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When you think about a person's psychology, what assumptions do you make? Generally, people assume that there's something regular or consistent in a person. They don't constantly change and act differently.
Typically a person has a sense of self or a personality. Personality psychology is the study of a person's unique, consistent, and stable patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving over time.
There are three important aspects when we study personality psychology:
Character is an aspect of psychology which describes what we consider to be desirable or undesirable in a person. Character refers to the parts of personality that are valued or not valued.
Personality is descriptive; it tells what a person is like. Character is prescriptive; it says how someone should or shouldn't be. Character is just one aspect of personality and is developed by cultural and social influences.
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Temperament is our innate and inherited aspects of personality. Things like how emotional, irritable, or sensitive a person is are part of temperament. While these traits can be developed, they are innate to an individual. Temperament is an aspect of behavioral genetics, which is the study of behaviors and personality that are inherited. These traits are not necessarily situational, which explains why personality can be stable and consistent over time.
In the field of personality psychology, there are many different approaches, just like the rest of psychology. Biological approaches focus on temperament and how heredity affects personality, while social or sociocultural approaches focus on things like character and the influence of others.
There are three approaches that are important to know specifically:
Psychodynamic theory emphasizes the importance of the unconscious on personality and temperament. There are several aspects to this theory with ideas developed by several important psychologists:
Personality psychology is the study of people's individual patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving over time. How do we determine what those patterns are for each person?
An assessment, or a test, is a way to help to measure the various different traits and aspects of a person's personality. There are different tests for different kinds of theories.
EXAMPLE
There could be one test for trait theories, one for psychodynamic, and one for humanistic; however, they could also be applicable to a wide range of theories.Each one of these different types of assessments has different strengths and limitations. Two important assessments are:
An interview is a face-to-face conversation that a person has with a psychologist. They are asked questions by a psychologist and share information about their psychological history, their current status, and their personality in general. Interviews can take two different forms:
Interviews do have some weaknesses, however. They can be affected or biased by the subject or interviewer's preexisting beliefs.
EXAMPLE
What the subject looks like might affect how the psychologist is rating the person within the system.There's also what is called the halo effect. The halo effect is the tendency to view a person as generally positive or negative based on things like attractiveness or age.
EXAMPLE
It's been shown that when a person is physically attractive, others are generally more likely to look at them as being intelligent or more worthwhile than other people.Within an interview, a person can also lie, which can affect the information as well.
The second type of assessment is direct observation. Direct observation refers to watching the subject within a naturalistic sort of setting to gather information about them.
EXAMPLE
A person might go to a school and watch a child playing and interacting with other children. This can provide information about that child's personality and their social interactions.Direct observations can give more in-depth information about the subjects. They can also provide more accurate information because it's within a natural setting, so they're not being affected by being in a room with a psychologist or in some strange environment.
However, direct observation can be affected by observer bias, meaning preexisting beliefs or ideas that impact the observation process.
EXAMPLE
If you think that teens are more argumentative, then you may tend to focus on more argumentative behavior that you observe, versus non-argumentative behavior.To prevent this, a lot of direct observations have different tools that help to control bias. They might use a rating scale, which is a list of traits or behavioral aspects that guides the observations and prevents misinterpretations. It tells the researcher what to look for, so they don't necessarily miss it within those situations.
Researchers can also do what's called a behavioral assessment. This is when an observer records how many times they observe certain kinds of behaviors. Instead of trying to measure the internal processes that are going on or the different personality traits, they can just note each time they see a behavior that they're looking for. They can create categories for different behaviors.
EXAMPLE
For example, a researcher can record how many times a person mentions a particular subject in a conversation.An objective assessment is when the same questions and measures are used for each person so they're not varying and can be studied in more depth. In addition, a questionnaire or an objective form of assessment should give the same score when different people are scoring it.
A personality questionnaire is a written form of test, where a person is given a list of questions that reveal different aspects of a person's personality, depending on the answers they give. Personality questionnaires often include questions about likely behaviors, a person's feelings, and their responses in different kinds of scenarios.
An advantage of questionnaires is that they can be given to a large number of people. A large amount of data can be collected to support whatever theories are being tested.
The weakness of questionnaires is that they can be inflexible. They can't be changed depending on what type of person is being studied. They can also be biased toward particular groups. The way that they are written can affect what kinds of scores you get from different kinds of people.
Another type of test is a projective tests, which is a little bit different. Projective tests tend to use ambiguous words or images to attempt to uncover unconscious thoughts or desires. Projective tests are focused on psychodynamic theories of the unconscious.
EXAMPLE
The Rorschach inkblot test is a projective test that records people's responses to different images of inkblots, which are then interpreted by an observer.The strengths are that projective tests are very difficult to fake because there aren't right or wrong answers. Often, the person doesn't realize what they're being tested on, because the test focuses on their unconscious, rather than their conscious mind. These tests can also provide in-depth information about the subject's mental processes that are otherwise very difficult to understand.
Weaknesses for projective tests include that they tend to be very low in validity since it is hard to tell at times what they are measuring. They're also subject to some interpretation by the psychologist who's giving it because the psychologist is recording the responses. There are specific procedures when scoring, however, so it's not completely up to the psychologist to determine what the interpretation will be.
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