Introduction to psychology of personality

Adjectives that can be used to describe characteristics of people are called trait.

Descriptive adjectives. There are more than 20,000 such trait-descriptive

adjectives.
Psychology of Personality
In the English
CPS language.
212 This astonishing fact alone tells us that, in everyday
life, there are compelling
LECTURE reasons
-3-for trying to understand and describe the nature
of those we interact with, as well as compelling reasons for trying to understand

and describe ourselves.

 Personality Psychology
CH 2

Personality Assessment, Measurment, and research

Design
 Sources of perspnality data
 Perhaps the most obvious source of information about a person is self-report
data (S-data)-the information a person reveals. Clearly, individuals may not
always provide accurate information about themselves for a variety of reasons,
such as the desire to present themselves in a positive light. Nevertheless, the
journals that publish the latest research in personality reveal that self-report is
the most common method for measuring personality.
 Self-Report Data (S-Data)

 Self-report data can be obtained through a variety of means, including

interviews that pose questions to a person, periodic reports by a person to
record the events as they happen, and questionnaires. The questionnaire
method, in which individuals respond to a series of items that request
information about themselves, is by far the most commonly used self-
report assessment procedure.
 Reasons for using self-report
 The most obvious reason is that individuals have access to a wealth of information about
themselves that is inaccessible to anyone else.

 Individuals can report about their feelings, emotions, desires, beliefs, and private
experiences. They can report about their self-esteem, as well as their perceptions of the
esteem in which others hold them.

 They can report about their innermost fears and fantasies. They can report about how
they relate to others and how others relate to them. And they can report about immediate
and long-term goals. Because of this potential wealth of information, self-report is an
indispensable source of personality data.
 Self-report can take a variety of forms, ranging from open-ended “fill in
the blanks ”to forced-choice true-or -false questions.

these are referred to as:

 Unstructured (open-ended, such as “Tell me about the parties you like the
most”)

 Structured (“I like loud and crowded parties”—answer “true” or “false”)

personality tests.
Activity
I am ……
o Social groups and classifications

o Ideological beliefs

o Interests

o Ambitions

o Self-evaluations
 A more complex method involves requesting participants to indicate in
numerical form the degree to which each trait term characterizes them,
say on a 7-point rating scale of 1 (least characteristic) to 7 (most
characteristic).

 This is called a Likert rating scale (after the person who invented it),
and it is simply a way for someone to express with numbers the degree
to which a particular trait describes him or her.
 Self-report measures have limitations
 For the self-report method to be effective, respondents must be both willing and able
to answer the questions put to them.

 Yet people are not always honest, especially when asked about unconventional
experiences, such as unusual desires, unconventional sex practices, and undesirable
traits.

 Some people may lack accurate self-knowledge. Because of these limitations,

personality psychologists often use sources of data that do not rely on the honesty or
insight of the participant. One of those sources is observers.
 Observer-Report Data (O-Data)
 Observer reports offer both advantages and disadvantages as sources of personality
data:

 One advantage is that observers may have access to information not achievable
through other sources.

 A second advantage of observer -reports is that multiple observers can be used to

assess each individual, whereas in self-report only one person provides information.
The use of multiple observers allows investigators to evaluate the degree of agreement
among observers-also known as inter-rater reliability.
 Observer-Report Data (O-Data)

 A second strategy for obtaining observational data is to use individuals who

actually know the target participants. For example, close friends, spouses,
mothers, and roommates have all been used to provide personality data on
participant.
 Naturalistic versus Artificial Observation

Naturalistic Artificial

• Observers witness and record events that occur • Observation can take place in fixed or artificial
in the normal course of the lives of their settings.
participants. • Observation is experimenter-generated
• offers researchers the advantage of being able situations has the advantage of controlling
to secure information in the realistic context of conditions and eliciting the relevant behaviour,
a person’ serve day life, but at the cost of not but this advantage comes at a cost-sacrificing
being able to control the events and behavioral the real realism of everyday life.
samples witnessed.
 Test Data (T-Data)
 Test data (T-data). In these measures, participants are placed in a standardized testing
situation. The idea is to see if different people react differently to an identical
situation.

 Henry Murray’ s (1948) classic book The Assessment of Men. The person is actually
being evaluated on tolerance of frustration and performance under adversity.

 Example of the use of T-data is Edwin Megar gee’s (1969) study on manifestations of
dominance.
 T-data have limitations
 First, some participants might try to guess what trait is being measured and then alter
their responses to create a specific impression of themselves.

 A second challenge is the difficulty in verifying that the research participants define the
testing situation in the same manner as the experimenter. An experiment designed to test
for “obedience to authority” might be mis-interpreted as a test for “intelligence,” perhaps
raising anxiety in ways that distort subsequent responses. Failure to confirm the
correspondence between the conception of experimenters and those of participants may
introduce error.
 T-data have limitations
 A third caution in the use of T-data is that these situations are inherently
interpersonal, and a researcher may inadvertently influence how the
participant behave. A researcher with an outgoing and friendly personality,
for example, may elicit more cooperation from participants than a cold or
aloof experimenter.
 Strengths

 T-data remain a valuable and irreplaceable/unique source of personality information.

