Chapter 4: The Psychological Person Flashcards
Psychology
Defined as mind and mental process.
Cognition
Our conscious or preconscious thinking process.
Emotion
Appraisal of stimulus, by changing body sensations, and by displays of expressive gestures.
Affect
Psychological manifestations of feelings.
Unconscious feelings
Of which we are not aware but which influence our behavior.
Mood
A feeling disposition that is more stable than emotion, less intense, and less tied to a specific situation.
Schema
An internalized representation of the world or an ingrained and systematic pattern of thought, action, and problem solving.
Assimilation
Responding to experiences based on existing schema.
Accommodation
Changing schema when new situations cannot be incorporated within an existing on.
Cognitive operations
To use abstract thoughts and ideas that are not tied to situational sensory and motor information.
Information processing theory
We receive stimulation from the outside and code it with sensory reception in the nervous system. The information is first represented in some set of brain activities and then integrated (by accommodation it assimilation) and stored for purposes of present and future adaptation to the environment.
Piaget’s stages of cognitive operations:
Sensorimotor stage (birth-2)
infant is egocentric and begins to sense objects existing apart from self.
Piaget’s stages of cognitive operations:
Preoperational stage (2-7)
Child remains primarily egocentric but discovers rules that be be applied to new incoming information. The child tends to overgeneralize rules, however, and thus makes many cognitive errors.
Piaget’s stages of cognitive operations:
Concrete operations (7-11)
The child can solve concrete problems through the application of logical problem-solving strategies.
Piaget’s stages of cognitive operations:
Formal operations stage (11-adulthood)
The person becomes able to solve real and hypothetical problems using abstract concepts.
Social learning theory
We are motivated by nature to experience pleasure and avoid pain.
Modeling
Behavior is also acquired by witnessing how the actions of others are reinforced.
Cognitive mediation
The space/thinking that social learning theorists believe happens between the occurrence of a stimulus and our response.
Multiple intelligences
In this theory the brain is understood not as a single cognitive system but as a central unit of neurological functioning that houses relatively separate cognitive facilities.
Kohlberg’s stages of moral development:
Preconventional morality
Child’s primary motivation is to avoid punishment and receive immediate rewards.
Kohlberg’s stages of moral development:
Conventional morality
Emphasizes adherence to social rules.
A person at this level of morality might be very troubled by circumstances that make her or him different from other people.
Many people never more on past this level.
Kohlberg’s stages of moral development:
Postconventional morality
Characterized by a concern with moral principals transcending those of their own society.
Cognitive theory
We developed mental schemata, or general processing rules that become enduring, from past experiences. These schemata discriminate and code stimuli, evaluate experiences and make judgements.
Cognitive error:
Absolute thinking
Viewing all experience as all good or all bad and failing to understand it can be a mixture of both.
Cognitive error:
Overgeneralization
Assuming that deficiencies in one area of life necessarily imply deficiencies other areas.
Cognitive error:
Selective abstraction
Focusing only on the negative aspects of a solution and consequently overlooking its positive aspects.
Cognitive error:
Arbitrary interference
Reaching a negative conclusion about a situation with insufficient evidence.
Cognitive error:
Magnification
Creating large problems out of small ones.
Cognitive error:
Minimization
Making large problems small and this not dealing adequately with them.
Cognitive error:
Personalization
Accepting blame for negative events without sufficient evidence.
Behavior change strategies:
Desensitization
Confronting a difficult challenge through step-by-step process of approach and anxiety control
Behavioral change strategies:
Shaping
Differentially reinforcing approximations of a desired but difficult behavior so as to help the person eventually master the behavior.
Behavioral change strategies:
Behavioral rehearsal
Role-playing a desired behavior after seeing it modeled appropriately and then applying the skill to real-life situations.
Behavioral change strategies:
Extinctions
Eliminating a behavior by reinforcing alternative behaviors.
Primary emotions
Evolved as a specific reactions with survival value for the human species. They mobilize us, focus our attention, and signal out state of minds to others.
Usually limited to anger, fear, sadness, joy, anticipation.
Secondary emotions
Are more variable among people and are socially acquired. They evolved as humans developed more sophisticated means of learning, controlling, and managing emotions to promote flexible cohesion in social groups.
Psychoanalytic theory
Primary internal drives and unconscious mental activity in human behavior. Sexual and aggressive drives are not “feelings” in themselves but they motivate behavior that will presumably gratify our impulses.
We experience positive emotions when drives are gratified and negative emotions when they are frustrated.
Ego
Where our conscious mental functioning takes place.
Responsible to negotiating between internal drives and the external world.
Ego psychology
Ego is conceived at birth and not derived from the need to reconcile drives within the constraints of social living, as psychoanalytic theory would say.
The ego is the source of our attention, concentration, learning, memory, perception.
Attribution theory
Our experience of emotion is based on conscious evaluations we make about physiological sensations in particular social settings.
We respond to situations as we understand them cognitively, which leads to directly to our experience of particular emotion.
Emotional intelligence
Persons ability to process information about emotions accurately and effectively.
Preconscious
Mental activity that is out of awareness but can be brought into awareness with prompting.
Self psychology:
Grandiose self
Arises from the positive affirmations of others we internalize; gives rise to our ambitions and enthusiasm.
Self psychology:
Idealized parent image
Represents guidance from others, which results in our ability to be self directed and to set goals.
Self psychology:
Twinship
Represents our natural social propensities to connect with others and through this process develop our individual talents and skills.
Narrative therapy
We all engage in an ongoing process of constructing a life/personal story/narrative that determines our understanding of ourselves and our position in the world.
