This summary includes the Personality traits Lecture, it's a recorded lecture. The lecture covered Chapter 10, 11, 12, and only pages 429 – 448 (without the boxes on pages 437- 439, and 444 - 445), and pages 461 - 467 of chapter 18 The Individual Book (de Bruin, E., 1st Edition)
DISPOSITIONAL TRAITS
Personality Psychology:
- The scientific study of the whole person
- focusing on individual similarities and differences
- in biological and social-cultural context
MCADAMS & PALS (2006)
- Dispositional traits --> Sketch a behavioural outline
- Characteristic adaptations --> Fill in details of human individuality
- Integrative life narratives --> Tell what a person’s life means
- Biological context --> Heritability and physiology
- William Utermohlen:
- Painter with Alzheimer --> kept on painting self-portraits --> they increasingly fade out (lose of personality + cognitive abilities to paint)
- Cultural context --> Socio-cultural processes
- Primo Levi --> Auschwitz camp survival --> Writes a book on ‘How is it possible to survive there?’ --> killed himself
- He felt as his personality was taken away from him (shaving head, …) --> “the only way someone can survive that environment is by keeping their personality alive”
DISPOSITIONAL TRAITS
APPROACHES
- Hippocrates (460-370 BC): Medicine
- Four ‘humors’ or bodily fluids: Blood, yellow bile, black bile, phlegm
- Galenus (130-200 AD): 4 temperaments
- Sanguine, choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic
- Personality types: A set of dispositions within the individual that are organized and relatively enduring and that influence his or her interactions with and adaptations to the environment
- Enneagram: a model of the human psyche which is principally understood and taught as a typology of nine interconnected personality types.
- Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: a self-help assessment test which helps people gain insights about how they work and learn.
- The Big Five: Almost unlimited combinations across dimensions of personality
TAXONOMIES
HOW CAN WE IDENTIFY TRAITS?
- Theoretical approach (Eysenck): Define number and content of traits top-down
- Lexical approach (Cattell, Wiggins, Goldberg, Costa & McCrae, Hexaco)
- Assess natural language bottom-up
- Synonyms and cross-cultural universality
- Statistical approach: used in all Taxonomies
- Develop tests
- Assess psychometric properties (factor analysis, CTT, and IRT analysis)
WHICH TRAITS DO EXIST?
- Eysenck: Extraversion, Neuroticism, Psychoticism
- Cattell: 16 factors, like Warmth, Impulsivity, Dominance etc.
- Goldberg Big Five: Intellect, Conscientiousness, Surgency, Agreeableness, Neuroticism
- Costa & McCrae Big Five: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism
- Hexaco model: Humility-Honesty, Emotionality, extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openness to experience
HOW ARE TRAITS ORGANIZED?
Megatraits (DeYoung):
- Stability: Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, low Neuroticism
- The tendency to resist being distracted from pursuing your long-term goals by immediate interruptions such as emotions and doubts
- Plasticity: Extraversion, Openness to Experience
- The tendency to generate and attend to new experiences by generating new strategies to pursue new goals and responding more eagerly to unusual experiences
MEASURMENT:
WHAT IS THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGICAL TESTING?
- Charles Darwin --> Individual differences
- Wilhelm Wundt --> Standardization
- Francis Galton/Karl Pearson/Charles Spearman --> Statistical approach, Classical test theory
- James Cattell --> Mental test
HOW CAN WE DEVELOP PERSONALITY TESTS?
- Different Approaches:
- Theoretical approach
- Lexical approach
- Statistical approach
- Examples:
- Act frequency approach --> How often are you engaged in the following acts?
- Steps: Traits are categories of acts
- Act nomination
- Prototypicality judgement
- Recording act performance
- Sentence items (Neo-PI-3, Costa & McCrae) --> How much do you disagree or agree with the following items?
- Trait adjectives (Goldberg) --> How much do you disagree or agree that you are… Talkative, Warm, Moody
QUALITY ISSUES
- Validity
- Does the scale measure what you want to measure?
- Test validity --> factor analysis
- Reliability
- Are the findings consistent and replicable?
- Test validity --> Classical Test Theory, Item Response Theory
- Usability
- Is the test ‘economical’ and communicable?
LIFESPAN DEVELOPMENT
HOW DO WE DEVELOP DISPOSITIONAL TRAITS WHEN GROWING UP?
- Reliable measurement from age 5 onwards
- Relative stability on short term, less on longer term
- Development of children and parents influence each other
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