PSY 0160: Psychology of

Personality | Exam 1 Study

Guide
Chapter 2: Personality Research Methods
 McAdam and Pals categories

Each person is like… McAdams and Pals Examples

description of each level
1 All others 1 Human nature Getting along, language
learning
2 Some others 2 Traits Neuroticism, openness,
aggressiveness, sensation
seeking
3 Characteristic adaptations Motivations, goals, values, can
change more easily than traits
3 No others 4 Narrative identity Identity – gives sense of unity,
purpose, and meaning
5 Culture Religious tendencies, marital
norms
 Measuring personality
o Funder’s First Law: advantages are often weaknesses, and vice-versa
o Funder’s Second Law: there are no perfect indicators of personality, just clues
o Funder’s Third Law: something beats nothing, 2/3rds of the time
o Spearman-Brown formula in psychometrics, the technology of psychological
measurement: the more error-filled your measurements are, the more of them you
need
o BLIS!
 S Data: Self-evaluation
 A person’s evaluation of his or her own personality
 Usually questionnaires or surveys
 Most frequent data source
 High face validity
o The degree to which an assessment instrument appears to
measure what it is intended to measure
 Pros
o Large amounts of info
o Access to thoughts, feelings, and intentions
o Some S data are true by definition
o Causal force
 o Simple and easy
 Cons
o Maybe they can’t/won’t tell you
o “Too simple and too easy” ookay
 I Data: Informants
 Judgments by knowledgeable informants about general attributes of
the individual’s personality
 Family, acquaintances, coworkers, clinical psychologists, teachers,
etc.
 Pros
o Large amount of info
o Real-world basis
o Common sense
o Some I data are true by definition
o Causal force
 Cons
o Limited behavioral info
o Lack of access to private experience
o Error
o Bias
 L Data: Life
 Verifiable, concrete, real-life outcomes that may hold psychological
significance
 Obtained from archival records or self-report
 The results or “residue” of personality
 Health, education, work, marriage, parenthood, crime, etc.
 Pros
o Objective
o Verifiable
o Intrinsic importance
o Psychological relevance
 Cons
o Multi-determination
o Possible lack of psychological relevance
 B Data: Behavior
 The most visible indication of an individual’s personality is what she
does
 Info that is carefully and systematically recorded from direct
observation
 Natural – based on real-life, naturalistic observation
o Pros
 Realistic
 Can incorporate I data
 Wide range of contexts, both real and contrived
 Appearance of objectivity
o Cons
  Difficult
 Expensive
 Desired contexts may seldom occur
 Uncertain interpretation
 Lab – experimentation
o Getting “good data” by designing for
 Reliability
 Test-retest
 Internal
 Controlling for noise?
 Measurement of the variance in observed
scores due to the true scores of people being
actually different; degree to which ‘truth’
influences measurement
 Power of aggregation (averaging)
 Can hit same place again and again on target
 Validity
 Does it appear to measure what you want it to
measure? Face
 Leads to measurable outcomes – criterion-
related
o Concurrent – at the same time
o Predictive – at a later time
 Construct – how well does the measure
capture the construt
 Hit bullseye
 Generalizability
 So we measure what we are supposed to
measure, every single time
 Common barriers
o People
 Gender bias
 Shows vs. no-shows
 Cohort effects
 Cultural differences
o Procedures
 Would other tests measuring
the same construct show the
same thing?
 Does the lab translate to the
world? External validity
 Combo of reliability and validity
o Mixed designs most useful/commonly used IRL – both
correlational and experimental
Chapter 3: Personality Assessment
 Widely used tests: MMPI, CPI, 16 PF, SVIB, HPI
o Most tests provide S data
o Some tests provide B data
 MMPI
 IAT (implicit association test)
 IQ
 Performance-based instruments
o Omnibus inventories vs. one-trait measures
 Empirical/Criterion: MMPI
o Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
o Screening device for psych patients
o Common response biases
 Acquiescence
1. Agreeing with items regardless of content
 Social desirability
1. Looking good, regardless
2. Fixed by making people choose between two equally appealing
options
 Multiple validity scales to detect these
1. “Uncommon virtues scale” – social desirability biases
2. “F scale” – careless responding
3. “K scale” – defensive test-taking attitude
4. And more!
o Issues
 Not always useful for normal personality
