Use LEFT and RIGHT arrow keys to navigate between flashcards;
Use UP and DOWN arrow keys to flip the card;
H to show hint;
A reads text to speech;
72 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
trait-descriptive adjectives |
adjectives that can be used to describe characteristics of people |
|
personality |
set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are organized and relatively enduring and that influence his or her interactions with, and adaptations to, the intrapsychic, physical, and social environments |
|
psychological traits |
characteristics that describe the ways in which people are different from each other |
|
average tendencies |
consistent patterns of a persons behavior |
|
usefulness of psychological traits |
describe, explain, predict |
|
organized personality traits |
psychological traits and mechanisms for a given person are not simply a random collection of elements, but linked to one another in a coherent fashion |
|
selection |
the manner in which we choose situations to enter |
|
evocations |
reactions we produce in others |
|
manipulations |
ways in which we intentionally attempt to influence others |
|
adaptation |
a central feature of personality concerns adaptive functioning--accomplishing goals, coping, adjusting, and dealing with the challenges and problems we face as we go through life |
|
intrapsychic |
within the mind |
|
human nature |
typical of our species and are possessed by everyone or nearly everyone |
|
nomothetic research |
statistical comparisons of individuals or groups, requiring samples of subjects on which to conduct research |
|
idiographic research |
focuses on a single subject, trying to observe general principles that are manifest in a single life over time |
|
domain of knowledge |
a specialty area of science and scholarship in which psychologists have focused on learning about some specific and limited aspects of human nature |
|
dispositional domain |
deals centrally with the ways in which individuals differ from one another |
|
biological domain |
humans are first and foremost, collections of biological systems, and these systems provide the building blocks for behavior, thought, and emotion |
|
intrapsychic domain |
deals with mental mechanisms of personality, many of which operate outside of conscious awareness; Freud's theory of psychoanalysis |
|
cognitive-experiential domain |
focuses on cognition and subjective experience |
|
a good theory: |
provides a guide for researchers organizes known findings makes predictions |
|
comprehensiveness |
does the theory do a good job of explaining all of the facts and observations within its domain? |
|
heuristic value |
does the theory provide a guide to important new discoveries about personality that were not known before? |
|
testability |
does the theory provide precise predictions that can be tested empirically? |
|
parisomony |
does the theory contain few premises and assumptions (parsimony) or many premises and assumptions? |
|
self-report data |
the information a person reveals |
|
types of questions |
structured unstructured |
|
experience sampling |
people answer some questions, perhaps about their moods or physical symptoms, every day for several weeks or longer |
|
observer-reporter data |
social relationships as potential sources of information about our personalities |
|
naturalistic observation |
observers witness and record events that occur in the normal course of the lives of their participants |
|
test data |
standardized tests |
|
physiological measures |
provide information about a person's level of arousal |
|
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) |
a technique used to identify the areas of the brain that "light up" when performing certain tasks such as verbal problems or spatial navigation problems |
|
projective techniques |
the person is given a standard stimulus and asked what he or she sees |
|
reliability |
the degree to which an obtained measure represents the true level of the trait being measured |
|
test retest reliability |
two tests which are highly correlated, yielding similar scores for most people |
|
internal consistency reliability |
items within a test--viewed as a form of repeated measurement--all correlate well with each other |
|
inter-rater reliability |
different observers agree with each other |
|
response sets |
the tendency of some people to respond to the questions on a basis that is unrelated to the question ocntent |
|
acquiescence |
the tendency to simply agree with the questionnaire |
|
extreme responding |
tendency to give endpoint tendencies |
|
forced-choice questionnaire |
minimizes effect of socially desirable responding; test takers are confronted with pairs of statements and are asked to indicate which statement in each pair is more true of them |
|
face validity |
refers to whether the test, on the surface, appears to measure what it is supposed to measure |
|
predicative validity |
refers to whether the rest predicts criteria external to the test |
|
convergent validity |
refers to whether a test correlates with other measure that it should correlate with |
|
discriminant validity |
evaluated simultaneously with convergent validity |
|
construct validity |
test that measures what it claims to measure, correlates with what it is supposed to correlate with and does not correlate with what it is not supposed to correlate with |
|
generalizability |
the degree to which the measure retains its validity across various contexts |
|
generalizability |
degree to which the measure retains its validity across various contexts |
|
experimental methods |
used to determine causality--whether one variable influences another variable |
|
counterbalancing |
method of obtaining equivalence with half the group receiving treatment and the other half not; rules out order effect |
|
correlational method |
statistical procedure used for determining whether there is a relationship between two variables |
|
lexical approach |
all traits to describe people are in the dictionary |
|
lexical hypothesis |
all important individual differences have become encoded within the natural language |
|
lexical approach criteria |
synonym frequency cross-cultural universality |
|
factor analysis |
identifies groups of items that covary (together) but tend not to convary with other groups of items |
|
interpersonal traits |
what people do to and with each other |
|
adjacency |
how close the traits are to each other |
|
bipolarity |
located on opposite sides of the circle and are negatively correlated with each other |
|
orthogonality |
specifies that traits that are perpendicular to each other on the model are entirely unrelated to each other |
|
trait theory assumptions |
individual differences stability over time consistency across situations |
|
aggregation |
averaging as a tool for assessing personality traits |
|
strong situation |
refer to situation in which nearly all people react in similar ways |
|
situational selection |
tendency to choose the situations in which one finds oneself |
|
faking |
motivated distortion of answers on a questionnaire |
|
Barnum statements |
generalities--statements that could apply to anyone |
|
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 |
required employers to provide equal employment opportunities to all persons |
|
disparate impact |
plaintiff must show an employment practice disadvantages people from a protected group |
|
Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) |
measures aspects of the Big Five that are relevant to the above three motives important to buisness |
|
rank order stability |
maintenance of individual position within a group |
|
personality coherence |
maintaining rank order in relation to other individuals but changing the manifestations of the trait |
|
actometer |
a recording device attached to the wrists of the children during several play periods to monitor movement |
|
self-esteem |
the extent to which one perceives oneself as relatively close to being the person one wants to be and/or as relatively distant from being the kind of person one does not want to be with respect to person-qualities one positively and negatively values |