Unit 1: Introduction to Personality Psychology

Chapter 1
Personality: the set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are
organized and relatively enduring and that influence his or her interactions with, and adaptations
to the intrapsychic, physical, and social environments.

Personality Is the Set of Psychological Traits…

Psychological Traits: Characteristics that describe ways in which people are different from each
other, these traits also define how we are similar to each other. They describe the average
tendencies of a person.
Example: talkativeness, shyness, etc.

Research on Personality has four Questions

1. How many traits are there?
2. How are traits organized?
3. What are the origins of traits?
4. What are the correlations and consequences of traits?

Psychological traits are useful for at least 3 reasons

1. Describe people and help understand the dimensions of differences among people
2. Explain behaviour, the reasons people act may be partly a function of their personality
3. Predict the future, different personality will go for different jobs, tolerate stress differently, etc.

And Mechanisms…
Psychological Mechanisms: Like traits, except mechanisms refer to the processes of
personality. Most psychological mechanisms involves information processing activity.
Example: Extraverted person is more prepared to notice and act on certain kinds of social
information.

Most psychological mechanisms have three possible ingredients:

1. Input: may make a person more sensitive to certain kinds of information from the environment
2. Decision rules: may make them more likely to think about specific options
3. Outputs: may guide their behaviour toward certain categories of action.
Example: Danger – if courageous, then face danger; if cowardly, then run from danger –
confront source of danger; run from cause of danger.
Not all of our mechanisms are activated at all times, at any point in time only a few are
activated.

Within the Individual…

Within the individual: Personality is something a person carries with him/herself over time and
from one situation to the next. We feel we have always been the same person and will continue
to be the same person. Although our personalities are influenced by our environments and
significant other in our lives, we feel we carry the same personalities from situation to situation.
Important sources of personality reside within the individual and, hence, are at least somewhat
stable over time and somewhat consistent over situations.

That are organized and relatively enduring…

Organized: psychological traits and mechanisms for a given person are linked together in a
coherent fashion.
 Example: when you are hungry, your desire for food is probably higher than your desire for
intimacy, our personalities are organized in a sense that they contain decision rules that govern
which needs are activated depending on the circumstances.

Psychological traits are also relatively enduring overtime, particularly in adulthood.

Example: Anger is a state, anger prone is a trait.
*Some situation may be overpowering and suppress some psychological traits (e.g.
talkativeness in lectures).

And that influence…

Influential forces: personality traits and mechanisms can have an effect on people’s lives.
Personality influences how we act, view ourselves, think about the world, etc. Personality plays
a key role in affecting how people share their lives and how we think, act and feel.

His/her interactions with…

Nature of person environment interactions is complex

Four Interactions with situations

1. Perceptions: refers to how we see or interpret an environment.
Example: inkblots.
2. Selection: describes the manner in which we choose situations to enter.
Example: how we choose friends, hobbies, classes, etc.
3. Evocations: reactions we produce in others, often unintentionally to some extent, we create the
social environments that we inhabit.
Example: a large person might intimidate people even if that is not their goal
4. Manipulation: ways we intentionally try to influences other.
Example: a neat person telling someone to clean up.

And adaptations to…

Adaptations: convey the notion that a central feature of personality concerns adaptive function –
accomplishing goals, coping, adjusting and dealing with the challenges and problems we face
as we go through life. Even behaviour that does not seem functional may be beneficial.
Example: worrying seems non-functional but you get social support.

The Environment
Environment: often poses challenges for people, some are direct threats to survival like extreme
weather.
Example: Hunger makes you eat, shivering makes you a bit warmer.
We also pose adaptive challenges
Example: We may desire a good job, but there are many other people also competing for those
same positions.
- Our fears help us avoid or safely interact with these environmental threats to our survival.
- Challenges we encounter in our struggle for belongingness, love, and esteem are central to an
understanding of personality.

Among the potentially infinite dimensions of the environments we inhabit, our “effective
environment” represents only the small subset of features that our psychological mechanisms
direct use to attend and respond to.

We also have intrapsychic environment in addition to our physical and social environments.
 Intrapsychic: within the mind. We all have memories, dreams, desires, fantasies, and a
collection of private experiences that we live with each day. Although it is not objectively
verifiable as our social or physical environments, it is nevertheless real to each of us and makes
up an important part of psychological reality.
Example: our self-esteem is dependent on the challenges and adaptive challenges, like how
well you are doing in your job/school, or in your friendships. Both have different intrapsychic
memories. Our self-worth influences our intrapsychic memories.
- Our intrapsychic environment, no less that our physical and social environment, no less than
our physical and social environments, provides a critical context for understanding human
personality.

Three Levels of Personality Analysis

Personality can be analyzed at three levels
1. Universal: Like all others (the human nature level)
2. Particular: Like some others (the level of individual and group differences)
3. Uniqueness: Like no others (the individual uniqueness level)

Human Nature
These are the traits and mechanisms of personality that are typical among humans and are
possessed by (nearly) everyone.
Example: nearly every human has language skills, a desire to belong and be loved by others.

Individual and Group Differences

Individual differences: ways in which each person is like some other people (e.g. extraverts,
sensation seekers)
Group differences: people in one group may have certain personality features in common, these
features make a group different than other groups. (e.g. age, gender, sexual orientation)
- Differences between men and women are important

Individual Uniqueness
No two individuals have identical personalities

Two kinds of Personality Research

1. Nomothetically: individual instances of general characteristics that are distributed in the
population. Nomothetic research typically involves statistical comparisons of individuals or
groups. It is typically applied to identify universal characteristics and dimensions of individual or
group differences.

2. Idiographically: single, unique cases. Research typically focuses on a single subject trying to
observe general principles that are manifest in a single life overtime.

A Fissure in the Field

Grand Theories of Personality
Most of these theories address the human nature level of analysis. Statements about the
universal core of human nature lie at the centre of grand theories of personality.

Contemporary Research in Personality

Most empirical research in contemporary personality psychology addressed the ways in which
individuals and groups differ.
 Six Domains of knowledge about Human Nature
Domain of Knowledge: speciality area of science where psychologists have focuses on learning
about some specific and limited aspects of human nature.
Six Domains
1. Dispositional Domain: deals centrally with the ways in which individuals differ from one
another, this domain cuts across all domains. This is because individuals differ in their habitual
emotions, self-concepts, physiological properties and even the intrapsychic mechanisms.
2. Biological Domains: Humans are composed of biological systems which provide the building
blocks for behaviour, thought and emotion. There are three areas within this domain:
a. Genetics
b. Psychophysics
c. Evolution
3. Intrapsychic Domain: deals with the mental mechanisms of personality. Psychoanalysis
(Freud) is the main theory in this domain.
4. Cognitive-Experimental Domain: focuses on cognition and subjective experiences, such as
conscious thoughts, feelings, beliefs and desires about oneself and others. Mechanisms in
subjective experiences differ in form and content from one another. Self and self-concept, goals
we strive for and out emotions are all a part of this domain.
5. Social and Cultural Domain: Personality is not something that resides in our heads, nervous
system and genes but is influenced by social and cultural factors.
6. Adjustment Domains: Personality plays a key role in how we cope adapt and adjust to the ebb
and flow of events in our day-day lives. For example, personality has been linked to some heart
problems.

