Chapter 7: Cognitive And Social Cognitive Aspects Of Personality

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Gestalt Psychology

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emphasizes the integrative and active nature of thoughts and perception, suggesting that the whole may be greater than the sum of its parts

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Gestalt theorists say:

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- humans seek meaning in their environments
- we organize things we receive from the world into meaningful perceptions
- perception involves a search for meaning

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Field Theory

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- developed by Kurt Lewin
- behaviour is determined by complex interactions among a person's internal psychological structure and the forces of external environment, and the relationships between the internal and external

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Life Space

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- part of Field Theory
- focuses on all the internal and external forces that act on an individual

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contemporaneous causation

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- field theory's definition of personality is focused on contemporaneous causation
- behaviour is caused at the moment of its occurrence by all the influences present in the individual at that moment

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cognitive style

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- each individual has a distinctive cognitive style
- an individual’s way of dealing with every day tasks of perception and problem solving

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Field-dependent

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people that are influenced by the contextual factors and influences around them

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Field-independent

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people that are not as influenced by the contextual factors and influences

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learning style

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the way a person approaches a skill or task to be learned

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Schema Theory

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- developed by Piaget
- new cognitive structures (schemas) build on the schemas acquired earlier
- children progress through a series of cognitive stages and their thought process becomes more sophisticated as they get older

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schemas

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cognitive structure that organizes knowledge and expectations about one's environment

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scripts

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a schema that guides behaviour in social situations

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I.e. of a script

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eating at a restaurant and the routine behaviours that accompany this situation

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categorization

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when we organize objects, people, and events into categories when we encounter them
- can help us make inferences and learn material quickly
- may cause us to oversimplify or stereotype

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rejection sensitivity

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how overly sensitive a person is to the cues that he or she is being rejected by another

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control of attention

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we notice things in our environment without even knowing

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ADHD and control of attention

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- person with ADHD has atypical attentional processes
- attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder
- may have thought and organization difficulty

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Personal Construct Theory

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- developed by George Kelly
- idea that people try to interpret and understand their environment and construct their own theories of human behaviour

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Role Construct Repertory Test

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- assessment instrument developed by George Kelly to try to portray a person's constructs by making comparisons between important people in the person's life
- triads between 3 people

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Social Intelligence

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idea that people differ in their level of mastery of particular skills or knowledge relevant to interpersonal skills (similar to Gardiner's multiple intelligences)

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Mind sight

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when we recognize that we sense what another person is feeling which is done through mirror neurons

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mirror neurons

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mirror neurons in brains that become active during observational learning

I.e. when you see someone in pain, you feel it too

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explanatory style

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set of cognitive personality variables that captures a person's way of interpreting life events
- when we make attributions, that are internal or external, for the things we experience

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people with optimistic perspective:

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tend to view all events as positive, even neutral events
tend to have better outcomes

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people with pessimistic perspective:

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tend to focus on negative potential in situations

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learned helplessness

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- Seligman and dog experiment
when a person has repeated experiences of a situation where they feel like they can't do anything to change the situation they're in and eventually give up

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cognitive intervention

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teaching people to change their thought processes

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learned optimism

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an optimistic style that can be trained to acheive

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Locus of control

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- developed by Julian Rotter
- variable that measures whether a person attributes outcomes to factors internal to the self or external self

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According to locus of control approach, behaviour depends on:

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outcome expectancy and reinforcement value

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outcome expectancy

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How strongly we expect our performance will have a positive outcome

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reinforcement value

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How much we value the expected reinforcement

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Rotter stated 6 Psychological Needs that drive people

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need for recognition-status
need for dominance
need for independence
need for protection-dependency
need for love and affection
need for physical comfort

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internal locus of control

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generalized expectancy that an individual's own actions lead to desired outcomes
- we have control of our outcomes

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external locus of control

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belief that things outside of the individual determine whether desired outcomes occur
- we don't have control of our outcomes

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Observational Learning

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- developed by Albert Bandura
- learning through observation of others, also known as modelling

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4 factors that influence modelling

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- characteristics of the model
- characteristics of the behaviour
- outcome expectancies
- attributes of the behaviour

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Bobo doll experiment

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children learning of aggression through observing adults' aggression on Bobo dolls

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self-efficacy

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an expectancy or belief about how competently one will be able to enact a behaviour in a particular situation

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self-efficacy beliefs are the result of 4 types of information:

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- Our experiences trying to perform the target behaviour/similar behaviour
- Watching others perform that or similar behaviours
- Verbal persuasion
- How we feel about the behaviour

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self-regulation

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monitoring one's own behaviour as a result of one's internal processes of goals, planning, and self-reinforcement

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humans as computers

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people as information processors
we process information similar to how computers do

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turing test

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- developed by Alan Turing
- a standard test to see whether a computer can adequately simulate a human
- a human judge interacts with a human and a computer and tries to determine which is the computer

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Advantages of Social Cognitive and Cognitive Approach

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captures importance of human thought and behaviour

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Limitations of Social Cognitive and Cognitive Approach

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- usually ignores emotional aspects of personality
- over simplistic
- underemphasizes situational factors

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Cognitive and Social Cognitive Approach's view of free will

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there is free will through active human thought process

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generalized expectancy

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According to Julian Rotter, expectancies that are related to a group of situations

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specific expectancy

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According to Julian Rotter, expectancy that a reward will follow a behaviour in a particular situation

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behaviour potential

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According to Julian Rotter, the likelihood of a behaviour in a specific situation

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situated social cognition

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the fact that social-cognitive processes change with change in the situation