Lecture 2 - Introduction to Personality Psychology

Question 1

What is the difference between a conceptual and operational definition?

Answer 1

Conceptual definition - the abstract idea or construct e.g. quality of life
Operational definition - concrete empirical indicators, data, or measures of the target concept/construct e.g. for quality of life we could measure life satisfaction or longevity.

Question 2

What are the three levels of personality that we discussed in this lecture?

Answer 2

Level 1: Dispositional traits, such as the Big Five
Level 2: Characteristic Adaptations
Level 3: Life Narratives

Question 3

What is the third level of personality discussed in the lecture?

Answer 3

Life Narratives - the way in which people tend to view their lives through a narrative that can help them understand, make sense of, and guide their lives.

Question 4

What are the two aspects of how a Life Narrative is generally described?

Answer 4

1. As a theme or set of themes
2. In a structured, coherent (or not) manner
   Differences in these two aspects are what bring about the many different life narratives of the many different people.

Question 5

What is are some common elements of Life Narratives that we discussed?

Answer 5

1. A prominent themes/set of themes
2. Prominent aspects of structure - e.g. turbulent, or slow and linear

Question 6

What is the prominent way of assessing life narratives?

Answer 6

An in-depth interview.

Question 7

In 2006 McAdams & Pals proposed three levels of personality. What were the three levels and why did they propose these three levels?

Answer 7

The three levels were:
Level 1 - Dispositional traits, such as the Big Five
Level 2 - Characteristic Adaptations
Level 3 - Life Narratives
McAdams and Pals noticed that theories such as The Big Five, did not do a very good job of providing way to capture and describe the variation in and complexity of personality. Assessing the literature to date they proposed that there were another two levels of defining nature that people used to describe personality.

Question 8

What did Alport and Odbert do in 1936 that gave rise to some of the most prominent theories in personality traits, such as the Big Five?

Answer 8

Alport and Odbert wanted to understand what traits make up personality. They took a lexical approach, justifying this with the belief that the “true” traits of personality would yield themselves in the variety of definitions and words we use to describe personality.
They turned to the dictionary and found 18,000 words that could be used to describe personality and published this as some kind of guide to what makes up personality.
This would later be the foundations that others used to generate theories of personality traits, such as the Big Five.

Question 9

What are two examples of life narrative themes that we discussed in this lecture?

Answer 9

The ‘redemtion’ sequence and the ‘contamination’ sequence.

Question 10

How are life narratives generally studied or examined?

Answer 10

An in depth interview with the person.

Question 11

The Big Five and Five Factor model are almost identical. Only one of the traits or factors is phrased differently. What is this trait/factor?

Answer 11

In the Big Five model there is Intellect/Openness, whereas in the Five Factor Model this trait/factor is called Openness to Experience.

Question 12

Who proposed the Five Factor Model and who prosed the Big Five?

Answer 12

Costa & McCrae (1992) proposed the Five Factor Model.
Goldberg and colleagues in the 1980s and 90s proposed the Big Five Model.

Question 13

What is the difference between the Big Five and Five Factor models of personality?

Answer 13

Goldberg and colleagues were furthering the work done by Alport & Odbert, and Cartell on personality traits that approached the topic from a lexical point of view.
Costa & McCrae developed their Five Factor Model of personality, which was remarkably similar to the Big Five Model, based on clinical observation and questionnaires.

Question 14

What is internal consistency reliability and how do we measure it, as discussed in this lecture?

Answer 14

Psychometric questionnaires tend to have multiple questions pertaining to a given concept or construct being studied. This allows for the same type of question to be answered to multiple ways, as well as different questions that can yield significant about a contruct can be asked. For example, on a Big Five personality quiz, multiple questions would be asked that would yield answers about the spectrum of someone’s Extraversion. In regards to these psychometric questionnaires Internal consistency reliability refers to how well these questions pertaining to a given concept yield similar answers. If there is high internal consistency reliability then the questions are likely to be accurately assessing the concept, e.g. Openness. If there is low internal consistency reliability then the questions are likely not doing a good job of assessing the given construct.
One common way to assess Internal Consistency Reliability is using Cronbach’s Alpha. Cronbach’s Alpha is a statistical coefficient used to measure internal consistency or reliability of a measure.

Question 15

What is Pearson’s r?

