What is Personality Psychology

Chapter 12 The Cognitive Perspective

Modified: 2022-08-04 9:03 pm

The so called "cognitive revolution" (see below) spilled over to personality theory as well. It provides a link between mental life, biology, and personality.

Learning Objectives:
•12.1 Identify the core assumption of the cognitive view of personality

•12.2 Identify memory as a vast set of interlinked content nodes whose activation activates memories

•12.3 Explain how the connectionist models can join symbol-processing models to form dual process models

•12.4 Outline cognitive-person variables

•12.5 Evaluate how assessment is a process of determining a person’s cognitive tendencies and contents of consciousness

•12.6 Outline cognitive approaches to therapy as solutions to problems in behavior

•12.7 Relate a major criticism of the cognitive perspective to the typical response given to it
Cognitive Psychology and Personality (p. 183)
- Two assumptions:
  - How people deal with information
    - Perception is the first step
    - Brain must organize:
      - Sights
      - Sounds
      - Smells
      - Tastes
      - Touches
    - Brain categorizes that information
  - How people make decisions
    - Conscious
    - Unconscious
    - Representation
      - What should you do on oh and two?
      - Some of you will recognize the domain: baseball (and softball)
        
        oh and two represents two strikes and no balls or a batter near striking out
        
        the pitcher should avoid giving a good pitch (in the "wheelhouse")
        
        the batter should avoid a called third strike
      - If you don't know baseball then oh and two won't be very intelligible to you
    - Memory
      - Memory is a major part of cognitive theory
      - Short term memories are fleeting and limited in size
      - Long term memories are essentially infinite
Box 12.1 Personal Construct Theory: Foreshadowing the Cognitive Perspective (p. 184)
- George Kelly, perhaps unwittingly, foreshadowed much of the so-called "cognitive revolution"
- He argued that experiencing the physical world was not enough
- People, he argued, were amateur scientists, so:
  - They make predictions all day long
  - They attempt to understand their subjective views of the world
- He used the term "personal construct" to summarize his views
- Cognitive Revolution? (from my History of Psychology text:)
  - The new cognitive psychology was not a revolution in the usual sense as a rapid change over a short time period. Plus, it did not intend to replace Behaviorism. There was no rapid conversion from Behaviorism to Cognitivism. The mind was back in psychology but the pace was evolutionary not revolutionary. Still, it was a revolution in terms of its approach to some of psychology’s new questions:
    - Is the brain a kind of computer?
    - What was memory and how did it affect behavior?
    - How did people solve problems?
    - What was language and how was it acquired?
    - What are the physiological underpinnings of cognition?
12.1 Representing Your Experience of the World (p. 184)

12.1.1 Schemas and Their Development
- Schemas organize information
- Schemas may use:
  - perceptions
  - knowledge
  - emotions
  - temporal information
- Exemplars are schemas that typically provide a specific example of a category
  - Text suggests "football player" as an example
- Prototypes are schemas that are the best fit for that category
  - They can be real or ideal
    - Think of a "chair"
      - A prototypical chair is:
        
        made of wood
        
        has no wheels, no padding, and no arms
12.1.2 Effects of Schemas
- Schemas
  - Put information into memory easily
  - Can change
  - Are personal
    - House buyers vs burglars (see page 185)
  - Can be self-perpetuating
  - Confirmation of schemas is more resistant to change
  - Serve as containers for additional information:
    - Classroom schema contains:
      - whiteboards, desks, students, teachers
      - do NOT contain elephants
- Default schemas are assumed to be true unless you are told otherwise
  - "Math classes are hard" is a likely default schema
12.1.3 Semantic Memory, Episodic Memory, Scripts, and Procedural Knowledge
- Schemas and memory interact
  - Semantic memory is knowledge
    - Capital of France (Paris) vs Captital of Burkina Faso (Ouagadougou)
  - Episodic memory is personal memories
    - Time-tagged (married on July 3, 1988)
    - Recalled in order of the events (birthday party: guests arrived, delivered presents, played games, ate cake and ice cream, opened presents, gave guests their present, guest left)
    - FYI, nearly every semantic memory you have was once an episodic memory
      - Example: What is 3 x 7 = 21
      - When you first learned that it was an episodic memory
      - Now it's a semantic memory (and you probably don't remember when you first learned it)
  - Scripts are a class of episodes (a type of prototype, see below)
    - Going to the store
    - Moving the lawn
    - Going to restaurant script
      - Walk in, be seated, get drinks, read menu, order, eat, dessert (maybe), get check, pay, tip, leave
      - Lost wallet? Wash dishes! (Note: this is NOT the default)
      - Bad food? Killing the cook is not the default either (but see Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Agent Sands (Johnny Depp) says:
        
