My “takeaway” from Personality Psychology
Hello , I am Josline , a postgraduate student majoring in Psychology.This is my first experience with blogging , an opportunity provided by Ms. Aishwarya , Assistant Professor of Dept. of Psychology, AIGS as a part of my semester assignments of Personality Psychology course .
Throughout this series I will be attempting to blog and publish my stories which would relate to topics explored regarding the topics from the course ,my experiences from the class ,recent or current trends and my own “takeaway “ from the class.
I look forward to this new and exciting adventure.
In First class, we explored popular and widely accepted definition of personality by Psychologist Gordon Allport(1937)which defined personality as “a set of psychological trait and mechanisms within the individual that are organised and relatively enduring and that influence their interaction with and adaptation to their intrapsychic , social and physical environment”.
Though this definition was given eight decades ago, it eventually set a base for trait psychology. Traits are hidden and smallest unit of personality, which help us to describe and understand certain aspects of personality of an individual. For example honesty is a trait and it can be used to describe individuals as honest or dishonest.
By psychological mechanism, Allport tried to highlight the process of how the behavior is expressed (Larsen & Buss, 2009). The process involves interpretation of situation you are,a conscious decision made based on interpretation and response to the situation .For example ,if a friend of mine is raving about a recent movie she watched ,and I don’t want to listen to review because of all the spoilers she might give but I don’t want to cut her off or offend her ,I might either have to wait till she finishes but only pretend to listen or stop her politely .
Psychological traits and mechanism when organised produce a need and goal oriented behaviors which are stable and consisted enough to be observed. Organisation shapes when, where and how we fulfill are desire or need so if I am attending a seminar I am not interested in thereby missing a lunch out with my friends , I would still be attending the seminar because it is my responsibility as student to attend and would later join my friends for lunch.
Allport definition also talks about psychological traits interaction referred to person-environment interaction .If we take the previous example, it how I chose to stay for seminar ,reason out for staying and still managed to fulfill requirements of both situation was explained by Larsen and Buss(2009) as process of perception(situation),selection(decision to attend ),evocation (how I convinced my friends)and manipulations(I attended both the events)
All these trait and mechanism are also influenced by the internal state of mind, the behavior of people around us and the immediate physical environment you are present in.
Though personality psychology does consist of various approaches such as genetic predisposition, evolutionary, cognitive psycho dynamic etc. the most widely researched approaches have been trait based. Some famous trait based theory are Eysenck ‘s PEN model ,Catell Taxonomy 16 PF personality and the Big five model or Five factor model by Goldberg and Norman
Research by Thomas, Castro and Antonello (2016) indicated that individual with high neuroticism; average urgency and agreeableness, average conscientiousness, and low openness are likely to develop more health complications and slower recovery after a kidney transplant. According to foster and Hogan (2016) Traits exist in the behaviors but it is not guided by traits instead they are guided by the intention, purpose and goals of the individual.
My takeaway from this class an insight about my own personality as I realized my own decision rule making mechanism were influenced parents, siblings and my friends and that personality is restricted to trait which we do or don’t possess and its expression but also how we chose to respond to our situations, perceptions we form and the goals we set.
Bibliography
Buss, R. J., & Larsen, D. M. (2009). Personality Psychology (4th edition ed.). New York: McGraw Hill Publication.
Hogan, R., & Foster, J. (2016). Rethinking Personalities. International journal of personality psychology , 2 (1), 37–43.
Thomas, C. V., Castro, E. K., & Antonello, I. C. (2016). Personality traits and clinical/biochemical course in the first year after kidney transplant. Renal Failure , 38 (9), 1383–1390.
Five factor model or The Big Five
In my last blog, I discussed about the personality in terms of trait and emergence of trait psychology. In this blog I would like to share my opinions about one of the most popular model of personality which emerged from the contribution of psychologist who extensively worked in the field of trait based personality psychology.
Five factor model or Big five model known now is the contribution of Goldberg (1981),Costa & McCrae(1995) and Saucier & Goldberg(1996).The five traits ,OCEAN ,which remains the widely used abbreviated version of
1. Openness –intellect
2. Conscientiousness
3. Extraversion or surgency
4. Agreeableness
5. Neuroticism- emotional stability(Larsen & Buss,2009)
History of the Five factor Model
One of the main reasons of its popularity remains the the detailed and methodological way used to arrive at this model, use of lexical and statistical approach.
Lexical approach is based on lexical hypothesis arising from “lexicon” of language. a lexicon is a descriptive word or phrase specific to certain speakers of language of particular region. a same lexicons vary from 2 languages and within the same language. For example Pelinti , a word in Buli Langauge of Ghana means to move hot food around in your mouth but its English version is yet to be known or invented .
Pioneers of this approach in trait psychology were Allport and Odbert(1936) who identified around 17,953 words or terms present in English Dictionary which describes or stood for a trait. These traits were later divided into :
- stable trait — e.g. intelligent ,
- Temporary states, mood or activities — e.g. excited, surprised ,
- Social evaluation — e.g. lazy, charismatic , and
- Metaphorical, physical and doubtful terms — e.g. skinny, prolific etc.(Larsen & Buss,2009)
The 4500 stable traits were utilized by Catell (1943) and reduced to 171 clusters which eventually condensed to 25 clusters of personality trait, 22 of which was discovered by Fiske(1949) using Statistical approach.
Statistical approach is a method of identifying trait from the available or collected data through the use of factor analysis. Factor analysis provides a factor loading , a numerical value indicating the correlation between two variables.
As Fiske method provided a comprehensive taxonomy of traits, he is credited as discoverer of five-factor model (Larsen &Buss, 2009).Tupes and Christal (2002) further simplified the factors and came up with their own five –factor model: Agreeableness, surgency ,conscientiousness ,emotional stability and culture, which were elaborated in detail by Norman (1963)(Larsen & Buss ,2009).
Goldberg in the year 1990 provided key single trait adjectives associated with each factor. They are as follows
1. Surgency or extraversion: talkative, extraverted, assertive, forward, outspoken versus shy, quiet, introverted, bashful, inhibited.
2. Agreeableness: sympathetic, kind, warm, understanding, sincere versus unsympathetic, unkind, harsh, cruel.
3. Conscientiousness: organized, neat, orderly, practical, prompt, meticulous versus disorganized, disorderly, careless, sloppy, and impractical.
4. Emotional stability: calm, relaxed, stable versus moody, anxious, insecure.
5. Intellect or imagination: creative, imaginative, intellectual versus uncreative, unimaginative, unintellectual(Larsen & Buss,2009)
The modern version of Big five consists of sentence — length item which was developed y Paul T.Costa and Robert R.McCrae in 1989.It is called NEO-PI-R ,where the neuroticism-extraversion-openness (NEO) Personality Inventory (PI) Revised(R) (Larsen & Buss,2009)
References
Buss, R. J., & Larsen, D. M. (2009). Personality Psychology (4th edition ed.). New York: McGraw Hill Publication.
Edwards, H. S. (2011, October 04). 14 Wonderful Words With No English Equivalent. Retrieved June 5, 2019, from http://mentalfloss.com/article/28915/14-more-wonderful-words-no-english-equivalent
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