationship. key terms 24  10.Genetic Junk: The 98 percent of the DNA in human chromosomes that are not protein-coding genes; scientists believed that these parts were functionless residue. Recent studies have shown that these portions of DNA may affect everything from a person's physical size to personality, thus adding to the complexity of the human genome. 11.Genome: The complete set of genes an organism possesses. The human genome contains somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 genes. 12.Genotype-Environment Correlation: The differential exposure of individuals with different genotypes to different environments. 13.Genotype-Environment Interaction: The differential response of individuals with different genotypes to the same environments. 14.Genotypic Variance: Genetic variance that is responsible for individual differences in the phenotypic expression of specific traits. 15.Heritability: A statistic that refers to the proportion of observed variance in a group of individuals that can be explained or "accounted for" by genetic variance (Plomin, DeFries, & McClearn, 1990). It describes the degree to which genetic differences between individuals cause differences in some observed property, such as height, extraversion, or sensation seeking. The formal definition of heritability is the proportion of phenotypic variance that is attributable to genotypic variance. 16.Molecular Genetics: Techniques designed to identify the specific genes associated with specific traits, such as personality traits. The most common method, called the association method, identifies whether individuals with a particular gene (or allele) have higher or lower scores on a particular trait measure. 17.Monozygotic (MZ) Twins: Identical twins that come from a single fertilized egg (or zygote, hence monozygotic) that divides into two at some point during gestation. Identical twins are always the same sex because they are genetically identical. 18.Nature-Nurture Debate: The ongoing debate as to whether genes or environment are more important determinants of personality. 19.Nonshared Environmental Influences: Features of the environment that siblings do not share. Some children might get special or different treatment from key terms 25  their parents, they might have different groups of friends, they might be sent to different schools, or one might go to summer camp while the other stays home each summer. These features are called "nonshared" because they are experienced differently by different siblings. 20.Passive Genotype-Environment Correlation: Occurs when parents provide both genes and environment to children, yet the children do nothing to obtain that environment. 21.Percentage of Variance: Individuals vary or are different from each other, and this variability can be partitioned into percentages that are related to separate causes or separate variables. An example is the percentages of variance in some trait that are related to genetics, the shared environment, and the unshared environment. Another example would be the percentage of variance in happiness scores that are related to various demographic variables, such as income, gender, and age. 22.Phenotypic Variance: Observed individual differences, such as in height, weight, or personality. 23.Reactive Genotype-Environment Correlation: Occurs when parents (or others) respond to children differently depending on their genotype. 24.Selective Breeding: One method of doing behavior genetic research. Researchers might identify a trait and then see if they can selectively breed animals to possess that trait. This can occur only if the trait has a genetic basis. For example, dogs that possess certain desired characteristics, such as a sociable disposition, might be selectively bred to see if this disposition can be increased in frequency among offspring. Traits that are based on learning cannot be selectively bred for. 25.Selective Placement: If adopted children are placed with adoptive parents who are similar to their birth parents, this may inflate the correlations between the adopted children and their adoptive parents. In this case, the resulting inflated correlations would artificially inflate estimates of environmental influence because the correlation would appear to be due to the environment provided by the adoptive parent. There does not seem to be selective placement, and so this potential problem is not a problem in actual studies (Plomin et al. , 1990). key terms 26  26.Shared Environmental Influences: Features of the environment that siblings share; for example, the number of books in the home, the presence or absence of a TV and VCR, quality and quantity of the food in the home, the values and attitudes of the parent, and the schools, church, synagogue, or temple the parents send the children to. 27.Twin Studies: Twin studies estimate heritability by gauging whether identical twins, who share 100 percent of their genes, are more similar to each other than fraternal twins, who share only 50 percent of their genes. Twin studies, and especially studies of twins reared apart, have received tremendous media attention. Chapter 7: Physiological Approaches to Psychology 1.alpha wave: A particular type of brain wave that oscillates 8 to 12 times a second. The amount of alpha wave present in a given time period is an inverse indicator of brain activity during that time period. The alpha wave is given off when the person is calm and relaxed. In a given time period of brain wave recording, the more alpha wave activity present the more we can assume that part of the brain was less active. 