Personality 18 January 2018 08:58 Nomothetic = looking for patterns (similarities and differences) and comparing large numbers. Idiographic = understanding unique structure of an individual's personality - mechanism by which difference emerges. Personality traits are defined as relatively enduring patterns of behaviourfi thought and feeling that are consistent across a wide variety of situations and contexts. Traits vs states: · Trait of anxiety = the disposition to despond with anxiety to situations that are perceived as threatening. · State of anxiety = a condition of the organism characterised by subjective feelings of apprehension and heightened autonomic nervous system activity. Multi-trait fundamentals: · Normally distributed · Structure amongst different traits? Which are related? Which are most basic? · Factor analysis (factors = clustersfi the clusters of traits correlate with one another). Cattell's trait theory: · Bottom-up theory by looking at people's lives and building a theory from it (boiled down to dictionary terms from Allport & Odbertfi then factor analysed rating of terms). · 16 personality factors = 16 source traits (fundamentals so further clustering would lose quality). · Revised 4 times (16PF5) and supported by over 60 studies. Eysenck's trait theory: . Top-down theory by starting with theory from Hippocrates & Galen (melancholicfi cholericfi phlegmatic and sanguine) and Jung's introversion and extroversion (1993). · Type dimensions: extroversion-introversion and emotional stability-neuroticism. · Biological and hereditary
· Hereditary extroversion-introversion due to reticular activating system as extroverts habitually low cortical arousal and seek strong stimuli; introverts habitually high arousal and avoid strong stimuli. Introverts easily conditioned and extroverts conditioned with difficulty. · Hereditary emotion stability-neuroticism due to autonomic nervous system as high neuroticism results in fast reaction to stress and low neuroticism results in slow reaction to stress. · Not all biologicalfi environmental effects · Traits of psychoticism (Eysenck & Eysenckfi 1976) The big 5: · Five traits are consistently foundfi but a disagreement on names. · Costa and McCrae (1992): openness to experiencefi conscientiousnessfi extraversionfi agreeablenessfi neuroticism. · Popular in the 21st Century If personality is defined as behavioural consistency across contextsfi then rather than being an explanation of behaviourfi personality is something to be explained. Situationism: · Behaviour no consistent across all situations · Mischel (1968) - social learning theory and situationism · Situation is more important than personality on behaviour. · Funder and Ozer (1983) suggested situation is not better than traits are predicting differences in behaviour. Interactionism: Situation affects behaviour for all people; personality affects behaviour for all situations; situation and personality interact. · Effect of strength - traits can vary strength of an effect. Hodges (1968) showed anxiety increase for everyone but more for people with high anxiety trait. · Opposing effects - traits reverse direction of an effect. ffiuring a high stress situationfi extrovert become more talkative and introverts become less talkative. · Choice effects - different personality leads to choosing different situations.
· Participation effects - different personality and then different behaviour of others lead to different situations. Constructivism: · Personality constructed out of societies and