[PSYCH 2B03] - Midterm Exam Guide - Comprehensive Notes for the exam (50 pages long!)
6 Feb 2017
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It is impossible to focus on all aspects of personality at the same time. Each approach to personality focuses on a limited number of key concerns and ignores everything else. Biological: architecture and function of nervous system, heritability, and evolutionary history. Humanistic: moment-to-moment conscious awareness, free will, and individual and cultural construals of reality. Learning and cognitive: rewards and punishments, environment, basic mental processes. The approaches are different answers to different questions, so you should take the approach that answers the question you find most interesting. What have we learned: research methods are useful, cross-situational consistency and aggregation. People remain who they are regardless of situation. Consistent patterns of behaviour are rooted in anatomy, brain chemistry, and genes. Rewarded behaviours become more likely and punished behaviours become less likely. Environment choice can determine rewards and punishments we receive. Ask the person directly, usually via questionnaire. People tend to describe themselves in the same way that others describe them.
