PSYC FPX 2900 assessment 1

Lola from a Traits Perspective

For the purposes of this paper, Lola’s personality in the case study will be analyzed by applying two trait theories. Which theory accounts best for Lola and how her personality traits might have developed will also be resolved. The two models or theories of personality are the Eysenck’s Hierarchical Model of Personality and the Five Factor Model.

Models of Personality

To understand better the personality traits of Lola, it is important to understand how the two models view personality. Hans Eysenck built his model of personalities on three general dimensions Psychoticism (P), Extraversion-Introversion (E), and Neuroticism-Emotional Stability (N), which can be easily remembered using the acronym PEN (Larsen & Buss, 2021). Eysenck was of the opinion that these characteristics are moderately inherited and any one of the characteristics such as Extraversion may be at the “top” of the hierarchy or be stronger. He also suggested a biological relationship between characteristics and a physiological response in the body such as Extraversion in an individual being associated with increased responsiveness of the Central Nervous System. A concise description of Eysenck’s model in terms of his PEN traits characterizes each “super trait such as Psychoticism having narrower traits below such as aggressive, cold, creative, antisocial, impersonal.

Extraversion-Introversion has sub-traits of sociable, lively, active, surgent and Neuroticism- Emotional Stability has sub traits of anxious, depressed, shy, emotional, tense, low self-esteem. Each narrow sub trait is followed by habitual acts and then specific acts in Eysenck’s model. For example, a daily activity of an extraverted person would be partying and an isolated activity would be going to bingo on the 3rd Friday of each month as a senior class representative. This is the basic structure of Eysenck’s hierarchical model (Larsen & Buss, 2021).

PSYC FPX 2900 Assessment 1 Lola from a Traits Perspective

The second is the Five Factor Model using these wide traits of Surgency/extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional stability, and -Culture/intellect/openness. Under the five-factor model, the traits are measured on two dimensions. The first is self-assessment of adjectives like, talkative, warm, calm, artistic, each one belonging to one of the wide five traits; Talkative belonging to extraversion and artistic belonging to Culture/intellect/openness. There are thousands more adjectives but they would all come under one of the five traits.

The second way that is used most often of measuring is also a self-rating but uses sentences to describe a person’s personality, like “I like talking with and meeting new people!”; which would fall under Surgency/extraversion. (Larsen & Buss, 2021). These personality dispositions can be combined to explain a person’s personality more adequately than one disposition. They who score high on Agreeableness and high on extraversion perform more volunteer work (Larsen and Buss, 2021).

There are an infinite number of variables to these combinations for the infinite number of different personalities there are.

Lola’s Personality

Lola is a college-aged female who is having some difficulty with her social and personal life. She had a history of difficulty with relating to people in her life like her family members and loved ones. She seems to think that there is an angle for which people want to be her friend or be friends with her, and she always looks at other girls as jealous of her looks. Even knowing she is beautiful, she is distrustful of other individuals and their motives for applying the fact to her. She has had some school problems and stress throughout her life but has gained some artistic inspiration with art classes like painting and music where she discusses joy and fulfillment.

She recently experienced a breakup of her boyfriend and is having a hard time dealing with that while trying to find her self-identity. Observing the people in Lola’s life can give some insight into how her personality may have developed. Starting with Eysenck’s Hierarchical Model of Personality, it can be observed how Lola may have inherited some of the dispositional characteristics from her mother. Eysenck believed that broad traits were moderately heritable. Lola’s mom portrays herself as not being friendly and not having friends or a social life during her upbringing as was Lola’s, and accusing Lola of being different from her other daughter Emily.

Lola also states that her parents did not spend time with her and her sister when they were young.

PSYC FPX 2900 Assessment 1 Lola from a Traits Perspective

Lola and her mother also both exhibit high introversion tendencies showing that Lola had inherited some of these tendencies from her mother. Lola at one point decides to become a model and though finding some fulfillment with this at first, comes to realize that she feels self-conscious about a lot of things about herself and exhibits signs traits of Neuroticism with having unstable emotions. She continues to show low emotional stability with her lack of sleep, difficulty in class and school after her breakup. Lola also shows creativity with her love for the arts which are specific behaviors that can come under Psychoticism in Eysenck’s hierarchical model of personality.

It can be observed that Eysenck’s model can be utilized to understand better those who are more prone to psychosis (Knežević et al., 2019).

Lola’s personality over the course of her life demonstrates one with little social contact, few friends, high stress but also moments of creativity and confidence. These are to be explained by Introversion, Neuroticism, and Psychoticism which are the three broad broad traits that Eysenck used for his hierarchical model, (PEN).

While it might be argued that the five-factor model with so many possible combinations of variables for descriptive personality traits may also describe Lola, Eysenck’s hierarchical model is a better fit for describing how Lola’s personality may have developed in terms of her family and environment.