Trait-Descriptive Adjectives
Adjectives that can be used to describe characterisics of people are trait descriptive adjectives
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 environment (including the intrapsychic, physical and social enviormen
Psychological Traits
Pscyhological trait are characteristics that describe ways in which people are unique or different from each other. Psychological traits include all sorts of aspects of persons that are psychologically meaningful and are stable and consistant apsects of p
Average Tendencies
Average tendency is the tendency to display a certain psychological trait with regularity. For example, on average, a high-talkative person will start more conversations than a low-talkative person. This idea explains why the principle of agregation works
Psychologial Mechanisms
Psychological mechanisms are like traits, except that mechanisms refer more to the processes of personality. A psychological mechanism may make people more sensitive to certain kinds of information from the enviornment (input), may make them more likely t
Within the Individual
The important sources of personality reside within the individual within the individual - that is, a person carries the sources of their personality inside themselves - and hence are stable over time and consistant over situations
Organized and Endruing
Organized" means that the psychological traits and mechanisms for a given person are not simply a random collection of elements. Rather, personality is a coherent because the mechanisms are traits are linked to one another in an organized fashion. "Endur
Influetial Forces
Personalality traits and mechanisms are influential forces in people's lives that influence our atcions, how we view ourselves, how we think about the world, how we interact with others, how we feel our selection of enrionments (particularily our social e
Person-Enviornment Interaction
A person's interactions with situations include perceptions, selections, evocations and manipulations. Perceptions refer to how we "see" or interpret an envirnment. Selection describes the manner in which we choose situations - such as our friends, our ho
Adaptation
Adaptations are inherited solutions to the survival and reproductive problems posed by the hostile forces of nature. Adaptations are the primary product of the selective process. An adaptation is a "reliably developing structure in the organism, which, be
Environment
Enviornments can be physical, social and intrapsychic (within the mind). Which aspect of hte environment is important at any moment in time is frequently determined by the personality of the person in that environment is important at any moment in time is
Human Nature
Human nature is defined as the traits and mechanisms of personality that are typical of our species and are possessed by everyone or nearly everyone.
Group Differences
People in one group may have certain personality features in common, and these common features make them different from other groups. Examples of groups studied by personality psychologists include different cultures, differnt age groups, different politi
Individual Differences
Every individual has personal and unique qualities which make them different from others. The study of all the ways in which individuals can differ from others, the number, origin and meaning of such differences, is the study of individual differences
Nomothetic
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Idiographic
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Domain of Knowledge
A specialty area of science and scholarship, where psychologists have focused on learning about some specific and limited apsect of human nature, often with perferred tools of investigation
Biological Domain
The core assumption of biological approaches to personality is that humans are, first and foremost a collections of biological systems, and these systems provide the building blocks (e.g. brain, nervous system) for behavior, thought and emotion. Biologica
Intrapsychic Domain
This domain deals with mental mechanisms of personality, many of which operate outside the realm of conscious awareness. THe predominant theory in this domain is Freud's theory of psychoanalysis. This theory begins with fundemental assumptions abou the in
Dispositional Domain
The distpositional domain deals centrally with the ways in which individuals differ from one another. As such, the dipositional domain connects with all the other domains. In the dispositional domain, psychologists are primarily interested in the number a
Cognitive/Experiential Domain
This domain focuses on congnition and subjective experience, such as conscious throughts, feelings, beliefs and desires about one self and others. This domain includes our feelings of self, identity, self-esteem, our goals and plans, and our emotions
Social and Cultural Domain
Personality affects, and is affected by, the social and cultural context in which it is found. Different cultures may bring out different facets of our personalities in manifest behavior. The capacities we display may depend to a large extent on what is a
Adjustment Domain
Personality plays a key role in how we cope, adapt, and adjust to the ebb and flow of events in our day-to-day lives. In addition to health consquences of adjusting to stress, there are certain personality features that are related to poor social or emoti
Criteria of a Good Theory
A theory should serve as a guide for researchers, directing them to important quesitons within some area of research. A theory should organize known findings and make predictions about behavior and psychological phenomona that no one has yet documented or
TheoriesVerses Beliefs
Beliefs are often personally useful and crucially important to some people, but they are based on leaps of faith, not on reliable facts and systematic observations. Theories, on the other hand, are based on systematic observations, taht can be repeated by