 Some scales have low reliability
1. Test-retest
2. Internal consistency
 Some scales have social/racial biases
1. “People say insulting and vulgar things about me”
2. Masculinity/femininity scale
 Performance-based B tests
o Get at implicit/unconscious motives/desires/attitudes
o Measure something uncontrolled, like reaction time
o Stroop
 Reaction time, color name in its color vs. not in its color – screens for brain
damage
o Implicit Association Test (IAT)
 The generalization is that the higher someone scores on the IAT (associates
a certain trait with a certain group), the higher the likelihood they will act in a
discriminatory manner
 Problems
1. Reliability r ~ 0.4, about half of what we want
2. Validity?
 3. Generalizability
o Ironic IAT effects where high IAT scores correlated with better
behavior toward out-group than in-group members –
overcompensating
4. Effect size
o ~2% variance in discriminatory behavior
5. How do we know this?
o Meta-analysis
 Types of tests
o Objective tests
 A personality test that consists of a list of questions to be answered by the
subject as Y/N, T/F, or on a numeric scale
 Answers mean one thing or another – less room for interpretation on the
binary
 S-data personality measures, preference scales, etc
 Some B-data
 Validity and subjectivity of test items
1. Items are still not absolutely objective
2. Some subjectivity in interpretation of meaning might be good
 Why so many items?
1. Aggregation increases stability and reliability
2. Spearman-Brown formula
 Three levels of measurement:
1. Instrument
o Large inventory of multiple items and tests
o Big 5 (OCEAN)
2. Test/Scale
o Several items that measure one dimension
o Extraversion scale of Big 5
3. Measure/Item
o A single item/behavior
o “I often attend parties.”
o But you want lots of them (aggregation = higher validity)
o Projective tests (B-data)
 People “project” their needs/desires/values onto an ambiguous stimulus
 E.g. Rorschach inkblot test
 Open to interpretation of whoever is administering the test
 Are no longer included in APA competencies
1. Psychology has more informative, reliable, valid measures
 Supposed to assess unconscious forces that might guide behavior
 Rorschach: Rare or poorly reasoned responses that do not fit the objective
structure suggest possible problems
1. Exner’s scoring system is better than Rorschach
2. Good for detecting thought disorders like schizophrenia, but not the
general population
 Basically, don’t use them for normal people!
  Disadvantages
1. Validity evidence is scarce
2. Expensive and time-consuming
3. Differences in interpretation
4. Other less expensive tests/interviewing work as well or better 
incremental validity, or if the test will give us more info than the info
we get from preexisting tests (Rorschach doesn’t have this)
5. Child abuse findings – pretty problematic way to find that
 How to make a personality inventory
o Rational-theoretical
 Four conditions
1. Items mean the same thing to the test taker and creator
2. Capability for accurate self-assessment
3. Willingness to make an accurate and undistorted report
4. Items must be valid indicators of the construct
 Jackson’s Personality Research Form (PRF)
1. Designed to measure needs and motives like the Thematic
Apperception Test
2. Based on Murray’s theory of needs/motives
o Factor analysis
 Start with a large number of items
 Administer to a large number of participants
 See how each item correlates w/ every other item, across people
 You can see how many factors emerge, or constrain the number of factors
 ANOVA, basically
 Can be “pure” (start with all possible combos)
 Often used in combination with Rational-theoretical approach
1. Jackson’s PRF did this – also brought in criterion validity
o Probably best method, combine all tools available to construct
a good test!
o Empirical/criterion
o Reliability
o Validity
 Content
 Concurrent/Predictive
 Construct
 External (generalizable)
o Significance
 Null-hypothesis significance testing (NHST)
1. Type I error
o False positive
2. Type II error
o False negative
 Effect size is often more meaningful than a p level
 1. Cohen’s d – defined as the difference between two means divided by
a standard deviation for the data, allows to assert if an effect size is
small or large
2. Odds ratios – appropriate when the research question focuses on the
degree of association between two binary variables, comparing the
“odds”
 Replication crisis in academia?
o Results that lack replication
o Underpowered results
o Solutions?
 Pre-registering studies
 Meta-analysis

