Psych Notes for Week of April 8th Pages 538 548 Personality is the outcome of hundreds of causal factors genetic prenatal parenting peer influences life stressors and plain old luck both good and bad Personality What is it and how can we study it Fundamental Attribution Theory The tendency to attribute too much of others behavior to their dispositions including their personalities and not enough to the situations they confront Personality People s typical ways of thinking feeling and behaving Traits Relatively enduring predispositions that influence our behavior across many situations Account in part for consistencies in our behavior across both time and situations Two major approaches to studying personality Nomothetic Approach Strives to understand personality by identifying general laws that govern the behavior of all individuals Idiographic Approach Strives to understand personality by identifying the unique configuration of characteristics and life history experience within a person Behavior genetic methods help psychologists to disentangle three broad influences on personality Genetic factors Shared environmental factors Experiences that mak individuals within the same family more alike Nonshared environmental factors Experiences that make individuals within the same family less alike Investigating the Causes of Personality Overview of Twin and Adoption Studies A higher correlation of a trait among identical than fraternal twins suggests a genetic influence Identical twin correlations that are equal to or less than fraternal twin correlations suggest the absence of a genetic component and instead point to nonshared environmental influences Anxiety proneness impulse control and tratidionalisms are commonfly influenced substantially by genetic factors Identical twins reared apart tend to be strikingly similar in their personality traits and are far more similar than fraternal twins reared apart Identical twins reared apart are about as similar as identical twins reared together Shared environment plays little or no role in adult personality Adoption Studies Permit investigators to separate the effects of genes and environment by examining children who were separated at an early age from their biological families The finding that an adopted child s personality is similar to that of his or her biological parents points to genetic influence The finding that an adopted child s personality is similar to that of his or her adoptive parents points to shared environmental influence Sociability The extent to which people enjoy being with others The correlations between biological parents and their adopted away children in their sociability levels are slightly higher than the correlations between adoptive parents and their adopted children even though the biological parents had essentially no environmental contact with their children after birth Being raised together doesn t lead to much similarity in personality between parents and offspring Birth Order Does it matter Overall still being disputed but found that it generally does not matter Behavior Genetic Studies A Note of Caution Molecular Genetic Studies May allow scientists to pinpoint which genes are associated with specific personality traits Rest on two premises Genes code for proteins that in turn often influence the functioning of neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin The functioning of many neurotransmitters is associated with certain personality traits Novelty Seeking A trait that refers to the tendency to search out and enjoy new experiences Found to be related with dopamine Psychoanalytic Theory The Controversial Legacy of Sigmund Freud and His Followers Psychologists psychiatrists and many other thinkers had generated theoretical models that sought to explain the development and working of personality These models address three key questions How do our personalities develop What are the core driving forces in our personalities or more informally what makes us tick What accounts for individual differences in personality Four influential models of personality Sigmund Freud s Psychoanalytic Theory Many mental disorders were produced by psychological rather than physiological factors Rests on three core assumptions The assumption that all psychological events have Psychic Determinism a cause Symbolic Meaning meaningless We rarely understand why we do what we do although we quite readily cook up explanations for our actions after the fact No action no matter how seemingly trivial is Unconscious Motivation The Id Ego and Superego The Structure of Personality Freud hypothesized that the human psyche consists of three agencies or components The Id Basic Instincts The reservoir of our most primitive impulses entirely unconscious part of iceberg completely submerged Sex and aggression Pleasure Principle Strives for immediate gratification The Ego The Boss The boss of the personality its principal decision maker Primary tasks are interacting with the real world and finding ways to resolve the competing demands of the other two psychic agencies Reality principle Strives to delay gratification until it can find an The Superego Moral Standards Our sense of morality Sense of right appropriate outlet and wrong Pages 561 566 Trait Models of Personality Consistencies in Our Behavior Trait theorists aim to pinpoint the major traits of personality Identifying Traits Factor Analysis Need to demonstrate that personality traits predict behaviors in novel situations or correlate with biological or laboratory measures Factor Analysis Analyzes the correlations among responses on personality measures to identify the underlying factors that give rise to these correlations The Big Five Model of Personality Big Five Consists of five traits that have surfaced repeatedly in factor analyses of personality measures Big five were uncovered using a lexical approach to personality which proposes that the most crucial features of human personality are embedded in our language If a personality trait is important in our daily lives it s likely that we talk a lot about it Five dimensions Openness to Experience Open people tend to be intellectually curious and unconventional Conscientiousness Conscientious people tend to be careful and responsible Extraversion Extraverted people tend to be social and lively Agreeableness Agreeable people tend to be sociable and easy to get along with Neuroticism Neurotic people tend to be tense and moody Implicit