Psychology 155: Personality Study Guide 2

Chapter 5: Biological Aspects of Personality

Temperament: Stable individual differences in emotional activity.

4 Basic Aspect of Temperament

  1. Activity (Vigorous motion vs. passivity).
  2. Emotionality (Easily aroused vs. calm and stable).
  3. Sociability (Approaches and enjoy others vs. aloof).
  4. Impulsivity (Aggressive and cold vs. conscientious and friendly).

Eysenck's Model

  1. Extroverts have a low level of internal arousal and seek out external stimulation
  2. Zuckerman's Theory
  3. Introverts have a high level of internal arousal and shy away from external stimulation.

Jeffrey Gray

  1. Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS): Overactive → anxiety
  2. Behavioral Activation System (Behavioral Approach System; BAS): Overactive → impulsivity

Effects of Biology

  1. Meniere's Disease
  2. Environment: Mercury exposure, lead poisoning manganese, cadmium
  3. Alzheimer's Disease, Pick's Disease, Strokes, etc.
  4. Biological Determinism: The belief that an individual's personality is completely determined by biological factors (and especially by genetic factors).
  5. Drugs: tranquilizers, sleeping pills, antidepressants, cocaine can have both short and long term effects on personality; Psychopharmacology

Tropisms: The processes by which some individual grow towards more fulfilling and health promoting spaces while other individuals remain subject to darker, health threatening environments. Some of these motivational forces originate in temperamental, differences, which themselves derive from combinations of genetics, hormonal exposures, and early experiences.

W.H. Sheldon

  1. Somatotypology: A theory relating body type to personality characteristics.
  1. Mesomorph: A somatotype describing muscular, large-boned, athletic types of people.
  2. Ectomorph: A somatotype describing slender bookworm types of people.
  3. Endomorph: A somatotype describing overweight, good-natured types of people.
  1. Physical traits affect how other view us therefore affect our personality

Cinderella Effect: Refers to evidence suggesting that parents give preferences to biological children over step-children.

  1. Attachment

Chapter 6: Behaviorist and Learning Aspects of Personality

Classical Conditioning of Personality

  1. Used to explain emotional aspects of personality
  2. Neurotic behavior
  3. Phobias
  4. Superstitious behavior

Generalization vs. Discrimination vs. Extinction

Thorndike's Law of Effect: The consequence of a behavior will either strengthen or weaken the behavior; that is, when a response follows a stimulus and results in satisfaction for the organism, this strengthens the connection between stimulus and response; however, if the response results in discomfort or pain, the connection is weaken.

  1. Operant conditioning: The changing of behavior by manipulating its consequences.
  2. Reinforcement (Preceding response increases after the consequence occur) vs Punishment (Preceding response decreases after the consequence occur)

Stimulus is Added / Stimulus is Removed
Response Increases / Positive Reinforcement / Negative Reinforcement
Response Decreases / Positive Punishment / Negative Punishment

Behaviorist Reinterpretation of Psychoanalytic and Neo-Analytic Concepts

Psychoanalytic or Neo-Analytic Concepts / Behaviorist Reinterpretation
Freud's notion of the id as the instinctual energies that form the undifferentiated core of personality. / Skinner asserted that this is simply humans' innate susceptibility to reinforcement, which is a product of evolution.
The internal personality structure termed the ego or “I,” which responds to the world according to the reality principle. / The learned responses to the practical contingencies of everyday life; there are different behavioral repertoires for different environmental contingencies.
The superego or “over-I” that internalizes societal rules that helps protect the ego from overwhelming id impulses. / Behavior is learned from the punitive practices of society, controlling behavior not allowed by parents and society; “unconscious” simply means that people are not taught to observe it and talk about it.
The ego defense mechanism of repression, that pushes threatening thoughts and motives back into the unconscious. / We learn to avoid behavior that is punish, and by not engaging in it, we avoid conditioned aversive stimulation.
Jung's notion of archetypes (universal emotional symbols) and the collective unconscious of deep, universal emotional symbols. / Skinner says that this is the evolution certain universal characteristics of the human species and the parallel cultural evolution of useful behaviors; there is thus a sameness or universality of things that are reinforcing, and a commonality of behaviors that societies need to control.

