Personality-- A distinctive and relatively stable pattern of behavior, thoughts, motives, and emotions that characterizes an individual.

Trait-- A descriptive characteristic of an individual, assumed to be stable across situations and time. Trait theorists describe "personality" as being made up of certain patterns or collections of "traits."

Chapter 12 of your textbook focuses on the different perspectives (e.g., biological, psychodynamic) and how they have viewed personality. If you were to find out something about your own personality, you might try to look at your own behavior, beliefs, general mood, etc., to try to come up with a description. But, could you be accurate and fair in your assessment? What if a friend (or enemy) described your personality? Would any two people come up with the same answer?

Because of these problems, and the need in psychology to compare and contrast people that have certain personalities, a variety of personality measures have been developed. Each reflects the theoretical perspective of its developer and, accordingly, taps into different aspects of personality.

For this pre-lab, you will get to take a personality assessment based on the trait approach to personality. Specifically, the Big Five personality traits described on pp. 459-460 of your text. This is currently the most accepted and popular way to measure personality.

In your lab/discussion session, you will be introduced to other ways to measure personality and how they relate to your views of yourself.

For step-by-step pre-lab instructions and to access the web pages needed to do the pre-lab, click the picture below: