Lezioni di differenze individuali nel temperaemento e personalità (parte prima)

Individual differences in personality and temperament

First midterm

April 9 (11-14)

10 closed questions 2 open questions in total 14 points

• Temperament and personality
• Group presentation 4 points - review committee 2 points

Second midterm

May 28

5 closed and 2 open questions 9 points in total

A star is born

The scientific field of personality is generally traced back to the year 1937 when Allport published “Personality: A Psychological Interpretation”, Stranger published “Psychology of Personality”, and Murray’s 1938 book “Explorations in Personality” was rising on the horizon.

A diversity of personality theories

Throughout the history of scientific psychology, diverse approaches to the field have competed. Among the perspectives that each have a distinct history are the psychodynamic perspective, the trait perspective, the learning perspective, the humanistic perspective, the cognitive perspective, and the biological perspective. Each approach has developed over time with contributions from major theorists and researchers. While the perspectives have sometimes influenced one another, they have taken different tactics toward a global theory of personality and in guiding the observations that researchers make and interventions that practitioners implement.

Personality's definitions

• "That which permits a prediction of what a person will do in a given situation" (Cattell 1950)
• Personality trait as that "which defines what a person will do when faced with a defined situation" Cattell 1979
• "The dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine his unique adjustments to the environment" Allport 1937
• An individual’s unique variation on the general evolutionary design for human nature expressed as a developing pattern of dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations, and integrative life stories complexly and differentially situated in culture (McAdams and Pals 2006)

The emphasis on dynamics and development in the last two personological definitions reminds us that some theories emphasize function and change in contrast to typically more static trait emphasis on description.

Personality

Personality psychology attempts to describe, predict, and explain those recurrent behaviors that set an individual apart from some or all other agemates. Personality psychology is concerned with those temporally stable tendencies of behavior in which persons of a similar age differ from another. Temporally stable tendencies of behavior are called dispositions (example: party lover). Dispositions that characterize the personality of an individual are called personality dispositions or personality traits (Allport) (example: funny, extroverted).

The big five model (by Caprara)

Personality trait is synonymous with disposition, inclination, and propensity. Sets of trends to think, feel, and act in relatively stable ways. Personality type is a particular combination of recurrent traits in a population.

Five traits of personality: Energy/extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability (neuroticism), openness.

1) Energy/Extraversion

Confident and enthusiastic orientation towards the various circumstances of life, most of which are interpersonal. The opposite pole is introversion.

Personality characteristics: social security, loquacity, dominance, dynamism, assertiveness.

• Dynamism: Level of activity, ease of speech, enthusiasm, sociability.
• Dominance: Ability to impose, ability to excel, ability to influence others, assertiveness.

2) Agreeableness

At a pole, characteristics like altruism, caring, emotional support; it does not predict social status. At the opposite pole, characteristics such as hostility, indifference towards others, selfishness.

Characteristics of personality: altruism, cooperativity, cordiality, taking care.

• Cooperativeness: Know how to understand and meet the needs of others, know how to cooperate effectively with others.
• Cordiality: Affability, kindness, courtesy, confidence.

3) Conscientiousness

Features such as accuracy, reliability, responsibility, willingness to succeed, and perseverance.

Characteristics of personality: ability of self-regulation, precision, scrupulosity, perseverance.

• Scrupulosity: Reliability, attention to details, love of order, precision.
• Perseverance: Persistence and tenacity in carrying out tasks and not failing commitments, hard work.

4) Emotional stability/Neuroticism

Features related to anxiety and the presence of emotional problems such as depression, mood instability, irritability. In general, the central aspects are negative effects and the thoughts and behaviors associated with emotional difficulties.

Characteristic of personality: capacity to control emotional reactions, mood stability, absence of negative affections.

• Control of emotions: Mood stability, absence of depression, control of anxiety.
• Control of impulses: Absence of impulsivity, irrational control, absence of excitability.

5) Openness

Openness to new ideas, to the values of others, and to one’s own feelings. On the other hand, central aspects are originality, creativity, nonconformity, on the other side intelligence, culture, analytics, and reflection.

Characteristics of personality: opening of news, large cultural interests, originality, creativity.

• Openness to culture: Interest to keep informed, interest in reading, interest in acquiring knowledge.
• Openness to experience: Favorable disposition towards news, originality, and creativity, favorable disposition towards values, styles, ways of life and cultures different from their own.