The Role of Personality Theory

Theories are essential in all scientific endeavours and serve useful purposes
- Provides a guide for researchers
- Organizes known findings
- Makes predictions
Good Theory: one that fulfills the three useful purposes

Standards for Evaluating Personality Theories

Scientific Standards for Evaluation Personality Theories: useful exploring the six domains
1. Comprehensiveness: does the theory explain all the facts and observations in its domain
2. Heuristic value: does the theory explain important new discoveries about personality that were
not known before.
3. Testability: does it provide precise predictions that can be tested empirically.
4. Parsimony: does the theory contain few premises and assumption or many premises and
assumptions (lack of)
5. Compatibility and integration across domains and levels: theory must work across all domains
or else it is fundamentally flawed.

Unit 2: Research Methods and Assessment Issues

Chapter 2

Chapter 4
Theoretical and Measurement Issues in Trait Psychology
Theoretical Issues
Trait theories share 3 important assumptions about personality traits and form the basic
foundation for trait psychology
1. Meaningful individual differences
2. Stability or consistency over time
3. Consistency across situations

Meaningful differences among individuals

Trait psychologists are primarily interested in the ways in which people are different from each
other

Trait psychology is also known as differential psychology

The trait perspective takes a quantitative approach which emphasizes how much a given person
differs on average

Of all the perspectives and strategies for studying personality, the trait approach is the most
mathematically and statistically oriented

According to trait psychologists, every personality is the product of a particular combination of a

few basic primary traits

Consistency over time

The view that many broad-based personality traits show considerable stability over time has
been supported by a large number of research studies

Personality traits are thought to have a biological basis, such as extraversion, sensation
seeking, activity level and shyness, which all show high consistency over time

Although a trait might be consistent over time, the way in which it manifests itself in actual
behaviour might change drastically

Criminal tendencies are known to decrease with age. Why this happens lies in the concept of
Rank Order: if all people show a decrease in a particular trait at the same rate over time, they
might still maintain the same rank relative to each other

→ people in general can show a decrease in impulsiveness as they get older, but those people
who were the most impulsive at an earlier age will still be the ones who are the most impulsive
at a later age

Consistency across situations

The evidence for consistency across time is substantial, but the question of consistency across
situations is debated
 Even though someone is really friendly, there are situations where they will not act
friendly

Walter Mischel suggested that personality psychologists should abandon their efforts to explain
behaviour in terms of personality traits and only focus on situations. If behaviour differs from
situation to situation than it must be situational differences. This position is called Situationism
 Mischel said that situations were the strongest determinant of behaviour
  He also maintains that trait psychologists are guilty of overstating the importance of
broad traits
 Mischel points out that psychologists are not good at predicting how an individual will
behave in a particular situation

Situationism today
Gladwell takes the position that most exceptional people get that way because of special
opportunities or life situations giving them an advantage (Ex. major computer companies like
Apple and Microsoft had founders all born between 1953-1956 when they were exposed to early
prototypes of computers and could spend hours playing with them).

Gladwell further says that exposure to critical life situations, at the right time, is what matters
most in understanding why some people are successful → the success does not lie within the
person but rather in the situations that they were exposed to

This view is rejected and the real answer to understanding most life outcomes can be found in
the interaction between personal characteristics and life situations: exceptional things happen
when chance situations meet the prepared person

Person-Situation Interaction
Two possible explanations for behaviour, or why people do what they do in any given situation:
1. Behaviour is a function of personality traits B=f(P)
2. Behaviour is a function of situational forces B=f(S)

The obvious answer is to integrate the two explanations and declare that both personality and
situations interact to produce behaviour or, B=f(P x S)
 This formula suggests that behaviour is a function of the interaction between personality
traits and situational forces
 If a person is frustrated in a situation (e.g., a vending machine takes their money but
doesn’t give them their product) AND the person happens to have a quick temper
(personality forces) then who or she will be more likely to become upset and begin to hit
the source of the frustration
o This point of view is called person-situation interaction and is the standard view
in modern trait theory

Some traits are specific to certain situations, such as someone who is generally easy going and
confident becoming tense and anxious during a test. This shows how very specific situations
can provoke behaviour that is otherwise out of character for a person, this is referred to as
Situational specificity

Some situations are so strong however, that everyone reacts in the same way:
 When really bad things happen like the death of a pet, virtually everyone reacts with a
strong emotion
o This is called Strong situation: situations in which nearly all people react in similar
ways

When situations are weak or ambiguous, personality has the strongest influence on behaviour

How we interpret social situations may reveal our personalities

→ people with a Machiavellian character (i.e., tendency to use others, be manipulative and cold)
often think others are out to get them, especially in ambiguous social interactions

There are 3 other ways in which personality traits interact with situations
1. Situational Selection
 The tendency to choose the situations in which one finds themselves in
 Researchers have examined whether specific personality traits predict how often
people enter into specific situations
 Researchers found that the trait of need for achievement correlated with
spending more time in work situations, suggesting that we can investigate
personality by studying the choices people make in life
o Given the choice, people typically choose situations that fit their
personalities
 Situations can also influence personalities
o I.e., being in an extraverted situation (big group of energetic people) can
raise a person’s level of positive affect
2. Evocation
 The idea that certain personality traits may evoke specific responses from the
environments
 People who are disagreeable and manipulative may evoke certain reactions from
others, such as hostility or avoidance
o People may create their own environments by eliciting responses from
others
 The idea of evocation is similar to Transference, which occurs when a patient in
psychoanalysis re-creates with the analyst, the interpersonal problems they are
having with others
3. Manipulation
 Defined as the various means by which people influence the behaviour of others
 Manipulation is the intentional use of certain tactics to coerce, influence, or
change others
 Manipulation changes social situations

Aggregation
The process of adding up, or averaging several single observations resulting in a better (more
reliable) measure of a personality trait than a single observation of behaviour

Seymour Epstein published several papers showing that aggregating several questions or
observations results in better trait measures

Charles Spearman published a paper in 1910, explaining tests with more items are generally
more reliable than tests with fewer items, he provided a formula called the Spearman-Brown
Prophesy Formula for determining how much a test’s reliability will increase as it is made
longer

Aggregation is a technique designed to improve trait measures by adding items to a

questionnaire or adding observations to obtain an overall score
Aggregation implies that traits are only one influence on behaviour, and that at any given time
there are many factors that influence behaviour. It also implies that traits refer to a person’s
average level
 Personality traits are average tendencies to behave in certain ways

Fleeson introduced Density Distributions of States

 Each trait is associated with specific states (i.e., extraversion is associated with talking
with others)

Measurement Issues
More than any other approach to personality, the trait approach relies on self-report
questionnaires to measure personality
 This assumes that people are willing and able to report accurately on their behaviour
 Some people might not be motivated to answer truthfully on a questionnaire
 Another issue is people who are not reading the questions carefully but still providing
answers
o A common method for detecting these problems is to embed an infrequency
scale within the questionnaire, which contains items almost all people will answer
the same (i.e., I make all my own clothes, I do not believe that wood really burns)
Answering more than one or two of these “wrong” will indicate the test as
suspicious
o Another technique is to add duplicate questions spaced apart in the
questionnaire to see if they have the same or different responses
 Faking on questionnaires involves the motivated distortion of answers
 People may be motivated to “fake good” in order to appear better off or better adjusted
or “fake bad” to appear worse off and more maladjusted than they really are
o Whenever important decisions are based on responses from questionnaires,
care must be taken to account for desirable responding or, “faking good”
o If researchers conclude that a truthful person was faking and reject their data this
is a false negative and if they decide a person who was faking was telling the
truth this is a false positive
 Barnum statements are generalities, statements that could apply to anyone though they
often appear to the reader to apply specifically to them (i.e., horoscopes)

