Intro to Personality

• The three fundamental approaches in personality psychology are lexical approach, statistical approach, and theoretical approach
• Lexical Approach - uses the dictionary as its source of information about what the important personality traits are. Lexical Approach uses the lexical hypothesis, which states that all important individual differences are encoded in natural language. This hypothesis accounts for changes of what individual differences are important through time and space
• In the lexical approach, the two criteria in identifying important traits are synonym frequency, and cross-cultural universality. Synonym frequency is the number of synonyms one trait has. Cross-cultural universality is how many languages describe the same trait. The higher the synonym frequency and cross cultural universality, the more important the trait is
• Statistical Approach starts with a pool of personality items then performs self-ratings which are then statistically analyzed. Statistical approach uses self-ratings about behaviour, experiences, and emotion then applies statistical methods to identify groups and clusters of items to find major personality dimensions. This can also be used to coordinate personality maps
• The Statistical Approach uses factor analysis which identifies groups of items going together, and makes sure these groups are mutually exclusive.
• The Theoretical Approach starts with theories which determine which variables (personality traits) are important. Whatever strengths and weaknesses are within the theories determines how strong and weak the analysis will be
• Eysenck's Hierarchical Model of Personality is a model based on what traits are believed to be highly heritable and likely have psychophysiological foundations. The main traits in Eysenck's model is extraversion (E), neuroticism (N), and psychoticism (P), or PEN.
• Psychoticism (P): A person who scores high on this dimension tends to be impulsive, aggressive, selfish, callous, cruel, manipulative, and antisocial. Psychopaths are an example of someone scoring very high on P. Those who score low on P tend to be empathetic, caring, cooperative, and law abiding.
• In Eysenck's Hierarchical Model of Personality, each trait (PEN) sits on top of its own hierarchy. Each trait starts with super-traits, then narrower traits, habitual acts, then specific acts.
• In Eysenck's personality system, specific acts are can become habitual acts if it is done/repeated frequently