PSYCH 101 Lecture 18: Psych 101 - LE 18
Document Summary
Personality refers to both unique and common characteristics. There are two primary approaches to assessing personality. Idiographic approaches use a different metric for different people, while nomothetic approaches use the same metric for all peple. In terms of idiographic approaches, people tend to have central traits that are specific to themselves. For the nomothetic approach, people don"t have unique traits, but they are unique because of the combination of traits. As a general rule, trait researchers tend to rely on personality descriptions, whereas humanistic psychologists use more holistic approaches. Projective measures explore the unconscious by having people describe/tell stories about ambiguous items. This projection tells us about their unconscious. The rorschach ink blot test is supposed to reveal unconscious conflicts. The thematic apperception test is when a person is shown an ambiguous picture and asked to tell a story. Tat has been useful for measuring motivational. It consists of multiple choice questions, and measures psychological problems.