2.anxiety: An unpleasant, high-arousal emotional state associated with perceived threat. In the psychoanalytic tradition, anxiety is seen as a signal that the control of the ego is being threatened by reality, by impulses from the id, or by harsh controls exerted by the superego. Freud identified three different types of anxiety: neurotic anxiety, moral anxiety, and objective anxiety. According to Rogers, the unpleasant emotional state of anxiety is the result of having an experience that does not fit with one's self-conception. 3.arousal level and arousability: In Eysenck's original theory of extraversion, he held that extraverts had lower levels of cortical or brain arousal than introverts. Eysenck proposed that introverts are characterized by higher levels of activity in the brain's ascending reticular activating system (ARAS) than are extraverts More recent research suggests that the difference between introverts and extraverts lies more in the arousability of their nervous systems, with extraverts showing less arousability or reactivity than introverts to the same levels of sensory stimulation. key terms 27  4.Ascending Reticular Activating System (ARAS): Incoming nerve fibers running through the reticular formation that influences physiological arousal- without this we would have continuous sleep 5.autonomic nervous system (ANS): That part of the peripheral nervous system that connects to vital bodily structures associated with maintaining life and responding to emergencies (e. g. , storing and releasing energy), such as the beating of the heart, respiration, and controlling blood pressure. There are two divisions of the ANS: the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches. 6.behavioral activation system (BAS): In Gray's reinforcement sensitivity theory, the system that is responsive to incentives, such as cues for reward, and regulates approach behavior. When some stimulus is recognized as potentially rewarding, the BAS triggers approach behavior. This system is highly correlated with the trait of extraversion. 7.behavioral inhibition system (BIS): In Gray's reinforcement sensitivity theory, the system responsive to cues for punishment, frustration, and uncertainty. The effect of BIS activation is to cease or inhibit behavior or to bring about avoidance behavior. This system is highly correlated with the trait of neuroticism. 8.cardiac reactivity: The increase in blood pressure and heart rate during times of stress. Evidence suggests that chronic cardiac reactivity contributes to coronary artery disease. 9.circadian rhythms: Many biological processes fluctuate around an approximate 24- to 25-hour cycle. These are called circadian rhythms (circa = around; dia = day). Circadian rhythms in temporal isolation studies have been found to be as short as 16 hours in one person, and as long as 50 hours in another person (Wehr & Goodwin, 1981). 10.comorbidity: The presence of two or more disorders of any type in one person. 11.cortisol: A stress hormone that prepares the body to flee or fight. Increases in cortisol in the blood indicate that the animal has recently experienced stress. 12.dopamine: A neurotransmitter that appears to be associated with pleasure. Dopamine appears to function something like the "reward system" and has even been called the "feeling good" chemical (Hamer, 1997). 13.electrode: A sensor usually placed on the surface of the skin and linked to a physiological recording machine (often called a polygraph) to measure key terms 28  physiological variables. 14.electrodermal activity (skin conductance): (also known as galvanic skin response or skin conductance) Electricity will flow across the skin with less resistance if that skin is made damp with sweat. Sweating on the palms of the hands is activated by the sympathetic nervous system, and so electrodermal activity is a way to directly measure changes in the sympathetic nervous system. 15.electroencephalograph (EEG): The brain spontaneously produces small amounts of electricity, which can be measured by electrodes placed on the scalp. EEGs can provide useful information about patterns of activation in different regions of the brain that may be associated with different types of information processing tasks. 16.free running: A condition in studies of circadian rhythms in which participants are deprived from knowing what time it is (e.g., meals are served when the participant asks for them, not at prescheduled times). When a person is free running in time, there are no time cues to influence behavior or biology. 