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Approaches to Personality

Isabel LONGDEN Psychology English

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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
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
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
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
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)
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
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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Description: Psychology Mind Map on Approaches to Personality, created by Isabel LONGDEN on 26/04/2021.
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Approaches to Personality

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