        "El, you really must try this because it's puerco pibil. It's a slow-roasted pork, nothing fancy. It just happens to be my favorite, and I order it with a tequila and lime in every dive I go to in this country. And honestly, that is the best it's ever been anywhere. In fact, it's too good. It's so good that when I'm finished, I'll pay my check, walk straight into the kitchen and shoot the cook. Because that's what I do. I restore the balance to this country. And that is what I would like from you right now. Help keep the balance by pulling the trigger.
- Procedural knowledge
  - Can be physical or mental
    - Example: riding a bicycle (physical)
    - Dividing two numbers in your head (mental)
  - Once learned, procedural knowledge lasts a very long time
    - Example: I'll bet you could ride a bicycle if you learned to as a child and had not ridden one in years
12.1.4 Socially Relevant Schemas
- People differ:
  - In how the form categories (schemas) for people, gender roles, environments, social situations, emotional situations, and the structure of music
  - In how complex their schemas are
    - The more knowledge possesed, the more complex the schema
    - Think about how you might feel out of your depth in trying to understand and explain an event you only have passing knowledge of:
      - Example: the rules of cricket, polo, or soccer
12.1.5 Self-Schemas
- Tend to be more complex
- Similar to self-concept
- Well developed
- More complex in people who think about themselves more
- Can change as situation changes
  - Example: going back to parent's home after being in college
  - Compartmentalization
- Can include schemas of:
  - expect to become
  - afraid of becoming
  - possible selves:
    - disliked selves
    - selves one ought to be
12.1.6 Entity versus Incremental Mindsets
- Do things change or do they stay the same?
  - That is the message of mindsets.
  - Mindsets:
    - Can be fixed or dynamic
    - Those with fixed mindsets may have more trouble coping when situations change
12.1.7 Attribution
- Inferring the cause of an event, could be:
  - Intentional
  - Accidental
  - A success
  - A failure
- The cause could be:
  - Internal
    - ability, effor
  - External
    - chance, task difficulty, powerful others
  - Stable
    - ability
  - Unstable
    - effort
- Individual differences
  - Are important
  - When failure is attributed to external factors then no need to worry about future
  - When failure is attributed to lack of ability or obstacles then failure may reoccur
- Health
  - Depression, illness, and death may come to those who see failure as coming from stable and permanent reasons

12.2 Activation of Memories (p. 188)
- Schemas work with memory to form networks (See Figure 12.1 below)
- Those networks have nodes that may be:
  - Semantic
  - Episodic
  - Containers of information
- Nodes may be strongly or weakly linked
- When a node is activated it moves into consciousness
- Partial activation of nodes happens also
- Partially activated nodes may be moved into consciousness by:
  - Other outside sources

12.2.1 Priming and the Use of Information
- Priming promotes partial activation
- Originally, priming studies looked at:
  - Is the primed information more accessible on a subsequent task
  - Is related information more accessible on a subsequent task
- However, priming only works if the subsequent task is in the same domain
  - Example: priming "dishonest" will not affect judgments of athleticism
- Priming is more common for categories that are used most
- Exposure to violence may create schemas with violent themes
- Thus, children raise in rough neighborhoods may judge ambiguous actions as being hostile
- Priming affects subsequent behavior, even in children as young as 18 months
12.2.2 Nonconscious Influences on Behavior
- The unconscious is back in psychology, but:
  - not in Freudian terms
  - as the cognitive unconscious
- There is evidence for subliminal (outside of perception) priming:
  - From relationships
  - From goals
  - From emotions
- In cognitive psychology consciousness is akin to a workspace where:
  - Information is handled
  - Decisions are made
  - Intentions are formed
- Many processes occur outside of consciousness:
  - heartbeat
  - highly practiced behaviors
    - Example: proficient drivers handle most tasks automatically, but if a strong rainstorm hits they must attend to their driving much more intentionally

