Social Cognitive Approaches

Question 1

What do Social cognivists argue?

Answer 1

That representations of the stimuli also control behaviour

Question 2

What did George Kelly (1905-1967) determine?

Answer 2

• 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

Question 3

What is agentic?

Answer 3

Influence and change their lives

Question 4

What did Albert Bandura (1925-2021) establish?

Answer 4

• recognised reinforcement
• learning that occurs without receiving direct external reinforcement
• Bobo doll experiment

Question 5

What was found in the bobo doll experiment?

Answer 5

• 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

Question 6

What did Bandura believe about people and their morality?

Answer 6

Good people usually do good things, wicked people often do wicked things

Question 7

What is Moral Justification?

Answer 7

portraying inhumane behaviour as having a moral purpose

Question 8

What is Euphemistic labelling?

Answer 8

sanitising language to make behaviour respectable (e.g., waste rather than kill)

Question 9

What is an advantageous comparison?

Answer 9

trivialising behaviour by comparing it to more immoral acts

Question 10

What is displacement of responsibility?

Answer 10

a legitimate authority accepts responsibility for a behaviour

Question 11

What is disregarding or misrepresenting injurious consequences?

Answer 11

minimise or avoid facing harm caused

Question 12

What is dehumanization?

Answer 12

denying humanness may be used to justify acting with fewer moral constraints

Question 13

What is the social learning theory?

Answer 13

reward appropriate behaviours and specify relevant rules and principles

Question 14

What is an agentic and proactive person?

Answer 14

someone with self-regulation and self-reflection capabilities

Question 15

What is self-efficacy?

Answer 15

• Belief that one can successfully execute a behaviour in a given situation
• Determines behavioural competence
• Implications for insight-oriented interventions versus skills training

Question 16

What does low self-efficacy lead to?

Answer 16

avoidance/escape

Question 17

What does high self-efficacy generate?

Answer 17

persistence

Question 18

What are Expectancies in the Social Learning Theory?

Answer 18

• 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

Question 19

What is an example of self-efficacy and expectancies for a depressed mood?

Answer 19

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

Question 20

What did Walter Mischel (1930-2018) develop?

Answer 20

• a broader approach to the social cognitive theory
• cognitive-affective personality system (CAPS)
• network information processing model

Question 21

What does the cognitive-affective personality system (CAPS) involve?

Answer 21

• Encodings
• Expectancies/efficacy
• Hot cognition/affect
• Life goals and values
• Behavioural scripts

Question 22

What are encodings?

Answer 22

• 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

Question 23

What is an example of encoding?

Answer 23

Being touched by a stranger versus your partner

Question 24

What are expectancies/efficacy?

Answer 24

• Personal Beliefs about outcomes

- Confidence about successfully coping with a certain situation

Question 25

What are hot cognitions/affect?

Answer 25

- 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)

Question 26

What are life goals and values according to Mischel?

Answer 26

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

Question 27

What are behavioural scripts?

Answer 27

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)

Question 28

What is chronic accessibility?

Answer 28

a signature set of connections that are easily primed

Question 29

What are personality dispositions?

Answer 29

are really just signatures

Question 30

What is a narcissistic personality?

Answer 30

encode others as vulnerable, useful; self-efficacy is exaggerated; criticism cues hostility; values are entitlement oriented; attributions are about greatness, elitism

Question 31

What are the implications for the assessment of social cognitive theories?

Answer 31

- 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)

Question 32

How can diaries be used in the assessment of social cognitive theories?

Answer 32

- 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?

Question 33

How can questionnaires be used in the assessment of social cognitive theories?

Answer 33

- 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)

Question 34

What is measured by the social phobia scale?

Answer 34

fear of being scrutinised during routine activities (e.g., eating, walking in front of others) presenting problem...

Question 35

What scale is the social phobia scale?

Answer 35

5-point scale | "not at all" "slightly" "moderately" "very" "extremely"

Question 36

What does the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale measure?

Answer 36

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

Question 37

What is meant by Item-total correlations?

Answer 37

- The correlation between the question score and the overall scale score - A good way of eliminating items that may not represent the construct

Question 38

What Item-total correlation is ideal?

Answer 38

- 0.2 or less generally considered small - 0.4-0.6 modest correlation - 0.70 large correlation

Question 39

What does Test-retest reliability measure?

Answer 39

- Measure of the strength of the association | - Bias: feedback between tests, preparation/practice effects

Question 40

What measure calculates Test-retest reliability?

Answer 40

Pearson correlation coefficient

Question 41

What does a Pearson correlation coefficient mean for Test-retest reliability?

Answer 41

``` 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 ```

Question 42

What is Construct Validity?

Answer 42

- It can distinguish between people who have vs don’t have certain known characteristics. - Convergent validity - Divergent validity

Question 43

What is the kind of construct validity called convergent validity?

Answer 43

It correlates well with tools that measure the same construct

Question 44

What is the kind of construct validity called divergent validity?

Answer 44

It correlates poorly with tools that measure unrelated constructs

Question 45

What are diaries focused on?

Answer 45

The presenting problem