Personality Terms Chapter 04

Front 1

Personality Trait

Back 1

A word or phrase that describes psychological qualities that are relatively stable, and differ between people.

Front 2

Trait Approach

Back 2

Attempts to build on intuition by translating the natural, informal language of personality traits into a formal psychology that measures traits and uses them to predict and explain human behavior.

Front 3

Individual Differences

Back 3

Differences between people in a psychological attribute (such as a personality trait).

Front 4

Behavioral Consistency

Back 4

The degree to which people's behaviors remain relatively the same (or at least similar) over time and across situations.

Front 5

Person-Situation Debate

Back 5

A theoretical and empirical argument about which predicts behavior best, personality or situational factors.

Front 6

Correlation Coefficient

Back 6

A number that ranges between -1 and +1 that reflects the degree to which one variable is associated with another variable (traditionally called "X" and "Y"). A negative correlation means that as the value of X gets larger, the value of Y becomes smaller; a positive correlation means that as X gets larger so does Y, and as X gets smaller so does Y; a zero correlation means that X and Y are unrelated.

Front 7

Positive Correlation

Back 7

Refers to the direction of a correlation coefficient; as X gets larger so does Y, and as X gets smaller so does Y.

Front 8

Negative Correlation

Back 8

Refers to the direction of a correlation coefficient; this term describes a situation when as the value of X gets larger the value of Y becomes smaller, and when the value of X gets smaller the value of Y becomes larger.

Front 9

Zero Correlation (no correlation)

Back 9

Refers to a sample for which two variables have no association with each other (r = 0).

Front 10

Strength, size (of correlations)

Back 10

Can range from 0 to 1, the __________ of a correlation refers to how tight, meaningful, or important the association among two variables are; the __________ refers to the nature of the relationship among the two variables (e.g., inverse relationship); you must interpret both of these separately to understand the meaning of a correlation coefficient.

Front 11

Cognitive Dissonance

Back 11

The unpleasant feeling that one is holding two conflicting attitudes at the same time. This feeling is held by some theorists to be an important mechanism underlying attitude change.

Front 12

Situationism

Back 12

The position that situations are more important than personality traits in determining behavior.

Front 13

Predictability

Back 13

In personality psychology, the degree to which your behavior can be predicted from your personality characteristics.

Front 14

Upper limit of predictability

Back 14

A correlation of about .40 for using personality traits to predict behavior.

Front 15

Self-Monitoring

Back 15

A personality trait that describes people who will quickly change their behavior according to the situation they are in.

Front 16

Moderator Variable

Back 16

A variable that changes (or alters) a correlation among two other variables.

Front 17

Obedience

Back 17

Doing something as a result of a direct order from an authority figure.