Chapter 4: Personality Traits, Situation, and Behavior

 The Trait Approach
o Most research w/in the trait approach relies on correlational designs
 Traits should be able to predict behavior
o Focus in on individual differences
 Strength: assesses and attempts to understand how people differ
 Weakness: neglects aspects of personality common to all people and how
each person is unique
o What counts as part of a trait?
 Internal – causal properties
 External – descriptive summaries or act frequencies
 Patterns of experience as well as overt behavior
o Trait: a relatively stable dimension (across time and situation) of personality that can
be used to characterize people
 Higher score on a trait:
 Frequency
 Intensity
 Breadth of situations
 The person-situation debate
o Social psychology is a thing!
o Situationism – situations are more important than personality traits in determining
behavior
 Conclusion: both personality and situations are important determinants of
behavior
o Interactionism – traits and situations both affect behavior
 The effect of traits may depend on situation and/or vice versa
 Situational selection
 Certain types of people get into certain types of situations
 Situational evocation
 People change the situations through behavior
o Traits are probabilistic – density distributions of states
  Myers-Briggs Type Indicator – actual horseshit
o Categorical vs. continuous
 The Big Five
o Openness/Intellect
 Intellectual, artistic, imaginative, curious
o Conscientiousness
 Hard-working, neat, responsible, organized
o Extraversion
 Outgoing, assertive, enthusiastic, sociable
o Agreeableness
 Kind, compassionate, polite, empathetic
o Neuroticism
 Anxious, depressed, irritable, vulnerable
o Finding source traits
 “Lexical method”
 Factor analyze words from the dictionary
 Trait clusters will be evident in the way we use and define these
descriptive words
 Questionnaire method
 Rationally constructed
 Items correspond to traits found via lexical method
 Characteristic adaptations
o Include motives, goals, plans, strivings, strategies, values, virtues, schemas, self-
images, mental representations of significant others, developmental tasks…
o Pigeonholing vs. individual differences (people don’t fit into boxes)
o “Like no others (uniqueness) – self-defining life narratives from McAdams and Pal

Chapter 5: Personality Judgment

 Consequences of everyday judgements of personality
o Opportunities
 Employment, friendships
o Expectancies/self-fulfilling prophecies
 Intellectual expectancy effects in children
 Social expectancy effects
 Accuracy of personality judgement
o First impressions
 Mostly automatic
 The face
 Other visible signs of personality
o Moderators of accuracy
 Good judge
 Someone who is accurate
 Describes others in favorable terms
 Good target
  Stable, well-organized, consistent behavior
 Visible (talkative vs. ruminative)
 Extraverted, agreeable
 Good trait: easy to observe, highly visible
 Good info
 Amount or quantity
 Acquaintanceship effect and a boundary
 Affect self-other agreement but not consensus
o The realistic accuracy model
 One explanation for how accurate judgment is possible

