Week 1 - Introduction to Personality Traits PDF

Week 1 - Introduction to personality traits 1. Identify the theoretical fundamentals of personality traits What is personality ? We can think of personality as a portmanteau word, blending the meaning of personal consistency and continuity. Personality captures consistent themes in the way we...

Week 1 - Introduction to personality traits 1. Identify the theoretical fundamentals of personality traits What is personality ? We can think of personality as a portmanteau word, blending the meaning of personal consistency and continuity. Personality captures consistent themes in the way we think, feel, act and react both personally and interpersonally. Historically personality was thought of as types for example type A and B personality with type A being someone who is a go getter perfectionist sort of character. Nowadays we tend not to think in typologies at all and it is far more common to think of personality in terms of traits. Traits are broad, enduring, relatively stable characteristics used to assess and explain behaviour, we assume we all have the same traits with them being presented at different levels in each individual. Traits are usually viewed as normally distributed rather than presence or absence, some people can be really extreme in that trait, on the lower end of the spectrum or sit nicely in the middle in being the most common. For example if you were to administer a personality questionnaire and someone scored 0 in neuroticism, this doesn’t actually mean they possess no level of neuroticism but rather that they are on the lower end of the spectrum. Each individual is unique in that their individual configuration of traits is unlikely to regularly occur. In psychology we apply the biopsychosocial approach to thinking about where personality traits come from. Where do these traits come from ? trait factors and their specific facets(traits) are heritable ie. genetic at least in part (usually ~ 50%) meaning that the other half of our individual personality traits are coming from our experiences within our life. Learned reactions and habits are exhibited on a consistent basis and interpersonal style and particular attitudes are going to be influenced by social and wider cultural groups. Whilst personality is relatively consistent people can change throughout their lives.  The lexical hypothesis that allport adopted is the idea that important aspects of personality are going to be represented already in our basic language. We look through the dictionary to see how people describe personality and categories that produce a group of traits. This was a nomothetic approach Allport had the idea of proprium and believed humans had a positive growth-oriented, progressive, creative driver of human nature. This is important as it represents an early aspect of what we call positive psychology. He also had the idea of cardinal, central and secondary traits. Cardinal meaning traits that are core to us and overridingly present in our personality, central traits that are of similar importance but not as pronounced and secondary traits that are more peripheral. How many characteristics make up a person ? For personality psychology researchers there's three central questions for those looking for a set of core personality characteristics. 1. How many of them are there ? 2. What are they ? 3. Are they universally applicable across cultural groups? The answer to these questions is a matter of theoretical judgement. We could get statistical data through factor analysis, but this does not tell us the answer. Judgements cannot always be based on reality. 2. Describe the 16-factor, 5-factor and 2-factor models of personality presented in the lecture 16 Factors Invented factor analysis. The sheer size of all of this list is both a strength and a weakness and because of that later theorists used cattell's model of factor analysis to further group items 5 Factor Openness is the last trait to be spat out of the factor analysis as the items don’t sit as balanced. The aspects and facets are lower level terms under the higher order personality factors. In the facet level you can get an idea of the things that are making up these traits, one criticism of facets level measures is that they are rarely defined and simply spoken about with reference to their name which affects content validity. Aspects level represents a balance between the factor and facets levels.  Research indicates looking from a facet or aspect level of approach may be more useful 2 Factor Just as the FFM is a very broad level of the hierarchy, we can actually go even broader - Broad traits at the top of the hierarchy - Very specific experiences and behaviours at the bottom Above the FFM we have what are called meta traits or superfactors and one useful two-factor model generated by Digma (1997) consisted of stability and plasticity which was based on the idea that FFM factors are not entirely independent, so we can further cluster them into two factors. 3. Understand the advantages and disadvantages of working with different levels of traits