17.frontal brain asymmetry: Asymmetry in the amount of activity in the left and right part of the frontal hemispheres of the brain. Studies using EEG measures have linked more relative left brain activity with pleasant emotions and more relative right brain activity with negative emotions. 18.harm avoidance: In Cloninger's tridimensional personality model, the personality trait of harm avoidance is associated with low levels of serotonin. People low in serotonin are sensitive to unpleasant stimuli or to stimuli or events that have been associated with punishment or pain. Consequently, people low in serotonin seem to expect that harmful and unpleasant events will happen to them, and they are constantly vigilant for signs of such threatening events 19.impulsivity: A personality trait that refers to lowered self-control, especially in the presence of potentially rewarding activities, the tendency to act before one thinks, and a lowered ability to anticipate the consequences of one's behavior. 20.monoamine oxidase (MAO): An enzyme found in the blood that is known to regulate neurotransmitters, those chemicals that carry messages between nerve cells. MAO may be a causal factor in the personality trait of sensation seeking. 21.morningness-eveningness: The stable differences between persons in preferences for being active at different times of the day. The term was coined to key terms 29  refer to this dimension (Horne & Osterberg, 1976). Differences between morning- and evening-types of persons appear to be due to differences in the length of their underlying circadian biological rhythms. 22.neurotransmitters: Chemicals in the nerve cells that are responsible for the transmission of a nerve impulse from one cell to another. Some theories of personality are based directly on different amounts of neurotransmitters found in the nervous system. 23.norepinephrine: A neurotransmitter involved in activating the sympathetic nervous system for flight or fight. 24.novelty seeking: In Cloninger's tridimensional personality model, the personality trait of novelty seeking is based on low levels of dopamine. Low levels of dopamine create a drive state to obtain substances or experiences that increase dopamine. Novelty and thrills and excitement can make up for low levels of dopamine, and so novelty-seeking behavior is thought to result from low levels of this neurotransmitter. 25.optimal level of arousal: Hebb believed that people are motivated to reach an optimal level of arousal. If they are underaroused relative to this level, an increase in arousal is rewarding; conversely, if they are overaroused, a decrease in arousal is rewarding. By optimal level of arousal, Hebb meant a level that is "just right" for any given task. 26.physiological systems: Organ systems within the body; for example, the nervous system (including the brain and nerves), the cardiac system (including the heart, arteries, and veins), and the musculoskeletal system (including the muscles and bones which make all movements and behaviors possible) 27.reinforcement sensitivity theory: Gray's biological theory of personality. Based on recent brain function research with animals, Gray constructed a model of human personality based on two hypothesized biological systems in the brain: the behavioral activation system (which is responsive to incentives, such as cues for reward, and regulates approach behavior) and the behavioral inhibition system (which is responsive to cues for punishment, frustration, and uncertainty). 28.reward dependence: In Cloninger's tridimensional personality model, the personality trait of reward dependence is associated with low levels of norepinephrine. People high on this trait are persistent; they continue to act in key terms 30  ways that produced reward. They work long hours, put a lot of effort into their work, and will often continue striving after others have given up. 29.sensation seeking: A dimension of personality postulated to have a physiological basis. It refers to the tendency to seek out thrilling and exciting activities, to take risks, and to avoid boredom. 30.sensory deprivation: Often done in a sound-proof chamber containing water in which a person floats, in total darkness, such that sensory input is reduced to a minimum. Researchers use sensory deprivation chambers to see what happens when a person is deprived of sensory input. 31.serotonin: A neurotransmitter that plays a role in depression and other mood disorders. Drugs such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil block the reuptake of serotonin, leaving it in the synapse longer, leading depressed persons to feel less depressed. 32.telemetry: a process by which electrical signals are sent from the participant to the polygraph through radio waves instead of by wires 33.theoretical bridge: The connection between two different variables (for instance, dimensions of personality and physiological variables). 