The Analysis of the Five Factor Model Essay examples

Guilford (1959) defines personality traits as being ‘any distinguishable, relatively enduring way in which one individual varies from another’. Subsequently, trait theory can be identified as an approach to the study of human personality. The aim of psychologists, specifically trait theorists, is to explain similarities and differences between individuals based on traits. Although numerous psychologists differ on the amount of traits that are significant, each theorist categorizes personality traits along several broad type spectrums. This assignment will focus on comparing and contrasting Eysenck’s Hierarchical Theory of Personality and Costa and McRae’s Five Factor Model (FFM), two different trait theories of personality.

Personality is a complex area of Psychology, which has been studied for many years, by many experts in the field. Each having their own ideas about how to understand, study and evaluate it. Here I will introduce personality briefly, looking at the theories behind it. Then explain the need for testing. As there are many test that are available to use, for the purpose of this essay I will look at The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) and discuss the reliability and validity of some studies around these tests.

The five-factor model is a common ground between Raymond Cattell’s 16 personality factor and Hans Eysenck’s three-factor theory. The five-factor model was designed by Robert McCrae and Paul Costa. The five-factor model consist of five different main personality traits known as the big five. Personality is fundamental traits, or characteristic behaviors and conscious motives. The five personality traits are extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, and neuroticism. These are also known as OCEAN. These traits are used to predict individual’s attitude and behavior. Each factor characterizes the level between two extremes. Openness is creativity, intelligence, perceptive, flexibility, imaginative, the and the ability to try new things (Fuhrman, 2015). Conscientiousness is to be future oriented, organized, and goal driven. Extraversion is warmness fun-loving, sociable, affectionate, and optimistic emotionality. Agreeableness is nurturing, emotionally supportive, and trustworthy. Neuroticism is commonly characterized by stress, anxiety, and depression as well as secure, calm and self-satisfied. Researchers believe that environmental and biological factors can influence individual’s personality. These traits are stable but can change over time. People become more conscientiousness and agreeable as they get older, and less neurotic, open, and extraverted. The outcome of clinical studies and research settings can be guessed using these five personality traits (Ilie,

The five-factor model (FFM) is a contemporary construct describing personality. It incorporates five traits – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism also referred to as OCEAN. Within each dimension, there are specific personality attributes, for example, openness includes subcategories of feelings and actions. The FFM was influenced by Cattell’s 16-factor model (1957) and shares traits with many other personality theories such as Eysenck’s PEN model. There has been an ongoing debate discussing how many factors appropriately represent the brain structure of personality, suggestions have varied from 2-7, recently Almagor et al. (1995) advocated that a 7-factor model unfolds when evaluative traits are involved. Costa & Mcrae (1992) claim that the FFM is the best theory of personality, however, the model has received much criticism. Through examining different aspects of the model its credibility can be explored.

found later on in the textbook is called the Five-Factor model of personality (Cervone & Pervin,

Costs & McCrae, (1995) supported the development that each of the Five Factor Model (FFM) further split into six facets, (Widiger & Costa, 2012). The five factor model and their six facets are explained as: “Extraversion (E) – gregariousness, sociability, affiliation, dominance, boldness and forcefulness, Agreeableness (A) - generous, cooperative, altruistic and warm, Conscientiousness (C) – responsible, efficiency, dependability, carefulness and organization, Neuroticism (low ES) – anxiousness, insecurity, indecisiveness and being tense /Emotional Stability (ES) - self-reliant and stable and Openness to Experience (O) – imaginative, unconventional, curious, original and independent minded” (Ehrhart et. al., 2008) allowing the five factor model to be effective in developing cross-cultural questionnaires (Costs & McCrae, 1995).

