Chapter 13 | Personality

Question 1

Personality

Answer 1

A person’s characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors.

Question 2

Personality trait

Answer 2

A pattern of thought, emotion, and behavior that is relatively consistent over time and across situations.

Question 3

Gordon Allport

Answer 3

Classic scientific definition of personality - the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine [the individual’s] characteristic behavior and thought

Question 4

Organization

Answer 4

Personality is a coherent whole

Question 5

Dynamic

Answer 5

The organized whole is dynamic.

It is goal-seeking, sensitive to particular contexts, adaptive to the person’s environment, and fluid over time.

Question 6

Psychological systems

Answer 6

1. mental nature of personality (psycho)
2. biological processes and external environments (physical)

Question 7

Temperaments

Answer 7

Biologically based tendencies to feel or act in certain ways

Question 8

Trait approach

Answer 8

Approaches to studying personality that focus on how individuals differ in personality dispositions.

Question 9

Five-factor theory

Answer 9

The idea that personality can be described using five factors: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

Question 10

Openness to experience

Answer 10

Imaginations v. down-to-earth
Likes variability v. likes routine
Independent v. conforming

Question 11

Conscientiousness

Answer 11

Organized v. disorganized
Careful v. careless
Self-disciplined v. weak-willed

Question 12

Extraversion

Answer 12

Social v. retiring
Fun-loving v. sover
Affectionate v. reserved

Question 13

Agreeableness

Answer 13

Soft-hearted v. ruthless
Trusting v. suspicious
Helpful v. uncooperative

Question 14

Neuroticism

Answer 14

Worried v. calm
Insecure v. secure
Self-pitying v. self-satisfied

Question 15

Eysenck’s Biological Trait Theory of Personality

Answer 15

According to Eysenck, personality is composed of traits that occur in three dimensions: extraversion/introversion, emotionally stable/neurotic, and high constraint/low constraint (originally called psychoticism).

Question 16

Behavioral approach system (bas)

Answer 16

The brain system involved in the pursuit of incentives or rewards

Question 17

Behavioral inhibition system (bis)

Answer 17

The brain system that monitors for threats in the environment and therefore slows or inhibits behavior in order to be vigilant for danger or pain.

Question 18

Fight-flight-freeze system (fffs)

Answer 18

The brain system that responds to punishment by directing an organism to freeze, run away, or engage in defensive fighting

Question 19

Humanistic approaches

Answer 19

Approaches to studying personality that emphasize how people seek to fulfill their potential through greater self-understanding

Question 20

Rogers’s Person-Centered Approach to Personality

Answer 20

According to Rogers’s theory, personality is influenced by how we understand ourselves and how others evaluate us, which leads to conditions of worth or unconditional positive regard.

Question 21

Locus of control

Answer 21

People’s personal beliefs about how much control they have over outcomes in their lives.

Question 22

Bandura’s Reciprocal Determinism Theory of Personality

Answer 22

The theory that the pression of personality can be explained by the interaction of environment, person factors, and behavior itself.

Question 23

Need for cognition

Answer 23

The tendency to engage in and enjoy thinking about difficult questions or problems.

Question 24

Situationism

Answer 24

The theory that behavior is determined more by situations than by personality traits.

Question 25

Interactionism

Answer 25

The theory that behavior is determined jointly by situations and underlying dispositions.

Question 26

Idiographic approaches

Answer 26

Person-centered approaches to assessing personality that focus on individual lives and how various characteristics are integrated into unique persons.

Question 27

Nomothetic approaches

Answer 27

Approaches to assessing personality that focus on the variation in common characteristics from person to person.

Question 28

Projective measures

Answer 28

Personality tests that examine tendencies to respond in a particular way by having people interpret ambiguous stimuli.

Question 29

Projective Measures of Personality

Answer 29

Projective measures are meant to provide insight into a particular person’s personality by allowing the person to project unconscious thoughts onto ambiguous images.

Question 30

Self-schema

Answer 30

A knowledge structure that contains memories, beliefs, and generalizations about the self and that helps people efficiently perceive, organize, interpret, and use information related to themselves. Concepts that overlap with the self are most strongly related to the self. Concepts connected to the self with a solid line are not quite as strongly related to self-knowledge. Clothing, connected with a dotted line, is related more weakly. Concepts with no connecting lines are not related to the self.

Question 31

Self-esttem

Answer 31

The evaluation aspect of the self-concept in which people feel worthy or unworthy.

Question 32

Sociometer

Answer 32

An internal monitor of social acceptance or rejection. According to sociometer theory, self-esteem is the gauge that measures the extent to which people believe they are being included in or excluded from a social group. (a) If the probability of rejection seems low, a person’s self-esteem will tend to be high. (b) If the probability of rejection seems high, a person’s self-esteem will tend to be low.

Question 33

Social comparison

Answer 33

The tendency for people to evaluate their own actions, abilities, and beliefs by contrasting them with other people's.

Question 34

Self-serving bias

Answer 34

The tendency for people to take personal credit for success but blame failure on external factors

Question 35

Cultural Differences in Self-Construal

Answer 35

Self-construal differs across cultures. (a) In individualist cultures, self-construal focuses on elements within the person. (b) In collectivist cultures, self-construal centers around areas where the person’s sense of self is connected with others.