The course will give you powerful frameworks to understand and human behaviour: We cover the major domains: What functions does personality serve?; Facets: What is buried inside the 5 domains?; Values as the immediate causes of behavior; Well-being: How does being happy differ from living a good life?; How can individual differences help us understanding the world: education, relationships, work, abnormal psychology.
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Table of Contents
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Admin
Course Chair: Professor Timothy Bates
- Course Secretary: ku.ca.de|thgirW.E#ku.ca.de|thgirW.E
Where and when the course is held
- See the University DRPS listing.
- More course information is available in the Y4 Handbook available here.
nb: You are all welcome to attend the Individual Differences journal club. (M.Sc. PID students: you should attend all meetings)
Objectives
- Developing an understanding of the causes and consequences of individual differences.
- To explore the role of personality in behaviour from wellbeing to politics
- To discuss these findings, relating them to opportunities for change or predicting behaviour.
- To foster critical appraisal skills and to encourage independent reading.
1: Introduction to the course
Lecture one consists of orientation to the course, and overview of personality, and allocation of students to the four subsequent weeks.
(pdf)
References
2: Personality & its Facets: Conscientiousness
3: Personality & Well-being: Depression, Happiness, Eudaemonia
4: Individual Differences and Society: Linking Personality to action
People's behavior is often only weakly linked to their personality. One model of why is that many behavior are mediated by values.
This week we can cover three topics:
- Openness is one of the 5-major dimensions of personality but little is known about it. In this period, we will try and summarise the world's literature on O and also look at O-related behaviors - from creativity to political attitudes.
- We don’t all vote for the same party: Why not?
- What are values?
Student presentations
last year
References
- Openness
- Robert McCrae 2009 on Openness
- TICS Creativity2007.pdf
- Nusbaum, E. C. and Silvia, P. J. (2011). Are intelligence and creativity really so different?: Fluid intelligence, executive processes, and strategy use in divergent thinking. Intelligence, 39. 36-45. doi. link.
- Nusbaum, E. C. and Silvia, P. J. (2011). Are Openness and Intellect distinct aspects of Openness to Experience? A test of the O/I model. Personality and Individual Differences, 51. 571-574. doi]. [<Go to ISI>:000293670500004 link].
- Silvia, P. J., Nusbaum, E. C., Berg, C., Martin, C. and O'Connor, A. (2009). Openness to experience, plasticity, and creativity: Exploring lower-order, high-order, and interactive effects. //Journal of Research in Personality, 43. 1087-1090. doi]. [<Go to ISI>://000272113800016 link].
- From Personality to Politics: A position paper
- Politics and Values
- Is political behavior rational? Or personal?
- Oxley.et.al <em>Science</em>The Physiology of Politics
- Rozin, P., Haidt, J. and Fincher, K. (2009). Psychology. From oral to moral. <i>Science</i>, <b>323</b>, 1179-80.
- Schnall, S., Benton, J. and Harvey, S. (2008). With a clean conscience: cleanliness reduces the severity of moral judgments. <i>Psychol Sci</i>, <b>19</b>,
- 1219-22.
- doi
- Chiao & Blizinsky 2009 5HTTLPR and collectivism
- (pdf)
5: Summary, Questions, Claims, Controversies, Breakthroughs at the borderline
Homework for each of you throughout the course is to collect ideas, newspaper and media claims, questions, controversies, strong claims in personality and related areas, and we can spend 2 hours in a round-table discussing these.
- What is altruism?
- Can personality explain personality disorder? [http://www.subjectpool.com/ed_teach/y4person/4_ant_bpd/ANT_and_Disorder.pdf" > ANT and Disorder.pdf ]
- Do people differ?
- Is IQ a protective factor in mental and physical health?
- BPD and ANT.pptx
- McNallyPTSD.ppt
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