Applications of Personality Testing in the Workplace

A survey revealed that 44% of its respondents used testing to screen or select employees

The personality tests used in the workplace are mostly self-report measures of specific traits or
dispositions

Personnel Selection
Employers sometimes use personality tests to select people especially suitable for a specific job

A number of personality tests and applications can aid employers in personnel selection

Integrity Testing
Personality tests that assess honesty and integrity are probably the most widely used form of
personality assessment in the business world
Designed to predict the tendency toward theft and absenteeism

Concerns over Negligent Hiring

If an employee assaults a customer, the employer can be sued for Negligent hiring so
employers may use personality tests to try to combat this

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

By far the most widely used personality assessment device in business settings
Tests 8 fundamental preferences, then these preferences are reduced to four scores:
1. Extraverted or Introverted
2. Sensing or Intuitive
3. Thinking or Feeling
4. Judging or Perceiving
These 4 scores are then combined to yield types, and each person is placed into one of the 16
types

Several problems with the MBTI:

 The theory that it is based from (jung’s theory of Psychological types) is not widely
endorsed by research
o People don’t come in types, instead, most personality traits are normally
distributed, suggesting that people are neither purely one type but are
somewhere in between
 The importance of cutoff scores for classifying people into one category or another
o Most users of the MBTI use the median score from a standardized sample as the
cutoff, the problem lies that a large percentage of people in any sample will be
clustered right around the median score
 MBTI does not have a high test-retest reliability
 Also assumes large between-category differences and no within-category differences
among people
o Ex. All extraverted types assumed to be alike, and introverted types are assumed
to be very different, which is not the case

The Hogan Personality Inventory

The MBTI should not be used to select employees

In most business settings, people work in groups, and every group has a status hierarchy.
Hogan’s theory is that within such groups, people want 3 things:
1. Acceptance, including respect and approval
2. Status and control of resources
3. Predictability

Hogan developed a questionnaire measure of personality called the Hogan Personality

Inventory (HPI) that measures aspects of the big five traits that are relevant to the above three
motives important to business

The HPI is based on the Big Five model, which has been modified specifically for applications in
the workplace
HPI follows standard statistical procedures, resulting in an inventory with a high level of
measurement reliability (test-retest correlations range from .74 to .86) there have been more
than 400 validity studies of the HPI

None of the items on the HPI are invasive or intrusive, and none of the scales show adverse
impact on the basis of gender, race, or ethnicity

Between 300 and 500 companies use the HPI services to select or develop employees

Unit 3: Personality Traits and Trait Taxonomies

Chapter 3
Traits as Internal Causal Properties
Traits are assumed to be internal in the sense that individuals carry their desires, needs, and
wants from one situation to the next.
These desires and needs are thought to be causal in the sense that they explain the behaviour
of the individuals who have them.

→ Ex. X may have a desire to take charge in most social situations, even if he does not always
express this desire, like situations when there is already an identified leader, such as a
professor.
→ Ex. Glass has the trait of being brittle. Even if a particular glass never shatters (i.e.,
expresses its brittleness), it still possesses the trait of being brittle.

Psychologists who view traits as internal dispositions believe that traits can lie dormant, but their
capacities remain present even when particular behaviours are not actually expressed.

Traits - the sense of internal needs, desires, drives, and so on - are presumed to exist, even in
the absence of observable behavioural expressions

Traits as Purely Descriptive Summaries

Proponents of this alternative theory make no assumptions about internality or causality in
regards to traits.

→ Ex. X being jealous of other men talking to his girlfriend could be caused by other men are
flirting with her, and she is responding to them (a situational cause), rather that viewing it as X
being an intrinsically jealous person.

Those who view traits as descriptive summaries do not prejudge the cause of the someone’s
behaviour. They just use traits to describe the person’s behaviour.

The Act Frequency Formulation of Traits

Some psychologists who endorse the descriptive summary formulation of traits have explored it
through a program of research known as “act frequency approach.”

The act frequency approach starts with the notion that traits are categories of acts.
 Just as the category “birds” has specific birds as members of the category (e.g.,
sparrows, robins)
 Ex. The category of dominance may include specific acts/behaviours such as:
o He issues orders to the group
 o He assigned roles and got the group going
o She decided what they watched on TV
Dominance is a trait category with hundreds of acts as members.
A dominant person according to the act frequency approach, is someone who performs a large
number of dominant acts relative to others. A trait, such as dominance, is a descriptive summary
of the general trend in a person’s behaviour - a trend that consists of performing a large number
of acts within a category relative to others.

Act Frequency Research Program

Three key elements: act nomination, prototypicality judgement, and act performance

Act Nomination
 A procedure designed to identify which acts belong to which trait categories

Prototypicality Judgement
 Identifying which acts are most central to, or prototypical of each trait category
o Which acts come to mind first when thinking of a category

Recording of Act Performance

 Securing information on the actual performance of individuals in their daily lives, which is
difficult
o Most researchers use self-reports of act performance or reports from close
friends and family

Evaluation of the Act Frequency Formulation

The formulation of traits as purely descriptive summaries, has been criticized on several
grounds, mostly at the technical implementation of the approach.
→ Ex. The act frequency approach (AFA) does not specify how much context should be
included in the description of a trait-relevant act.

Another criticism is that it seems applicable to overt actions, but what about failures to act and
covert acts that are not directly observable?
→ Ex. a person may be very courageous, but this would not be known under ordinary life
circumstances in which people don’t need to display this trait

However, explorations of the act frequency approach have helped to identify the domains in
which it provides insight into personality.
Other research shows that the AFA can be used to predict important outcomes in everyday life
such as job success, salary, and how rapidly one is to be promoted within business
organizations

Identification of the Most Important Traits

Three approaches have been used to identify important traits:
Lexical Approach: all traits listed and defined in the dictionary form the basis of describing
people
Statistical Approach: Uses factor analysis, or similar statistical procedures, to identify major
personality traits
Theoretical Approach: researchers rely on theories to identify important traits
Lexical Approach
Starts with the Lexical Hypothesis: all important individual differences have become encoded
within the natural language. Differences among people that are important are noticed, and
words are invented to talk about those differences

People create trait terms which are important in communicating with others.

The lexical approach has two criteria for identifying important traits Synonym frequency and
cross-cultural universality
 If an attribute has many words to describe it than it is more important
 The prevalence of many synonyms suggests that that trait is important
 The more important a trait is the more languages will have a term for it
o If a trait is important in all cultures than its members will use terms to describe it
and is therefore universally important in human affairs

One problem with the lexical strategy is that personality is conveyed through different parts of
speech (adjectives, nouns, adverbs).

However, the lexical strategy has been a good starting point for identifying important individual
differences but should not be used on its own.

Statistical Approach
Starts with a pool of personality items, such as trait words or a series of questions about
behaviours, experiences, self-ratings or emotions. Once the pool of items is made, the statistical
approach is applied which consists of having a large number of people rate themselves or
others on the items and then a statistical procedure is used to identify groups as well as clusters
of items.

The most commonly used statistical procedure is factor analysis

 Factor analysis essentially identifies groups of items that go together but tend not to
covary with other groups of items

A major advantage of identifying clusters of personality items that covary is that it provides a
means for determining which personality variables have some common property

Factor analysis can also be useful in reducing the large array of diverse personality traits into a
smaller and more useful set of underlying factors

However, if an important personality trait is left out of the factor analysis, it will NOT show up in
the results

Factor analysis has been extremely valuable for personality researchers in order to reduce a
large array of diverse personality adjectives or items into a smaller, more meaningful set of
broad factors

Theoretical Approach
Starts with a theory that determines which variables are important to measure

Evaluating the Approaches for Identifying Important Traits

The theoretical approach is only as strong as the theory is. If you have a strong theory that tells
you which variables are important, then it saves one from looking aimlessly.

