Part 2 – Parts of PersonalityChapter 6 – Mental Abilities and Navigating the

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Part 2, Chapter 6 - Vocabulary

These flashcards have been designed as a study tool to assist in your mastery of each chapter’s vocabulary and accompanying concepts.

Instructions:  This is an animated PowerPoint slide show.  To use it as intended, begin the slide show by clicking on "slide show" (above) and then "view show," or by clicking on the slide show icon below. 

For use in conjunction with: Personality: A Systems Approach, By John D. Mayer

Copyright © 2007 Allyn & Bacon  Mayer’s Personality: A Systems ApproachFlashcards by Rebecca Disbrow

Part 2 – Parts of PersonalityChapter 6 – Mental Abilities and Navigating the

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Mental Ability

The capacity to perform mental tasks, such as solving problems, generating ideas, and similar challenges.

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Intelligence

A specific type of mental ability involving the capacity to reason abstractly so as to arrive at the proper solution to a problem.

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Verbal-Propositional Intelligence

An intelligence that involves the capacity to reason validly with words and language and to understand the meaning of words and language.

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Mental Age

The age that a person’s mental functioning most resembles. If a child can solve problems that most six-year-olds can solve, for example, but fails most problems seven-year-olds can solve, the child is said to have a mental age of six.

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Intelligence Quotient

A score originally proposed as an index of a person’s rate of mental (versus chronological) growth. The Intelligence Quotient, or IQ, has come to mean ant score that reflects an individual’s level of general intelligence.

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Rate IQ

A measure of intelligence. The rate IQ is calculated by taking a person’s mental age, dividing it by the chronological, and multiplying by 100. (Compare to Deviation IQ)

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Deviation IQ

A measure of intelligence. The deviation IQ is calculated by examining a person’s distance or deviation from the average performance of all other people his or her age (compare to Rate IQ).

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Standard Deviation

A measure of distance from a group mean. The standard deviation is a unit of measure. It is calculated by, first, summing the squared deviations from the mean of each person, second, obtaining the average of the summed squared deviations (referred to as variance), and, finally, taking its square root.

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Perceptual-Organization Intelligence

A type of intelligence that involves perceiving visual patterns, organizing the perceptual information in them, and being able to divide the patterns into parts and to reconstruct them.

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Spatial Intelligence

A type of intelligence pertaining to understanding how objects move in space. Spatial intelligence is often measured by examining people’s capacity to accurately rotate objects in their minds and identify what the rotated object would look like.

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Hot Intelligence

A group of intelligences concerned with understanding and reasoning about information of direct personal, felt significance to the individual. For example, emotional intelligence

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Social Intelligence

A type of intelligence concerned with understanding social relations and how to carry out social tasks.

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Personal Intelligence

A proposed intelligence that involves accurately understanding oneself and one’s own mental processes and qualities.

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Practical Intelligence

A type intelligence involving the capacity to understand problems in everyday life that are often left undefined or poorly defined. Practical intelligence requires the problem solver to formulate the problem himself or herself, under conditions in which information necessary to a solution may be lacking. It is said to operate on tacit knowledge – that is, knowledge not often explicitly stated.

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Emotional Intelligence

The ability to reason with emotions, and of emotions to enhance thought. Emotional intelligence involves the capacity to accurately perceive emotions, to use them in thinking, to understand emotions, and to manage emotional experience.

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Creativity

The capacity to generate multiple novel and appropriate solutions to problems.

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Verbal Fluency

The capacity to generate a large number of appropriate words that fit a specified category For example, words that rhyme with

“smell”)

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Alternate Uses

A task in which a participant tries to think of as many uses as possible for an everyday object, such as a desk or a pen.

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Divergent Thinking

The capacity to generate many alternative solutions to a specified problem. For example, to “What are all the

things you can do with a water bottle?”

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General Intelligence (g)

An overall index of a person’s ability to solve problems accurately and quickly across all major areas of cognitive reasoning- verbal-propositional, perceptual, organizational, spatial, and others.

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Intellectual Absorption

A trait related to intelligence that concerns the capacity to become involved in intellectual problems to the point of losing track of other activities.

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Schizotypal Style

A cognitive style associated with a mental disorder involving very odd forms of thinking and perceiving, and behavioral eccentricities.

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Bipolar Disorder

A mental disorder marked by severe swings in mood.

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Crystallized Intelligence

Actual knowledge stored about the world that can be applied to the solutions of mental problems.

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Fluid Intelligence

A type of ongoing mental capacity or ability to deal with novel, new problems.

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Concrete Thinking

Thinking that correctly holds symbols, ideas, and thoughts in memory, but without any comparisons or generalizations about those ideas.

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Abstract Reasoning

The capacity to manipulate symbols, see relationships among concepts, and to integrate ideas in thought.

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Assortive Mating

The tendency for people to marry or otherwise mate with those people who are similar to themselves in particular dimensions or traits. People exhibit assortive mating for intelligence.