Personality and individual differences

Question 1

What did ancient Hippocrates and Galen believe about personality?

Answer 1

That the physical humours or fluids within the body were linked with personality traits
Yellow bile - quick tempered, volatile, aggressive
Blood - enthusiastic, optimistic, social, cheerful
Phlegm - calm, relaxed, slow paced
Black bile - gloomy, pessimistic, sad

Question 2

Who developed phrenology?

Answer 2

Franz Joseph Gall

Question 3

What is phrenology?

Answer 3

A pseudoscience that aimed to predict people’s personality by the size, shape and bumps on their skull.

Question 4

What are the principles of phrenology?

Answer 4

• The brain is divided into 27 independent organs
• Each organ controls an aspect of your personality - pride, vanity, murderous instincts, friendly
• The size of the organ corresponds to the strength of the trait
• The size of the organ is determined by the bumps on the skull

Question 5

What is personality?

Answer 5

Comes from the latin persona
Involves both internal traits and external expressional style
emotions
behaviours
cognitions
motivations
social tendencies

Question 6

How do we define personality?

Answer 6

No single definition is acceptable

- Those characteristics of the person that account for consistent patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving 

- The set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are organised and relatively enduring that influence his or her interactions with, and adaptations to the physical and social environment 

Personality is the enduring set or traits and styles that he or she exhibits

Question 7

What is the psychodynamic theory of personality?

Answer 7

Personality is influenced by our unconscious mind and our childhood experiences
ID - responsible for needs and urges
Superego - ideals and morals
Ego

Question 8

What is the humanist theory of personality?

Answer 8

Humanists emphasise the importance of free will and he role of each person’s conscious life experiences in personality development
Belief that people are inherently good and people are motivated to pursue things that will help them reach their full potential

Question 9

What is the behaviourist or social cognition theory of personality?

Answer 9

Our personality is influenced by the associations, rewards and punishments
Social cognition - views personality through the lens of socil interactions and learning. Consider that the environment has a strong influence on our personality and that personality is learnt

Question 10

What is the trait theory of personality?

Answer 10

Allport and Cattle
This theory does not describe how personality may have developed
Trait theories describe the different facets of personality

Question 11

What is a trait?

Answer 11

A relatively stable personality characteristic that causes individuals to behave in certain ways

Question 12

Traits assume characteristics are…

Answer 12

1) Relatively stable overtime, relatively stable across situations

Question 13

Are traits continuous or categorical

Answer 13

Continuous. You can have more or less of a trait by demonstrating that behaviour more frequently

Question 14

What is Eysenck’s big three?

Answer 14

Extroversion - introversion
Neuroticism - emotional stability
Psychoticism - ego control - added later

Question 15

What is Eysenck’s theory of personality?

Answer 15

Argued that personality is linked with physiological substrates in the nervous system and that differences in personality are a result of differing levels of nervous system arousal

Question 16

Neuroticism

Answer 16

Autonomic arousal (regulates involuntary bodily function)

Question 17

Extraversion

Answer 17

Cortical arousal ( response for higher order cognitive processes)

Question 18

What is the Lemon test?

Answer 18

Looks at Reticular activating system
This responds to stimuli like food or social contact - controls how much saliva you produce

Question 19

What is the baseline activity of the RAS in introverts?

Answer 19

High, only need a small stimulus to produce a large response as introverts are more cortically aroused or stimulated than extraverts.

Question 20

What is the baseline activity of the RAS in extraverts?

Answer 20

Low, need a much larger stimuli to produce a response

Question 21

What is the big five?

Answer 21

Personality can be reduced to five core factors, acronym OCEAN

Question 22

What does each trait on OCEAN represent>

Answer 22

A continuum. Individuals are ranked on a scale between the two extreme ends of five broad dimensions.

Question 23

What does OCEAN stand for?

Answer 23

Openness - willingness to try new things
Conscientiousness - to regulate their impulse control to engage in goal directed behavours
Extroversion - the tendency and intensity in which someone seeks interaction with their environment
Agreeableness - how people tend to treat relationships with others
Neuroticism - the overall emotional stability of an individual

Question 24

Criticism of the big five

Answer 24

Doesn’t provide a theory, just describes personality
Doesn’t give specific traits
Demonstrates good cross cultural validity

Question 25

What did Mischel find?

Answer 25

That only 9% of our behaviour can be explained by our personality so the rest must be the situation

Question 26

What did Bowers find about personality?

Answer 26

13% of variance in behaviour is explained by persnoality. 10% by situational and 20% is based on interaction between the two

Question 27

How can we measure personality?

Answer 27

The Barnum effect

Question 28

What is the Barnum Effect?

Answer 28

A cognitive bias that occurs when individuals believe that generic personality descriptions and statements apply to themselves. Diagnostic - interest blank test. Also known as the Forer effect

Question 29

Projective tests

Answer 29

Based on the idea that if you give people an ambiguous stimulus and ask them to describe it, their answer will tell you something

Question 30

The Rorschach test -

Answer 30

People’s descriptions of what they see in inkblots eludes to their personality

Question 31

Thematic Apperception Test

Answer 31

Involves showing people a series of picture cards depicting a variety of ambiguous characters, scenes and situations. Then asked to tell a story for each picture presented.

Question 32

What so most personality questionnaires use?

Answer 32

Likert statements

Question 33

What are informant report questionnaires?

Answer 33

Completed by the people who know the target well, Rate their agreement or disagreement

Question 34

What are behavioural measures

Answer 34

A person’s personality can be measured by observing their behaviour or the traces of their behaviour