Psych 150: Personality Psychology on

Intro to Personality

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

What is personality? #

Personality encapsulates the characteristics of a person that describe and explain consistent patterns of feeling, thinking, and behaving.

Unlike social psychology, which studies situational/external causes of behavior, personality psychology focuses on intraindividual/internal causes.

Some of the goals of studying personality include:

Classifying the structure of personality (what)
Explore the mechanisms that enable personality (why)
Identify consistent patterns and regularities: make distinction between traits and states

History of Personality Psychology #

Freud #

1875: Freud

Trait Theory

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Using the psycholexical (trait) approach, researchers study the personality characteristics important in a culture by studying the lexicon for personality traits.

Traits, States, Activities #

A trait is consistent across time and situations, and has internal causes.

A state is a transitory, externally caused emotion (angry because… happy when at… surprised by…)

An activity is inconsistent and transitory, referring to what a person is doing at a given time.

Temperament and Birth Order

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Derryberry & Reed 2002: can having high attentional control buffer (protect) highly anxious people from getting stuck on threat-related information?

IV: trait anxiety
DV: attentional bias
Moderator: attentional control
Finding/result: for an uncued trial, the highly anxious with low attentional control were much slower than those with low anxiety. There was no significant difference found in the other trials. This suggests that in cases where anxiety is high, attentional control does moderate attention.

Temperament: the nature part of personality: core aspects that are biologically defined (see [[psych131-140/2-4 temperament]] for the developmental-psych treatment, including the same Kagan inhibited/uninhibited distinction).

Heritability of Personality

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Heritability is the degree to which variability in a characteristic can be explained by genetic variability in the population. The same concept applied to mental-health symptoms is discussed in [[psych131-140/2-3 genetics]]; the broader nature-vs-nurture framing is in [[psych131-140/nature and nurture]]. The population-level definition of evolution as the change in allele frequencies — the substrate this statistic measures — is in [[anthro1/modern-evolutionary-theory]].

![[/psych150/img/Pasted-image-20230208112529.png|500]] Identical twins have higher heritability factors compared to fraternal twins, suggesting some relationship between genetics and personality even in the same environment.

Attachment

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Attachment provides an internal working model (blueprint for behavior) for:

Proper caregiving behaviors
How we expect infants to react to caregiving

In a normal environment, infants develop primary regulatory strategies for attachment with parents. In this strategy, parents are seen as a secure base from which to explore the world. Children show proximity maintenance (defaults to staying near parents, and protesting separation)

Secure children explore and play freely when their parent or caregiver is present. They are visibly upset when caregivers leave, and are happy when they return.

Functions of the attachment system:

Transference

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Definition #

Transference is the process by which the representation of a significant other is applied to a new person who is similar to that person in some manner.

In other words, when we meet someone new who reminds us of someone we know well, we assume the new person also shares other attributes of the known person. We then think we know everything about them.
We also transfer how we feel about the other person

Basic assumptions #

Significant other schemas are stored in memory
Schemas can be activated by different sources of knowledge
- Can become chronically activated
Transference occurs when a schema is activated and applied to a new person
The result of transference is that the perceiver goes beyond the information given about the new person, derived from their previous schema

Properties #

Transference only works for our own significant others. When asked to infer characteristics about nonsignificant others, there is no effect.

If-Then Personality

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Paradox of personality #

By definition, personality should be stable and coherent; however, we don’t really observe this in reality. (For example, tipping behavior cannot be predicted from agreeableness/generosity, and may change depending on the restaurant.)

There are two main solutions to this paradox:

Average out over all observations of a behavior. This is the trait approach, and removes much of the nuance of situational behaviors.
Take variability seriously, and figure out a way to account for it.

These two solutions correspond to

Outcomes and Applications

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Outcomes #

Mortality #

[[3b. Wilson et al. 2005.pdf]]

Establish relationship between personality, activity levels, and mortality in old age
IV: extraversion, neuroticism –> DV: mortality
Mediators: health, activity (cognitive, social, physical)
Findings: higher neuroticism and lower extraversion were associated with higher levels of mortality (21%)
- This was because neurotic, introverted individuals had a lower level of social/physical/cognitive ability

Friedman et al. 1995- Terman Life-Cycle study, conducted from 1921 to 1986 on children with high IQ