Social Cognitive Approaches Flashcards
What do Social cognivists argue?
That representations of the stimuli also control behaviour
What did George Kelly (1905-1967) determine?
- founder of the social cognitive movement 1950s
- how you construe determines how you respond
- we are scientists with the power to rethink events and test hypotheses
What is agentic?
Influence and change their lives
What did Albert Bandura (1925-2021) establish?
- recognised reinforcement
- learning that occurs without receiving direct external reinforcement
- Bobo doll experiment
What was found in the bobo doll experiment?
- Children spontaneously acted aggressively after watching an aggressive model
- Expectancies and self-efficacy shape our choices and our choices shape our expectancies and self-efficacy
What did Bandura believe about people and their morality?
Good people usually do good things, wicked people often do wicked things
What is Moral Justification?
portraying inhumane behaviour as having a moral purpose
What is Euphemistic labelling?
sanitising language to make behaviour respectable (e.g., waste rather than kill)
What is an advantageous comparison?
trivialising behaviour by comparing it to more immoral acts
What is displacement of responsibility?
a legitimate authority accepts responsibility for a behaviour
What is disregarding or misrepresenting injurious consequences?
minimise or avoid facing harm caused
What is dehumanization?
denying humanness may be used to justify acting with fewer moral constraints
What is the social learning theory?
reward appropriate behaviours and specify relevant rules and principles
What is an agentic and proactive person?
someone with self-regulation and self-reflection capabilities
What is self-efficacy?
- Belief that one can successfully execute a behaviour in a given situation
- Determines behavioural competence
- Implications for insight-oriented interventions versus skills training
What does low self-efficacy lead to?
avoidance/escape
What does high self-efficacy generate?
persistence
What are Expectancies in the Social Learning Theory?
- Personal beliefs about the consequences of acting in a certain way
- Vicariously learned and shaped by experience
- Can have positive and negative expectancies – internal conflict, very similar to Dillard & Miller
What is an example of self-efficacy and expectancies for a depressed mood?
Self-efficacy:
- I cannot cope with social situations
- I am unable to face that job
Expectancies:
- If I face my job people at work will find out that I am incompetent
- staying at home saves me from having to solve that problem
What did Walter Mischel (1930-2018) develop?
- a broader approach to the social cognitive theory
- cognitive-affective personality system (CAPS)
- network information processing model
What does the cognitive-affective personality system (CAPS) involve?
- Encodings
- Expectancies/efficacy
- Hot cognition/affect
- Life goals and values
- Behavioural scripts
What are encodings?
- Personal meaning associated with an external cue
- Followed by a stream of thoughts, feelings, expectations, goals, scripts that can be rather automatic
- Same cue but individual subjective experience
What is an example of encoding?
Being touched by a stranger versus your partner
What are expectancies/efficacy?
- Personal Beliefs about outcomes
- Confidence about successfully coping with a certain situation
What are hot cognitions/affect?
- Thoughts that activate strong emotions (He/she rejected me and that makes me angry)
- Includes physiological component
- Thoughts associated with important consequences
- Often have existential themes (rejection, major setback, safety, aloneness)
What are life goals and values according to Mischel?
Life goals = Global outcomes you desire for yourself and that you hold closely (e.g., a close family, social justice, wealth)
Values = Provide direction and structure to life, organise and drive one’s efforts and decisions
What are behavioural scripts?
Learned ways of responding in an organised way to a given set of CAUs
(through observational learning, direct behavioural learning processes, or our own reflections on what works – we can regulate our own behaviour)
What is chronic accessibility?
a signature set of connections that are easily primed
What are personality dispositions?
are really just signatures
What is a narcissistic personality?
encode others as vulnerable, useful; self-efficacy is exaggerated; criticism cues hostility; values are entitlement oriented; attributions are about greatness, elitism
What are the implications for the assessment of social cognitive theories?
- Tend to be focused on specific situations, not very interested in consistencies in personality
- Expanded focus on self-report
- Many points of leverage in formulating cases (cues, hot cognitions, self-efficacy, expectancies, values, goals, behavioural scripts)
How can diaries be used in the assessment of social cognitive theories?
- Identify cues for presenting problems, identify cues for when presenting problems recede
- When cues are present, what expectancies/self-efficacy concepts are activated?
- When do ‘hot’ emotions appear, and what activates them?
- Behavioural scripts and their effectiveness?
How can questionnaires be used in the assessment of social cognitive theories?
- A specific measure may be of little use – a few different measures may help to capture signatures
- CAUs are interdependent
- What are the things that give this person meaning? (life goals and values)
What is measured by the social phobia scale?
fear of being scrutinised during routine activities (e.g., eating, walking in front of others) presenting problem…
What scale is the social phobia scale?
5-point scale
“not at all” “slightly” “moderately” “very” “extremely”
What does the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale measure?
fear of more general social interaction – distress when meeting and talking with other people (fear of being inarticulate, boring, sounding silly, or being ignored) presenting problem
What is meant by Item-total correlations?
- The correlation between the question score and the overall scale score
- A good way of eliminating items that may not represent the construct
What Item-total correlation is ideal?
- 0.2 or less generally considered small
- 0.4-0.6 modest correlation
- 0.70 large correlation
What does Test-retest reliability measure?
- Measure of the strength of the association
- Bias: feedback between tests, preparation/practice effects
What measure calculates Test-retest reliability?
Pearson correlation coefficient
What does a Pearson correlation coefficient mean for Test-retest reliability?
1 = perfect reliability 0.9 < 1 = excellent reliability 0.8 < 0.9 = good reliability 0.7 < 0.8 = acceptable reliability 0.6 < 0.7 = questionable reliability 0.5 < 0.6 = poor reliability < 0.5 = unacceptable reliability
What is Construct Validity?
- It can distinguish between people who have vs don’t have certain known characteristics.
- Convergent validity
- Divergent validity
What is the kind of construct validity called convergent validity?
It correlates well with tools that measure the same construct
What is the kind of construct validity called divergent validity?
It correlates poorly with tools that measure unrelated constructs
What are diaries focused on?
The presenting problem