However, its weaknesses coincide with the weaknesses of the theory. If the theory contains
gaps or biases, the subsequent data will too.

In practice, many personality researchers use a combination of the three strategies.

Taxonomies of Personality
Eysenck’s Hierarchical Model of Personality
The model that is strongly rooted in biology

Eysenck developed a model for personality based on traits he thought were highly heritable and
had a likely psychophysiological foundation

The three main traits he found that met this criteria were:
1. Extraversion-introversion (E)
 Extraverts are social, active and lively, have a high activity level and like to play
practical jokes on people
 Introverts like to spend time alone, seem aloof and distant, prefer a routine, be
more organized and predictable
2. Neuroticism-emotional stability (N)
 High in neuroticism means one is more anxious, irritable, guilty, tense, lacking
self-esteem, and shy
 High N scorer also has trouble sleeping, prone to mental disorders like
Depression, experiences a greater degree of emotional arousal, stay angrier for
longer and are less forgiving
 Low N scorer are emotionally stable, even-tempered, calm, and slower to react to
stressful events
3. Psychoticism (P)
 High P people are more aggressive, egocentric, lack empathy, and are antisocial
 High P scorer is typically a solitary individual, described as a loner, cruel and
inhumane, more verbally and physically aggressive, and prefer violent films and
unpleasant paintings and photos
 Men who score high on Machiavellianism (which is highly correlated with P) are
more likely to endorse promiscuous and hostile sexual attitudes as well as,
pretend to be in love with someone when they are not, ply potential sex partners
with alcohol, and report trying to force others into sexual acts
 High P also get into more dangerous activities, such as theft, violence, and
vandalism
 Low P tend to be more religious

Biological Underpinnings
Two aspects of biological underpinnings of Eysenck’s personality system:
1. Heritability
 Evidence confirms that PEN do have moderate heritabilites
 2. Identifiable physiological substrate
 One can identify properties in the brain and nervous system that are presumed to
be apart of the causal chain that produces personality traits (i.e., extraversion is
supposed to be linked with central nervous system arousal or reactivity
 Eysenck proposed that Neuroticism was linked with the degree of lability
(changeability) of the autonomic nervous system

Eysenck’s taxonomy has multiple features:

 It is hierarchical, starting with broad traits, which subsume narrower traits, which in turn
subsume specific actions, the broad traits are shown to be moderately heritable

It also has several limitations:

 Many other personality traits also show moderate heritability, not just PEN
 Eysenck may have missed some important traits in his taxonomy

Cattell’s Taxonomy: The 16 Personality Factor System

Cattell believed that true factors of personality should be found across different types of data
such as; self-reports (S data), and lab tests (T data)

Cattell has one of the largest taxonomies at 16 factors

Cattell can be credited for developing a strong empirical strategy for identifying the basic
dimensions of personality, as well as for stimulating and shaping the entire trait approach to
personality

Limitations:
 Some researchers have failed to replicate the 16 separate factors, and many argue that
a smaller number of factors capture the most important ways in which individuals differ

Circumplex Taxonomies of Personality

Wiggins started with the Lexical approach but went further by arguing that trait terms specify
different kinds of ways in which individuals differ. One kind of individual difference has to do with
what people do to and with each other - Interpersonal Traits

Temperament traits: nervous, gloomy, excitable

Character traits: moral, principled, dishonest
Material traits: stingy, miserly
Attitude traits: spiritual, pious
Mental traits: clever, logical, perceptive
Physical traits: healthy, tough

Three advantages to the Wiggins Circumplex:

1. Provides an explicit definition of interpersonal behaviour
2. The circumplex specifies the relationships between each trait and every other trait within
the model. There are 3 relationships specified in the model (Adjacency: how close the
traits are to each other in the circumplex, bipolarity: located on opposite sides of the
circle and are negatively correlated with each other, and Orthogonality: specifies the
traits that are perpendicular to each other on the model and are unrelated to each other)
3. It alerts investigators to gaps in investigations of interpersonal behaviour
Limitations:
 The interpersonal map is limited to two dimensions
o Other traits not captured in these two dimensions also have important
interpersonal consequences

Five-Factor Model
Most widely used and accepted model

Made up of 5 traits:
1. Extraversion or surgency
2. Agreeableness
3. Conscientiousness
4. Emotional stability
5. Openness-intellect

The five factor model is based on the lexical approach and statistical approach

Fiske is noted as the first person to discover a version of the five-factor model

Tupes and Christal emerged with the five-factor model: surgency, agreeableness,
conscientiousness, emotional stability, and culture. This factor structure was replicated by
Norman

What is the empirical evidence for the five-factor model?

 Very replicable in studies using english-language trait words as items
 It has been replicated in other languages and in different item formats
 Measured in two ways:
o Self-ratings of single-word trait adjectives
o Self-ratings of sentence items

Lewis Goldberg has done the most research on the big-five using single-word trait adjectives
which are:
1. Surgency or extraversion
2. Agreeableness
3. Conscientiousness
4. Emotional stability
5. Intellect or imagination

Paul Costa and Robert McCrae have developed the most widely used measure for sentence-
length items, which is called the NEO-PI-R:
The Neuroticism-Extraversion-Openness (NEO) Personality-Inventory (PI) Revised (R)

What is the identity of the fifth factor?

Still some disagreement about the content and replicability of the fifth factor, a major cause of
these differences is that different researchers starts with different item pools to factor analyze.

Those who start with the lexical strategy usually endorse intellect as the fifth factor
Those who use questionnaire items tend to prefer openness

What are the empirical correlates of the five factors?

 Extraversion
o Love to party, enjoy talking a lot, social attention is the cardinal feature of
extraverts
o Extraverted men tend to be more bold with women who they don’t know
o Tend to be happier, more involved and enjoy their work and show more
commitment and organization for their work
o Tend to be physically stronger, and also more likely to get into car accidents and
road fatalities
 Agreeableness
o Favor negotiation to resolve conflicts
o Low-agreeable people try to assert their power to resolve social conflicts
o More likely to withdraw from social conflict
o Like harmonious social interaction
o Judge harshly of those who commit antisocial acts, and be less likely to be
bullied as kids compared to low-agreeable people
o Get along well with others, are well liked, avoid conflict
o Disagreeable people are aggressive and seem to be in many social conflicts
 Conscientiousness
o Hard working, punctual, and reliable
o Have greater job satisfaction, greater job security, and more positive and
committed social relationships
o Do not procrastinate, tend to be perfectionists, and score high on achievement
motivation
o More likely to stick with exercise plans and less likely to gain weight in middle
age
o Low C is linked to more risky sexual; behaviours like unprotected sex and are
more open to potential partners while already in a relationship
o Low C tend to have frequent arrests
 Emotional Stability
o People low in emotional stability are more tired throughout the day, and
experience more grief and depression when mourning a death of a loved one,
they also experience more self-handicapping and sexual anxiety
o People low in this trait also have dissociate experiences such as inability to recall
important life events, have more frequent suicidal ideation, report poorer physical
health, and engage in more health-impairing behaviours like drinking alcohol
excessively
 Intellect-openness
o High O people tend to remember their dreams more and have more vivid dreams
o Experiment with new foods, a liking for new experiences and have difficulty
ignoring previously experienced stimuli
o High openness is linked to creativity
o Low O people have more tunnel vision and find it easier to ignore competing
stimuli
o High O people report less prejudice to minority groups and are less racist
o High O people are more likely to have tattoos and piercings
Is the five-factor model comprehensive?
Critics argue that it leaves out important aspects of personality.

