PSYC 332 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Solitude, Kurt Lewin, California Psychological Inventory

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 332
• Professor: Richard Koestner

Document Summary

Table 4. 1: four positions of the nature of traits. Traits are biological patternings in the cns that cause behaviour to occur and account for the consistencies in socioemotional functioning from one situation to the next and over time. Traits are tendencies to act, think, or feel in consistent ways that interact with external in uences, such as cultural norms and situational variables, to in uence a person"s functioning. Trait attributions can be used both to describe behaviour summaries and to suggest causal or generative mechanisms for behaviour. Traits are descriptive summary categories for behavioural acts. Acts that have the same functional properties may be grouped together into families, with some acts being more prototypical or representative of the general family features than others. Traits are convenient ctions devised by people to categorize and make sense of the diversity of human behaviour and experience.