34.tridimensional personality model: Cloninger's tridimensional personality model ties three specific personality traits to levels of the three neurotransmitters. The first trait is called novelty seeking and is based on low levels of dopamine. The second personality trait is harm avoidance, which he associates with low levels of serotonin. The third trait is reward dependence, which Cloninger sees as related to low levels of norepinephrine. 35.Type A personality: In the 1960s, cardiologists Friedman and Rosenman began to notice that many of their coronary heart disease patients had similar personality traits—they were competitive, aggressive workaholics, were ambitious overachievers, were often hostile, were almost always in a hurry, and rarely relaxed or took it easy. Friedman and Rosenman referred to this as the Type A personality, formally defined as "an action-emotion complex that can be observed in any person who is aggressively involved in a chronic, incessant struggle to achieve more and more in less and less time, and if required to do so, against the opposing efforts of other things or other persons" (1974, p. 37). As assessed by personality psychologists, Type A refers to a syndrome of several traits: (1) key terms 31  achievement motivation and competitiveness; (2) time urgency; and (3) hostility and aggressiveness. Chapter 8: Evolutionary Perspectives on Psychology 1.Natural Selection: Darwin reasoned that variants that better enabled an organism to survive and reproduce would lead to more descendants. The descendants, therefore, would inherit the variants that led to their ancestors' survival and reproduction. Through this process, the successful variants were selected, and unsuccessful variants weeded out. Natural selection, therefore, results in gradual changes in a species over time, as successful variants increase in frequency and eventually spread throughout the gene pool, replacing the less successful variants. 2.Hostile Forces of Nature: Hostile forces of nature are what Darwin called any event that impedes survival. Hostile forces of nature include food shortages, diseases, parasites, predators, and extremes of weather. 3.Sexual Selection: The evolution of characteristics because of their mating benefits rather than because of their survival benefits. According to Darwin, sexual selection takes two forms: intrasexual competition and intersexual selection. 4.Intrasexual Competition: In Darwin's intrasexual competition, members of the same sex compete with each other, and the outcome of their contest gives the winner greater sexual access to members of the opposite sex. Two stags locking horns in combat is the prototypical image of this. The characteristics that lead to success in contests of this kind, such as greater strength, intelligence, or attractiveness to allies, evolve because the victors are able to mate more often and hence pass on more genes. 5.Intersexual Selection: In Darwin's intersexual selection, members of one sex choose a mate based on their preferences for particular qualities in that mate. These characteristics evolve because animals that possess them are chosen more often as mates, and their genes thrive. Animals that lack the desired characteristics are excluded from mating, and their genes perish. 6.Genes: Packets of DNA that are inherited by children from their parents in distinct chunks. They are the smallest discrete units that are inherited by offspring intact, without being broken up. key terms 32  7.Differential Gene Reproduction: Reproductive success relative to others. The genes of organisms who reproduce more than others get passed down to future generations at a relatively greater frequency than the genes of those who reproduce less. Since survival is usually critical for reproductive success, characteristics that lead to greater survival get passed along. Since success in mate competition is also critical for reproductive success, qualities that lead to success in same-sex competition or to success at being chosen as a mate get passed along. Successful survival and successful mate competition, therefore, are both part of differential gene reproduction. 8.Inclusive Fitness Theory: Modern evolutionary theory based on differential gene reproduction. The "inclusive" part refers to the fact that the characteristics that affect reproduction need not affect the personal production of offspring; they can affect the survival and reproduction of genetic relatives as well. 9.Adaptive Problem: Anything that impedes survival or reproduction. All adaptations must contribute to fitness during the period of time in which they evolve by helping an organism survive, reproduce, or facilitate the reproductive success of genetic relatives. Adaptations emerge from and interact with recurrent structures of the world in a manner that solves adaptive problems and hence aids in reproductive success. 