Ch 14. Personality Processes Flashcards
Stimuli that occur close together in time will come to elicit the same response.
Behaviors followed by pleasant outcomes tend to be repeated; behaviors followed by unpleasant outcomes tend to be dropped.
- Explain personality in terms of the learning process
- Implies everyone should behave the same in the same environment or situation
LEARNING-BASED APPROACHES
the change of behavior as a result or function of experience
Learning
STUDY OF HOW A PERSON’S BEHAVIOR IS A DIRECT
RESULT OF HIS ENVIRONMENT, PARTICULARLY THE REWARDS AND PUNISHMENTS THAT THE ENVIRONMENT CONTAINS
BEHAVIORISM
- People should be studied from the outside.
- Personality is the sum of everything a person does.
- Belief that the causes of behavior can be directly observed
- Goal: functional analysis
- Everything a person does and is, is learned through experience.
beliefs of behaviourism
a decrease in responsiveness with each repeated exposure to something
HABITUATION (behaviourism)
a kind of learning in which an unconditioned response that is naturally elicited by one stimulus becomes elicited also by a new, conditioned stimulus
CLASSICAL CONDITIONING (behaviourism)
nothing one does really matter. happen when events seem to happen randomly and nothing can be predicted, which causes depression (opposite of positive psychology)
learned helplessness (behaviourism)
the process of learning in which an organisms behaviour is shaped by the effect of the behaviour in the environment (cat in the box)
positive/negative reinforcement and
positive/negative punishment
OPERANT CONDITIONING (behaviourism)
classical conditioning is more passive and responsive learning whereas
operant conditioning is focused on reinforcement/punishment focused
shaping
method used to teach or modify behavior by reinforcing successive approximations of the desired behavior.
- Ignores thinking, motivation, and emotion
- Primarily based on animal research
- Ignores the social dimension of learning
- Organisms are treated as essentially passive
Shortcomings of Behaviourism (social-learning theory)
the expectation that one can accomplish something successfully
- affects persistence
- influenced by the self-concept
- how to change behaviour
- influences motivation/performance
SELF-EFFICACY (social-learning theory)
Goal of Psychotherapy
- Humans learn nearly everything by observation.
- Bobo doll studies: aggressive behavior increases with modeling, especially when model is reinforced
- Positive behaviors can also be learned from observation.
Observational Learning (social learning theory)
drive behaviour by influencing what you attend to, think about, and do.
Goals (motivation)
short-term goals will help organize and support the long-term goals
unique goals to the individual that pursue them
Idiographic Goals
- Current concerns: ongoing motivation that persist in the mind until the goal is either attained or abandoned
- Personal Projects: the efforts put into goals. What people actually do to attain their goals
- Personal Strivings: long-term goals that can organize broad areas of life; people can have strivings that are inconsistent with each other
- Conscious at least some of the time
- Describe thoughts and behaviors aimed at fairly specific outcomes
- Can change over time
- Assumed to function independently
- limitation: goals are not coherently organized
Properties of idiographic goals
relatively small number of essential motivations that almost everyone pursues (can help organize Idiographic goals)
Nomothetic Goals
- enjoyment
- self-assertion
- esteem
- interpersonal success
- avoidance of negative affects
Emmon’s Five (nomothetic goals)
what two things an nomothetic goals be boiled down to?
work
social interaction
Judgment goals: focus on achieving a specific outcome or result.
Development goals: emphasize personal growth, learning, and improvement. These goals focus on acquiring new skills, expanding knowledge, and developing competencies.
Entity Theory: individuals believe that intelligence, abilities, and skills are fixed and inherent traits.
Incremental Theory: individuals believe that intelligence, abilities, and skills can be developed and improved over time through effort, learning, and practice.
a sequence of activities that progress toward a goal
strategies
assumes the worst will happen and uses that lens to develop goals and strategies. finds relief when the worst situation doesn’t happen.
Defensive pessimism (opposite of optimism)
A type of procedural knowledge that cannot be learned or fully expressed through words,
but only through action and experience
EMOTION
- appraisal
- physical responses
- facial expressions
- nonverbal behaviour
- motives
Basic stages of emotional experience (possible sources: immediate stimuli, classical conditioning, memories, or thoughts)
happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust
Core emotions
- people differ in their desire to feel certain emotions
- some people experience emotion more strongly than others
- higher rates of change of emotion in certain people
- emotional intelligence: cognitive control of own emotions, being able to accurately perceive emotions
- alexithymia: very little emotional awareness, can’t express emotions, and can’t feel emotions
individual differences in emotional life
The most important aspect of many systems of personality and cognition is their interaction.
IF - THEN contingencies make up a person’s personality
Behavioral Signature
cognitive-affective personality system (CAPS)
Personality emerges from mental representations of BEATS that are relevant to important goals.
People have basic needs that combine to produce emergent needs, from which the final need for self-coherence or meaning in life emerges.
Basic Needs: Trust, Control, Self-esteem
Predictability, competence, and acceptance which leads to - self coherence
BELIEFS, EMOTIONS, AND ACTION TENDENCIES (BEATS)
- Personality is something a person does.
- Includes thinking, wanting, and feeling
- Also includes the personality processes of learning, motivation, and emotion
PERSONALITY AS A VERB
