Chapter 13 Personality the unique and relatively enduring set of behaviors thoughts feelings and motives that characterize an individual Individual differences unique 1 2 Consistency enduring Trait a disposition to behave consistently in a particular way Ex Friendliness Neuroticism Behavioral thresholds the point in which a person moves from not having a particular response to having one Nature nurture of personality 1 Quantitative trait loci QTL approach Personality traits evolved as adaptive behavioral responses to problems regarding survival and reproduction Ex Natural selection Sexual selection Some behavioral geneticists study the relationship between genes and personality the location on genes that might be associated with particular behaviors genetics Other 50 is Shared environment Unshared environment most influential part Error most basic personality traits are explained about 50 by a technique in behavioral genetics that looks for 2 Twin adoption studies Temperament the biologically based disposition to behave in a certain ways Ex Mother s stress levels may influence infant s stress response Extraversion neuroticism agreeableness openness to experience conscientiousness and psychoticism exist across cultures Differ on certain dimensions Theories of personalities 1 Psychoanalytic theories personality resides in the unconscious and early childhood experiences lay the foundation for adult personality Freud conscious preconscious unconscious Unconscious contains al drives urges or instincts that are outside of our a sense of self in direct contact with the outside world Reality principle the seat of impulse and desire Pleasure principle monitors and controls behaviors Moralistic principle Defense mechanism awareness but motivate most speech thoughts feelings or actions Id Ego Superego anxiety by denying and distorting reality in some way impulses out of consciousness Projection them onto others Reaction formation Repression turns an unpleasant idea feeling or impulse into its opposite the denial of particular ideas feelings or impulses and projection of the unconscious act to keeping threatening thoughts feelings or unconscious strategies the mind uses to protect itself from Sublimation way th 2013 April 10 involves expressing a socially unacceptable impulse in an acceptable a person s behavior changes in different situations traits are the major force behind personality Allport looked up words Social cognitive learning theories Mischel Stanford Marshmallow experiment 25 30 were able to wait Prefrontal cortex was bigger those who waited and had higher GPA and SAT scores Trait theories that described people McCrae and Costa Big Five five factor model dimensions of personality 1 Openness how interested we are to new things 2 Conscientiousness how organized we are 3 Extraversion how sociable we are 4 Agreeableness how friendly we are 5 Neuroticism how anxious worried we are a theory that proposes that there are five universal essence of personality includes Big Five and talents aptitudes and we have a biological foundation for our personality traits Eysenck Basic tendencies cognitive abilities Biological Theories Three dimensions of personality 1 Neuroticism 2 Extraversion 3 Psychoticism Personality is caused by 1 Genes 2 Neurochemistry 3 Central nervous system Review Page 531 in textbook Measuring personality 2 1 Behavioral observation most natural and comfortable technique participants rate as more observe behavior and count specific behaviors associated with specific traits Inter rater reliability measure of how much agreement there is in ratings when using two or more raters Interviewing engaging and pleasant Open ended answers good for participant bad for researcher asked to interpret or tell a story about what they see Rorschach Inkblot test a projective test in which the participants is asked to respond to a series of ambiguous inkblots participants are presented with a vague stimulus or situation and 3 Projective tests 4 Questionnaires self report instruments on which respondents indicate the extent to which they agree or disagree with a series of statements as they apply to their personality Rational method a method for developing questionnaire items that involves using reason or theory Empirical method a method that focuses on including questions that characterize the group the questionnaire is intended to distinguish