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structural approaches
are supposed to describe the person is like in general and tend to emphasize the mean along and dismiss the remainder of the distribution as meaningless
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process approaches
describe how individuals differentially react to situations and tend to emphasize the variability within the distribution, dismissing individual's unique distribution parameters as unpredictable
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5 empirical outcomes - SHIFT FOCUS
- the wider the typical individual's distribution, the more of any given individual's behavior left undescribed by his or her mean alone
- single states would not be stable (predictable), as predicting an individual's precise momentary location within the distribution would be inefficient
- means of the distributions nonetheless would be highly stable, bc the distribution is the reliable characteristic of individual's behavior and the location is an important feature of the distributions
- at least one other parameter of distributions would also be stable
- within-person behavioral variability must be meaningful (predictable) and, preferably, differentially so for different individuals
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location
average tendency of the individual's states
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size
standard deviation - diversity of the individual's behaviour/how differently they act from moment to moment
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shape (skewed or kurtosis)
describes the frequency and direction of an individual's extreme behaviour
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five main assertions of whole trait theory
- the descriptive side of traits is best thought of as density distributions of states
- it is important to provide an explanatory account of the Big 5
- adding an explanatory account to the Big 5 creates two parts to traits, an explanatory part and a descriptive part, and these two parts are distinct entities that nevertheless can be joined into whole traits bc one of the parts is the causal consequence of the other part
- the explanatory part of traits consists of social-cognitive mechanisms
- what needs to be done next is to identity social-cognitive mechanisms that produce Big-5 states
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interpretative processes
represents the cognitive aspects of the mind
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motivational processes
the representation of desired and feared end-states that create the directional impetus in the individual
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stability-inducing processes
account for factors that guide the individual towards his or her typical trait manifestation, such as genetic, homostatic, or habit forces
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temporal processes
is necessary to account for influences of past events on the present, such as inertia or cycles
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random error processes
is needed to account for unpredictable trait manifestations
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