PSY 236 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Blood Pressure, Lexical Hypothesis, Anal Retentiveness
Document Summary
General, internal and comparative dispositions that account for consistency in behavior over time. Persistent over time and situation, but not exactly in the same form. Traits ared dimensional - not categorical - not personality types . Dimensions : you can have a little or a lot and everything in between. Blood pressure is a dimension (hypertension is a categorical name for a particular range of a dimension) Categories: you either have it or you don"t. Consistency across situations in relation to the trait. Traits explain the behavior of people who possess them. Assumed to be capacities that are present even in the absence of overt expressions (e. g. aa glass is brittle, even if it never breaks) Semantically useful - rules out other causes of behavior (why don"t i go to parties?) Description of expressed behavior with no assumption about internality or causality: the act frequency approach, traits are categories of acts, high frequency acts become viewed as traits.
