Personality Flashcards
(7 cards)
Personality psychology
biologically and environmentally determined characteristics within the person that account for distinctive and relatively enduring (behavior happens across time) patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting
Trait Theory of Personality
Gordon Allport - first to systematically study the “self as something to be known”, partly reaction against Freud
General types of traits
- Cardinal traits - rare, strongly determines someone’s behavior, will describe all your behavior (eg Dalai Lama - compassion)
- Central traits - general disposition (eg. outgoing or neurotic)
- Secondary traits - context dependent, dependent on environment/who you’re with (eg talkative with friends but not with parents/family)
Lexical Hypothesis
if there are traits to describe human behavior, then we must have a word for them
- each trait word also should uniquely define a part of personality
Allport and Odbert terms
- states and moods (shorter - feelings)
- evaluations (traits with valence - good v bad)
- physical attributes (state - tall slim)
- traits
Big Five traits
OCEAN (or CANOE)
Openness - imaginative, independent, philosophy
Conscientiousness - organized, careful, planning, responsible
Extraversion - outgoing, energetic, extent to which someone can experience positive emotions
Agreeableness - good-natured, helpful, trusting, compassion, respectful
Neuroticism - calm, secure, anxiety, ability to display negative emotions
Temperament
personality on tested in adults and teens (can’t do with kids due to environment), temperament similar, but targets young children and toddlers
- individual differences in positive emotionality (extraversion), negative emotionality (neuroticism), self-regulation (conscientiousness and agreeableness)
- can be predictive of general success
- measure. by teachers, parents, self-reports (in older kids) and behavioral paradigms
