Psychology - Personality Test 1 Definitions

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Domain of Knowledge

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A specialty area of science and scholarship in which psychologists havefocused on learning about some specific and limited aspects of human nature.

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Nomothetic Research

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Involves statistical comparisons of individuals or groups, requiringsamples of subjects on which to conduct research. Nomothetic research istypically applied to identify universal human characteristics and dimensions ofindividual or group differences.

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Idiographic Research

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Focuses on a single subject, trying to observe general principles thatare manifest in a single life over time. Often, idiographic research results incase studies or the psychological biography of a single person.

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Differences among Groups

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People in one group may have certain personality features in common, andthese common features make that group of people different from other groups.

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Individual Differences

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Ways in which each individual is like some other individuals in certainways.

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Human Nature

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The traits and mechanisms of personality that are typical of our speciesand are possessed by everyone or nearly everyone.

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Adaptation

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The notion that a central feature of personality concerns adaptivefunctioning such as accomplishing goals, coping, adjusting, and dealing withthe challenges and problems we face as we go through life.

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Person-Environment Interaction

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Two people may be exposed to the same objective event, yet what they payattention to and how they interpret the event may be very different.

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Influential Forces of Personality

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Personality traits and mechanisms can influence our lives such as how weact, how we view ourselves, how we think about the world, how we interact withothers, how we feel, how we select our environments, and how we react.

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Within the Individual

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Means that personality is something a person carries with him- orherself over time and from one situation to the next.

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Organized

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The psychological traits and mechanisms for a given person are notsimply a random collection of elements. Rather, personality is organizedbecause the mechanisms and traits are linked to one another in a coherentfashion.

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Enduring

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Psychological traits are also relatively enduring over time, particularlyin adulthood, and are somewhat consistent over situations. To say that someoneis angry at this moment is not saying anything about a trait, whereas anotherperson may possess anger as an enduring trait.

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Psychological Mechanisms

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Like traits, except that the term ‘mechanisms’ refers more to theprocesses of personality. For example, most psychological mechanisms involve aninformation-processing activity. Someone who is extraverted may look for andnotice opportunities to interact with other people and an extraverted person isprepared to notice and act on certain kinds of social information.

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Psychological Traits

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Characteristics that describe ways in which people are different fromeach other.

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Average Tendencies

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Someone with a certain trait tends to emit related behavior with greaterfrequency than those who may not possess that trait. Therefore, traits describethe average tendencies of a person.

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Personality

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The set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individualthat are organized and relatively enduring and that influence his or herinteractions with, and adaptations to, the intrapsychic, physical, and socialenvironments.

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Trait-Descriptive Adjectives

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Adjectives that can be used to describe characteristics of people.

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Unstructured Personality Tests

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Open-ended, such as “Tell me about the parties you like the most.”

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Structured Personality Tests

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“I like loud and crowded parties” Answer “True” or “False.”

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Likert Rating Scale

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Method that involves requesting participants to indicate in numerical form the degree to which each trait term characterizes them from a low number to a high number.

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Twenty Statements Test (TST)

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A test for use in regards to one's "sense of self" which helps identify self-designations. The question "Who am I?" is asked at the top of a paper and must be given 20 different responses.

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Inter-Rater Reliability

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The use of multiple observers allows investigators to evaluate the degree of agreement among observers.

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Multiple Social Personalities

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Our manifest personalities vary from one social setting to another, depending on the nature of relationships we have with other individuals.

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Naturalistic Observation

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Observers witness and record events that occur in the normal course of the lives of their participants. For example, a child might be followed throughout an entire day, or an observer may sit in a participant’s home.

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Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

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A technique used to identify the areas of the brain that “light up” when performing certain tasks such as verbal problems or spatial navigation problems. It works by gauging the amount of oxygen brought to particular places in the brain.

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Projective Techniques

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A person is given a standard stimulus and asked what he or she sees.

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Reliability

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The degree to which an obtained measure represents the true level of the trait being measured.

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Repeated Measurement

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There are different forms of repeated measurement; one example is to repeat a measurement over time for the same people. If the two tests are highly correlated, yielding similar scores for most people, the resulting measure is said to have high test-retest reliability.

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Response Sets/Non-Content Responding

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Refers to the tendency of some people to respond to the questions on a basis that is unrelated to the question content.

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Acquiescence

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A response set which is the tendency to simply agree with questionnaire items, regardless of the content of those items.

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Extreme Responding

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A response set which refers to the tendency to give endpoint responses, such as “strongly agree” or “strongly disagree” and to avoid the middle part of response scales, such as “slightly agree” or “slightly disagree.”

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Social Desirability

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A response set which is the tendency to answer items in such a way as to come across as socially attractive or likable.

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Forced-Choice Questionnaire

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An approach to minimize the effects of socially desirable responding. Test takers are confronted with pairs of statements and asked to indicate which statement is truer of them out of the pair, though each statement is similar in social desirability.

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Validity

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Refers to the extent to which a test measures what it claims to measure.

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Theoretical Constructs

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Hypothetical internal entities useful in describing and explaining differences between people.

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Generalizability

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The degree to which a measure retains its validity across different contexts.

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Experimental Methods

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Used to determine causality – To find out whether one variable influences another variable.

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Counterbalancing

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In this kind of experiment, equivalence is obtained by counterbalancing the order of the conditions, with half the participants getting the drug first and sugar pill second, and the other half getting the sugar pill first and the drug second.

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Correlational Method

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A statistical procedure for determining whether there is a relationship between two variables without manipulation.

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Correlation Coefficient

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Correlations around .10 are considered small; correlations around.30 considered medium; and correlations around.50 or greater considered large.

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Directionality Problem

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A reason why correlations can never prove causality. If A and B are correlated, we do not know if A is the cause of B or if B is the cause of A, or if a third unknown variable is causing both A and B.

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Case Study Method

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Examining the life of one person in particular depth, which can give researchers insights into personality that can be used to formulate a more general theory that is tested in a larger population. They can also provide in-depth knowledge of a particularly outstanding individual.

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Cross-Cultural Universality

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In the lexical approach, cross-cultural universality states that if a trait is sufficiently important in all cultures then the trait must be universally important in human affairs.

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Factor Loadings

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Indexes of how much of the variation in an item is “explained” by the factor, or the degree to which the item correlates with (loads on to) the underlying factor.

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Factor Analysis

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A commonly used statistical procedure used to identify underlying structure in personality ratings or items. FA essentially identifies groups of items that correlate with each other, but tend not to correlate with other groups of items.

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Conscientiousness

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“Responsible” “Scrupulous” “Persevering” “Fussy/Tidy”

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Emotional Stability

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“Composed” “Not Hypochondriacal” “Poised”