PSY 111 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: 6 Years, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, Hans Eysenck
21 Jun 2018
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Chapter 12 Personality
●Personality
○Individuals enduring characteristic style of behaving, thinking, and feeling
●Studying personality
○SUBJECTIVE “eye of the beholder” values
○PRIOR events that SHAPE us (genes, family)
○ANTICIPATED events that MOTIVATE us (hopes, fears)
○Understand DIFFERENCES in specific characteristics (extrovert vs intro)
○EXPLORE how all parts of each person mesh together as a WHOLE
●MEASURING personality
1. Personality Inventories
●SELF-REPORT - subjective answers about thoughts, feelings and behaviors
●The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory - 2 RF (MMPI)
●338 self-descriptive statements
●True/False responses
●MEASURES a wide range of psychological constructs (clinical problems,
antisocial behavior, and somatic problems)
●VALIDITY scales - faking, consistency, lying, test attitude
2. Projective Techniques
●AMBIGUOUS STIMULI- to elicit unique responses that reveal inner aspects of
personality
●Designed to CIRCUMVENT the limitations of self reports
●Assume that people will project personality factors that are BELOW
AWARENESS on to the stimuli and will not censor their responses
●CONTROVERSIAL
●The best known projective tests are
○RORSCHACH INKBLOT TEST: individual interpretations of a set of
unstructured inkblots are analyzed to identify a respondents inner
feelings and interpret his/her personality structure
○THEMATIC APPERCEPTION TEST (TAT): respondents reveal
UNDERLYING MOTIVES, concerns and the way they see the social world
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through STORIES they make up about ambiguous pictures of people
●Limitations of projective tests
○BIASES of the examiner
○Examiner must always ADD AN INTERPRETATION (was about..?)
○The interpretation could well be the the EXAMINER’S OWN
PROJECTION
○Projective tests have NOT been found to be RELIABLE (consistent) or
VALID (accurate) in predicting behavior
●Measuring personality OTHER
A. TECHNOLOGY
a. High tech methods also used in personality measurement
a.i. Wireless communication
a.ii. Social media pages
●THE TRAIT APPROACH
○Traits: RELATIVELY STABLE DISPOSITION to behave in a particular
and consistent way
○Identifying Patterns of Behavior and CATEGORIZE differences among
individuals
●2 Challenges
○INFINITE set of adjectives
○Understanding whether traits have BIOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
(orderliness representing an inner property of the person that causes
neatness) or MOTIVE FOUNDATIONS (orderliness representing the need
for organization)
■Traits as causes have used PERSONALITY inventories to measure
them
■Traits as motives have more often use PROJECTIVE tests
●The SEARCH for core traits
MAIN THEMES in all the adjectives used to describe personality
●To identify this core, researchers have used the computational procedure called
factor analysis
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○FACTOR ANALYSIS sorts trait items into small dimensions
○Different factor analysis techniques have yielded different views of
personality structures
●A consensus: BIG FIVE dimensions of personality
○Conscientiousness
○Agreeableness
○Neuroticism
○Openness to experience
○Extraversion
●STRENGTHS of The Big Five Model
○Strikes the RIGHT BALANCE between accounting for variation in
personality while avoiding overlapping traits
○Other personality research, the SAME FIVE FACTORS have EMERGED
○The big 5 show up across a wide range or participants, including children,
other cultures and other languages suggesting that the big five may nearly
be UNIVERSAL
●RELIABILITY (consistency over time) of The Big Five
○Fairly stable through lifetime but may SHIFT SLIGHTLY in different
environments or circumstances
○In general, people become slightly MORE CONSCIENTIOUS in their 20s
○And a big MORE AGREEABLE in their 30s
●Traits as BIOLOGICAL BUILDING BLOCKS
○Relatively stable over the life span
○CHANGES caused by
■Brain DAMAGE (phineas gage)
■Brain PATHOLOGIES (alzheimer's, stroke, tumor)
■PHARMACEUTICAL TREATMENTS that change brain chemistry
(antidepressant meds)
○Research shows the GREATER THE OVERLAP IN GENES the greater
similarity in personality
■Variability among individuals
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Individuals enduring characteristic style of behaving, thinking, and feeling. Prior events that shape us (genes, family) Anticipated events that motivate us (hopes, fears) Understand differences in specific characteristics (extrovert vs intro) Explore how all parts of each person mesh together as a whole. Self-report - subjective answers about thoughts, feelings and behaviors. The minnesota multiphasic personality inventory - 2 rf (mmpi) Measures a wide range of psychological constructs (clinical problems, antisocial behavior, and somatic problems) Validity scales - faking, consistency, lying, test attitude. Ambiguous stimuli- to elicit unique responses that reveal inner aspects of personality. Designed to circumvent the limitations of self reports. Assume that people will project personality factors that are below. Awareness on to the stimuli and will not censor their responses. Rorschach inkblot test: individual interpretations of a set of unstructured inkblots are analyzed to identify a respondents inner feelings and interpret his/her personality structure.
