COGNITIVE
APPROACH
PERCEPTIONS
INTERPRETATIONS
BELIEFS
Cato Grønnerød
PSY2600
COGNITION AND
PERSONALITY
PERCEPTIONS
INTERPRETATIONS
GOALS
Cato Grønnerød
PSY1006
INTRODUCTION
 Cognitive approaches to personality focus
on differences in how people process
information
 Cognition refers to awareness and thinking
as well as to specific mental acts such as
perceiving, interpreting, remembering,
believing, anticipating, attributing
THREE LEVELS OF COGNITION
 Perception
• Process of imposing order on information received by
our sense organs
 Interpretation
• Process of making sense of, or explaining, events in
the world
 Beliefs and desires
• Standards and goals people develop for evaluating
themselves and others
© 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
PERSONALITY REVEALED
THROUGH…
 Perception
• Field Dependence-Independence
• Pain Tolerance
 Interpretation
• Explanatory Style / Attributions
• Automatic Thoughts
• Personal Constructs
 Beliefs and Desires
• Outcome Expectations
• Self-Efficacy
• Long-Term Beliefs
© 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
PERSONALITY REVEALED
THROUGH PERCEPTION
 Field Dependence-Independence
 Pain Tolerance and Sensation ReducingAugmenting
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FIELD DEPENDENCEINDEPENDENCE
 Field independent people
• Have the ability to focus on
details despite the clutter of
background information (relative
to field dependent)
 Measures used to assess
field-dependence
• Rod and Frame Test (RFT)
• Embedded Figures Test (EFT)
© 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
FIELD DEPENDENCEINDEPENDENCE
 Field independent persons
• Favor natural sciences, math, engineering
• More analytical, sees and favors complexity
• More interpersonally detached
 Field dependent persons
• Favor social sciences and education
• More holistic, intuitive and contextual
• Attentive to social cues, oriented toward other people
© 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
FIELD DEPENDENCEINDEPENDENCE
 Field independent people
• Better able to screen out distracting information and
focus on a task
• Police officers better at filtering out distracting info
and deciding when to shoot
 Field independent students
• Learn more effectively than field dependent students
in hypermedia-based instructional environment
© 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
PAIN TOLERANCE
 Aneseth Petrie’s reducer-augmenter theory
of pain tolerance and Sensation ReducingAugmenting
• People with low pain tolerance have a nervous
system that is amplified or augmented to subjective
impact of sensory input
• People with high pain tolerance have a nervous
system that is dampened or reduced effects of
sensory information
© 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
PAIN TOLERANCE
 Reducers seek strong stimulation, perhaps
in order to compensate for lower sensory
reactivity
 Reducers may use substances (nicotine,
caffeine, alcohol, other drugs) to artificially
“lift” their arousal level
© 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
PERSONALITY REVEALED
THROUGH INTERPRETATION
 Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory
 Locus of Control
 Learned Helplessness
© 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
LOCUS OF CONTROL
 Rotter’s “expectancy model” of learning
behavior
• Learning depends on the degree to which a person
values a reinforcer—its reinforcement value
• People differ in their expectations for reinforcement—
some believe they are in control of outcomes,
whereas others do not
© 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
LOCUS OF CONTROL
 Locus of control describes person’s
interpretation of responsibility for events
 External locus of control
• Generalized expectancies that events are outside of
one’s control
 Internal locus of control
• Generalized expectancies that reinforcing events are
under one’s control, and that one is responsible for
major life outcomes
© 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
LEARNED HELPLESSNESS
 Animals (including humans) when
subjected to unpleasant and inescapable
circumstances, become passive and
accepting of a situation, in effect learning to
be helpless
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EXPLANATORY STYLE
 Tendency that some people have to use
certain attributional categories when
explaining causes of events
 Three broad categories of attributions
• External or internal
• Stable or unstable
• Global or specific
© 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
EXPLANATORY STYLE
 Pessimistic explanatory style
• Emphasizes internal, stable, and global causes for
negative events
• Associated with feelings of helplessness and poor
adjustment
 Explanatory style is stable over time
• r=.54 for questionaire and coding from diaries 52
years later
© 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
EXPLANATORY STYLE
 Explanatory Style and Depression
• Internal: Everything is my own fault
• Stable: This is how it’s always been and always will
be
• Global: This is how my life is, I’m not good at anything
 Cognitive therapy will try to change these
attributions
© 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
AUTOMATIC THOUGHTS
 Automatic thoughs precede and cause
emotions
•
•
•
•
•
Automatic apprisals of situations
Specific and discrete
Rapid and immediate
Tied to depression
Modifying the thought will change the emotion
KELLY’S PERSONAL
CONSTRUCT THEORY
 Human Nature
• Search for meaning
• Lack of meaning creates anxiety
 Humans-as-scientists
• People attempt to understand, predict, and control
events
 Personal constructs
• Constructs person uses to interpret and predict
events
© 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
KELLY’S PERSONAL
CONSTRUCT THEORY
 Fundamental Postulate
• “A person’s processes are psychologically
channelized by the ways in which he anticipates
events”
 Commonality corollary
• If two people have similar construct systems, they will
be psychologically similar
© 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
KELLY’S PERSONAL
