Unit 1️⃣ Part 1️⃣ Flashcards
(22 cards)
Which is the definition of Personality?
There are a lot of definitions but the one which describe best personality is:
Personality Is the set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are organized and relatively enduring and that influence his or her interactions with, and adaptations to, the intrapsychic, physical, and social environments.
What is a Psychological Traits?
Psychological traits are stable, enduring characteristics or patterns of behavior, thought, and emotion that differentiate one individual from another. These traits are considered consistent across different situations and over time, shaping how people typically behave or respond in various contexts.
Usefulness of the traits:
Describe, Explain, Predict behaviour.
What are Psychological Mechanism?
Psychological mechanisms refer to the underlying processes or systems in the mind that drive behavior, emotions, and thoughts. These mechanisms help explain how and why we act in certain ways in response to our environment or internal states. Essentially, they are the mental processes that underlie our behavior, helping us to adapt, cope, or react to different situations.
Key ingredients of psychological mechanisms:
• Input: can make people more sensitive to certain types of environmental information.
• Decision rule: can make them think about concrete options.
• Output: can guide your behaviour toward certain actions.
What does Within the individual means?
Your personality is something you carry with you no matter where you go. It affects how you act in different situations.
• Even though your personality can be shaped by the people and environment around you, it mostly stays the same over time and across different situations.
• While you grow and change in some ways, you usually feel like the same person you were last week, last month, or even last year.
This means that personality is both stable and flexible—it stays with you but can also adapt to new experiences
What does organized and relatively enduring means?
Organized: means that psychological traits and mechanisms are not simply a random set of elements.
Relatively enduring: means that they last over time, they don’t change constantly.
What’s the difference between Traits and State?
• A trait is a long-term pattern (e.g., someone who is generally an angry person).
• A state is a temporary emotion (e.g., feeling angry in a specific moment).
What does influence means?
It means that our traits can have an effect on people’s lives: how we think, act,f eel…
How does personality interacts with the environment?
In 4 ways:
1. Perceptions: How we interpret a situation in the environment. E.g., Two people see the same thing.
2. Selection: How we choose the situations in which we get involved. E.g., Hobbies, partner, career..
3. Evocations: Reactions that we generate in others. (to some extent we create the social environment in which we live) E.g., Very active child, tall and burly person.
4. Manipulations: Ways in which we intentionally influence others. E.g., someone very neat with a
messy partner.
How does personality help us adapt into life’s challenges?
Personality isn’t just about traits but how we adapt, adjust and solve problems.
It influences how we set goals overcome challenges and deal with different situations.
Our behavior is functional—it serves a purpose, even if it sometimes seems unhelpful.
Some behaviors may seem maladaptive (not helpful) or non-functional, but they often have underlying reasons.
What does the Physical environment do?
It can pose challenges for people that generate
adaptations. E.g., at a general level: fear of heights or snakes can help us not to expose ourselves
to these dangers
What does the social environment do?
It also poses adaptive challenges, being the personality which determines what is important to us at any given time. E.g., competition for a higher status job or pursuing another job.
What is the Intrapsychic environment?
It is Memories, dreams, fantasies.
Everyone has their own inner reality to which they adapt. E.g., self-esteem.
Which are the Three levels of personality analysis?
“Each person is, in certain respects, like all other persons, like some other persons, and like no other person.”
- Like all other person?
Which is a psychological traits typical of humans that have the desire to live with others and belong to social groups.
- Like some other persons?
Which is a psychological traits of some people that differentiates themselves from others or make them similar.
• E.g. Individual: Variance in the need for belonging to groups, in extraversion…
• E.g. Group: Men are more physically aggressive than women, Eastern cultures are more collective than Western ones….
- Like no other person?
So basically each individual has personal qualities not shared by anyone in the world.
E.g., John’s special way of being overwhelmed, how Lucia expresses her love…
Which is the the role of personality theories?
Personality theories aim to provide a framework to understand individual differences in behavior, thoughts, and emotions. These theories offer models to explain how and why people develop distinct personalities, the factors that shape them, and how personalities influence behavior. The role of these theories is to provide an organized way to study and explain personality traits that contribute to how people interact with the world around them.
Gap between the analysis of human nature and analysis of group and individual differences
- Grand theories of personality: try to explain personality in a big universal way.
- Contemporary research in personality: focuses on small, specific part of personality but doesn’t always connect them into one big theory.
A good theory will be one that:
- Provides a guide for researchers;
- Organizes and explains the known results;
- Makes predictions.
Standards for evaluating personality theories:
- Comprehensiveness: Does the theory work well when it comes to explaining all (or many) facts and observations? The more, the better.
- Heuristic value: ¿ Does the theory provide a guide to new discoveries? It gives direction to the research.
- Testability: ¿ Does the theory Provide predictions that can be tested empirically? If not, as a story is fine.
- Parsimony: ¿ Does the theory contain few premises and assumptions? Be careful, personality is something very complex
- Compatibility and integration across domains and levels: Does the theory violate any known law in other domains or
levels?
