Chapter 12 Flashcards
Cognitive Approaches
Differences in how people think form the focus of cognitive approaches to personality.
Personalizing Cognition
The first person who looked at the picture.
Objectifying Cognition
The second subject who looked at the picture.
Cognition
Awareness and thinking, as well as to specific mental acts such as perceiving, attending to, interpreting, remembering, believing, judging, deciding, and anticipating.
Information Processing
Transformation of sensory input into mental representations and the manipulation of such representations.
Perception
Process of imposing order on the information our sense organs take in.
Interpretation
Making sense of various events in the world.
Conscious Goals/Beliefs & Desires
Standards that people develop for evaluating themselves and others.
Rod and Frame Test
Participants sit in a darkened room and are instructed to watch a glowing rod surrounded by a square frame, which is also glowing.
Field Dependent
If the participant adjusts the rod so that it is leaning in the direction of the tilted frame, then that person is said to be dependent on the visual field.
Field Independent
Other participants disregard the external cues and instead use information from their bodies in adjusting the rod to upright.
Pain Tolerance
In which people undergo the same physical stimulus but react quite differently from each other in terms of the pain they report experiencing.
Reducer/Augmenter Theory
The dimension along which people differ in their reaction to sensory stimulation.
Construct
Summarizes a set of observations and conveys the meaning of those observations.
Personal Constructs
Constructs a person routinely uses to interpret and predict events.
Postmodernism
Intellectual position grounded in the notion that reality is constructed, that every person and every culture has a version of reality that is unique, and that no single version of reality is any more privileged than another.
Fundamental Postulate
The statement that a person’s processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which they anticipate events.
Locus of Control
Concept that describes a person’s perception of responsibility for the events in their life.
Expectancy of Reinforcement
Characteristics that distinguish specific individuals.
Generalized Expectancies
A person’s expectations for reinforcement held across a variety of situations.
External Locus of Control
Generalized expectancy that events are outside of one’s control
Internal Locus of Control
Generalized expectancy that reinforcing events are under one’s control and that one is responsible for the major outcomes in life.
Learned Helplessness
If repeated attempts to change the situation failed, they would resign themselves to being helpless.
Explanatory Style
Tendencies some people have to frequently use certain explanations for the causes of events.
Causal Attribution
A person’s explanation of the cause of an event.
Pessimistic Explanatory Style
Puts a person at risk for feelings of helplessness and poor adjustment is one that emphasizes internal, stable, and global causes for bad events.
Optimistic Explanatory Style
Emphasizes external, temporary, and specific causes of events.
Personal Project
Set of relevant actions intended to achieve a goal that a person has selected.
Cognitive Social Learning
Emphasizes the cognitive and social processes whereby people learn to value and strive for certain goals over others.
Self-Efficacy
Belief that one can execute a specific course of action to achieve a goal.
Modeling
Seeing others engage in the performance with positive results.
Promotion Focus
The person is concerned with advancement, growth, and accomplishments.
Prevention Focus
The person is concerned with protection, safety, and the prevention of negative outcomes and failures.
If-Then Propositions
If situation A, then the person does X; but if situation B, then the person does Y.
Achievement View of Intelligence
How much knowledge a person has acquired relative to others in their age cohort.
Aptitude View of Intelligence
An ability to become educated, as the ability or aptitude to learn.
General Intelligence
Intelligence used to be thought of as a single broad factor or G.
Multiple Intelligences
Includes seven forms, such as interpersonal intelligence and intrapersonal intelligence.
Cultural Context of Intelligence
What is defined as intelligent behavior will differ across cultures.
Inspection Time
The time it takes a person to make a simple discrimination between two displayed objects.
Human Nature
Humans as scientists; people attempt to understand, predict, and control events.
Commonality Corollary
If two people have similar construct systems, they will be psychologically similar.
Sociality Corollary
To understand a person, must understand how they construe the social world.
Anxiety
Not being able to understand and predict life events.
