PSYC 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 21: Psychological Testing, Neuroticism, Extraversion And Introversion

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Jens Pruessner

Document Summary

Personality: relatively stable pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving that distinguishes one person from another: distinctive, relatively consistent. Laboratory investigations: psychological tests, reliability, validity, standardization. Characteristics of useful psychological test: requite individuals to respond to statements about themselves in form of yes- no or true false answers, some of best-known and most widely used personality measures. Assumes people project their personality characteristics onto ambiguous stimuli: rorschach inkblot test- widely used. Extensive training required subjective judgment required for interpretation validity and reliability. Barnum effect tendency to accept generalized personality descriptions as accurate descriptions of oneself. Mischel: moved attention from search for traits to study of how situations influence behaviors, some characteristics consistent over time, may be limitations in the methods used to study consistency. Epstein: behaviors depends on situation, but there are consistent behavioral tendencies across situations, posits situation also influences likelihood that person will exhibit specific behavior. Evaluation guidelines: comprehensiveness, parsimony, usefulness, heuristiv function, empirical validity.