Proponents of the five factor model are open about the potential inclusion of more factors when
the evidence warrants it

One approach to personality factors beyond the big five has been to explore personality-
descriptive nouns rather than adjectives

A second approach has been to use the lexical approach, focusing on large pools of trait
adjectives in different languages
 Several studies have converged a sixth factor, one study of seven languages found
Honesty-humility to be a sixth factor
o Low H people are said to be more exploitive and to engage in criminal behaviour

Chapter 5

Unit 4: Biological Domain of Personality

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Unit 5: Psychoanalytical Approaches to Personality

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Unit 6: Motivation and Humanistic Topics in Personality

Chapter 11

Unit 7: Cognitive Topics in Personality

Chapter 12

Unit 8: The Self

Chapter 14
Descriptive Components of the Self: Self Concept
- Knowledge of self develops over years

Development of the Self-Concept

- Starts in infancy → A child learns that some things are always there (e.g. the body) and some
things are only there sometimes (e.g. a mother’s breast)
→ Makes the distinction between its own body and everything else
→ Most children recognize themselves in a mirror by 18 months Around 2 before they can
recognize themselves in pictures

→ Toddlerhood Around 2-3 toddlers begin to identify with their gender and age
Children at this age also explain their self-concept to include references to family “I am Peter’s
sister”
→ Childhood Between about 3-12, children’s self-concepts are based mainly on developing
talents and skills
Starting in school (age 5-6) children increasingly being to compare their skills and abilities with
those of others

Social comparison
Self-schemata- usually refers to past and current aspects of the self, but there are also
schemata for future selves, which people are able to imagine
Possible self
Evaluative Component of the Self: Self-Esteem
- self-esteem starts when children identify standards or expectations for behaviour and then live
up to them → when children master tasks (e.g. toilet training) it builds pride

- later childhood esteem begins with social comparison

- later on people develop internal standards

Evaluation of one’s Self

- self-esteem is a general evaluation of self-concept along a good-bad or like-dislike dimension
→ we have to take the bad with the good, we have acknowledge that we have both strengths
and weaknesses
→ when we do something that we do not consider to be like our self (being rude) we may
experience a dip in self-esteem

- people can evaluate themselves positively or negatively in different areas of their lives →
global self-esteem may be a composite of several individual areas of self-evaluation each of
these sub areas can be assessed separately

→ although there are distinct areas of life when people can feel more or less confident in
themselves (friendship, academics and appearance) self-esteem measures these as
moderately correlated

Research on Self-Esteem
- much of the research concerns how people respond to evaluation

Reactions to Criticisms and Failure Feedback

- how people with high and low self-esteem respond to failure feedback and criticism →
participants are taken into a lab and instructed to complete an important task
→ the participants are told they did poorly

→ the participants are given the opportunity to work on another test/assignment and they
measure how hard they try low self-esteem: try less and give up faster
high self-esteem: try just as hard as on the first test

→ research thinks that people readily accept feedback that is consistent with their self-concept

Self-Esteem and Coping with Negative Events

- high self-esteem persons maintain their positive evaluation through the ups and downs of
everyday life

Brown and Smart (1991)

- following failure in ones area of life, the high self-esteem persons will often focus on
other areas of life in which things are going well → most effective but least used strategy
for overcoming feelings of failure

Patricia Linville (1987)

- this idea of compartmentalizing the self is consistent with the research on self-
complexity
→ We have many roles and many aspects to our self-concept
Some of us have a very simple perception (job)
Some have larger senses of self (job, family, friends etc.)
→ People who have large sense of self, if they fail in one area they have a buffer to
keep them stable

Protecting us enhancing the Self

- People with low self-esteem are more likely to protect their self-concept by avoiding failure
much more than they are motivated to enhance their success
Taylor et. al. 2000
- The participants took an intelligence test and then were given the scores of the other
participants
- Participants were led to believe that they had done much better (false success
feedback) or much worse (false failure feedback)
→ The participants were offered the opportunity to receive more information on how
others did in comparison to them
→ Those with low self-esteem asked for more information only when they knew it
would be favourable
Defensive pessimism- a strategy in which a person facing a challenge, such as an up-coming
test, expects to do poorly.
- Defensive pessimists are motivated by their fear of failure, but they take this gloomy outlook
because the impact of failure can be lessened if it is expected in advance

Self-handicapping- a process in which a person deliberately does the things that increase the
probability that he or she will fail
→ When she fails, she can say she was simply unprepared not that she’s unintelligent or lacks
the ability to do well
→ For individuals with low self-esteem, failing is bad but failing without an excuse is even worse

Self-Esteem Variability
- Is an individual difference characteristic; it is a magnitude is short-term fluctuations in on-going
self-esteem
- Stress two main points → First: researchers make a distinction between level and variability of
self-esteem Level and variability in self-esteem are hypothesized to be based on different
psychological mechanisms are often found to interact in predicting important life outcomes

→ Second: self-esteem variability is related to the extent to which one’s self-evaluation is

changeable

Social Component of the Self: Self Identity

- Social identity is the self that is shown to other people → Gender and ethnicity are aspects of
social identity They may or may not figure into a person’s self-concept, but they are part of one’s
social self

→ Identity has an element of continuity because many aspects are constant (gender, ethnicity)

The Nature of Identity

- Identity has two important features: continuity and contrast → Continuity means that people
can count on you to be the same person tomorrow as you are today
→ Contrast means that your social identity differentiates you from other people. An identity is
what makes you different in the eyes of others

Identity Development
- Although anything that provides a sense of sameness can potentially become part of identity,
people have the ability to choose what they want to be known for
- Identity can be achieved in several ways, according to Erikson (1968) → Negative identity,
identity foreclosure etc.

Identity Crises
- A person’s identity can change from time to time
- Erikson coined the phrase identity crisis, meaning the feelings of anxiety that accompany
efforts to define or redefine one’s own individuality and social reputation

Identity Deficit
- Arises when a person has not formed an adequate identity and thus has trouble making major
decisions → This occurs because they have no inner foundation

- Identity deficits are particularly vulnerable to the propaganda of various groups

Identity Conflicts
- Involves an incompatibility between two or more aspects of identity → This kind of crisis often
occurs when a person is forced to make an important and difficult life decision

- Identity conflicts are “approach-approach” conflicts, in which the person wants to reach two
mutually contradictory goals

Resolution of Identity Crisis

- Both commonly occur during adolescence
 - - those who do find resolution involves two steps → First: they decide which values are most
important to them
→ Second: they transform these abstract values into desires and actual behaviours

Unit 9: Interpersonal Theories of Personality

Chapter 15

Unit 10: Personality in Sex, Gender, and Culture

Chapter 16
Escalating levels of sexism and violence – from undervalued intelligence to sexual harassment
in elementary school – cause girls to still their creative spirit and natural impulses which
destroys self-esteem.

