PSYC1030 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Nomothetic, Developmental Psychology, Coefficient Of Determination
PSYC1030 Lecture Thirteen: Personality
• Personality refers to the character traits that identify what makes a person who they
are. It's a particular pattern of behaviour and thinking that prevails across time and
situations, and makes people different from others
• In clinical psychology, the goal is to discover the causes of individual differences in
behaviour from a personality perspective, whereas in social psychology, the focus is on
the social influences on behaviour. Understanding and measuring personality is
important in many areas in psychology, and especially so in clinical psychology. What
researchers try to do is identify personality characteristics, figure out what variables
produce and control those characteristics, and they do so in numerous approaches:
-Nomothetic approach involves trying to understand personality by identifying general
rules that govern the behaviour of all individuals
-Idiographic approach is used when people are interested in understanding personality
by identifying the unique configuration of characteristics and life history within the
individual person
• There are three things that personality researchers have thought might cause
personality
-genetic factors; the things inherited by parents, so some sort of biological factor
-shared environmental factors; people living in the same situations might have similar
personalities because of their shared experiences
-non-shared environmental factors; people living similar lives but with slight
variations might cause personality differences
• It can be different to distinguish between genetic and shared environment factors
especially when subjects are related
• Twin studies is a way to investigate causes of personality, although they do have the
issue of nature versus nurture, which has been big in developmental psychology.
These studies are useful because they compare the personalities of identical twins or
monozygotic twins, to twins who are fraternal twins or dizygotic twins
• Identical twins share a lot more genetic material than fraternal twins, because they
come from a single egg that's fertilised by a single sperm, whereas fraternal twins are
from two separate eggs and two different sperm. At some point, early on, when the
cells are separating the group of cells split and two separate fetuses develop, creating
identical twins, and they often share the same placenta. Fraternal twins are always two
different groups of cells developing into two fetuses in two different placentas
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Document Summary
Psyc1030 lecture thirteen: personality: personality refers to the character traits that identify what makes a person who they are. It"s a particular pattern of behaviour and thinking that prevails across time and situations, and makes people different from others. In clinical psychology, the goal is to discover the causes of individual differences in behaviour from a personality perspective, whereas in social psychology, the focus is on the social influences on behaviour. Understanding and measuring personality is important in many areas in psychology, and especially so in clinical psychology. What researchers try to do is identify personality characteristics, figure out what variables produce and control those characteristics, and they do so in numerous approaches: Nomothetic approach involves trying to understand personality by identifying general rules that govern the behaviour of all individuals. Idiographic approach is used when people are interested in understanding personality by identifying the unique configuration of characteristics and life history within the individual person.
