7. Navigating Self, from Awareness to Authenticity Flashcards
Cognition
A general term referring to awareness and thinking, as well as to specific mental acts such as perceiving, interpreting, remembering, believing, and anticipating.
Personalizing Cognition
Processing information by relating it to a similar event in your own life. This style of processing information occurs when people interpret a new event in a personally relevant manner. For example, they might see a car accident and start thinking about the time they were in a car accident.
Objectifying Cognition
Processing information by relating it to objective facts. This style of thinking stands in contrast to personalizing cognition.
Three Levels of Cognition
That are studied frequently by personality psychologists
- Perception
- Interpretation (explaining/making sense of events in the world)
- Conscious Goals (standards people use to evaluate themselves and others)
George Kelly
Personal Constructs
In Kelly’s theory, beliefs or concepts that summarize a set of observations or version of reality, unique to an individual, which that person routinely uses to interpret and predict events.
These are binary/bipolar
Postmodernism
Belief that reality is a construct and different for every person and culture.
Julian Rotter
Generalized Expectancies
A person’s expectations for reinforcement that hold across a variety of situations (Rotter, 1971, 1990). When people encounter a new situation, they base their expectancies about what will happen on their generalized expectancies about whether they have the abilities to influence events.
Locus of Control
Specific Expectancies
A person’s expectations for reinforcement that vary in diferent situations. Recent researchers have developed specific locus of control scales for specific categories of events. This approach emphasizes locus of control in discrete areas of life, such as health locus of control.
Learned Helplessness
Animals (including humans), when subjected to unpleasant and inescapable circumstances, often become passive and accepting of their situation, in effect learning to be helpless. Researchers surmised that if people were in an unpleasant or painful situation, they would attempt to change the situation. However, if repeated attempts to change the situation failed, they would resign themselves to being helpless. Then, even if the situation did improve so that they could escape the discomfort, they would continue to act helpless.
Causal Attribution
A person’s explanation of the cause of some event.
Explanatory Style
Definition + Three Dimensions
A way of explaining failures/issues/problems:
Internal-External
Stable-Unstable
Specific-Global
Cognitive Social Learning Approach
A number of modern personality theories have expanded on the notion that personality is expressed in goals and in how people think about themselves relative to their goals. Collectively these theories form an approach that emphasizes the cognitive and social processes whereby people learn to value and strive for certain goals over others.
Albert Bandura
Self-Efficacy
A concept related to optimism and developed by Bandura. The belief that one can behave in ways necessary to achieve some desired outcome. Also refers to the confidence one has in one’s ability to perform the actions needed to achieve some specific outcome.
Tony Higgins - Regulatory Focus Theory
Promotion Focus
One focus of self-regulation whereby the person is concerned with advancement, growth, and accomplishments. Behaviours with a promotion focus are characterized by eagerness, approach, and “going for the gold.” See also prevention focus.
Tony Higgins - Regulatory Focus Theory
Prevention Focus
The other focus of self-regulation where the person is concerned with protection, safety, and the prevention of negative outcomes and failures. Behaviours with a prevention focus are characterized by vigilance, caution, and attempts to prevent negative outcomes. See also promotion focus.
Objective Self-Awareness
Seeing oneself as an object of others’ attention. Often, objective self-awareness is experienced as shyness, and for some people this is a chronic problem. Although objective self-awareness can lead to periods of social sensitivity, this ability to consider oneself from an outside perspective is the beginning of a social identity.
