By Edward Diener and Richard E. Lucas, University of Utah, University of Virginia, Michigan State University. Personality traits reflect people’s characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Personality traits imply consistency and stability—someone who scores high on a specific trait like Extraversion is expected to be sociable in different situations and over time. Thus, trait psychology rests on the idea that people differ from one another in terms of where they stand on a set of basic trait dimensions that persist over time and across situations. The most widely used system of traits is called the Five-Factor Model. This system includes five broad traits that can be remembered with the acronym OCEAN: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Each of the major traits from the Big Five can be divided into facets to give a more fine-grained analysis of someone's personality...

This module on learning introduces classical and operant conditioning and social/observational learning and is appropriate for an undergraduate psychology course, either as a first introduction to the topic or as a refresher for more advanced courses.It includes a brief overview of the topic, module level objectives, readings (online free textbook and a website), links to YouTube videos explaining the three major learning theories, a low-stakes quiz sample, one required discussion, an optional discussion, and a choice of three different assignments.Links are active at time of upload, but that may change, of course.