Clark Hull

  1. Habits: Simple associations between a stimulus and a response.
  2. Primary Drive: A fundamental innate motivator of behavior, specifically hunger, thirst, sex, or pain.

Dollard and Miller

  1. Social Learning Theory: A theory that proposes that habits are built up in terms of a hierarchy of secondary drives
  2. Habit Hierarchy: A learned hierarchy of likelihoods that a person will produce particular responses in particular situations.
  3. Secondary Drives: Drives that are learned by association with the satisfaction of primary drives.
  1. Internal Conflicts
  2. Approach-Avoidance Conflict: Conflict between primary and secondary drives that occurs when a punishment results in the conditioning of a fear response to a drive.
  3. Approach-Approach Conflict: Conflict in which a person is drawn to two equally attractive choices.
  4. Approach-Avoidance Conflict: Conflict in which a person is faced with two equally undesirable choices.

Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis: Aggression is the result of blocking, or frustrating, a person's efforts to attain a goal.

Act Frequency Approach: Assessing personality by examining the frequency with which a persona performs certain observable actions.

Chapter 7: Cognitive and Social-Cognitive Aspects of Personality

Field Dependence vs Field Independence (Rod-and-Frame Test)

Domain / Characteristics
Children's Play Preferences / Field-independent children are more likely to favor solitary play over social play.
Socialization Patterns / Field-independent people are more likely to have been socialized with an emphasis on autonomy over conformity.
Career Choices / Field-independent people are more likely to be in technological rather than humanitarian occupations.
Preferred Interpersonal Distance for Conversation / Field-independent people are more likely to sit farther away from a conversational partner.
Level of Eye Contact / Field-independent people make less frequent and less prolonged eye contact with a conversational partner.

Schema Theory

  1. Schema: A cognitive structure that organizes knowledge and expectations about one's environment.
  2. Script: A schema that guides behavior in social situations.

Categorization: The perceptual process by which highly complex ensembles of information are filtered into a small number of identifiable and familiar objects and entities.

  1. Stereotypes

George Kelly

  1. Personal Construct Theory: Approach to personality that emphasizes the idea that people actively endeavor to construe or understand the world and construct their own theories about human behavior.
  2. Role Construct Repertory Test: An assessment instrument to evoke a person's own personal construct system by making comparisons among triads of important people in the life of the person being assessed.

Intelligence

  1. Social Intelligence: The idea individuals differ in their level of mastery of the particular cluster of knowledge and skills that are relevant to interpersonal situations.
  2. Emotional Intelligence: The set of emotional abilities specific to dealing with other people.
  3. Emotional Knowledge: The ability to recognize and interpret emotions in the self and others.
  4. Multiple Intelligences: Howard Gardener's theory that claims that all human beings have at least seven different ways of knowing about the world and that people differ from one another in the relative strengths of each of these seven ways.
  5. Language,
  6. Logical-Mathematical Analysis
  7. Spatial Representation
  8. Musical Thinking
  9. Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence
  10. Understanding the Self
  11. Understanding Others

Julian Rotter

  1. Six Psychological Needs:
  2. Recognition-Status
  3. Dominance
  4. Independence
  5. Protection-Dependency
  6. Love and Affection
  7. Physical Comfort
  1. Specific Expectancy vs. Generalized Expectancy
  2. Locus of Control: The variable that measures the extent to which an individual habitually attributes outcomes to factors internal to the self vs. external to the self.
  3. Internal Locus of Control vs. External Locus of Control

Albert Bandura

  1. Self-System: The set of cognitive processes by which a person perceives, evaluates, and regulates his or her own behavior so it's functionally efficient and appropriate.
  2. Observational Learning or Vicarious Learning