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Trait-descriptive adjectives
Words that describe traits, attributes of a person that are characteristic of a person and perhaps enduring over time
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3 fundamental questions that guide peopel that study traits
How should we conceptualize traits?
How can we identify which traits are the most important from among the many ways that individuals differ?
How can we formulate a comprehensive taxonomy of traits—a system that includes within it all the major traits of personality?
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what is a trait? 2 formulations
traits as internal causal properties
traits as purely descriptive summaries
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traits as internal causal properties
Traits are presumed to be internal in that individuals carry their desires, needs, and wants from one situation to next
Desires and needs are presumed to be causal in that they explain behavior of individuals who possess them
Traits can lie dormant in that capacities are present even when behaviors are not expressed
Scientific usefulness of viewing traits as causes of behavior lies in ruling out other causes
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traits as purely descriptive summaries
Traits as descriptive summaries of attributes of a person; no assumption about internality, nor is causality assumed
Argue that we must first identify and describe important individual differences and subsequently develop casual theories to explain them
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Act frequency research program:
Act nominations
Designed to identify which acts belong in which trait categories
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Act frequency research program:
Prototypicality judgements
involves identifying which aces are most central or prototypical of each trait category
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Act frequency research program:
Monitoring act performance
Securing information on actual performance of individuals in their daily lives
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Critique of act frequency formulation
-Does not specify how much context should be included in the description of the trait-relevant act
- Seems applicable to overt actions, but what about failures to act or covert acts not directly observable?
-May not successfully capture complex traits
-Atheoretical
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Atheoretical
nothing within approach provides guide to which traits are important or explanation for why individuals differ in frequency of act performance over time
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Accomplishments of act frequency formulation
- Helpful in making explicit the behavioral phenomena to which most trait terms refer
- Helpful in identifying behavioral regularities
- Helpful in exploring the meaning of some traits that are difficult to study, such as impulsivity and creativity
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3 approaches to identification of the most important traits
- - lexical approach
- - statistical approach
- - Theoretical approach
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Lexical approach
Starts with lexical hypothesis: All important individual differences have become encoded within the natural language over time
Trait terms are important for people in communicating with others
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2 criteria for identifying important traits: lexical approach
Synonym frequency
Cross-cultural universality
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Problems and limitations (2): lexical approach
Many traits are ambiguous, metaphorical, obscure, or difficult
Personality is conveyed through different parts of speech (not just adjectives), including nouns and adverbs
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Statistical approach
Starts with a large, diverse pool of personality items
Goal of statistical approach is to identify major dimensions of personality
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Factor analysis: Statistical approach
Identifies groups of items that covary or go together, but tend not to covary with other groups of items
Provides means for determining which personality variables share some property or belong within the same group
Useful in reducing the large array of diverse traits into smaller, more useful set of underlying factors
Factor loading: Index of how much of a variation in an item is “explained” by a factor
Cautionary note: You only get out of factor analysis what you put in; thus, researchers must pay attention to the initial selection items
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Theoretical approach
- Starts with a theory, which then determines which variables are important
- Example: Sociosexual orientation
Strengths coincide with strengths of a theory, and weaknesses coincide with the weaknesses of a theory
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Eysenck's hierarchial model of personality
- Model of personality based on traits that Eysenck believed were highly heritable and had psychophysiological foundation
- Three traits met criteria: Extraversion-Introversion (E), Neuroticism-Emotional Stability (N), Psychoticism (P)
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Extraversion
High scorers like partiers, have many friends, require people around to talk to, like playing practical jokes on others, display carefree, easy manner, and have a high activity level
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Neuroticism
High scorers are worriers, anxious, depressed, have trouble sleeping, experience array of psychosomatic symptoms, and over-reactivity of negative emotions
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psychoticism
High scorers are solitary, lack empathy, often cruel and inhumane, insensitivity to pain and suffering of others, aggressive, penchant for strange and unusual, impulsive, and has antisocial tendencies
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Hierarchical Structure of Eysenck’s System
- Super traits (P, E, N) at the top
- Narrower traits at the second level
- Subsumed by each narrower trait is the third level—habitual acts
- At the lowest level of the four-tiered hierarchy are specific acts
- Hierarchy has the advantage of locating each specific, personality-relevant act within increasingly precise nested system
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Biological underpinnings- key criteria for "basic" dimensions of personality
- Heritability: P, E, and N have moderate heritabilities, but so do many other personality traits
- Identifiable physiological substrate
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Biological underpinnings- limitations: Eysenck's theory
Many other personality traits show moderate heritability
Eysenck may have missed important traits
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Cattell's Taxonomy: 16 personality Factor system
Believed that the true factors of personality should be found across different types of data, such as self-reports and laboratory tests
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Major criticisms of cattell's taxonomy (16 factor peronanlty system)
Some personality researchers have failed to replicate the 16 factors
Many argue that a smaller number of factors captures important ways in which individuals differ
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The Wiggins Circumplex
- Started with the lexical assumption
- Argued that trait terms specify different kinds of ways in which individuals differ: Interpersonal, temperament, character, material, attitude, mental, and physical
- Wiggins was concerned with interpersonal traits and carefully separated these out
- Defined “interpersonal” as interactions between people involving exchanges
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Wiggins circumplex: 2 resources that define social exchange
love and status
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3 advantages of wiggins circumplex
Provides an explicit definition of what constitutes “interpersonal” behavior
Specifies relationships between each trait and every other trait in the model (adjacency, bipolarity, orthogonality)
Alerts investigators to “gaps” in work on interpersonal behavior
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limitation of wiggins circumplex
Interpersonal map is limited to two dimensions—other traits may have important interpersonal consequences
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5 factors of Five-factor model
- 1. Surgency or Extraversion
- 2. Agreeableness
- 3. Conscientiousness
- 4. Emotional Stability
- 5. Openness/Intellect
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five-factor model: baed on
lexical and statistical approach
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