Chapter 6: Using Personality Traits to Understand

Behavior
 Connecting traits w/ behavior
o Typological approach
 Focuses on the patterns of traits that characterize whole persons, and tries to
sort these patterns, which type are you
o Many-trait approach
 Level of measurement: instrument
 Beginning with the (implicit) research question, who does that?
 100 trait inventory, California Q-Set
o Essential-trait approach
 Level of measurement: instrument
 Which traits are the most important?
o Single-trait approach
 Level of measurement: scale
 Examines the link between personality and behavior by asking, what do
people like that do?
 Beginnings of the Trait Approach
o Galton
o Allport
o Allport & Odbert
o Murray
o Cattell
 How many traits?
o Murray – 20 motives/needs
o Raymond Cattell (prominent guy) – 16 PF
o Costa & McCrae and others – Big Five/Five Factor Model
o Hans Eysenck – three higher-level types
 The Big Five Personality Factors: 10 Aspects
o Extraversion (approach oriented, sensitivity to reward [incentive and consummatory],
positive affect)
 Assertiveness
  Dominant
 Outspoken
 Active
 Enthusiasm
 Sociable
 Playful
 Fun-loving
o Agreeableness (altruism, social affiliation, cooperation)
 Compassion
 Warm
 Empathetic
 Kind
 Politeness
 Considerate
 Unaggressive
 Compliant
o Conscientiousness (effortful control of impulses and distractions, so as to follow rules
and pursue long-term goals)
 Industriousness
 Hard-working
 Self-disciplined
 Orderliness
 Neat
 Careful
 Punctual
 Thrifty
o Neuroticism (emotional sensitivity to threat and punishment)
 Volatility
 Temperamental
 Irritable
 Easily upset
 Withdrawal
 Anxious
 Depressed
 Vulnerable
o Openness/Intellect (cognitive flexibility and complex info processing – both abstract
and perceptual; curiosity, imagination)
 Openness
 Artistic
 Creative
 Perceptive
 Intellect
 Smart
 Intellectual
 Philosophical
  Higher-order factors of the Big Five (DeYoung, Peterson, & Higgins, 2002)
o Stability
 Emotional, social, and motivational stability
 The need to maintain a stable organization of functioning in order to
accomplish goals
 Serotonin function
o Plasticity
 Exploration and engagement w/ novelty, cognitive and behavioral flexibility
 The need to incorporate novel info into one’s worldview
 Dopamine function
 “Four Ways Five Factors are Basic” – the structure of personality
o Stability across time and observers, predictive validity
o Found in natural language and personality systems
o Found in different age, sex, race, and language groups
o Heritable and therefore partly genetically based
 Facebook studies (Kosinski et al. study – weird ass correlations based on Facebook likes),
Cambridge Analytica
 “Single traits”
o Self-monitoring
 Monitoring yourself in different situations (relatable)
o Narcissism
 Summary
o Big Five is a good general catch-all, but may not adequately capture certain
important traits, such as narcissism, impulsivity, honesty/humility