CONSTRUCT THEORY
 Post-modernism
• An intellectual position grounded in notion that reality
is constructed, that every person and every culture
has unique version of reality, with none having
privilege
 Sociality corollary
• To understand a person, must understand how she
construes the social world
© 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
KELLY’S PERSONAL
CONSTRUCT THEORY
 Clinical application
• Wanted to demonstrate to his clients that the
constructs are hypotheses, not facts
• Problem reformulation
• Role Construct Repertory Test (Rep Test)
• Assess similarities and differences in triads of important
people in a persons life
• Fixed-Role Therapy
• The client plays a role with characteristics different from
them selves
PERSONALITY REVEALED
THROUGH GOALS
 People differ in their goals, and these
differences reveal and are part of
personality
 Personal Projects Analysis
 Self-Efficacy
 Mastery Orientation
 Regulatory Focus
 Cognitive-Affective Personality System
© 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
PERSONAL PROJECTS
ANALYSIS
 Personality is what structures a person’s
daily life through the selection of goals and
desires, that then determine specific
strategies that people use
 Emphasizes the “doing” of personality over
the trait approach’s “having” of personality
 Emphasizes active nature of personality
 Happiness is related to feeling of control
over one’s projects
EXPECTATIONS
 Cognitions than explicitly anticipate future
events
 Outcome expectations
• An estimate that a given behavior will lead to a
particular outcome
 Self-Efficacy / Efficacy Expectations
• The belief that one can execute a specific course of
action to achieve a goal
SELF-EFFICACY (BANDURA)
 High self-efficacy beliefs often lead to effort
and persistence on tasks
 Self-efficacy and performance mutually
influence one another
 Will affect goal setting
 ”Whether you think you can or you can’t,
you’re usually right”
SELF-EFFICACY
 What increases self-efficacy?
• Own experience
• Hands-on experience of relevant behaviour
• Observational learning
• To see others succeed
• Verbal encouragment
• To be told that one is able
• Low emotional activation
• Worries, stress and/or exhaustion decreases self-efficacy
SELF-EFFICACY
 Information on Self-Efficacy
• ”It is our duty as human beings to proceed as though
our limits of our capabilities did not exist”
• ”Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re
usually right”
• “Confidence is what you have before you understand
the problem”
LONG-TERM BELIEFS
 It is a dire necessity to be loved or approved
by virtually every significant other person in
the community
 One should be thoroughly competent,
adequate and achieving in all possible
respects in order to be worthwile
 It is awful and catastrophic when things are
not the way one would very much like them
to be
LONG-TERM BELIEFS
 Human unhappiness is externally caused,
and we have little or no ability to control our
own sorrow
 Our past history is an all-important
determinant of our present behavior; if
something once strongly affected our life, it
should always have a similar effect
 There is invariably a right, precise and
perfect solution to human problems, and it
is catastrophic if this solution is not found
MASTERY ORIENTATION
(DWECK)
 ”Entity” theory of intelligence
• View their intelligence as unchangeable and fixed
• Having to work hard is perceived as evidence of low
intelligence
 ”Incremental” theory of intelligence
• Intelligence can be increased through effort and
persistence
• Not threatened by failure
REGULATORY FOCUS (HIGGINS)
 Promotion focus
• Concerened with advancement, growth and
accomplishments
• Eagerness, approach and ”going for gold”
 Prevention focus
• Concerened with protection, safety, prevention of
failure
• Vigilance, caution, prevention
COGNITIVE-AFFECTIVE
PERSONALITY SYSTEM (MISCHEL)
 Personality is an organization of cognitive
and affective activities that influence how
people respond to certain kinds of
situations
 Focus on process more than traits
 Mental activities such as construals, goals,
expectations, beliefs, feelings, selfregulation, abilities, plans, and strategies
COGNITIVE-AFFECTIVE
PERSONALITY SYSTEM (MISCHEL)
 People differ in the distinct organization of
their cognitive and affective processes, and
in their accessability of these processes
 ”If … then”-propositions
• IF situation A THEN X, IF situation B THEN Y
 The psychological situation organizes
behavior
INTELLIGENCE
 Achievement versus aptitude views of
intelligence
 “g” or general intelligence versus domainspecific intelligences
 Widely accepted definition of intelligence
(Gardner, 1983)
• Application of cognitive skill and knowledge to solve
problems, learn, and achieve goals valued by the
individual and the culture
 Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences
© 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
 Goleman
 Traditional measures of intelligence predict
school performance, but not outcomes later
in life, such as occupational attainment,
salary, marital quality
 Emotion intelligence strongly predicts these
life outcomes
© 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
 Emotional intelligence includes a set of five
specific abilities
• 1. Awareness of our own feelings and bodily signals,
being able to identify our own emotions, and make
distinctions
• 2. Ability to regulate emotions, especially negative
emotions, and to manage stress
© 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
• 3. Ability to control one’s impulses, direct attention
and effort, delay gratification, and stay on task toward
goals
• 4. Ability to decode social and emotional cues of
others, empathy
• 5. Ability to influence and guide others without
incurring anger, resentment
© 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
SUMMARY AND EVALUATION
 Cognitive approaches to personality focus
on differences in how people process
information
 People differ in how they think, perceive,
interpret, remember, believe, desire, and
anticipate events in their lives.
