Social Cognition Flashcards
What is a stereotype?
Beliefs about a social group that affects how behaviour is interpreted
- Process information when engaged in social interactions
What is a stereotype threat?
When negative beliefs about your group interferes with performance
- More when salient
- Direct threat to cognitive performance
How can stereotype threat affect older people’s cognition?
Increases the decline of cognition, IF you believe it to be true
- Not productive
- Cannot learn
- Dependant on others
- Reduces will to live
- More rigid, cant adapt
What are the two theoretical ideas about how older adults handle stereotypes of aging?
- Labelling theory
- Resilience theory
Labeling theory
Tendency to apply the stereotype to yourself with confrontation of an age-related stereotype
- Older people are more likely to do it
- Impression formation and priming of stereotypes support it
- Negative self-perception of age
Resilience Theory
Tendency to confront the negative stereotypes that leads to rejection of said stereotype
- Distance oneself from negative stereotypes
- Positive self-perception of age
What are the aspects in social judgement?
- Emotional intelligence
- Impression formation
- Accessibility of social information
- Context influence
- Processing capacity
What is emotional intelligence and its two aspects?
The ability to recognize emotional information about oneself and others, identify it, contrast it and use it to guide thinking and behavior
1. Seen as a trait, a persons self-perceived dispositions and abilities, crystal intelligence
2 Being able to understand and process emotional information an apply them in the right context, success-rate , fluid intelligence
How does emotional intelligence change over the years?
Increases with life experiences
- Association with subjective well-being, may be the reason
- Specific ability to perceive others emotions declines
What is impression formation?
Forming a first impression, happens within 10 seconds, and being able to revaluate it
- Flexibility
How does impression formation change?
Positive to negative
- Older adult seem more willing to change
Negative to positive
- Older adult maintain their first impression
Negativity Bias
Negative information creates a stronger impression than positive
What can interfere with formation processing?
- Emotional information has more weight
- Older seems for sensitive to diagnosticity of available information
- Social context
- More resources to go through with negative information, higher arousal
Social Knowledge
Using previous experiences and learned information and applying them to new situations
- Availability and accessible
Attributional Biases
What kind of explanation you’re giving to explain others behavior
- Dispositional, within a person
- Situational, with in the context
Correspondence Bias
Relying on dispositional attributes instead of situational
- Fundamental attribution bias
- Younger adults draw inferences of older peoples behavior
- Ignoring critical information, more stereotypes
How does the correspondence bias change with age?
Younger adult
- More prone
- Contributes to stereotypes
Older
- Consider both types of information to draw inferences
- Life experiences
What can affect the tendency to use correspondence bias?
- If a situation is unclear, too ambiguous
- Relationship situations
Older tend to be more prone to the bias - Existing beliefs
Older use this bias more - Culture differences
Collective vs individualistic
Positivity Effect
Tendency to avoid more negative information and focus positive when making decisions or judgments as well as remembering events
What is SAVI?
Strength and vulnerability integration model
- Difficult to regulate high levels of negative arousal when getting older
- Positive arousal reduces the load
How does positivity effect relate to SOC models?
- SOC suggest development occurs as we continuously update our personal goal in comparison to our resources available
- Focus on physical health and socio-emotional domains
- Goal selection, often toward retaining autonomy
- Emotional goals, supportive context for their cognitive functioning
- Optimizing our well-being
What is personal control?
My actions are what affected my performance
- Entity (innate) vs Skill (learned)
- Multidimensional
- Linked to better quality of social relationships, better health and higher cognitive functioning
Heckhausen - Strategy for maintaining control
- Control as motivational system to regulate individuals abilities to control outcomes throughout life
- Primary control strategies
Change of environment; Loss of friends makes you look out for new ones, more adaptive - Secondary control strategies, cognitively changes, seeing a situation from a different point of view, minimize losses
- Primary used more in early and middle adulthood
- Primary is what you strive for most
- When function decline, use of secondary increases
What are some of the critics to Heckhausen’s theory?
- Age-related changes in goals and maintaining control could be a result of living, life experiences
- Cultural differences, focus on individualistic strategies vs collectivistic
Collaborative Cognition
Better together than alone, to remember something or solving a cognitive task
- Enhance cognition, especially memory and problem-solving tasks
- Compensation
- Two people, close relationship and a long period of time together
Why is collaborative cognition considered an example of SOC?
- Its implicit, it just happens
- Compensatory for cognitive decline
- Selective of situations that promotes collaborative cognition
- Optimizing resources by relying on others expertise
