PSYC 2600 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Psychoticism, Neuroticism, Surgency

• School: Carleton University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 2600
• Professor: Lorena Ruci

Document Summary

Internal: individuals carry their desires, needs, and wants from one situation to another. The internal properties of a person that cause behavior. Causal: explain the behavior of individuals who possess them. Presumed to exist even in the absence of observable behavioral expressions. Behavior is not caused by traits, but traits are a way to describe observable behavior. All traits listed and defined in the dictionary form the basis of describing differences among people. Lexical hypothesis: all important individual differences have become encoded within the natural language. Over time differences in people that are important are noticed and words are invented to talk about those differences. Trait terms are extraordinarily important for communicating with others about others. Synonym frequency - if an attribute has many trait adjectives to describe it than it is a more important dimension of individual difference. Cross-cultural universality - the more important an individual difference is the moe languages that will have a term for it.