Chp 7 - Cognitive and Social-Cognitive Approaches Flashcards
Cognitive and Social-Cognitive
- Traditional learning perspectives too limited
- Social learning
- Cognition important (Matter what we think, how cognitive processes have impact on us)
- What matters most is how you perceive and think about the world around you.
Kurt Lewin’s Field Theory (3)
- We try to understand the world around us:
- What matters is how we perceive, analyze information
- Gestalt perspective applied to personality and social psychology
Kurt Lewin’s Field Theory Style
Life Space
* All the internal and external forces (e.g. mood, physiological forces, environment) that act on an individual
* Behaviour caused by interaction among elements life space
* May be distinct and separate or overlap
Contemporaneous causation
* Behaviour caused at the moment of its occurrence by forces (internal/ex) acting at that moment
Cognitive Style (4)
- ways of acquiring, organizing, using information elements
- Field Dependence
- Cognitive Complexity
- Learning Style
Cognitive Style: Field Dependence, tests for it (2)
Rod-and-Frame Test: Adjust the line to vertical
Embedded Figures Test: locate the sample shape within the more complex image
- field dependent
- field independent
Field Independent
- Prefer solitary play
- Not as influenced by content
- Tend to focus on detail
- More analytical
- Emphasise autonomy
Field Dependent
- Prefer social play
- Sensitive to context
- More eye contact
- Closer proximity (sit/stand closer to you)
- Tend to be more holistic, intuitive
Cognitive Style: Cognitive Complexity
Extent to which one uses and is comfortable with greater number of separate elements
Low Cognitive Complexity:
- See world in simpler, more absolute terms
- Prefer straightforward solutions
- Prefer certainty
High in cognitive complexity:
- Comfortable with complex solutions, don’t mind a question with multiple answers…
- Tend to be long-lasting, difficult to change due to behaviours reinforces cognitive style
Learning Style
How you acquire, organize, use information
influences how you interact with the world
- holistic/ analytic
- verbal/ visual representation
Schema
- Cognitive structure to organise knowledge
- Influence what we expect, notice, and remember
- Asked to recall what was in the room of the office, people tend to recall it, eg. Pen
But fail to recall what we don’t expect , e.g a skull, due to our schema
Script
Schemas for familiar events
Stereotype
Application of categorization to others based on a group membership
- “They are a musician”, think of a particular stereotype
George Kelly
Constructive Alternativism
Personal Construct Theory
Person as Scientist
The Primacy of Cognition
REP (Role Construct Repertory Test)
Constructive Alternativism
“We assume that all of our present interpretations of the universe are subject to revision or replacement.”
We construct our own interpretations of reality and
behave according to those interpretations
Personal Construct Theory: The Person as Scientist
Perception influenced by personal constructs
(How you at, explain, interpret the words, Rules, guidelines, categories you use)
We:
* See how people behave and interact
* Detect relationships among events
* Test hypotheses
* Form theories
* Reach conclusions
Personal Constructs
We develop personal constructs, concepts with maximum predictive value
*Behaviour influenced by anticipation
*Cognitive and emotional elements
*Continuously revise our personal constructs
The Fundamental Postulate
Anticipation from construct determines
- thoughts
- emotions
- actions
We prepare for events that we anticipate
(Take actions to prepare for things that will happen, emotional state leading up to the event )
Compare the outcome to the anticipated:
- Validation
- If event as anticipated, then construct strengthened: validation
- Was the event as fun as I thought? - Invalidation
- If not, construct revised: invalidation
Personal Construct Theory: Healthy Development
Healthy people validate their personal constructs; they are good scientists
Don’t match up, then revise personal construct
Eventually get to point of anticipating situations accurately
- Prepare our emotional states
- Behave appropriately over wide range of situations
Personal Construct Theory: Unhealthy Development
When outcome and anticipation don’t match
(But also don’t change, don’t revise construct)
- Maintains invalid constructs
- construct vague: Disorganised, inconsistent, easily shaken
Anticipation is inconsistent:
Behaviour:
- also not line up to the situation
- Change abruptly
The Role Construct Repertory (REP) Test
*Assesses personal constructs
*Lists of others in the person’s life
- Will ask to dev a list of individuals who you consider important
*Three persons are selected
*How are two similar and different from the third
The reason the person gives for similarity, contrast reflects the construct
e.g. sis/mom/teacher
*Repeated for different triads
*Provides a qualitative impression, no standardized scoring
*Draw attention to personal constructs
*REP Test especially sensitive to differences between Real and Ideal Self
Social Intelligence
- Knowledge and skills relevant to interpersonal situations
- Includes Emotional Intelligence (EI)
Emotional Intelligence
Multiple models, Goleman’s most referenced
1. Perceiving emotions
2. Using emotions as a tool
3.Understanding emotions
4.Managing emotions
EI: Perceiving emotions
Accurately detect emotions from facial expressions, pictures, voices, cultural artifacts, including one’s own emotions. Most basic.
