all right welcome back let's look at the trait and biological perspectives when it comes to personality so first off remember that the trade approach is going to use that factor analysis to figure out what are the individual traits that comprise personality and one of the first people to use factor analysis for personality was Hans eisenic and he said that personality came down to two single Dimensions so how extroverted versus introverted you are versus how stable versus unstable you are so you can look at these particular personality characteristics and see if you can fit yourself into one of these particular quadrants so it's amazing that he said our personality came to came down to two particular traits he later changed his model to actually add a third trait which is called psychoticism versus self-control psychoticism means more like creativity and going against the grain versus people who follow follow the rules follow the group that would be self-control now another very important um trait Theory of Personality and probably the most well accepted trait Theory right now would be the Big Five personality um that personality seems to come down to five basic traits and these particular traits seem to be seen across all cultures which suggests that there is an evolutionary or a biological basis to these uh particular personality traits so it's often short to shortened to the acronym the ocean uh traits all right so o being openness to experience C being conscientiousness e being extroversion a being agreeableness and N being neuroticism and people can fall either high or low on all of these five different traits now there does seem to be biological basis to certain traits for insta for instance um uh extroversion versus introversion extroverts seem to have very little electrical activity at rest and so they tend to seek out activities and experiences that would help raise that electrical activity so that's a biological basis whereas introverts it seems like they have too much cortical activity occurring and so what do they do they seek out experiences that are going to reduced that electrical activity stability versus instability seems to be have a biological basis as to your autonomic nervous system so stable people it takes a lot for their autonomic nervous system to react versus unstable individuals have a hair like trigger for their autonomic nervous system and finally novelty to novelty seeking or openness to experience seem related to dopamine levels now the social cognitive theories of personality would put forth by Albert bandura Canadian psychologist and he was a big advocate of reciprocal determinist determinism and this is the idea that really does combine the social and the cognitive aspects that the environment plays a role on the person but the person also can affect the environment that they choose that's really what reciprocal determinism is that all of these are interconnected now a big component to the social cognitive theory is that we build self-efficacy self-efficacy is our confidence in our ability to do a particular task and we know that self-efficacy is affected by four different factors so we will remember that our past performance so how we did on a particular task is going to affect our self-efficacy watching others can actually improve or uh hurt our self-efficacy verbal persuasion again positive is going to help our self-efficacy negative verbal persuasion will hurt our self-efficacy and our arousal level all right there's a certain level of arousal that we need to enhance our self-efficacy versus hurt our self-efficacy finally let's look at how we um measure or assess personality and it really depends on which perspective that we talked about as to how a psychologist would assess um personality now psychodynamic perspective where our personality is in our unconscious all right they tend to look at what we call projective tests where they ask you about ambiguous stimuli and the idea is that your personality is going to come out in those ambiguous stimuli so some common projective personality tests that are used by psychodynamic therapists would be the Rorschach ink block tests where it's a standard set of ink blots and you ask your client about what they see in those ink blots and the idea here is your personality is going to come out in that another important one is What's called the Thematic Apperception Test and that is where psychologists have standard set of cards that have pictures on it like pictures of two people or pictures of a house and again they ask what tell me a story about these pictures and the idea is that your personality comes out in that now another big type of Personality scale would be uh sorry personality assessment are those scales those paper and pencil tests personality tests that we can take oftentimes personality scales are very objective all right because they can be scored according to a particular key and it allows people to collect a lot of data in a short amount of time now the problem with these paper and pencil type of personality tests is that we don't know how truthful people are answering those questions so good personality scales will build in validity scales so little truth detectors that should tell whether somebody's answering true or truthfully now probably the most common or well used personality scale right now is the mmpi the Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory which is in its second um revision and this mmpi2 scale has about 567 true false items it has a lot of those validity scales so the truth detecting scales built right in and what they found is that the mmpi tends to be answered the same way depending on certain employment um vocations a person has it is answered the same way depending on certain psychological disorders that you have so a lot of clinical psychologists will use this mmpi to determine whether somebody has a certain psychological disorder employers will use this mmpi to see if you have certain characteristics that are ideal for that particular employment so a lot of military and police um employers will use this mmpis so we'll stop there and that that brings us to the end of Personality psychology