Professional Documents
Culture Documents
All of the topics covered in this study guide are fair game for exam questions.
1. What is Personality? (Chapter 1, McAdams & Pals) (lecture 2)
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Know definitions of the 5 basic approaches discussed in the book and in lecture
1. Trait
a. How people differ psychologically
2. Biological/Physiological
a. Understand the mind in terms of the body
b. Genetic, evolutionary, neurobiology, neurochemistry
3. Psychoanalytic
a. Unconscious mind and internal mental conflict
4. Phenomenological
a. Humanistic psychology: how conscious awareness produces uniquely
human attributes
b. Cross-cultural psychology: how the experience of reality varies across
cultures
5. Learning & Cognitive
a. Learning: how behavior changes as a result of rewards, punishments and
life experiences
b. Social learning: learning through observation and self-evaluation
Understand that the 5 Basic Approaches are good for examining some things and
bad at understanding others.
8.
Understand what pigeonholing is, and why it is not an accurate criticism of the
goals of personality psychology.
a) People really are different
b) Describing individual differences in typical cognition, feeling and behavior does
not force anyone into a neat little box; personality psychology acknowledges that
typical does not mean always and personality can change.
Be able to define the different kinds of data and know the examples we went over.
Understand the advantages and disadvantages of each kind of data:
a) Self Report
i.
Definition: a persons evaluation of his or her own personality
ii.
Most frequent data source
iii.
High face validity (the degree to which an assessment instrument appears to
measure what it is intended to measure)
iv.
Usually questionnaires or surveys
v.
Advantages
1. Based on a large amount of information
a) You are always with yourself
b) People are usually their own best expert
2. Access to thoughts, feelings and intentions
3. Definitional truth
4. Causal force
a) Efficacy expectations (what you think you are capable of and the
kind of person you think you are)
5. Self-verification
6. Simple and easy data
vi.
Disadvantages
1. Maybe people wont tell you
2. Maybe people cant tell you
a) Memory is limited and not perfect
b) Fish-and-water effect
c) Active distortion of memory
d) Lack of self-insight
3. Too simple and too easy
b) Informant
i.
Definition: judgments by knowledgeable informants about general attributes
of the individuals personality
ii.
Acquaintances, coworkers, clinical psychologist,etc
iii.
iv.
v.
6.
iii.
2.
Disadvantages
a) Difficult and expensive
b) Desired contexts may seldomly occur
Laboratory B Data
1. Experiments
a) Make a situation happen and record behavior
b) Examine reactions to subtle aspects of situations
c) Represent real-life context that are difficult to observe directly
2. Certain Tests
a) MMPI (Minnesota Personality Inventory)
b) Blurry line between S and B
c) Rorschach
3. Physiological measures
a) E.g. Facial muscles, eye movements, plethysmographs
4. Advantages
a) Range of contexts in the lab
b) Appearance of objectivity
i.
Buts subjective judgments must still be made
5. Disadvantage
a) Uncertain interpretation
Know that doing the best possible research involves some combination of these types
of data!
Terms to define:
1. Multideterminism
a) They have many causes, so trying to establish direct connections between
specific attributes of personality and life outcomes can be extraordinarily
difficult.
2.
Construct
a) Something that cannot be directly seen or touched but which affects and helps to
explain many different things that are visible.
3.
Operational Definition
a) Something you can perform a mathematical operation on.
4.
Validity
a) Content Validity
i.
The actual measure itself
ii.
E.g. does your measure address all aspects of your construct?
b) Criterion Related Validity
i.
How well your measure relates to something it should
1. concurrent-at the same time
2. predictive-at a later time
3. e.g. does answering a certain pattern of questions predict that you have
Reliability
a) 2 administrations of a test
b) A test split into two parts
c) Alternate forms of the same test
d) Multiple items within one measure
e) Two raters/observers of the same behavior
6.
Generalizability
a) Aggregation
2.
3.
Correlation Coefficient
a) Mathematical index of the relation (direction and strength)
3.
4.
P-value
a) The possibility that the actual size of the difference between conditions or of the
correlation is zero is called the null hypothesis.