The science and Politics of studying sex and gender

History of the study of sex differences
· Men were more aggressive than women (only finding in difference in personality).
· Effect size: estimate how large a difference is. E.g. Sex Difference (d statistic).
Calculation of effect size: How large are sex differences?
· D statistic used to express a difference in standard deviation units. D of 0.5 means that
average difference is half a standard deviation. 1.00 means that difference between groups is
one full standard deviation.
Minimalists and Maximalists
· Minimalists: sex differences as small and inconsequential. (1) Empirically, most findings show
small magnitudes of effect size, Tremendous overlap. (2) What ever difference there is does not
have practical importance for behaviour in everyday life.
· Maximalists: magnitude of sex differences is comparable to magnitude of other effects in
psychology and should not be trivialized. Small difference can have large practical importance.

Sex differences in personality

· Sex differences in temperament in children which can predict future behaviour.
· Five-factor model of personality provides a consistent framework for organizing findings about
sex differences personality.
· Sex differences in sexuality, criminality, and physical aggression.
Temperament in Children
· Temperament reflects biological based emotions and behavioural consistencies that appear
early in life and predict patterns and outcomes later.
· Inhibitory control: largest sex difference, d = -0.41. Ability to control inappropriate responses or
behaviors (Girls have a better ability to regulate).
· Perceptual sensitivity: d = -0.38. Ability to detect subtle stimuli from the environment.
Differences tend to fade as adults do not differ much in conscientiousness.
· Surgency: d = 0.38. A cluster including approach behaviour, high activity and imulsiveity
showed a higher difference of boys.
· Low inhibitory control and high surgency may account for physical aggressiveness (d = 0.60).
· Negative affectivity: anger, difficulty, amount of distress and sadness. Girls and boys showed
no difference. Fearfulness (d = -0.12).
· In adulthood, there is a moderate difference of emotional instability. Gender stereotypes may
lead to the actual development of gender differences in adulthood, given negligible gender
difference among children.
Five-Factor Model
· Extraversion: Women scored higher on gregariousness than men, men scored moderately
higher on assertiveness (d = 0.50), men scored slightly higher on activity.
· Agreeableness: Women scored moderately higher than men (d = -0.32). Trust: cooperate with
on another, give others the benefit of doubt, view others as good at heart. Tender-mindedness:
having empathy for others and being sympathetic with those who are downtrodden (d = -0.97).
· Aggressiveness: Men more aggressive than women (d = 0.86). Men commit 90 percent of all
homicides, commit more violent crimes.
· Conscientiousness: Men and women are relatively the same (d = -0.14).
· Emotional stability: Women are moderately lower on this than men (d = -0.49).
· Intellect-openness to experience: Men and women are identical on this dimension.
Basic Emotions: Frequency and Intensity
· Women experience both positive emotions and negative emotions more frequently and
intensely than do men.
· Affection and joy showed largest sex difference.
· Women experience fear and sadness more than men.
· Minimal sex difference in guilt.
· Men don’t express their emotions because they literally don’t experience as frequently or as
intensely as do women.
Other Dimensions of Personality
· Self-esteem: how good we feel about ourselves. Central to mental health. High self esteem
performs better on cognitive tasks, take credit for their successes but not their failures. Men
score slightly higher than women (d = 0.21). Young children and adults have a smaller gap.
· Sexuality and mating: Men would like to have 18 sex partners in their lifetimes, women around
4-5. Men like casual sex. Men are more likely to initiate friendship with their opposite-sex friends
because they are sexually attracted to them, to dissolve friendships that do not result in sex.
Men more likely to be sexually aggressive, narcissistic men lack empathy for rap victims.
· People-Thing Dimension: Nature of vocational interests. Things that deal with machines, tools
or materials such as carpenters, auto mechanics, building contractors, tool makers and farmers.
People prefer social occupations involve thinking of others, caring for others, directing others.
Examples are high school teachers, social workers, nurses. Huge difference men like things
women like people.

Masculinity, femininity, androgyny and sex roles

The Search for Androgyny
· One can be high on both masculinity and femininity.
· Masculinity: assertiveness, boldness, dominance, self-sufficiency, and instrumentality.
· Femininity: nurturance, expression of emotions, and empathy.
· Androgyny: scored high on both femininity and masculinity. Viewed androgynous people as
most highly developed. Presumed to embody the most valuable elements of both sexes, such
as assertiveness – taking positive steps in ones job and interpersonal sensitivity to the feelings
of others.
· Scales measure the personality characteristics of instrumentality and expressiveness.
· Gender Schemata: cognitive orientations that lead individuals to process social information
based on sex linked associations.
· Both genes and environment play a role in the degree to which sex roles are adopted.
 Gender Stereotypes
· Beliefs that we hold about the ways in which the sexes differ, regardless of where these beliefs
are accurate reflections of the sex differences.
· Gender stereotypes have three components: cognitive, affective and behavioural.
o Cognitive: deals with the ways we form social categories such as all men are
dads who are faithful and invest heavily in their children.
o Affective: You may feel warm or hostile towards that person simply because
you categorise them.
o Behavioural: You may discriminate against someone simply because he
belongs in a social category.
Content of Gender Stereotypes
· Common across cultures.
· Men seem as more aggressive, autonomous, achievement-oriented, dominant, exhibitionist,
and persevering. Women were affiliative, deferent, heterosexual, nurturant and self-abasing.
· Women – perceived as more communal or oriented towards the group.
· Men – perceived as more instrumental, asserting their independence form the group.
Stereotypic Subtypes of men and women
· Men fall into five subtypes: playboy, career men,
· Women: classically feminine, soccer moms, sex-bombs, confident career women.
Prejudice and Gender Stereotypes
· Stereotypes are damaging: legal decisions, medical treatments, car purchases, check cashing
and job hunting.

Theories of Sex differences

Socialization and Social Roles
· Socialization theory: notion that boys and girls become different as boys are reinforced by
parents, teachers, and the media for being masculine and girls for being feminine. Children lean
behaviours that are deemed appropriate for their sex. Boys are given baseball bats girls are
given dolls. Girls are comforted when they cry boys are punished.
· Social Learning theory: variant of socialization theory, boys and girls also learn by observing
the behaviour of others. Girls watch their mothers cook, boys watch their fathers work.
· Dependency is taught to girls by mom and dad more frequently than to boys. Girls are told to
stay close to home, boys are free to roam. Girls are given more chores. Fathers interact less
with their girls. Girls are socialized to be more sexually restrained.
· Problem for tradition theories is they do not provide account for origins of differential parental
socialization practices.
· Why do parents want their children to grow up differently?
· Social role theory: sex differences originate as men and women are distributed into different
occupational and family roles.
· More sexually egalitarian countries show largest sex differences in personality.
Hormonal Theories
· Hormonal theories: of sex differences argue that men and women differ not because of the
external social environment but rather because the sexes have different underlying hormones.
· Some evidence such as an overactive adrenal gland which is a condition called congenital
adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). Results in females include preference for male toys, superiority in
traditionally masculine cognitive skills such as special rotation ability, throwing accuracy, also
traditional masculine occupations.
· Testosterone linked with aggression, dominance, and career choice.
Evolutionary psychology Theory
· Sexes are predicted to be the same in all domains in which they have faced the same adaptive
problems over human evolutionary history.
· Sexes are predicted to differ only in domains in which men and women have confronted
different adaptive challenges over human evolutionary history.
· Adaptive problems: problems that need to be solved in order for an individual to survive and
reproduce.
· Domain of mating and sexuality: man can reproduce in a single act of sex, women must carry
for nine months. So therefore, women are more cautious about their partners.
An integrated theoretical perspective
· Evolutionary – why sexes differ but not how, hormonal and socialization – how sexes differ but
not why.
· Cannot ignore that being in a dominant position causes testosterone to rise.

