List and define the eight perspectives of personality psychology that are discussed in this section. What is the usefulness of studying eight perspectives of personality psychology?
List and define the eight perspectives of personality psychology that are discussed in this section.
List and define the eight perspectives of personality psychology that are discussed in this section. What is the usefulness of studying eight perspectives of personality psychology?
Chapter 1: What is Personality?
The basic questions that personality psychologists seek to answer are, ?What makes us unique,? and ?What makes us a human being??
II. Personality psychology is the scientific study of psychological forces
A. Unconscious
B. Ego forces
C. Cognitive
D. Biological
E. Conditioning/shaping
F. Traits skills
C. Spiritual/existential
H. Person-situation interaction
Ill. Because personality psychologists use scientific methods to test their theories, conclusions as are much more reliable and valid (compared to those obtained from astrology ? palm-reading, physiognomy, etc.).
A. Importance of data and statistics for scientific testing of many theories
B. Distinction between correlation and causation
IV. What are the sources of personality theories?
A. Careful observation and deep introspection of insightful thinkers
B. Systematic empirical research
C. Concepts borrowed from other disciplines (note that knowledge gleaned from other disciplines may also be used to test present theories for instance, if new advances in biochemistry show that one theory of personally is impossible, the theory must then be reworked to be consistent with current biochemical knowledge).
V. Preview of 8 different approaches to studying personality
A. Psychoanalytic
B. Neo-analytic
C. Cognitive
D. Biological
E. Behaviorist
F. Trait/skill
G. Humanistic/existential
H. Person-situation interactionist
VI Brief history of personality psychology
A. Theatre & self-presentation
B. Religious influences
C. Evolutionary biology
D. Progression of testing
VII. Modern theories
A. Allport: The search for underlying organizational properties, with a focus on individuality.
B. Lewin: Gestalt tradition, integrative nature of perception and thought, a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts; believed in the importance of changing situation
C. Murray: emphasis on comprehensive orientation-longitudinal design; personology
D. M. Mead: Highlighted the importance of cross-cultural comparisons.
VIII. Issues to be addressed throughout the course
A. The importance of the unconscious?
B. The definition of the self
C. Unique vs. general approaches to studying people (nomothetic vs. idiographic)
D. Male-female differences
F. Personal vs. situational influences
F. Cultural determinants of personality
C. Usefulness of personality for understanding behavior
H. The value of understanding each individual
CHAPTER 2: HOW IS PERSONALITY STUDIED AND ASSESSED?
This chapter first explains the importance of careful measurement, and goes on to talk about reliability and validity. Response sets and other biases are explained. This chapter then describes the ten basic types of assessment, and provides examples of each.
I. What is sub active assessment? Measurement that relies on interpretation.
A. Problems with subjective assessment: Judges may not agree in their judgments; even when they do agree, they may still he wrong
B. Advantages of subjective assessment. Complex phenomena may be examined and valuable insights gained
II. What is reliability? Consistency in scores or ratings that are expected to be consistent. Random variations in measurement are called ?error of measurement? or ?error
variance. What about different ways of assessing reliability?
A. Internal consistency and split-halt reliability
B. Cronbachs coefficient alpha for internal consistency
C. Test-retest reliability (measure of consistency over time)
Ill. But what happens when people change? When our environments influence us in different ways? How can we then have ?reliable? personality assessments?
A. Look at personality as an underlying influence that affects behavior that is,
specific responses or behaviors might change over time, but consistent underlying patterns should be discernible.
B. Look for consistency in the short term, but expect changes when looking over periods of many years. Also, expect to see some changes after life-changing transitions and/or traumatic events.
IV. What is validity? Are we measuring what we think we are measuring? Construct validity is ascertained by finding whether behaviors, attitudes, etc. that are theoretically relevant to the construct can be predicted by the measure
A. Convergent Validity: a measure is related to what it should be related to
B. Discriminant Validity: a measure is not related to what it should not be related to
C. Construct Validity: the extent to which a test truly measures a theoretical construct
D. Criterion-related Validity: the measure can predict important outcome criteria
F. Content Validity: the measure accurately measures the domain it is supposed to
F. Because proper test validation requires the establishment of several different
types of validity, and the assessment of various traits, it is called ?Multitrait-Multimethod
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