5. Individual differences Flashcards
What is a personality?
The distinctive and relatively enduring ways of thinking, feeling and acting that characterise a person’s responses to life situations
What are personality traits?
- Relatively stable cognitive, emotional and behavioural characteristics of people
- Help people establish their individual identities
- Continuum along which individuals vary
What 2 factors does Eysenck’s personality theory have?
- Neuroticism/stability - tendency to experience negative emotions
- Extraversion - degree to which a person is outgoing and seeks stimulation
What are the 5 traits in the five-factor model of personality?
- Openness - imagination
- Conscientiousness - organised
- Extroversion
- Agreeableness - trust and empathy
- Neuroticism (emotional instability)
OCEAN
What did Eysenck propose as the biological basis of extroversion and introversion?
- Customary levels of cortical arousal
* Introverts are over-aroused and extraverts are under-aroused
What did Eysenck propose as the biological basis of neuroticism?
- Suddenness of shifts in arousal
* Neurotic people show large, sudden shifts in limbic system arousal
In a test comparing identical and fraternal twins, what percentage of traits are genetically determined according to the results?
50% genetically determined
If someone is calm under extreme pressure and can be selfish, how would they score on the five-factor model?
- Low on neuroticism
* Low on agreeableness
How does conscientiousness affect someone’s wellbeing?
- Adds 7.5 years to lifespan
- Less likely to engage in harmful behaviours
- Medical engagement and adherence
- Improving conscientiousness
How does neuroticism affect someone’s wellbeing?
- Increased reporting of somatic symptoms e.g. pain
- Higher rates of mental health disorders
- Higher mortality rates e.g. CVD
- Higher rates of healthcare usage - less adherence to healthy behaviours
When can neuroticism be protective?
When combined with high conscientiousness - person more inclined to look after health
How can you decrease neuroticism?
- Psychological therapies
* Medication
What is intelligence?
Ability to:
• Acquire knowledge
• Think and reason effectively
• Deal adaptively with the environment
What test measures mental age?
Binet-Simon Scale
What is the average in the IQ (intelligence quotient) test?
100
How are the IQ scores distributed?
Normal distribution
What percentage of people score within 2 SD of the mean score in the IQ test?
95%
Are there many outliers in the IQ test?
Very few
What did Charles Spearman believe that intellectual activity involves?
- General factor (g)
- Specific factor (s) e.g. mechanical, verbal, numerical, spatial
- Analysis suggests that people who do well on one task tend to do well on others
What is the most common intelligence test that is used in many settings, what is it made up of, and what is the child version called?
- WAIS-IV
- Made up of a general ability score
- Cognitive domains within that, in which there are specific tasks to test the domain
- Child version: Wechsler test
What are the problems with intelligence tests?
- Quite narrow
- Hard to decide what intelligence is
- Ability to survive in harsh conditions may be more adaptive and useful?
What are Garder’s multiple intelligences?
- Linguistic intelligence
- Logical-Mathematic intelligence
- Spatial intelligence
- Musical intelligence (important to listen to patterns of sounds in medicine)
- Bodily-Kinaesthetic intelligence
- Intrapersonal intelligence
- Interpersonal functioning
Give an example of the clinical use of IQ tests?
Testing cognitive function of stroke patients
Why is it sometimes a problem to averaging something like limb strength quotient?
- If a tennis player sprained his left ankle, his LL score would go down to 50
- His other limb scores could all be above 100 and all average to above 100
- This could give a LQ of above 100 - appears to be no problem, even though there is
