01:830:101 Final: Chapter 12-17

• School: Rutgers University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: 01:830:101
• Professor: Mimi Phan

Document Summary

Personality: a characteristic pattern of thinking, interacting, and reacting that is unique to each individual, and remains relatively consistent over time and situations. Idiographic approach: focus on creating detailed descriptions of individuals and their unique personality characteristics. Nomothetic approach: examines personality in large groups of people, with the aim of making generalizations about personality structure. Personality traits: labels applied to specific attributes of personality, such as reserved, outgoing, and adventurous. Trait perspective: describes personality based on how well each of these traits describes a specific person. Factor analysis: a statistical technique that reveals statistical similarities among a wide variety of items. Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory (mmpi-2): a multiple-question personality inventory that is used to characterize both normal personality dimensions and profiles that fit various psychological disorders. Provides a multidimensional profile of each individual who completes it. Main purpose is to discriminate between normal and abnormal characteristics.