10.Xenophobia: The fear of strangers. Characteristics that were probably adaptive in ancestral environments, such as xenophobia, are not necessarily adaptive in modern environments. Some of the personality traits that make up human nature may be vestigial adaptations to an ancestral environment that no longer exists. 11.Byproducts of Adaptations: Evolutionary mechanisms that are not adaptations but rather are byproducts of other adaptations. Our nose, for example, is clearly an adaptation designed for smelling. But the fact that we use our nose to hold up our eyeglasses is an incidental byproduct. 12.Evolutionary Byproduct: Incidental effects evolved changes that are not properly considered adaptations. For example, our noses hold up glasses, but that is not what the nose evolved for. 13.Evolutionary Noise: Random variations that are neutral with respect to selection. key terms 33  14.Domain Specific: Adaptations are presumed to be domain specific in the sense that they are "designed" by the evolutionary process to solve a specialized adaptive problem. Domain specificity implies that selection tends to fashion specific mechanisms for each specific adaptive problem. 15.Functionality: The notion that our psychological mechanisms are designed to accomplish particular adaptive goals. 16.Deductive Reasoning Approach: The top-down, theory-driven method of empirical research. 17.Inductive Reasoning Approach: The bottom-up, data-driven method of empirical research. 18.Social Anxiety: Discomfort related to social interactions, or even to the anticipation of social interactions. Socially anxious persons appear to be overly concerned about what others will think. Baumeister and Tice propose that social anxiety is a species-typical adaptation that functions to prevent social exclusion. 19.Evolutionary-Predicted Sex Differences: Evolutionary psychology predicts that males and females will be the same or similar in all those domains where the sexes have faced the same or similar adaptive problems (e. g. , both sexes have sweat glands because both sexes have faced the adaptive problem of thermal regulation) and different when men and women have faced substantially different adaptive problems (e. g. , in the physical realm, women have faced the problem of childbirth and have therefore evolved adaptations that are lacking in men, such as mechanisms for producing labor contractions through the release of oxytocin into the bloodstream). 20.Effective Polygyny: Because female mammals bear the physical burden of gestation and lactation, there is a considerable sex difference in minimum obligatory parental investment. This difference leads to differences in the variances in reproduction between the sexes: most females will have some offspring, while a few males will sire many offspring, and some will have none at all. This is known as effective polygyny. 21.Sexually Dimorphic: Species that show high variance in reproduction within one sex tend to be highly sexually dimorphic, or highly different in size and structure. The more intense the effective polygyny, the more dimorphic the sexes are in size and form (Trivers, 1985). key terms 34  22.Reactively Heritable: Traits that are secondary consequences of heritable traits. 23.Frequency-Dependent Selection: In some contexts, two or more heritable variants can evolve within a population. The most obvious example is biological sex itself. Within sexually reproducing species, the two sexes exist in roughly equal numbers because of frequency-dependent selection. If one sex becomes rare relative to the other, evolution will produce an increase in the numbers of the rarer sex. Frequency-dependent selection, in this example, causes the frequency of men and women to remain roughly equal. Different personality extremes (e. g. , introversion and extraversion) may be the result of frequency dependent selection. 24.Restricted Sexual Strategy: According to Gangestad and Simpson (1990), a woman seeking a high-investing mate would adopt a restricted sexual strategy marked by delayed intercourse and prolonged courtship. This would enable her to assess the man's level of commitment, detect the existence of prior commitments to other women and/or children, and simultaneously signal to the man the woman's sexual fidelity and, hence, assure him of his paternity of future offspring. 25.Unrestricted Mating Strategy: According to Gangestad and Simpson (1990), a woman seeking a man for the quality of his genes is not interested in his level of commitment to her. If the man is pursuing a short-term sexual strategy, any delay on the woman's part may deter him from seeking sexual intercourse with her, thus defeating the main adaptive reason for her mating strategy. 26.Psychopathy: A term often used synonymously with the antisocial personality disorder. It is used to refer to individual differences in antisocial characteristics. 