Emotion and personality
| English | Chinese | Pinyin |
|---|---|---|
| emotion | 情绪 | qíng xù |
| personality | 人格 | rén gé |
| trait theories | 特质理论 | tè zhì lǐ lùn |
| learning approaches | 学习取向 | xué xí qǔ xiàng |
Three things happen at once
- An emotion 情绪 has a physiological change, an expression, and a subjective feeling.
- Your heart rate rises, your face changes, and you feel afraid. The question psychology asks is which comes first.
- Theories differ on the order, and a question naming a theory expects that theory's order back.
Which are the three components of an emotion? Choose all that apply.
The theories differ on the order of these three, not on which three they are.
The competing orders
- One account says the body responds first and the feeling is our reading of the body.
- Another says the feeling and the bodily change happen at the same time.
- A third says we notice the bodily change and then interpret it using the situation — the same racing heart is fear in the dark and excitement at a concert.
- The third explains why context changes what an identical body state feels like.
Personality
- Personality 人格 is a person's stable pattern of thinking, feeling and behaving.
- Trait theories 特质理论 describe it along dimensions, placing each person somewhere on each.
- Learning approaches 学习取向 explain it as the accumulated result of experience — which is the emphasis GAC029 takes.
- Both agree personality is stable; they disagree about where the stability came from.
The same racing heart feels like fear in a dark corridor and excitement at a concert. Which account explains that best?
Identical physiology, different context, different emotion — which is the evidence that account was built on.
The same racing heart, twice.
Alone in a dark corridor: heart pounding, breathing fast. You feel afraid.
At the front of a concert: heart pounding, breathing fast. You feel exhilarated.
The physiological state is nearly identical. The interpretation differs because the situation differs, which is exactly the evidence the third theory was built to explain — and naming it is what earns the mark.
A sociable person being quiet at a funeral disproves that they are sociable.
A trait is a tendency across many situations, not a prediction about any single one.
In one sentence, explain how a learning approach would account for a person's shyness.
Example: "Earlier attempts to join conversations went badly, so the behaviour that avoided them was reinforced."
A trait is a tendency across many situations, not a prediction about the next one. Someone high on a sociability dimension is quiet at a funeral, and that is not a contradiction of the trait.
Do not use a personality label as an explanation of itself. "He is aggressive because he has an aggressive personality" restates the observation and explains nothing — an examiner reads it as evidence you have no mechanism.
Why is "he is aggressive because he has an aggressive personality" a weak answer?
The label is a summary of the behaviour, so it cannot also be its cause.