Approaches to Personality

Approaches to Personality

1. What is Personality?

   • Psychological definitions
     • Funder (1997)
       • An individual's characteristic pattern of thought, emotion and behaviour, together with the psychological mechanisms - hidden or not - behind those patterns
     • Carver and Scheier (2000)
       • A dynamic organisation, inside the person, of psychophysiological systems that create a person's characteristic patterns of behaviour, thoughts and feelings.
     • Wilt and Revelle (2014)
       • Abstractions that explain patterns of Affect, Behaviour, Cognition (and sometimes, Desires)
     • All 3 definitions refer to key components
       • 3 components
         • Cognitive
         • Behacvioural
         • Emotional
       • Characteristic patterns - predictable and knowable
       • Mechanisms/systems that underlie patterns

2. Overarching Approaches to Personality

   • Nomothetic vs. Idiographic
     • Nomothetic
       • The same set of words are relevant to everyone
       • Traits are linked to common underlying physiological areas
     • Idiographic
       • Rejects idea of common terms
       • Uniqueness - shouldn't categorise people
   • Dispositional vs. Situational
     • Dispositional
       • Linked to nomothetic approaches
       • Consistent, internal dispositions
       • Act regardless of context
       • Evidence
         • Significant correlation between traits and behaviour r = 0.40 (Funder, 2001)
           • Consistency across situations
           • But other things will influence behaviour, e.g. mood
         • Traits influence types of situation encountered
     • Situational
       • Respond to individual situations
       • Patterns of behaviour comes from behavioural signatures

3. Early Models of Personality

   • Four Temperaments
     • Galen - applied Ancient Greek Philosopy to describe temperament
       • Balance of bodily fluid determined balance of temperament
         • Mucus - phlegmatic (calm)
         • Bile - Choleric (angry)
         • Blood - Sanguine (happy)
         • Black Bile - Melancholic (depressed)
       • Imbalance led to mental illness
       • Contributions
         • Popularised notion of personality types
         • Temperament descriptors influenced modern theories of personality
         • Specified link between biology and temperament
   • Eysenck's PEN Theory
     • Initial Theory (1947)
       • Two dimensions of personality
         • Extraversion
         • Neuroticism
       • Continuum
       • Orthogonal to one another
       • Normal distribution for each
       • Super traits that provide the complete description of personality
       • Biological underpinning
     • The 3rd Dimension
       • Psychopaths
         • Emotionally unstable
         • Lower levels of fear
         • Lack of remorse
         • Lack of appreciation of consequences
       • Not normally distributed
       • Not independent of neuroticism
     • The Biology
       • Extraversion
         • Different activity levels in the reticulo-cortical system
           • ARAS - ascending reticular activation system
             • Modulates level of difficulty in the cortex
           • Cortex
         • Moderate levels of arousal are preferred
           • Extraverts
             • Lower levels of cortical arousal
             • Seek out stimulation
           • Introverts
             • Higher levels of cortical arousal
             • Avoid stimulation
         • Gale (1983) - reviewed studies that tested biological hypothesis
           • Mixed evidence - most support
           • Methodological issues
             • Unsystematic use of personality measures
             • Arousal level of task causes people to adapt to preferred level of cortical arousal which obscures differences
           • Trans, Craig and McIsaac (2001) - addressed methodological issues
             • Activity measured from frontal regions of brain
             • Used older participants (stable personality)
             • Used 'moderately demanding' task
             • Compared mean amplitude of EEG activity between extra/introverts
               • Introverts - 4.5microvolts
               • Extraverts - 6.9microvolts
       • Neuroticism
         • Differential activity levels in the reticulo-limbic system
           • Limbic system - involved with emotional processing
           • Neurotics prone to higher levels of arousal in limbic system
       • Psychoticism
         • Linked to male hormones/dopamine levels
       • Evaluation
         • Good evidence for E and N factors
         • Major contribution to trait and biological theories of personality
         • Development of several personality questionnaires
           • EPI, MMQ, EPQ-R, EPP
         • P factor less accepted
         • Neurobiological of emotional processing more complex than original thought
         • Too much focus on biology/genetics

4. Behavioural Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory

   • Jeffrey Gray - development/alternative to Eysenck
   • Based on work with non-human animals
   • Two separate systems that dictate responses in given situations
     • Behavioural Activation System
       • Activates 'approach; behaviour towards goal according to prev experiences
       • Motivated to seek reward
       • Based on conditioned responses associated with positive events
     • Behavioural Inhibition System
       • Focuses attention on potential costs
       • Inhibits behaviours associated with negative events
       • Motivated to avoid harm and punishment
   • Main neural components
     • Amygdala
     • Ventromedial hypothalamus
     • Midbrain gray matter
   • Individual differences lie in differential strengths of BAS and BIS
   • Theory revised (r-RST) in line with advances in neuroscience
     • Walker et al. (2017) additional fight/flight/freezing system
     • BIS as an evaluative comparator of responsive conflicts
   • Personality Dimensions
     • Anxiety driven by strength of BIS system
     • Impulsivity driven by strength of BAS
     • Psychoticism considered separate to BAS and BIS

5. Lexical Hypothesis and Data Reduction Techniques

   • Lexical Hypothesis
     • All aspects of individual personality can be described from single words used in language
       • Allport and Odbert (1936)
         • Collected all personality terms from Webster's dictionary
         • Extract all words related to behavioural differences - 18,000
         • Removed terms related to cognitive, physical or transient states - 4,500
     • Latent Variables
       • Many physical variables can be directly observed and measured
       • Most psychological variables cannot be directly observed (latent)
     • Correlations
       • Use statistical tools to identify words that are similar enough in meaning to relate to latent traits
       • The basis of 'data reduction' techniques
       • Enable us to determine which terms are related to one another, and so represent a common latent factor
       • A correlation matrix shows relationships between each pair
   • Data Reduction Techniques
     • Factor Analysis
       • A multivariate data reduction technique
       • Looks for the set of latent variables that best account for the pattern of correlation within the dataset
       • Data reduced to underlying latent factors
       • A statistical technique that uses patterns of correlations between several variables to identify a smaller number of underlying latent variables
       • Researcher must decide how many factors to extract
       • Researcher names factors based on the items that load onto it
       • For independent factors, items should load strongly on only one factor (with low cross-loading)

6. Cattell's 19 Personality Factor Model

   • Raymond Cattell
     • Learnt under Spearman
     • Started with 4,500 words of Allport and Odbert
       • Systematically reduce number of terms to a much smaller set
       • Made groups of synonyms with rates
       • And pairs of antonyms
       • Selected exemplar from each pair
       • Ended up with 171 different terms
     • Too many for a factor analysis
       • 100 people each rated one/two people on all 171 terms
       • Examined correlations to identify 60 clusters
       • Added a few more terms from psychiatric literature
     • Factor analysed range of data relating to ~45 surface traits
     • Eventually identify 16 personality factors (source traits)
   • 16 Personality Factors
     • Q factors can only be measured through self-report and not other types of data
     • Scales not categories
     • Listed in order of importance/variance explained
   • Discussion
     • Subjectivity and arbitrariness in analysis
     • Many failures to replicate 16 factor structure
     • Sixteen is too many to work with
     • Correlations between factors - not independent
     • Better accounted for by smaller number of independent factors
     • Methodical, data-driven approach to theory development
     • Prompted use of factor analysis in personality research
     • Revised 16PF questionnaires still used
     • Formed the basis of subsequent 'big 5' models

7. Big Five and Alternatives

   • Costa and McCare's Big Five
     • Cattell - evidence for five 'super' factors
     • Other work based on 'lexical hypothesis' showed 5 factors
     • Convergence of models showing 5 independent factors
     • Five factors are 'necessary and reasonably sufficient' for describing major features of personality at a global level (McCrae & Costa, 1986)
     • Costa and McCrae (1985)
       • Neuroticism
       • Extraversion
       • Openness to Experience
       • Agreeableness
       • Conscientiousness
   • NEOAC/OCEAN
     • NEO-PI-R
     • Measure 6 facets of each super trait
       • Neuroticism
         • Anxiety
         • Vulnerability
         • Angry hostility
         • Depression
         • Self-consciousness
         • Impulsiveness
       • Extraversion
         • Warnth
         • Gregariousness
         • Assertiveness
         • Activity
         • Positive emotions
         • Excitement-seeking
       • Openness to experience
         • Fantasy
         • Aesthetics
         • Feelings
         • Actions
         • Ideas
         • Values
       • Agreeableness
         • Trust
         • Altruism
         • Straightforwardness
         • Compliance
         • Modesty
         • Tendermindedness
       • Conscientiousness
         • Competence
         • Order
         • Dutifulness
         • Self-discipline
         • Deliberation
         • Achievement-striving
     • Each facet measured with several items
   • Big Five vs. Eysenck's Gigantic Three
     • Eysenck's Three Factors (PEN)
       • Openness is intelligence
       • Agreeableness = Low P, Low N and High E
     • Costa and McCrae (1985)
       • Correlations between scores on PEN and OCEAN scales
         • Good correlation between neuroticism and extraversion scores between the two
         • Much poorer correlation between openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness with Eysenck's traits
   • Criticism
     • Jack Block (1995) - has written scathingly about Big Five
       • Factors derived from factor analysis depend on which variables are entered ... and on number of factors extracted
       • Single words insufficient to describe all aspects of personality - sentences and paragraphs needed
       • Overreliance on lay persons, results in important omissions
       • Simple correlations do not capture full complexity of relationships between terms
     • Evidence for cross-cultural stability of factors
     • Emerging evidence for biological basis
     • The most widely-used model of personality
     • A useful 'common currency' in personality research
     • Other Big Trait Models
       • Alternative Big Five (Zuckerman et al., 1999)
       • HEXACO (Lee and Ashton, 2004)

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