PSYC 332 Chapter 4: Chapter 4

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 332
• Professor: Richard Koestner

Document Summary

There may exist a kernel of psychological individuality that remains intact over many decades of life, and a kind of stylistic essense to the self. An essential feature to your personality makeup that seems to have always been there. Personality traits= broad and relatively stable individual differences in feeling, thought and behaviour, which tend to differentiate one social actor from the next. Allport found 18,000 words which referred to human differences in psychological functioning; 4,500 of which reflected stable and enduring personality traits (many overlapped in meaning eg. sociable and friendly) Statistical analysis used to group common terms and narrow it down into a comprehensive list. Arguably 2 to 7 basic regions of personality traits exist. The most popular groupings is the big five, which are 5 superordinate traits, each of which subsumes smaller traits. The big 5= openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism ocean. These are all psychological characteristics for which people assign broad, dispositional trait labels.