Answer 15

Also known as The Pearson Correlation Coefficient (r), Pearson’s r is the most common way to measuring a linear correlation.

Question 16

Why is that a good Pearson’s r value is around 0.4 in social sciences?

Answer 16

If Pearson’s r is lower than 0.4 then there is likely not a very meaningful, if any, association between the two variables. If Pearson’s r is higher than 0.4 then the concern is that you may actually be measuring the same concept/variable.

Question 17

Who took Alport & Odbert’s (1936) 18,000 terms and generated a 16-factor solution to this unwieldy laundry list of personality descriptors?

Answer 17

Cartell in 1946 did factor analysis to assess which of the 18,000 terms pertaining to personality actually were talking about the same personality traits. Cartell came up with a 16-factor solution to this endeavour and proposed that these 16 factors were the basic personality traits and everything else about personality relates back to these 16 factors.

Question 18

What were some the problems or limitations of Cartell’s 16 personality traits and how he reached this number of traits?

Answer 18

1. When other people tried to replicate the 16-factor solution proposed by Cartell they kept generating different factors.
2. Before Cartell did factor analysis he went through the 18,000 words and discarded synonyms.antonyms and near-identical descriptors and ended up with 171 descriptors that he then did a factor analysis on. When others have done the same they have come up with a different set of descriptors.
3. The correlations between some of the 16 factors were very high, suggesting that they might be reflective of the same trait.

Question 19

Who proposed the Big Five Model of Personality Traits?

Answer 19

Golberg and colleagues in the 80s and 90s worked on defining the personality trait space and proposed the Big Five Model for Personality.

Question 20

Who proposed the Five Factor Model of Personality Traits and how did the development of this model differ to that of the Big Five?

Answer 20

McCrae and Costa in 1992 put forth their Five Factor Model of Personality Traits. Whilst this Model is very similar to the Big Five there are a couple of differences. Firstly, instead of Intellect/Openness as a trait in the Big Five, Five Factor Model has Openness to Experience. Secondly, this model was arrived at through clinical observation and questionnaire analysis.

Question 21

What are the five dispositional personality traits defined int the Big Five and Five Factor Model?

Answer 21

The acronym OCEAN is helpful here.
O - Openness to Experience (Five Factor Model)/Intellect (Big Five)
C - Conscientiousness
E - Extraversion
A - Agreeableness
N - Neuroticism

Question 22

What are some ways Personality Traits are measured?

Answer 22

1. Mini-Markers Big-5 scoring - rating oneself or others on a scale for certain descriptors.
2. The Big Five Inventory-Two Self-Report - which is what we did for our lab report

Question 23

How is Cronbach’s alpha determined?

Question 24

According to the lexical hypothesis of personality traits….

Answer 24

Salient personality characteristics will, over time, be coded in language.

Question 25

What are characteristic adaptations?

Answer 25

Characteristic adaptations, often referred to as the level 2 of personality traits, refers to ways of thinking, feeling and behaving that are highly contextualised and are more to do with what you are working on in the present as opposed to your personality traits, which tend to be stable across time. Examples of characteristic adaptations are schemas, goals, beliefs.
Characteristic Adaptations can be seen as the goals, interpretations and strategies of a person that are not necessarily traits, but are important parts of the person

Question 26

What is the third level of personality that we talked about in the lecture?

Answer 26

Life Narratives.

Question 27

What are life narratives?

Answer 27

People tend to see their lives through a narrative that incorporates the most important or significant events in their lives, which come together as a context for who they are today. People tend to have an underlying moral value to their lives, such as looking after loved ones, or honour.

Question 28

What are some of the questions life narratives help us form answers to (regardless of how subjective these answers may be)?

Answer 28

Who am I?
Why am I the way I am?
Where am I going?

Question 29

What is Narrative Identity?

Answer 29

Narrative Identity refers to the identity we have built up for ourselves based on the story we tell ourselves of our lives thus far.

Question 30

Life Narratives or Narrative Identity are generally described in two ways. What are these two ways?

Answer 30

1. Themes - such as what the moral of the narrative is, the lesson learnt, the recurring themes, such as loss or being taken advantage of, a redemption or contamination sequence.
2. Structure/form - how the story is told, how it unfolds, such as turbulent, or a ‘growth story’.

Question 31

How are life narratives normally studied/uncovered?

Answer 31

Through in depth interviews.