Cognition and Approaches to the Self Flashcards
cognition and the subjective experience: components
- conscious thoughts
- feelings and emotions
- beliefs
- desires about oneself and others
self and self-concept
levels of cognition
- perception
- process of imposing order on info received by our sense organs - interpretation
- process of making sense of events in the world - beliefs and desires
- standards and goals people develop for evaluating themselves and others
overcoming learned helplessness
we behave differently if we believe we can do something about our situation
personality and perception
field independent
- people have the ability to focus on details despite the clutter of background info
measures to assess field-dependence
- rods and frame test (RFT)
- embedded figures test (EFT)
- refer to slide 6 and 7 of powerpoint
effects of field dependence/independence on life choices
education
- FI favour natural sciences, math, engineering
- FD favour social sciences and education
interpersonal relations
- FI people are more inerpersonally detached
- FD are attentive to social cues oriented toward other people
interpretation: Kelly’s personal construct
personal constructs
- constructs used to interpret and predict events
Kelly and post-modernism
- reality = constructed
- every person and every culture has a unique version of reality
reality is what we experience, every person has a unique experience and no one has the right one
Kelly’s personal construct: commonality corollary
- if 2 people have similar construct systems, they will be psychologically similar, personality similar
- culture is an example of how 2 people might think similarly
Kelly’s personal construct: sociality corollary
- to understand a person, we must understand how they construe the social world
- we must understand their constructs
what is a corollary?
a result, a consequence
Kelly’s personal construct: anxiety
result of not being able to understand and predict life events
interpretation: locus of control
describes one’s interpretation of responsibility for events
1. external
- generalized expectancies that events are outside of one’s control
2. internal
- generalized expectancies that reinforcing events are under one’s control, and that one is responsible for major life outcomes
interpretation: learned helplessness
- becoming passive and accepting of a situation when subjected to unpleasant and inescapable circumstances
- learning to be helpless
- observed in both humans and non humans
learned helplessness: explanatory style
- tendency to use certain atributional categories when explaining causes of events
- tendency to explain stressors in characteristic manner
- pessimistic and optimistic
learned helplessness: categories of attirbutions
- external vs internal
- stable vs unstable
- global vs specific
causal attributions
refer to notebook page _____
personal projects analysis
- emphasizes the “doing” of personality over the trait approach of “having”
- active nature of personality
- personality strictures a person’s daily life through the selection of goals and desires
aspects of the self
- self-awareness
- self-concept
- self-esteem
- social identity
- self-recognition in the mirror test is one criterion for determining whether a species has self-awareness
self-concept
- basis for understanding onself
- answers “who I am?”
development of self-concept: infancy
- realize that it is distinct from the rest of the world
- rudimentary sense of self-awareness of one’s own body
development of self-concept: 2-3 years
- identify and associate with their sex and age
- expand self-concept to include references to family
development of self-concept: 5-6 years
- children increasingly begin to compare their skills and abilities with those of others (social comparison)
- development of the private self concept
development of self-concept: teen years
- final unfolding of the self-concept
- perspective taking
- objective self-awareness
- many teens go through a period of extreme self-consciousness
shyness
- when objective self-awareness becomes chronic
- is genetic
- shy individuals have more reactive amygdala
- parents of formerly shy children encouraged them to socialize
- shy people tend to interpret social interactions negatively
evaluation apprehension
shy people are apprehensive about being evaluated by others
self-schemata
- specific knowledge structures/cogitive representations of self-concept
- past experiences influence our autobiographical memories; memories accessed will depend on the self-schemata in question
- guide processing of info about the self; particularly in social interactions
- e.g. attitudes, preferences, traits
possible selves
- schemata for selves in the future
- ideas each person has about who he might become, hope to become, or fear they will become
self-guides: the ideal and ought self
ideal self
- what a person wants to be
ought
- understanding of what others’ want us to be
self-discrepancy theory
refer to notebook page ____
self-complexity
- extent to which people have many different and relatively independent ways of thinking about themselves
- refer to drawing in notebook page ____
self-concept clarity
- extent to which knowledge about the self is stable, clear, consistently defined
- those with low concept-clarity tend to have
1. low self-esteem
2. high neuroticism
3. high rumination
4. more likely prone to overall depression
the true self
- person you truly are
- authenticity is how close one is to true self
- 4 related components
1. awareness
2. unbiased processing
3. behaviour
4. authentic relationships - importer phenomenon:
1. feeling like a phony, fraud, fake
2. typically occurs when shifting social roles, or attempting something beyond skills or training
self-esteem
- one’s general evaluation of one’s self-concept along a good-bad, or like-dislike dimension
- how we feel about ourselves can vary from day-to-day, hour-to-hour, BUT always around some average
- people can evaluate themselves differently in different areas of life or different aspects of self
self-esteem vs self-worth
self-esteem: how we feel about ourselves in relation to others
self-worth: how we feel about ourselves consistently, what we believe we are deserving of
implicit self-esteem
- not necessarily aware of having it
- can be measured with the Implicit Association Test
explicit self-esteem
- aware of having it
- usually, similar levels of implicit and explicit self-esteem
reactions to criticism
high self-esteem
- concerned with projecting successful, prosperous and thriving self image
low self-esteem
- most concerned with avoiding failure
- following failure, they generalize to other areas of life
defensive pessimism
- expect to fail
- when failure occurs, no new negative info about the self is revealed
self-handicapping
- person deliberately does things that increase probability of failure
- when they fail, they have the excuse for failure
- hence, failure is not attributable to self
self-serving bias
taking credit for success, but denying responsibility for failure
self-esteem regulation
- action involved in maintaining self-esteem
1. forming close relationships
2. belonging to sical groups
3. experiencing success
self-esteem variability
- refers to magnitude of short term fluctuations in self esteem
- individual differences characteristics
- thought to result from particular vulnerability of a person’s self-worth to events of everyday life
your identity
- is the self we show to others
- part of ourselves that we use to create impression to let others know what to expect from us
- different from self-concept: identity contains elements that are socially observable publicly available expressions of the self
What is the similarity between identity and self-concept?
What is the difference between identiy and self-concept?
Identity includes elements of ourselves that are expressable and publicly available to others
social identity
- includes sex, ethnicity and height
- element of continuity, because many of its aspects = constant
- identity provides social definition of a person
- refers to social knowledge or what others think of the person
identity: continuity
people can count on you to be the same person tmr and today
identity: contrast
- your social identity differentiates you from others
- makes you unique in the eyes of others
identity crises
identity deficits
- arises when a person has not formed adequate identity
- has trouble making major decisions
identity conflict
- involves incompatibility between 2 or more aspects of identity
- e.g. The values of an individual may clash with the values of the workplace
resolving identity crises
- whether in adolescence or adulthood, resolution identity crisis has 2 steps
1. person decides which valus are most important to them
2. person transforms abstract values into desires and behaviours