EI: Using emotions as a tool
Match emotions to current tasks
EI: Understanding emotions
Comprehend complicated relationships among emotions, how emotions change over time
EI: Managing emotions
Regulate emotions in ourselves and others to achieve intended goals
Explanatory Style: Optimism/Pessimism
Optimists:
* Life satisfaction
* Stress coping
* Health (Good predictor of life span: high in optimism)
Explanatory Style: Learned Helplessness
If you put an individual in unavoidable, inescapable, random aversive consequences
*Learn to be helpless
*Develop profound emotional apathy
*May be accompanied by learned hopelessness
Punishment arise randomly:
- The wide range of behaviours are punishes
- Anything they do is punished
- Learned not to behave
e.g. War prisoners/ victims of domestic abuse
Don’t leave after being held in prison/ home
Pessimistic explanatory style
*permanent (“it will never change”)
*personal (“it is my fault”)
*pervasive (“everything is bad, there is nothing positive in my life”)
Not gonna do anything to change the situation
Explanatory Style: Learned Hopefulness
If you can learn to be hopeless, can you learn to
be hopeful?
Learned Hopefulness
*Positive expectations for the future
*Based on positive interpretations of events, self-enhancing appraisals
*Learned optimism
Explanatory Style: Locus of Control
general expectation about our relationship to
the world
What’s in control of what happens to you? What’s your relationship with the world?
-Internal
-External
Development associated with family style
Internal LoC:
* Emphasis on effort, effort rewarded
* education
* personal responsibility (Parents modelling for kids, taking responsibility for own’s actions)
* thinking (React to outcomes cognitively)
Internal Locus of Control
Individual is responsible for what happens to them
Associated with the positive life aspects e.g. greater the life satisfaction, less stress
External Locus of Control
attributes academic success or failure to luck or chance, a higher power or the influence of another person
Self-serving Bias
May occur for events central to self-concept, to
protect ego
A+: “I’m brilliant”
F:“The test was impossibly difficult,
the markers were not fair”
Self System: Human Agency
We have the capacity to exert control over our own
lives; active process
- Intentionality
- Forethought
- Self-reactiveness
- Self-reflectiveness
Human nature is to learn, grow, adapt, change
Self System: Human Agency: Intentionality
Plan, modify plans, act with intention
You are not a weathervane:
“If actions were determined solely by external rewards and punishments, people would behave like weathervanes… constantly shifting direction to conform to whatever influence happened to impinge on them at the moment”
Albert Bandura
Self System: Human Agency: Forethought
Anticipate outcomes, set goals, choose behvaiours.
You are not a weathervane
Self System: Human Agency: Self-reactiveness
Motivate and regulate our own actions
Set goals, monitor progress, change strategies
Self System: Human Agency: Self-reflectiveness
We evaluate our motivations, values, goals, metacognition
Observational Learning
We learn how to behave by watching others behave
- You don’t have to reward a child with aggression for them to not be aggressive
- Bandura Bobo doll experiment (watched model act aggressive to toys, so child when unsupervised would act, also learn specific aggressive acts)
- Early experiments criticised on methodological grounds
Factors that Influence Observational Learning (4)
- Outcome expectancy
- Behaviours expected to lead positive outcomes
- Sensitive to what happens to other people as well as how others behave - The model
- Age, gender, status, competence, similarity (in later 20th Century this was prominent in advertising) - The behavior
- Simple (more likely to copy than complex ones), and salient (important) behaviours - The observer
- Self-esteem, dependence, age/cognitive development (more likely to copy behaviours of others)
Self efficacy
- How confident do you feel
- How likely do you think succeeding Is
- High self efficacy beliefs have a wide array of positive social outcomes
- Push to improve self efficacy in 1940s
Establishing self efficacy: Performance experience
Performance experience -› self efficacy beliefs
Successes in past lead to successes in future type of thinking
Establishing self efficacy: Observational Learning
- Vicarious experiences sensitive to whether other people succeed
- If other people can, I can
Roger banister example( between 1954 - 1956 it went from 1 person having a sub 4 minute mile to having almost 300 people who have run one)
Establishing self efficacy: verbal persuasion
-verbal persuasion
What people say during childhood have an impact on the development of self efficacy
Establishing self efficacy: Emotional arousal
Stress excitement are two sides of the same coin
How you interpret has an impact on performance and on self efficacy
View on self efficacy: Change since Bandura
We have a general self efficacy but also have specific self efficacy’s
Areas with some increased self efficacy and some with decreased (strong student, weak artist example)