Chapter 17
Unit 11: Personality, Stress, Coping, and Health
Chapter 18

Unit 12: Personality, Emotions, and Psychopathology

Chapter 13: Emotion and Personality
 Emotions: can be defined by their three components: (1) emotions have distinct
subjective feelings or effects associated with them; (2) emotions are accompanied by
bodily changes, mostly in the nervous system, and these produce associated changes in
breathing, heart rate, muscle tension, blood chemistry, and facial and body expressions;
(3) emotions are accompanied by distinct action tendencies or increases in the
probabilities of certain behaviours
 Action tendencies: increases in the probabilities of certain behaviours that accompany
emotions. The activity, or action tendency, associated with fear is fight or flight
 People differ from each other emotionally from event to event
 Other theories of emotion emphasize the functions that emotions play, such as
generating short-term adaptive actions to help us survive
 Functional analysis: in the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles
Darwin proposed a functional analysis of emotions and emotional expressions focusing
on the “why” of emotions and expressions. Darwin concluded that emotional expressions
communicate information from one animal to another about what is likely to happen.
Issues in Emotion Research
Emotional States v. Emotional Traits
 Emotional states: transitory states that depend more on the situation or circumstances a
person is in than on the specific person. Emotions as states have a specific cause, and
that cause is typically outside of the person
 Emotional trait: stable personality traits that are primarily characterized by specific
emotions
Categorical v. Dimensional Approach to Emotion
 Emotion researchers are divided into two camps:
1. Categorical: primary emotions are key, search for primary emotions that are the
underlining of the rest

