Cognitive Perspective Flashcards
The cognitive approach
Explains differences in personality as differences in the way people process information
Cognitive assumptions
Sees the human being as a complex but orderly information processing system
We integrate, organise, store, and retrieve information
We develop characteristics patterns of thinking
Cognitive organisation is good
It saves mental resources
Allows us to understand events using small pieces of information
Cognitive organisation can be bad
Eg in unusual circumstances
Eg stuck in ‘negative’ perceptions
Our thoughts influence our actions in 3 ways
The way we perceive and interpret the world
The way we regard ourselves
The way we set goals and plan to achieve these goals
Schemas
Mental organisations or categorisations of knowledge based on experience
Impose order on perception - they are the glue that holds together ‘order’ in the chaos of information
Self-schema
Cognitive representations of ourselves that we use to organise and process self-relevant information.
Your self-scheme consists of the behaviours and attributes that are most important to you.
Once we have developed a scheme about ourselves there is a strong tendency for that scheme to be maintained by a bias in what we attend to, a bias in what we remember, and a bias in what we are prepared to accept as true about ourselves: self-perpetuating (easier to encode and recall information that is consistent with self-schemas)
Possible selves
Are cognitive representations of the kind of person we might become someday
Include roles and occupations we aspire to, and roles we fear we might fall into.
Also include the attributes we think we might possess in the future.
Two functions:
Provide incentives for future behaviour
Help us interpret the meaning of our behaviour and the events in our lives
George Kelly: personal constructs
The cognitive structures we use to interpret and predict events.
We have our own construction of reality
Anticipations/expectations; test expectations; adjust understandings; develop a way of interacting with the world.
Personal vision of reality
Mental representations: based on perceptions of past experiences; used as bias for future perceptions, interpretations, and behaviours.
Personal constructs: predictive efficiency
Constructs maintained if they have predictive efficiency
Similar constructs -> basis for friendship
Chronically accessible constructs
Personality constructs change and evolve over time, depending on if they are able to predict things
Personally constructs: structure
Personal constructs are bipolar dimensions (eg good vs bad, tall vs short, friendly vs unfriendly) which allows for constructive alternativism
Organisation of constructs are hierarchical
Kelly: Corollaries
Our personal constructs develop due to the operation of particular interpretive processes (called corollaries)
Kelly identified 11 corollaries (like rules for organisation of personal constructs)
Organisation corollary
The hierarchical organisation of constructs for a given individual
Dichotomy corollary
Bipolarity of constructs
Experience corollary
We may change constructs, based on experience
Evolving constructs
Communality corollary
People with similar personal constructs will behave in similar ways/share similar views
Range of convenience corollary
Some constructs are applicable to many situations, but others are more narrow
How widely we apply our constructs is unique to an individual
Kelly: personality assessment
Kelly developed the Repertory Grid Technique for assessing personality
This generally invokes:
Creating a list of people you know, then people are compared in the list to elicit an understanding of an individual’s personal construct system
Provides an indication of how someone views the world
Issues with Repertory Grid Technique: Kelly
No standard way of scoring it
Does not yield a score to interpret
Reliant on the ability of someone to describe the constructs they use
People can interpret words differently
Cognitive therapy: Kelly
In Kelly’s model, people experiencing psychological problems are not constructing the world around them accurately
The therapist needs to make the client aware of the problems in their personal construct system and then they can be changed
Therapist must understand the client’s subjective worldview
Controlled elaboration: challenge maladaptive constructs and replace them with new ones
Cognitive therapy: Ellis
An important early advocate of cognitive therapy was Albert Ellis.
Believed people who have emotional problems (eg anxiety, depression) have irrational beliefs that guide their interpretation of events.
Used Rational Emotive Therapy to help clients change these demanding irrational beliefs and replace them with more rational ones
The basic model of rational emotive behaviour therapy
A: activation event (actual event, clients immediate interpretation of event)
B: beliefs (evaluations, rational/irrational eg I am going to fail)
C: consequences (emotions, behaviours)
D: disputation (evidence?)
E: education
F: feeling (new feeling)
Ellis: psychological disturbance
Failure to accept that we are fallible (can't always be right/perfect) 'Musterbarion' (we must be good, must do this...) Ego disturbance (if we can't meet our own demands we get upset) Discomfort disturbance (believe life should be easy so upset when it isn't)
Cognitive therapy: Beck’s therapeutic approach
Developed from the work of both Kelly and Ellis
Cognitive restructuring or reframing
Cast aside faulty schemas and build new ones
Negative cognitive triad = negative thinking about the self, world, and the future
Hostile cognition
Aggressive responses are more likely when a situation activate hostile thoughts and emotions
When hostile cognition are highly accessible, the likelihood of acting aggressively increases
Boys with a history of reacting to minor events aggressively tend to interpret unintentional acts as deliberate and hostile
Recall of information in women vs men
Women are better able to recall emotional memories than men
Men develop independent self-construals (self-concepts are relatively unrelated to the cognitive representations they have of others)
Women develop interdependent self-construals (self-concepts highly related to the cognitive representations they have of others and their relationships with those people)
Negative schemas
A cognitive structure containing memories about and associations with depressing events and thoughts
Attend to negative information, ignore positive information, and interpret ambiguous information in depressing ways
Negative cognitive style
How we interpret negative life experiences
Tend to attribute their problems to stable (enduring) and global (widespread) causes
