Gender, Personality and Identity

Question 1

Definition of personality

Answer 1

The organized combination of attributes, motives, values and behaviours unique to each individual.

Question 2

What factors contribute to developing a personality?

Answer 2

• Shaped by evolution (nature)
• Constructed from past and future experiences
• Adaptations to specific situations
• Stable traits that influence our thoughts, behaviours and feelings

Question 3

What is the psychoanalytic approach to personality development?

Answer 3

• Everyone goes through the same stages of personality development
• Who you are at 5 years old is who you are now, and who you will be in 30 years

Question 4

What is the social learning approach to personality development?

Answer 4

• Personality would change depending on changes in environments and contexts
• Early experiences are important, but experiences with peers, teachers and culture are also important

Question 5

What is the trait theory approach to personality development?

Answer 5

• Personality dimensions: stable across time, don’t develop at standard universal stages
• Traits are: heritable, early emerging, and universal but culture shapes the degree or ways that trait is expressed

Question 6

What is the Big Five of Personality and what do they represent?

Answer 6

Openness to experience: curious
Conscientiousness: systematic and organised
Extraversion: outgoing and social
Agreeableness: affable and cooperative
Neuroticism: temperamental

Question 7

What does HEXACO represent?

Answer 7

Honesty-humility: sincere and fair
Emotionality: ability to emotionally regulate
Extraversion
Agreeableness
Conscientiousness
Openness to experience

Question 8

What are the dimensions of temperaments in infants’ personality development?

Answer 8

• Easiness and difficultness
• Behavioural inhibition
  Surgency, negative affect and effortful control
• Biology

Question 9

Definition of temperament

Answer 9

Genetically based tendencies to respond in predictable ways to events

Question 10

Explain the easiness and difficultness dimension

Answer 10

There are easy, difficult and slow to warm up babies. They relate to behavioural frustration and adjustment in childhood

Question 11

Explain the dimension of behavioural inhibition

Answer 11

It is the extent of being willing to experience new things or in contrast, shy away from them. Biologically and genetically rooted. Risk factor for anxiety disorder

Question 12

Explain surgency, negative affect and effortful control

Answer 12

Surgency: actively approaching new experiences in an emotionally positive way
Negative affect: generally sad or irritable
Effortful control: ability to control and regulate behaviour, emotions and attention

Question 13

How much continuity/discontinuity in personality is there across development?

Answer 13

There is a discontinuity in that personality becomes more consistent with age, but continuity in that this change is consistent and stable. So there is a projected stability across different traits changing over the years

Question 14

What causes personality to remain stable over the years?

Answer 14

Stability is caused by the hereditary nature of traits, the foundation is laid in childhood, and if the environment doesn’t undergo change.

Question 15

What causes personality to change over the years?

Answer 15

Change is caused by biological factors (e.g. car accident, brain injury), environmental changes (moving away from home, divorce), or a poor person-environment fit (having a friend that encourages growth more than parents)

Question 16

What is the difference between sex and gender?

Answer 16

Sex: biological contributions, sex chromosomes, hormones, external genitalia and internal reproductive organs
Gender: dependent on different perceptions of masculinity and femininity, gender-role norms and how they were raised

Question 17

Why are there gender stereotypes?

Answer 17

They bias our perceptions, having positive self-bias, good at suppressing bad stereotypes about self.
Social-role hypothesis stresses the importance of the context, or society’s expectation of men and women’s roles and behaviour.

Question 18

What do unfounded stereotypes affect?

Answer 18

How we are perceived, how we perceive others, and how we are raised (intergenerational effect)

Question 19

How do stereotypes affect our earliest interactions with infants?

Answer 19

They affect play behaviour (more active and aggressive with male infants), and descriptions of infants (the infant’s clothing colour would determine how they were described - either fragile/princess-like or strong/handsome

Question 20

Definition of gender-role norms.

Answer 20

Patterns of behaviour that should be adopted by males and females in a particular society, with different desirable behaviours/characteristics being associated with each gender. If inconsistent behaviours are revealed, could be discouraged or excluded

Bigger than just stereotypes, overgeneralised beliefs.

Question 21

What is the biosocial theory of gender-role development?

Answer 21

There is an emphasis on how biology influences people’s reactions toward a child and this influence their subsequent gender-role development. Gender is thought to be biologically based.

Question 22

What does the biosocial theory of gender role development say happens from birth to 3 years old?

Answer 22

At first, they are passive involved in gendered activity and interactions.
- 12 month olds: expect consistency in visual and auditory stimuli (seeing a woman and expecting a woman’s voice)
- 18 month olds: expect consistency in visual stimuli and behaviour (expecting boys to play with cars and trucks, instead of dolls)
- 24 month olds: expect individuals to act in gender consistent ways (men take out the trash, women in the kitchen cooking)

Question 23

When is the gender-role norm developed in childhood?

Answer 23

2 year olds behave in gender congruent ways
3 year olds can give verbal proof of gender identity

Question 24

What is the social learning theory of gender role development?

Answer 24

Gender roles are learnt through differential reinforcement and observational learning

Question 25

How does social learning theory explain gender role development from 1-3 years of age?

Answer 25

Differential reinforcement: males and females are reinforced for behaviour matching their gender, of which they often internalise from parents or peers Observational learning: learning behaviour from parents' examples or peers, or media they are exposed to

Question 26

How does social learning theory explain gender role development 3-6 years of age?

Answer 26

- They believe people would perform better in their gender-stereotyped occupations - They react negatively when asked to think of themselves in a counter-stereotypical occupation - They continue to show gender-consistent behaviour - They prefer to play with same-sexed children

Question 27

How does cognitive theory explain gender role development?

Answer 27

- Children are believed to teach themselves how to be 'male' or 'female' - Gender schema theory: organised sets of beliefs and expectations about each gender - Kohlberg's theory: gender is a trait, something that is stable and consistent across development

Question 28

How do 3-6 year olds develop according to gender schema theory?

Answer 28

There is an increase in gender stereotype rigidity - They show that they have a gender identity and grow in understanding of what that means - Forming in-group/out-group schema - Information processing approach: acquiring more information about their gender - Looking for confirming information from the environment, consistency with internal ideas

Question 29

How does Kohlberg's theory account for gender-role development from 7 to puberty?

Answer 29

- They become less rigid in stereotype adherence - They understand that acting in gender-inconsistent ways does not adversely affect one's male or femaleness - They engage in active socialisation, where they actively look at same-sex role models for examples to follow

Question 30

What is the integrated approach to gender role development beyond puberty?

Answer 30

- Adolescence: They become less tolerant of behaviours that deviate from gender norms, flexibility returns in late adolescence - Adulthood: less gender differentiation in young adulthood due to responsibility of all stereotypical gendered behaviours. Differentiation increases when couples marry and increase when a child is introduced - Late adulthood: gender expression becomes more androgynous - All the theories are used in one way or another due to nuanced and complex development during this time: biosocial, social learning, gender schema, and cognitive developmental