27.Balancing Selection: This maintains personality differences, and occurs when genetic variation is maintained by selection because different levels on a trait dimension are adaptive in different environments. Chapter 9: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Personality 1.psychic energy: According to Sigmund Freud, a source of energy within each person that motivates him or her to do one thing and not another. In Freud's view, it is this energy that motivates all human activity. key terms 35  2.instincts: Freud believed that strong innate forces provided all the energy in the psychic system. He called these forces instincts. In Freud's initial formulation there were two fundamental categories of instincts: self-preservation instincts and sexual instincts. In his later formulations, Freud collapsed the self-preservation and sexual instincts into one, which he called the life instinct. 3.libido: Freud postulated that humans have a fundamental instinct toward destruction and that this instinct is often manifest in aggression toward others. The two instincts were usually referred to as libido, for the life instinct, and thanatos, for the death instinct. While the libido was generally considered sexual in nature, Freud also used this term to refer to any need-satisfying, life-sustaining, or pleasure-oriented urge. 4.thanatos: Freud postulated that humans have a fundamental instinct toward destruction and that this instinct is often manifest in aggression toward others. The two instincts were usually referred to as libido, for the life instinct, and thanatos, for the death instinct. While thanatos was considered to be the death instinct, Freud also used this term to refer to any urge to destroy, harm, or aggress against others or oneself. 5.conscious: The part of the mind that contains all thoughts, feelings, and images that a person is presently aware of. Whatever a person is currently thinking about is in his or her conscious mind. 6.preconscious: Any information that a person is not presently aware of, but that could easily be retrieved and made conscious, is found in the preconscious mind. 7.unconscious: The unconscious mind is the part of the mind about which the conscious mind has no awareness. 8.blindsight: Following an injury or stroke that damages the primary vision center in the brain, a person may lose some or all of his or her ability to see. In this blindness the eyes still bring information to the brain, but the brain center responsible for object recognition fails. People who suffer this "cortical" blindness often display an interesting capacity to make judgments about objects that they truly cannot see. 9.deliberation-without-awareness: The notion that, when confronted with a decision, if a person can put it out of their conscious mind for a period of time, key terms 36  then the "unconscious mind" will continue to deliberate on it, helping the person to arrive at a "sudden" and often correct decision some time later. 10.id: The most primitive part of the human mind. Freud saw the id as something we are born with and as the source of all drives and urges. The id is like a spoiled child: selfish, impulsive, and pleasure loving. According to Freud, the id operates strictly according to the pleasure principle, which is the desire for immediate gratification. 11.pleasure principle: The desire for immediate gratification. The id operates according to the pleasure principle; therefore, it does not listen to reason, does not follow logic, has no values or morals (other than immediate gratification), and has very little patience. 12.primary process thinking: Thinking without the logical rules of conscious thought or an anchor in reality. Dreams and fantasies are examples of primary process thinking. Although primary process thought does not follow the normal rules of reality (e.g., in dreams people might fly or walk through walls), Freud believed there were principles at work in primary process thought and that these principles could be discovered. 13.wish fulfillment: If an urge from the id requires some external object or person, and that object or person is not available, the id may create a mental image or fantasy of that object or person to satisfy its needs. Mental energy is invested in that fantasy and the urge is temporarily satisfied. This process is called wish fulfillment, whereby something unavailable is conjured up and the image of it is temporarily satisfying. 14.ego: The part of the mind that constrains the id to reality. According to Freud, it develops within the first two or three years of life. The ego operates according to the reality principle. The ego understands that the urges of the id are often in conflict with social and physical reality, and that direct expression of id impulses must therefore be redirected or postponed. 15.reality principle: In psychoanalysis, it is the counterpart of the pleasure principle. It refers to guiding behavior according to the demands of reality and relies on the strengths of the ego to provide such guidance. 16.secondary process thinking: The ego engages in secondary process thinking, which refers to the development and devising of strategies for problem solving key terms