 Personality psychologists are interested in
these differences as well as characteristics
of cognition that all humans share
© 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
COGNITIVE THERAPY
 In the 1950s behavioural theory and therapy
(Skinner etc.) was prominent
 In the 1960s other theorists (esp. Aaron
Beck) proposed the importance of
thoughts/cognitions
 Albert Ellis added the emotional dimension
and the “rationalisation” of thoughts and
feelings
 Since then, many other theorists and
models
MAIN ELEMENTS IN COGNITIVE
THEORY
 Negative automatic thoughts
 Negative schemas/negative schema content
• Leads to process of logical errors/cognitive distortions
 Content negative with respect to
• Self
• World
• Future
SCHEMAS
 Are permanent
 Long term reference material about things
in the world
 A schema is like a box that contains the
results of previous experiences as
interpreted by the person
• Outcome expectations
 The content of the schema can be positive
or negative or a mixture
COMMON NEGATIVE SCHEMA
CONTENT
 Nature of self: I am no good
 Integrity of self: I am unsafe/will come to
harm
 Nature of social world: I am or will be alone
 Nature of the world: The world is
bad/against me
 Nature of others: Other people are
bad/against me
SCHEMA PROCESS
STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
(Includes awareness of
sensations)
AUTOMATIC
THOUGHTS
ACTIVATING
EVENT
Emotional
Response
SCHEMAS
Behavioural
Response
LOGICAL ERRORS
 Errors in making conclusions from sensory
input
 Also known as “cognitive distortions”
 Not errors in perception, but errors in
interpretation
 Misinterpretation or non-objective
interpretation
TYPES OF LOGICAL ERRORS
 Catastrophization
• More dire than justified
• Unjustified negative prediction
 Overgeneralization
 Personalization
• Invalid assumption of responsibility
• Mind-reading
TYPES OF LOGICAL ERRORS
 Selective abstraction
•
•
•
•
Biased weighting
Not considering all the facts
Black & white thinking
False absolutes
 Arbitrary thinking
• “Shoulds”
• Emotional reasoning
WHICH LOGICAL ERROR?
Activating event
Belief or thought
Referee
awards
Penalty
He’s
useless
- Invalid allocation of
responsibility
- Overgeneralisation
- Biased Weighting
Emotional
onsequence
C
Anger
- Must or Should
Emotional Reasoning
WHICH LOGICAL ERROR?
Emotional
onsequence
Activating event
Belief or thought
C
Bike
Smash
My career is
over, this is
the end
Depression
Catastrophisation
- More dire than justified
- Unjustified negative
prediction
- Overgeneralisation
(External attribution)
WHICH LOGICAL ERROR?
Activating event
Going
to a
party
Belief or thought
I’ll
probably
embarrass
myself
Catastrophisation
- Biased Weighting
- More dire than justified
- Unjustified Negative Prediction
Emotional
onsequence
C
Anxious
WHAT GOES WRONG?
 We make logical errors in our childhood
 We develop early maladaptive schemas
 We make logical errors after Activating
(Critical) Events
• Have frequent negative automatic thoughts
 We believe in and use dysfunctional
strategies
GOALS OF THERAPY
 In the Moment
• Change logical errors to appropriate logic
• Reduce the frequency of automatic thoughts
• Change the balance of schema content from negative
to positive
• Help the client change their behaviour
GOALS OF THERAPY
 Later in Therapy
• Change logical errors to appropriate logic in more
pervasive way
• Change schema content
• Build new schema content
• Revise memories
• Change meta-cognitions regarding behavioural
strategies