Procedures used to obtain T-data can be designed to elicit behaviour that would be
difficult to observe in everyday life. They allow investigators to control the context and
to eliminate extraneous sources of influence. And they enable experimenters to test
specific hypotheses by applying control over the variables that are acknowledged to
have causal influence. For these reasons, T-data procedures remain an
indispensable/vital set of tools for the personality researcher.
 Mechanical Recording Devices
 Personality psychologists have been enterprising in adapting technological
innovations for the study of personality. An example of researcher ingenuity is the use
of the “actometer” to assess personality differences in activity or energy level.

 The actometer is essentially a modified self-winding watch, which can be strapped to

the arm or legs of participants (typically, children); Day-to-day and hour-to-hour
fluctuations in mood, physiology, and setting limit of any single sample of activity
level.
 Physiological Data
 A critical source of personality data enjoying a research measurement. Physiological measures
can provide information about a person’ s level of arousal, a person’ s reactivity to various
stimuli, and the speed at which a person takes in new information, and all potential indicators of
personality.

 Sensors can be placed on different parts of a person’ s body, for example, to measure
sympathetic nervous system activity, blood pressure, heart rate, and muscle contraction. Brain
waves, such as reactivity to stimuli, also can be assessed. And even physiological changes
associated with sexual arousal can be measured via instruments such as a penile strain gauge
(Geer & Head, 1990) or a vaginal blood flow mete.
 Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

 A more recent physiological data source comes from functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI), 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 that is brought to particular places in the brain. When a certain part of the
brain is highly activated, it draws large amounts of blood. The oxygen carried by the blood
accumulates in that region of the brain.

 The fMRI is able to detect concentrations of iron carried by the oxygen contained in the red
blood cells and thus determine the part of the brain that is used in performing certain tasks. The
colorful images that emerge from fMRI brain scans are often quite dramatic.
 Projective Techniques

 Another type of T-data are projective techniques, in which the person is given
a standard stimulus and asked what he or she sees.

 The most famous projective technique for assessing personality is the set of
inkblots developed by Hermann Rorschach.
 Life-Outcome Data (L-Data)

 Life-outcome data (L-data) refers to information that can be gleaned/collected

from the events, activities, and outcomes in a person’ s life that are available.

 Personality psychologists often use S-data and O-data to predict L-data.

 Life-Outcome Data (L-Data)
 L-data can serve as an important source of real-life information about personality.
Personality characteristics measured early in life are often linked to important life
outcomes several decades later. In this sense, life outcomes, such as work, marriage, and
divorce, are, in part, manifestations of personality.

 Nonetheless, it must be recognized that life outcomes are caused by a variety of factors,
including one’ s sex, race, and ethnicity and the opportunities to which one happens to be
exposed. Personality characteristics represent only one set of causes of these life
outcomes.
 Evaluation of personality measures
 Reliability can be defined as the degree to which an obtained measure represents the true level
of the trait being measured.

 There are several ways to estimate reliability. One way to estimate reliability is through
repeated measurement.

1. test-retest reliability: two tests are highly correlated, yielding similar scores for most people.

2. internal consistency reliability: psychologists constructing various measures assume that all
items on a scale are measuring the same characteristic
3. inter-rater reliability: observer -based personality measures is to obtain measurements from
multiple observers. the measure is said to have high reliability when different observers agree with
each other.
 Validity

 Validity refers to the extent to which a test measures what it claims to

measure.

 Five types of validity;

• Face validity

• Predictive validity

• Convergent validity

• Discriminant validity
• Construct validity
 Generalizability

 Generalizability is the degree to which the measure retains its validity

across various contexts. One context of interest might be different groups
of persons.

 A personality psychologist, for example, might be interested in whether a

questionnaire retains its predictive validity across age groups, genders,
cultures, or ethnic groups.
 Research Designs
 Three basic research designs in the field of personality psychology

 Experimental

 Correlational

 Case studies
 Experimental methods
 Experimental methods are typically used to determine causality-that is, to find out
whether one variable influence another variable. A variable is simply a quality that differs,
or can take different values, for different people.

 In order to establish the influence of one variable on another, several key requirements of
good experimental design must be met:

 (1) manipulation of one or more variables and

 (2) ensuring that participants in each experimental condition are equivalent to each other.

 In experimental designs, it is desirable to establish whether or not the groups in the

different conditions are significantly different.
 Correlational Studies

 A second major type of research design in personality is the correlational

study. In the correlational method a statistical procedure is used for
determining whether or not there is a relationship between two variables.

 A major advantage of correlational studies is that they allow us to identify

relationships among variables as they occur naturally.
 Case Studies
 Sometimes a personality researcher is interested in examining the life of one person
in-depth as a case study.

 There are many advantages to the case study method:

 Researchers can find out about personality in great detail, which rarely can be
achieved if the study includes a large number of people.

 Case studies can give researchers insights into personality that can then be used to
formulate a more general theory to be tested on a larger population.

 They can provide in-depth knowledge of particularly outstanding individuals.

 Experimental method Correlation Case Study
When to use suited for establishing suited for establishing the • suited for generating hypotheses that
causal relationships relationships between two can be tested subsequently using
among variables. or more variables that correlational or experimental methods.
occur in everyday life.
Pros (for) impractical to use the • can be used to identify patterns in
experimental method for individual psychological functioning
some questions. that might be missed by the more
rigorous but artificial experimental
approach and the limited correlational
designs.
• wonderful in depicting the richness and
complexity of human experience.
Cons poor at identifying the poor at establishing • cannot be generalized to anyone beyond
(against) relationships among causality. the single individual being studied.
variables as they occur
naturally in everyday life.