Study Guide Ch 5 8 for Exam 2 NOTE Exams may contain material not included on this guide Material on guide is not guaranteed to be on exams Use this information as a GUIDE for your studying but do not treat it as a map that will show you everything This information comes from the textbook AND the lectures Previous quiz questions the featured readings and the summaries at the end of textbook chapters should also guide your studying Chapter 5 Fiver Basic Traits In the Brain and in Behavior since we talked about this chapter for 3 days I d emphasize it more than the others Even though it s from Chapter 4 make sure you understand interactions They are not going away Book definition Interactionism Behavior is a function of the person and his or her traits in interaction with the environment Modern interactionism The core of the modern interactionist approach is captured in four basic postulates 1 Actual behavior is a function of a continuous process of multidirectional interaction or feedback between the individual and the situation he or she encounters 2 The individual is an intentional active agent in this interactional process 3 On the person side of the interaction cognitive and motivational factors are essential determinants of 4 On the situation side the psychological meaning of situations for the individual is the important behavior determining factor There are many different ways of thinking about interactionism 1 Mechanistic interactionism drives from the concept of an interaction effect as it appears in certain statistical procedures In mechanistic interactionism a person s trait constitutes one independent predictor the situation constitutes a second independent predictor and the interaction between trait and situation constitutes a third predictor The dependent variable or outcome to be predicted is some form of measurable behavior In such a study a significant effect for the trait situation interaction indicates a that there exists a statistical tendency for the trait to be associated with the behavior when a particular level of the situation is involved or similarly b that there exists a tendency for the situation to be associated with the behavior when a particular level of the trait is involved 2 While mechanistic interactionism partitions the variance in behavior into that statistically accounted for by persons situations and their interactions reciprocal interactionism conceives of a more fluid and complex pattern in which person situation and behavior continually and reciprocally influence one another It is probably some form of reciprocal interactionism that is regularly implied by most personality psychologists when they say that behavior is a function of the interaction of person and environment Highlights from lecture notes Interactions are a theme throughout the semester Interactions interact with personality traits Interactions are not yes and no and are not always and never IT S SOMETIMES and DEPENDS on some other factor Example Extroverts tend to prefer interacting with other people but the DEPENDS on you can list any number of factors that will be related that situation What is need for cognition How does it relate to education and persuasive messages Highlights from lecture notes Need for cognition A need to participate in activities that are stimulating mentally Example Doing puzzles watching nature documentaries reading non assigned psychology articles It relates to having positive and negative experiences in school Not everyone that is high in need for cognition loves learning and not everyone that is low in need for cognition hate learning But there s an internal drive to seek out information Example You re motived to seek out information on political candidates and enjoy looking up policies the interest you You re not paid to do this or getting a grade for it but you find it personally rewarding It can relate to intelligence but certainly not the same as intelligence There can be really bright people that do not care to use their intelligence to investigate difficult complex problems At the same time there are still people that have below average intelligence that critically think about things People with a high need for cognition will independently seek out knowledge They prefer written and verbal information OVER visual information They don t only focus on arguments that support what they think but they like hearing both sides of an argument so they can be better informed to have a knowledgeable discussion about all sides of an issue They seek out information they might not agree with Less likely to change their minds though when presented with new information People with a low need for cognition prefer visual graph information More likely to use a short cut to information A person might be high in need for cognition but you may realize it s not for their chosen field You might be high in need for cognition compared to people in your hometown but you re not high in need for cognition compared to people you are psychology majors or go on to graduate degrees etc Understand how most people are not pure introverts or extraverts What are we really saying when we refer to someone as an introvert or an extravert No one is 100 extravert or 100 introvert Occasionally psychologist still refer to people as one or the other But we are simply referring to people who tend to act more or less extraverted ways Book definition Differences are always a matter of degree There are very few 100 pure extraverts out there or 100 pure introverts Instead most of us fall somewhere in the middle of the continuum For convenience sake nonetheless I will sometimes use the terms extraverts and introverts but what I will always mean is people tending to score relatively high on Extraversion and thus high on Introversion respectively As linear continua do not break down into simple either or types But quantitative differences on a trait continuum are nonetheless very important in measuring psychological individuality as we will see throughout this chapter Finally as with all of the Big Five traits we should think of Extraversion as a large factor in personality comprised of many smaller factors or facets Extraversion is really a family of related smaller traits such as sociability warmth and excitement seeking all sharing a resemblance to each other but each carving out something of its own identity within the broad family constellation What did Carl Jung say the relationship
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