PSYC 1010 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Sigmund Freud, Personal Unconscious, Psychoanalytic Theory

• School: York University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 1010
• Professor: Gerry Goldberg

Document Summary

The essential features of the concept of personality are consistency and distinctiveness. In summary the concept of personality is used to explain (1) the stability in a person"s behavior over time and across situations (consistency) and (2) the behavioral differences among people reacting to the same situation (distinctiveness). A personality trait is a durable disposition to behave in a particular way in a variety of situations. The statistical procedure of factor analysis created by raymond. Cattlel was used to reduce a huge list of personality traits compiled by gordon allport to just 16 basic dimensions of personality. In factor analysis, correlations among the many variables are analyzed to identify closely related clusters variables. Based on his factor analytic work, cattlel concluded that an individual"s personality can be described completely by measuring just 16 traits. In more recent years, robert macrae and paul costca have use factor analysis to arrive at it even simpler, five factor model of personality.