PSY 1001H Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Rorschach Test, California Psychological Inventory, Thematic Apperception Test
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Psy 1001
Fall 2016
PERSONALITY
Personality: (lectures, discussion section & chapter 14)
What is personality? How can it be measured?
1. Dr. Simpson defines personality as “distinctive, characteristic patterns of thought, emotion
and behavior that uniquely define an individual.”
What is meant by distinctive and characteristic (that is, consistent) in this definition?
Distinctiveness – people react differently to the same situation (ex: upcoming party)
Consistency – stability of a person’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior over time and across
different situations
States vs traits: states are temporary, traits are enduring
2. What is the Person-Situation debate?
Is behavior controlled by personality traits or by the situation one is in?
Why is this important?
Only 10% of what you do in a situation is due to traits, 90% everything else
BOTH person and situation are important (interactionism)
Who is Walter Mischel?
1968, spawned debate, personality doesn’t exist, situation dictates how they think, feel,
behave
3. What is a self-report measure?
Usually have direct, face-valid scales and items
Ex: 1-5 scales
A projective test?
Often used indirect measures that assess less conscious aspects of personality
What assumptions underlie each?
What are the strengths and limitations of each of these approaches?
4. What are the following and which are self-report measures, and which are projective tests?
Self-report measures
MMPI: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, widely used structured personality test
designed to assess symptoms of mental disorders
CPI: California Psychological Inventory, “normal person’s MMPI”, unlike MMPI, measures
personality traits in normal range, popular measure for college counseling and industry,
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BFAS: Big Five, five traits that have surfaced repeatedly in factor analysis of personality
measures, OCEAN acronym – openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion,
agreeableness, neuroticism
Projective Tests
Thematic Apperception Test (the TAT): “tell a tale”, projective test requiring examinees to
tell a story in response to ambiguous pictures
The Rorschach: Rorschach Inkblot Test, projective test consisting of ten symmetrical
inkblots
5. What is meant by an idiographic approach to personality?
Unique constellation of special attributes
Cannot be measured across people (must examine what each person is like)
“biographies”
What is a nomothetic approach?
“compared with others”
everyone has certain traits to some degree
there are limited sets of traits
differ in amount/strength
Models of personality
6. Gordon Allport proposed an “idiographic approach” to personality with three levels: cardinal
traits, central disposition and secondary dispositions.
What kinds of characteristics are associated with each level?
Cardinal: extremely pervasive in a person’s life
Central disposition: small set of traits that stand out in a person (typically described here
and think of ourselves)
Secondary disposition: less salient characteristics (ex: habits) and only seen in specific
situations
7. What is the Lexical Hypothesis?
All meaningful individual differences are encoded in language
If there’s a word for it, must be important or trait for it
If a factor is represented by many more words in one culture/language than another, what
inference can you make about that culture, given the Lexical Hypothesis?
that factor is important or emphasized within the culture
8. What is meant by factor analysis?
Statistical technique (“clusters of items”) used to determine how many concepts are
measured (ex traits) by a set of questions
When is factor analysis useful?
9. What is a personality trait?
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find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
How can it be measured: dr. simpson defines personality as distinctive, characteristic patterns of thought, emotion and behavior that uniquely define an individual. Distinctiveness people react differently to the same situation (ex: upcoming party) Consistency stability of a person"s thoughts, feelings, and behavior over time and across different situations. Only 10% of what you do in a situation is due to traits, 90% everything else. Often used indirect measures that assess less conscious aspects of personality. Mmpi: minnesota multiphasic personality inventory, widely used structured personality test designed to assess symptoms of mental disorders. Cpi: california psychological inventory, normal person"s mmpi , unlike mmpi, measures personality traits in normal range, popular measure for college counseling and industry, Bfas: big five, five traits that have surfaced repeatedly in factor analysis of personality measures, ocean acronym openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism.