Measures developed in the Italian context

• Big Five Questionnaire (BFQ)
• Big Five Questionnaire-Children (BFQ-C)
• Big Five Observer (BFO)
• Big Five Adjectives (BFA)

Big five questionnaire (BFQ)

• Has found a wide positive address in the organizational contexts where it has been employed
• 132 items
• Easy and quick compilation
• Provides a personality profile
• It has been a group of over 15,000 subjects, of which over 6,000 in evaluation condition.
• It is important to compare the scores to the normal population.
• Reduced version: The (BFQ-R) is only used for research purposes, it has a lower number of lie scale assertions (60 items not 132), and there is the absence of a lie scale.
• The design is to assess the subject’s tendency to provide answers that are probably distorted of falsely positive (providing a very positive image of themselves) or negative (providing a very negative image of self).
• Social desirability is considered, which is a type of response bias that is the tendency of survey respondents to answer questions in a manner that will be viewed favorably by others.

T score

We have first raw score then we use (medium= 50 Standard deviation= 10) the normal score is between 1 and -1 (25= very low; 75= very high) so the range of normality is between 40 and 70.

Administration

The BFQ can be administrated either individually or in groups. The instructions can be read aloud to the subjects, accompanied by any clarification if necessary, which should not influence their answers.

It’s important to:

• Recommend the subject to answer all the statements
• Underline the importance of responding spontaneously since it is possible to evaluate the truthfulness of the answers through specific procedures
• To underline that it is useless to attempt to falsify one’s own profile, since there are no right or wrong answers, nor is there a desirable or undesirable personality profile.

The more the subject is accurate in responding spontaneously and sincerely, the greater the informative value of the questionnaire results.

Profile drafting and return

After scoring, that is the correction of the completed questionnaire and calculation of the scores relative to each dimension, a personality profile is constructed, which graphically illustrates the combination and levels of the different dimensions measured for the individual subjects. The personality profile is usually accompanied by a narrative, a written text that provides the subjects with an extended reading and an interpretation of the profile itself. In some cases, this narrative is integrated with other knowledge about the subject, relating to personal data or scores obtained in other tests.

The formulation of the items

Items can be formulated in the same direction of dimension that is measuring, or in opposite.

How to execute the recoding: Example: it is very true for me that I’m subject to frequent mood changes (value 5) → low emotional stability; solution is recording of each item for emotional stability → in this case 5=1 / 4=2 / 3=3 / 2=4 / 1=5

Calculation of raw scores

For every sub-dimension, there are positive items and negative items. SUM OF POSITIVE items + (X-SUM OF NEGATIVE items) X= Constant that allows us not to recode a priori negative items

From raw scores to T scores

The scores obtained by summing the items are called "raw". The raw scores must be converted into "standardized" scores, i.e., in scores that are expressed in a "standard" scale RAW SCORES → STANDARDIZED SCORE. In our score medium= 50 S.D= 10

Big five theory

A little bit of history (history of modern personality theory and research)

The two tasks of personality psychology

• The study of individual differences: The dimensions along which people differ from each other; concerns itself with a cross-sectional treatment of personality in terms of traits, attitudes, and habits.
• The study of individual persons as unique, integrated wholes: Treat personality from a functional, historical-genetic standpoint.

Personality vs character

Allport suggested that the latter term, defined as the personality evaluated according to prevailing standards of conduct, was not an appropriate topic for psychological studies, so he continues to use personality in preference to character this soon became standard practice.

Allport and Gestalt psychology

“I learned that chasm exists between the common variety of differential psychology and a truly personalistic psychology that focuses upon the organisation not the mere profiling of individual traits.” He was particularly impressed with Stern’s repudiation of his earlier view of personality as sum of total of traits in favour of an emphasis on the total personality.

Murray

His background in biochemistry permitted his work, in the explicit analogy between his classification of the variables of personality and the periodic table of chemistry.

The big five trait taxonomy (1999)

The lexical hypothesis related with Galton, the most important individual differences in human transactions will come to be encoded as single terms in some or all of the world’s languages. Concerning the relations among personality terms has been mirrored in efforts by later investigations to discover the nature of those relations, so as to construct a structural representation of personality descriptions. The lexical hypothesis points that most of the socially relevant and salient personality characteristics have become encoded in the natural language. Thus, the personality vocabulary contained in the dictionaries of natural language provides an extensive and finite set of attributes that people speaking that language have found important and useful in their daily interactions. With a seminal lexical study of personality-relevant terms in an unabridged English dictionary, they distinguish all the terms that could be used to distinguish the behavior of one human being from that of another. Allport and Odbert thought that organizing these attributes into a satisfactory taxonomy would keep psychologists at work for a lifetime. Divided in 4 alphabetical lists, which contain stable traits.

