PSYC 2740 Chapter Notes - Chapter 3: Sociosexual Orientation, Orthogonality, Neuroticism

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 2740
• Professor: Carol Anne Hendry

Document Summary

Individuals carry desires, needs, and wants from one situation to the next: something inside each other that causes us to act in particular ways, explain the behaviour for the person who processes them. Internal psychologists believe that traits can lie dormant because capacities remain present even when particular behaviours are not expressed: traits like needs, drives, and desires are presumed to exist even in the absence of observable behavioural expressions. Traits as purely descriptive summaries: no assumptions about internality or causality, no prejudice on the cause of someone"s behaviour, we must first identify and describe the important individual differences among people, then develop casual theories to explain them. The act frequency formulation of traits an illustration of the descriptive summary formulation: starts with the notion that traits are categories of acts. Act frequency research program: act nomination, procedure designed to identify which act belongs in which trait category, prototypical judgement.