Chapter 19: Disorders of Personality

The Building Blocks of Personality Disorders
  Personality disorders can be seen as maladaptive variations within several domains
including: traits, emotions, cognitions, motives, interpersonal behaviour, and self-
concepts
 Traits in personality describe consistencies in behaviour, thought, or action and
represent meaningful differences among persons
o Personality disorders can be thought of as maladaptive variations or
combinations of normal personality traits
 Widiger describes how extremes on either end of specific trait dimensions can be
associated with personality disorders
 Motivation is another basic building block of personality and describes what people want
and why they behave in particular ways
 The maladaptive variations of power and intimacy are a common theme in several
personality disorders
o Extreme lack of intimacy or exaggerated need of power are common
 Cognition is another building block and consists of mental activity involved in perceiving,
interpreting, and planning
o These processes can become distorted in personality disorders
 Personality disorders typically involve an impairment of social judgement
 Emotion is another building block and consist of extreme variation in experienced
emotions
o Most personality disorders have an emotional core that is an important
component to understanding that disorder
 The self-concept is another building block and is a person’s own collection of self-
knowledge, or one’s understanding of oneself
o Most personality disorders there is some distortion in the self-concept
 Social relationships are frequently disturbed or maladaptive in personality disorders
 Biology can also be a building block of personality disorders as some personality
disorders have been found to have a genetic component and some have been studied
under a psychological component
The Concept of Disorder
 Psychological disorder: a pattern of behaviour or experience that is distressing and
painful to the person, that leads to disability of impairment in important life domains, and
that is associated with increased risk for further suffering, loss of function, death, or
confinement
 Abnormal psychology: the study of the various mental disorders, including thought
disorders, emotional disorders, and personality disorders
What is Abnormal?
 Abnormal: broadly defined, the term abnormal is based on current levels of societal
tolerance. In this sense, behaviours that society deems unacceptable would be labeled
as abnormal. Because tolerance levels can change over time, psychologists have
started directing their attention toward people’s subjective views and experiences.
Anxiety, depression, and feelings of loneliness may be linked to disorganized thought
patterns, disruptive perceptions, or unusual beliefs. These may inhibit a person's ability
to work or socialize, and may all be considered abnormal
 Psychopathology: the study of mental disorders
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
 The most widely used system for diagnosing mental disorders is the DSM-5
 Categorical view: one either has or does not have a personality disorder (past view)
 o It view disorders as distinct and qualitatively different from normal extremes on
each personality trait
 Dimensional view: each disorder is seen on a continuum, ranging from normality to
severe disability or disturbance (current view in DSM-5)
o This view implies that certain patterns of behaviour, in various amounts, comprise
each personality disorder
 Modern personality theorists argued that the dimensional view provides a more reliable
and meaningful way to describe the personality disorders
What is a Personality Disorder?
 Personality disorder: an enduring pattern of experience and behaviour that differs greatly
from the expectations of the individual’s culture
 A personality disorder is usually manifest in more than one of the following areas: in how
people think, how they feel, how they get along with other, or in their ability to control
their own behaviour
 The pattern of behaviour that defines the personality disorder typically has a long history
in the person’s life and can often be traced back to manifestations in adolescence or
even childhood and cannot be a result of drug abuse, medication, or a medical condition
General Criteria for Personality Disorders
1. A personality disorder shows an enduring pattern of inner experience and behaviour that
deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture. This pattern is
manifest in two or more of the following areas:
1. Cognition
2. Affectivity
3. Interpersonal functioning
4. Impulse control
b. The enduring pattern is inflexible and pervasive across a broad range of personal and
social situations
c. The enduring pattern leads to clinically significant distress or impairment in social,
occupational, or other important areas of functioning
d. The pattern is stable and of long duration, and its onset can be traced back to
adolescence or early adulthood
e. The enduring pattern is not better accounted for as a manifestation or consequence of
another mental disorder
f. The enduring pattern is not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance or a
general condition
Culture, Age, and Gender: the Effect of Context
 A person’s social, cultural, and ethnic background must be taken into account whenever
there is a question about personality disorders
 Culture, age, and gender are also important factors to consider
The Erratic Cluster: Ways of Being Unpredictable, Violent, or Emotional
 The erratic group consists of disorders that appear dramatic, emotional, and
unpredictable, they are: antisocial, borderline, histrionic, and narcissistic
Antisocial Personality Disorder
 Antisocial personality disorder: a person suffering from antisocial personality disorder
has a general disregard for others and cares very little about the rights, feelings, or
happiness of other people. Also referred to as a sociopath or psychopath, a person
suffering from antisocial personality disorder is easily irritated, assaultive, reckless,
irresponsible, glib or superficially charming, impulsive, callous, and indifferent to the
suffering of others
  Begins to manifest at a young age with things such as minor stealing and continues to
escalate into worse behaviour as they age
 Characteristics antisocial personality disorder:
o Repeated lying
o Impulsivity
o Easily irritated
o Assaultive
o Recklessness
o Irresponsibility
o Lack of remorse
 Eye-blink startle method: people typically blink their eyes when they are startled by a
loud noise. Moreover, a person who is in an anxious or fearful state will blink faster and
harder when startled than a person in a normal emotional state. This means that eye-
blink speed when startled may be an objective physiological measure of how anxious or
fearful a person is feeling. The eye-blink startle method may allow researchers to
measure how anxious persons are without actually having to ask them
Borderline Personality Disorder
 Borderline personality disorder: the life of the borderline personality is marked by
instability. Their relationships are unstable, their emotions are unstable, their behaviour
is unstable, and even their image of themselves is unstable. Persons with borderline
personality disorder, compared to those without, have a higher incidence rate of
childhood physical or sexual abuse, neglect, or early parental loss
 Characteristics of borderline personality disorder:
o Instability of relationships, emotions, and self-image
o Fears of abandonment
o Aggressiveness
o Self-harm
o Strong emotions
Histrionic Personality Disorder
 Histrionic personality disorder: the hallmark of the histrionic personality is excessive
attention seeking and emotionality. Often such persons are overly dramatic and draw
attention to themselves, preferring to be the centre of attention or the life of the party.
They may appear charming or even flirtatious. Often they can be inappropriately
seductive or provocative
 Characteristics of histrionic personality disorder:
o Excessive attention seeking
o Excessive and strong emotions
o Sexual provocativeness
o Shallow opinions
o Suggestibility
o Strong need for attention
Narcissistic Personality Disorder
 Narcissistic personality disorder: the calling card of the narcissistic personality is a
strong need to be admired, a strong sense of self-importance, and a lack of insight into
other people’s feelings. Narcissists see themselves in a very favourable light, inflating
their accomplishments and undervaluing the work of others. Narcissists day dream
about prosperity, victory, influence, adoration from others, and power. They routinely
expect adulation from others, believing that homage is generally long overdue. They
 exhibit feelings of entitlement, even though they have done nothing in particular to earn
that special treatment
 Characteristics of narcissistic personality disorder:
o Need to be admired
o Strong sense of self-importance
o Lack of insight into other people’s feelings and needs
o Sense of entitlement
o Sense of superiority
o Self-esteem that is strong but paradoxically fragile
o Envy of others
The Eccentric Cluster: Ways of Being Different
 The eccentric cluster of personality disorders have a way of making people ill at east
socially and just plain different, they include: schizoid, schizotypal, and paranoid
 Schizoid and schizotypal take their root and are tied to schizophrenia
 Schizophrenia means: cutting the mind off from itself and from reality
Schizoid Personality Disorder
 Schizoid personality disorder: the schizoid personality disorder is split off or detached
from normal social relations. The schizoid person simply appears to have no need or
desire for intimate relationships or even friendships. Family life usually does not mean
much to such people, and they do not obtain satisfaction from being part of a group.
They have few or no close friends, and they would rather spend time by themselves than
with others
 Characteristics of schizoid personality disorder:
o Detached from normal social relationships
o Pleasureless life
o Inept or socially clumsy
o Passive in the face of unpleasant events
Schizotypal Personality Disorder:
 Schizotypal personality disorder: whereas the schizoid person is indifferent to social
interaction, the schizotypal personality is acutely uncomfortable in social relationships.
Schizotypes are anxious in social situations, especially if those situations involve
strangers. Schizotypal persons also feel that they are different from others, or that they
do not fit in with the group. They tend to be suspicious of others and are seen as odd
and eccentric
 Characteristics of schizotypal personality disorder:
o Anxious in social relation and avoids people
o “Different” and nonconforming
o Suspicious of others
o Eccentricity of beliefs, such as in ESP or magic
o Unusualness of perceptions and experiences
o Disorganized thoughts and speech
Paranoid Personality Disorder
 Paranoid personality disorder: the paranoid personality is extremely distrustful of others
and sees others as a constant threat. Such a person assumes that others are out to
exploit and deceive them, even though there is no good evidence to support this
assumption. Paranoid personalities feel that they have been injured by other persons
and are preoccupied with doubts about the motivations of others. The paranoid
personality often misinterprets social events and holds resentments towards others for
slights or perceived threats
  Characteristics of paranoid personality disorder:
o Is distrustful of others
o Misinterprets social events as threatening
o Harbours resentments towards others
o Is prone to pathological jealousy
o Is argumentative and hostile
The Anxious Cluster: Ways of Being Nervous, Fearful, or Distressed
 The final cluster of personality traits consist of patterns of behaviour geared towards
anxiety, they include: avoidant, dependent, and obsessive-compulsive
 Neurotic paradox: although a behaviour pattern may successfully solve one problem
from a person, it may create or maintain another equally or more severe problem
Avoidant Personality Disorder
 Avoidant personality disorder: the major feature is a pervasive feeling of inadequacy and
sensitivity to criticism from others, the avoidant personality will go to great lengths to
avoid situations in which others may have opportunities to criticize their performance or
character, such as school or work or other group settings. Such a person may avoid
making new friends or going to new places because of fear of criticism or disapproval
 Characteristics of avoidant personality disorder:
o Feelings of inadequacy
o Sensitive to criticism
o Activities are restricted to avoid embarrassment
o Low self-esteem
Dependent Personality Disorder
 Dependent personality disorder: the dependent personality seeks out others to an
extreme. The hallmark of the dependent personality is an excessive need to be taken
care of, to be nurtured, coddled, and told what to do. Dependent persons act in
submissive ways as to encourage others to take care of them or to take charge of the
situation. Such individuals need lots of encouragement and advice from other and would
much rather turn over responsibility for their decisions to someone else
 Characteristics of dependent personality disorder:
o Has an excessive need to be taken care of
o Is submissive
o Seeks reassurance from others
o Rarely takes initiative and rarely disagrees with others
o Does not work well independently
o May tolerate abuse from other to obtain support
Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder
 Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder: the obsessive-compulsive personality is
preoccupied with order and strives to be perfect. The high need for order can manifest
itself in the person’s attention to details, however trivial, and fondness for rules, rituals,
schedules, and procedures. Another characteristic is a devotion to work at the expense
of leisure and friendships. Obsessive-compulsive persons tend to work harder than they
need to
 Characteristics of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder
o Preoccupied with order
o Perfectionist
o Devoted to work, seeking little leisure time or friendship
o Frequently miserly or stingy
o Rigid and stubborn
  OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) is different than OCPD (obsessive-compulsive
personality disorder)
Prevalence of Personality Disorders
 Prevalence: the total number of cases that are present within a given population during a
particular period of time
 OCPD is the most common with narcissistic being the least common, however this data
is based on interviews and self-reporting and may underestimate the prevalence of
some disorders, especially narcissism
 At any given time 13% of the population is diagnosable with a personality disorder
 25%-50% of people who meet the criteria of one diagnosis will also meet the criteria for
another
 Differential diagnosis: arrived at when, out of two or more possible diagnoses, the
clinician searches for evidence in support of one diagnostic category over all the others
Gender Differences in Personality Disorders
 Overall prevalence rate in men and women are fairly equal
 Antisocial personality disorder is more prevalent in men
 Borderline and dependent are more prevalent in women
 Paranoid and obsessive-compulsive may be more prevalent in men but the difference is
not large
 Gender stereotypes can have an effect on how people are diagnosed and clinicians
need to be aware of this
 Different genders manifest disorders differently
Dimensional Model of Personality Disorders
 The dimensional model allows for more of a spectrum and for a person to be diagnosed
with more than one disorder, as well as acknowledges the distinction between what is
normal and what is abnormal as a matter of degree than a clear break
 Currently the DSM-5 still sees personality disorders as categorical
Causes of Personality Disorders
 There are biological explanations, learning explanations, psychodynamic explanations,
and cultural explanations
 Personality disorders have multiple causes
 Most of the research on personality disorders is descriptive or correlational
o Because of this it cannot pin down the casual direction of relationships
 Biology and experience are tightly intermingled, making it difficult to attribute a disorder
to only one kind of cause
Summary
 The concept of disorder relies on making a distinction between what is normal and what
is abnormal
 The study of abnormal psychology, as known as psychopathology, attempts to develop
reliable taxonomies for mental disorders
 Personality disorders are enduring patterns of experience and behaviour that differ
greatly from the norm and the expectations of the individual’s social group and
commonly show up in abnormalities in how people think, feel, get along with others, or
their ability to control their own actions
 Personality disorders commonly have patterns of behaviour that lead to distress for the
person or others and typically have a long history in a person’s life and can trace back to
childhood or adolescence