5.
effect size
a) The number that will reflect the size, as opposed to the likelihood, of their result.
2.
3.
****you do not need to know who Allport, Cattell, and Eysenck are or what they each
specifically did. I might use them as examples in questions ( but I wont quiz you on the
actual content of who they are or what they did ****
5. Personality Assessment I
Projective tests = try to grant insight into personality by presenting participants with
ambiguous stimuli and interpreting the participants open-ended responses. To the extent
they are validand many are notthey appear to tap into aspects of personality not
captured by questionnaire measures.
-The Rorschach test appears to have some degree of validity, but may not offer
enough information beyond what can be gained from quicker, easier tests to justify its
added expense.
-The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) appears to measure aspects of needs
(e.g., the need for achievement) that are missed by questionnaire measures.
Know the disadvantages of Projective Tests
Validity evidence is scarce.
Expensive and time-consuming.
A psychologist cannot be sure about what they mean.
Objective tests ask participants specific questions and assess personality on the basis of
the participants choices among predetermined options such as True or False, and Yes or
No.
These tests are created using:
rational
factor analytic
empirical methods
* the state of the art is to combine all three methods.
Know examples of Objective Tests. What kind of test is the MMPI? How was it
created?
Rational Method
Each item must mean the same thing to the person who takes the test as it did to
the psychologist who wrote it.
The person who completes the form must be able to make an accurate selfassessment.
The person who completes the test must be willing to report his self-assessment
accurately and without distortion.
All of the items on the test must be valid indicators of what the tester is trying to
measure.
Factor Analytic Method (limitation)
Quality of the information you get from a factor analysis will be limited by the
quality of the items you put into it in the first place.
Once the computer has identified a cluster of items as being related statistically, a
human psychologist must still decide how they are related conceptually.
Sometimes the factors that emerge do not make much sense.
Personality dimensions uncovered by factor analysis to include perplexing
combinations of traits that are difficult to name precisely.
Empirical Method (basic assumption)
Certain kinds of people have distinctive ways of answering certain questions on
personality inventories.
Terms to Define:
Criterion keying vs. Empirical methods of test construction
Criterion keying: part of the process that is used to create tests that are constructed
with empirical methods.
Factor Analysis understand the example(s) discussed
A statistical method for finding order amid seeming chaos.
MMPI (you do not need to know the subscales)
Issues
Not always useful for normal personality
Some scales have low reliability
Some scales have social/racial biases
Rorschach test
6. Personality Assessment II (Chapter 6)
The Accuracy of Personality Judgment
Personality judgments- how can we tell if they are accurate
consensus (Judgments that agree with judgments from other sources (such as
other people)
predictive validity (judgments that are able to predict the target persons
behavior are more likely to be accurate than judgments that do not agree with each other
or cannot predict behavior)
Depending on how well they know you, how well do other people predict your behavior?
First Impressions: Valid information about some attributes of personality can be found in:
faces, tone of voice, mode of dress, and even the condition of someones
bedroom. Know the examples of this that we discussed in class.
Understand that such judgments are more accurate for some traits than others, and
tend to become more accurate with more extended acquaintanceship.
Know the 4 components of the Realistic Accuracy Model
Relevance, availability, detection, utilization
Implications:
Accurate personality judgment is difficult.
Moderators of accuracy must be result of something that happens at one or
more of these four stage.
The model is the most important. The accuracy of personality judgment
can be improved in four different ways.
Know the Vazire (2010) Self-Other Knowledge Asymmetry
Self-other knowledge Asymmetry
Both self and others are imperfect raters
Terms to Define:
Self-fulfilling prophecy
expectancy effect
good judge
Intelligent, conscientious, sociable, open
good target
Stable, does not change much across situations
good trait
Visible, evolutionary, judgability, visible traits are easier to see, traits related to
sociosexuality are easier to see
good information
More information is generally better, strong situations vs. weak situations,
stressful/emotional situations
Communion
Interested in developing and maintaining interpersonal relationship
transparent self
If you exhibit large discrepancies between who you are inside and who you
display outside, you may feel isolated and unhappy and exhausted.
Trait observability