Cattell

Use the stable traits’ list from Allport and Odbert as a starting point to build 171 scales most of which were bipolar. He develops a set of 35 bipolar clusters. He uses correlation and factorial analysis, and other multivariate techniques into the field of personality. "The ideal of science of personality description is to build its traits upon a foundation of objective test measurement." He adopted trait as the fundamental conceptual unit of personality (like Allport). He distinguishes (like Murray) the dynamic traits from the temperament traits and the ability traits. In his view, each kind of trait had its own pattern of correlation relationship among its component variables and the external situation. Thus, dynamic trait variables change most in response to change of incentives and showed a complex higher-order correlation, while temperament trait variables change least in response to any change in the field. His major contribution to personality was his analysis of temperament traits via mathematical and statistical techniques. He identified 12 personality factors which became part of his 16 personality factors questionnaire.

Extroversion and neuroticism

Appear in one form or another in most personality inventories. They are called “the big two”. There are few signals of convergence, for example, Eysenck observed that “where we have literally hundreds of inventories incorporating thousands of traits largely overlapping but also containing specific variance, each empirical finding is strictly speaking only relevant to a specific trait, this is not the way to build a unified scientific discipline.”

Eysenck’s (1967) three-factor model consisting of extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism; J. A. Gray’s (1970) model of behavioral activation and behavioral inhibition; and others. Two reoccurring dimensions across diverse models are extraversion-introversion and emotional stability-instability (neuroticism). Biological investigations and recent cross-cultural investigations generally support that these are largely universal, biologically-based dimensions of individual differences.

Costa and McCrae’s research

In 1980, they developed the NEO Personality Inventory to measure 3 broad personality dimensions: Neuroticism, Extraversion, and openness to experience (the starting point was Cattell’s work). It has a 114-item questionnaire developed through factor analysis to fit a three-dimensional model of personality, 8 item scales are used for each of six facets or specific traits. In 1992, they published the 240-item NEO Personality Inventory Revisited (NERO PI-R) in which there are six specific facets per factor.

The two models of BIG FIVE

The assimilators (Costa/McCrae and Wiggins). Nowadays, we can say that there are two five-factor models:

• One developed by McCrae and Costa and operationalized in the NEO PI
• Associated with studies based on the lexical hypothesis and operationalized in sets of factor markers provided by Norman, Goldberg, and others.

Similarities between these two models

• The number of dimensions is identical (5).
• The content of Factor IV is essentially the same, although it is oriented in the opposite direction (emotional stability vs neuroticism).
• There is similarity in the content of Factor III (Conscientiousness).

Differences between these two models

• The location of Factor I and II are systematically rotated.
• Factor V is conceived as openness to experience in NEO PI and as Intellect/Imagination in the lexical model.

The biological basis of traits

There are theories along the years that try to correlate personality to biological basis, from Eysenck that began to find a link between 3 factors and nervous system structures and functioning, then the link to the limbic system, arousal.

Individual differences

• Dispositions on the surface: observable variations of behavioral, affective, and cognitive styles.
• Traits: useful to talk about individual differences.

Tradition of research

• To look for universal structure of observable (phenotypical) individual differences.

Introduction to personality psychology

Determinants don’t think about a cause and an effect. The factors that casually contribute to psychological functioning and individual psychological adjustment.

Dynamics

Is about the organization of interacting elements within a person and the ways those elements change over time. Such changes can be determined by what is inside individuals, and not just by what is inside.

Potentialities

Individuals are not passive to react in a certain way.

To study potentialities

1. To contrast the traditional focus of psychology on limits.
2. Individual qualities develop and express themselves through dynamic interactions between individuals and their cultural environment.

Personality psychology

To study psychological and social processes that can contribute to the complete expression of human capacities - JPSP Journal of Psychology and Social Personality.

Interindividual coherence: the dynamics of the characteristics of that particular profile of that particular person. How distinct psychological processes function as a coherent system, within which individuals get to...

Interindividual differences

Typical dispositions or behavior traits that refer to a specific person and that contribute to differentiate one person from another.

Interaction between biological and cultural factors

Nature vs nurture, epigenetics etc.

Interpersonal relationship

A fundamental context for personality development. They mediate the influence of social structures on individuals.

Personality (Caprara and Cervone)

Complex set of psychological systems that contribute to the unity and continuity of behavior and individual experiences (how it has been expressed, or how it is perceived by the individual and by others).

Perspective issue

In the presentation, the topic is between persons or within a person? In an article, what perspective do the authors choose to follow?

• Individual: I put myself in the shoes of others.