Chapter 7: Personality Development

 The origins of personality
o Childhood personality research emanated from research focused on 1) child
temperament and 2) adult personality
 Temperament: behavioral consistencies that emerge early in life, are typically
emotional in nature, and that are presumed to have a biological basis
 Thomas and Chess thought temp. was the “how” of behavior… problem is,
can’t really distinguish between the how, what, why; more advanced stats
dissolved categorization
 Newer models have refined their OG work
 Rothbart’s Model of Temperament: includes negative emotionality,
positive emotionality/surgency, and effortful control/constraint
o Adult personality research progressed fairly independently from temperament
research
o Results from studies using lexical approach and factor analyses of existing
psychological questionnaires not designed to measure Big Five have led to a general
consensus that the structure of adult hierarchy resembles the following hierarchy
o So we have a structure for temperament, and a structure for personality, but... they’re
the FUCKING SAME, KAREN!
  Personality emerges early in life
 Personality traits are emotional in nature
 Temperament traits are influenced by the environment
 Conclusion: SAME!
 Best to think of temp. as early basis of personality, which becomes
broader and more differentiated as the developing child acquires new
tendencies and competencies, through both biological maturation and
learning
 Developmental origins of the Big Five
o Neuroticism
 Negative emotionality earliest, present w/in first months of life
 More complex emotions emerge w/in first two years w/ growing self-
recognition
o Extraversion
 Positive emotionality earliest, present w/in first few months
 Talkativeness, activity level, sociability  E
o Conscientiousness
 Self-regulatory capacities earliest, emerge toward end of first year
 Mean-level increases thru preschool years
o Agreeableness
 Empathy for others (first year), aggression (low end of agreeableness,
emerges 24-48 months)
o Openness/Intellect
 Not a lot of research on this one
 Curiosity and imaginative play are likely early signs; emerge during preschool
years
 Personality stability and change
o Rank-order stability
 Assessed by examining how strongly correlated one’s scores on a particular
trait are at different times
 Reflects the degree to which the relative ordering of individuals on a given
trait is maintained over time
 Four conclusions from research:
 Most studies found moderate to high ROS
 It increases with age until about 50-60, then plateaus
 It decreases as the interval between measurements increases
 It does not appear to vary widely from trait to trait
o Forces for stability
 Genetics
 Heritability of most traits ~ 0.5
 Genetics likely contribute to heterotypic continuity
 Physical and environmental factors
 SES, physical appearance
 NOT birth order
 Early experience
 E.g. Early maltreatment
  AGE: Cumulative Continuity Principle
 ROS increases with age
 Psychological maturity
 High A, High C, Low N predict high personality stability and less
change moving forward
 Person-environment transactions
 Active
o Person seeks out compatible environments and avoids
incompatible ones
 Reactive
o Different people response differently to the same situation
 Evocative
o Aspect of an individual’s personality leads to behavior that
changes the situations he or she experiences
 Mean-level personality change takeaways
o Personality is not “set like plaster” – there are standard mean-level changes
 Extraversion (and O/I) decrease (and recover) in adolescence and then
gradually fall again over time
 Emotional stability, agreeableness, and conscientiousness tend to plummet
during adolescence, then recover and slowly increase over the course of
later adulthood, consistent with the maturity principle
o Correlated change
 When one trait changes, the others seem to change too – is this being driven
by the meta-traits? Maybe!
 Personality change is possible
o Not only is mean-level change possible but expected
o Personality is generally stable, but even that evidence leaves room for change as
correlations over time do not equal t
o How does it change?
 Genetics
 *Social investment
 Changing social roles leads to personality change
 *Maturity principle
 Mean-level changes
 Life experiences
 Can I change my personality?
o Most people want to change their personality to be more socially desirable (lower N,
higher A/C/E/O)
o Definition of personality: “characteristic patterns of thoughts, behaviors, emotions” 
changing what you think, do, feel is possible, but it ain’t easy!
o Methods for voluntary change
 Psychotherapy/pharmacotherapy
 SSRIs
 Treatment for depression
 Other interventions
  Generally change current behavior to be more in line with desired trait
 increases in desired trait will follow
 Change your experience
 Entering into stable social roles
 Traveling – O/I increase
 Joining a club/team – A increase
o Steps to personality change
 Precondition 1: changing is considered desirable/necessary
 Precondition 2: changing is feasible
 Leads to self-regulated behavioral changes  precondition 3: self-regulated
changes become habitual  trait change
 Personality development: core principles
o Cumulative continuity
 Traits increase in rank-order consistency over time
o Maturity
 Personality tends to change in a way that makes us better equipped to
handle life’s challenges and circumstances
o Plasticity
 Personality can change throughout life, but not easily
o Role continuity
 Adopting specific roles can lead to stability of specific traits
o Identity development
o Social investment
 Changing social roles
o Corresponsive
 Person-environment transactions can cause traits to remain stable over time
 What do the Big Five predict?
o E: partying, popularity, sex partners and practices, traffic accidents and ER visits,
sales
o A: less bullied, money to charity, avoiding OH and cigs, refusing romantic affairs
o C: reduced mortality, greater job satisfaction, less procrastination
o N: health complaints, divorce, social awk, distress, poor coping strategies
o O/I: creative achievement, IQ, liking complex music, dreams, drugs
o Industrial/academic performance
 C, low N
o Juvenile delinquency
 Low C, low A
o Vocational interests
 E and sales, O/I and complexity
o Risky sex
 E, N, low C, low A
o Political ideology
 C, O/I, A
o OH consumption
 E, low A
o Volunteer work
  E, A
o Happiness; “subjective well being”
 E, low N
o Forgiveness
 A, low N