There are several types of theories regarding personality traits and development. The ones more commonly in use by researchers are Eysenck’s theory and the 5-factor model. Eysenck’s theory consists of psychoticism (P), extraversion (E), and neuroticism (N). The 5-factor model is viewed as accurate about personality traits, among all culture’s. It consists of PEN plus additional factors besides PEN; conscientiousness and agreeableness. Eysenck’s theory and the 5-factor model are two popular personality theories that researchers used to identify personality traits that produce behaviors and both theories consists of traits that are identifiable in Lola. The preferred theory to use researching Lola is Eysenck’s

This theory consists of broad, long-lasting dispositions that can be assessed. The five-factor model consists of representations of the core description of human personality, the only dimensions necessary to understand what makes us tick. The “Big Five” in the model are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The advantages of this theory are being able to identify personality traits using assessments and questionnaires as a more reliable method of assessing personality. Disadvantages of the trait theory includes a focus on broad dimensions instead of uniqueness of individuals and the tendency for biased

The Five Factor Model is particularly useful to psychologist by classifying disorders into traits and psychologist use a number system or a check yes/no sort of style. The Five Factor Model of personality does not replicate the same data in developing countries but does so in developed countries. The reason behind this is the different connotations that words have between cultures (Moss, 2015). The model is considered too complex with regards of using traits compared to other theories. Cognitive therapy is an appealing model because it focuses on human thought.

In 1990, J.M. Digman advanced his five factor model of personality, which Lewis Goldberg extended to the highest level of organization.[13] These five overarching domains have been found to contain and subsume most known personality traits and are assumed to represent the basic structure behind all personality traits.[14] These five factors provide a rich conceptual framework for integrating all the research findings and theory in personality psychology. The Big Five traits are also referred to as the "Five Factor Model" or FFM,[1] and as the Global Factors of personality.[15]

The mean values for the Big Five traits were respectively close, such as 26.41 and 34.99; this suggested the reliability were adequate and consistent throughout all three samples. For the two-month re-test study results, showed reliability and scores were similar in the two independent subsamples. The convergent validity coefficients were substantial and significant and exceeded the discriminant validity. This suggests that an adequate convergent and discriminant validity of the Big Five. When participant’s age and gender were held constant, the Big Five were associated with school performances. Therefore, supported the hypothesis of the high students and suggested predictive validity. Overall, the results support the reliability and validity of the Big Five and can be useful in assessing personality traits in adults and adolescents

FFM originated from the United States and is currently used by psychologist around the world in various applications. The model suggests that personality traits are universal and can fit well in a cross culture testing (Costs & McCrae, 1995).

To understand personality there are three main aspects that must be looked at: LArsen and Buss Definition of personality, The Six Domains of knowledge of personality, and Costa and McCrae's Five Factor Theory. In this essay I will first break down larsen and Buss definition and connect it to the domains, then connect the domains to the five factor thoery (FFT).

The original International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) focused on Goldberg’s 100-adjective markers of the psycholexical FFM structure (Goldberg, 1990/1992). The current IPIP-50 is a 50-item prototype public domain (the NEO-PI-R is a commercial questionnaire) personality questionnaire (Goldberg et al., 2006; Goldberg, 2011). Since the questionnaire is free of charge over 600 different studies have employed it (Goldberg, 2016). Until 2005 the IPIP big-five factor markers lacked validating evidence, but research conducted in 2005 found that the IPIP-50 had a high internal consistency and related strongly to both Costa and McCrae’s NEO-FFI and Eysenck’s EPQ-R Short Form (Gow et al., 2005). In addition, Gow et al. (2005) found that although Intellect and Openness related less strong, it was still 0.59. A study carried out in New Zealand found that there was hardly any evidence to suggest hidden biases at the item or scale level of the IPIP-50 (Guenole & Chernyshenko, 2005). Before looking at the research examining the relation between the FFM and EI, this literature review first presents some of the current findings in EI.

Some of the initial ideas and founding features for the five factor model were theorised by numerous different researchers. Researchers believe that the number of personality traits can be reduced to five major factors, hence the “Big Five” and all other personality traits can be placed within each of the five major factors. These beliefs were first brought about by the findings of Fiske (1949) who was conducting a study in-order to gather supporting evidence for Cattell’s 12 personality factors (Cattell, 1943; 1945a, b), which eventually became part of his 16 Personality Factors (16PF) questionnaire (Cattell et al., 1970). Initially Fiske was trying to collect supporting data for Cattell’s 12 personality factors though he instead found support for five factors, this started an explosion of research throughout the 1980’s and 90’s which continued to provide supporting evidence for the five major factors.