12.3Connectionist Views of Mental Organization (p. 190)
- Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) is another viewpoint, it:
  - Uses a neuronal metaphor (neurons, synapses, neural networks)
  - Assumes that many processes are happening at the same time (the parallel part)
  - The units pass activating or inhibiting messages back and forth
  - Eventually, the system settles into a final state (can happen quickly)
  - At times, an abrupt change may take place
- In social perception and decision making blended solutions are rare
- Instead, one perception or solution may alternate between two states
- See Figure 2.4. You cannot see both women at the same time
  - the young woman is looking away, has black hair, and a choker around her neck
  - the old woman is looking down, has a large nose, and her mouth is closed
  - it might take you a while to see both, but when you do you will see one and then the other
  - you will not see both at the same instant

12.3.1 Dual-Process Models

Dual process models represent a compromise between symbol processing and connectionist models

Several types of dual process models have been proposed:

Conscious processor vs Intuitive Processor

Rational vs Experiential

Hot vs Cool

Controlled vs Automatic

All agree that some actions require quick responses while others can be handled more slowly and with thought

12.3.2 Explicit and Implicit Knowledge

People have explicit and implicit knowledge

In prejudice, people may be explicitly neutral but implicitly prejudiced

Children as young as 4 may already possess implicit attitudes

In self-esteem, people may possess congruent or noncongruent self-esteem

Explicit knowledge may derive from conditioning

Implicit knowledge may derive from verbal learning

Box 12.2 What's in a Name? (p. 191)

I heard Pelham give a talk once, it was wild

He argues that:

People's names are related to:

Where they live

Their jobs

Politician's names

Marriage partners

Self-schemas may be responsible

Box 12.3 Delay of Gratification: The Role of Cognitive Strategies (p. 193)
- Several theorists have tried to explain delay of gratification
- Cognitive theorists argue that mental strategies play a major role
  - In children, thinking about the taste of the food makes delay difficult
  - But, thinking about non-edible qualities helped them delay
12.4 Broader Views on Cognition and Personality (p. 194)
Box 12.4 The Theorist and the Theory: Mischel and His Mentors (p. 195)
- Walter Mischel's main mentor was George Kelly (see above)
- Mischel and his family escaped Vienna to avoid the Nazis in 1930
  - Interestingly Freud was a neighbor
- In the United State he became disilusioned with Freudian theory when he applied it to juvenile offenders
- He went to the Ohio State University where he studied under Kelly and Julian Rotter
- Both of those mentors left marks on him (along with Freud)
- In many ways his professional work contributed to the cognitive-social learning perspective
12.5. Assessment from the Cognitive Perspective (p. 197)
- 12.5.1 Think-Aloud, Experience Sampling, and Self-Monitoring
  - Think-Aloud protocols are often used in problem solving situations
  - Experience Sampling today is most likely collected with cell phones
    - Data show that:
      - Voluntary actions involve more positive feelings
      - Work is positively correlated with positive feelings
      - Close attention is correlated with satisfaction, freedom, alertness, and creativity
  - Self-Monitoring (or Event Recording):
    - Focuses on classes of events
    - Participants report:
      - Behaviors, emotions, thought patterns, and information during the day
      - Allows participants to see their regularities
    - Ayman al-Zawahiri was targeted and killed by his "pattern of life"where the CIA was sampling his daily routine
- 12.5.2 Contextualized Assessment
  - Contextualized assessment examines behavior and thinking in specific contexts
  - When compared to more general measures the contextual measures more finely assessed children's behavior
  - One study labelled children as:
    - Externalizers
      - When teased or threatened they hit or bossed
    - Internalizers
      - When teased or threatened they whined and withdrew
    - Mixed cases
      - Hit and withdrew socially when others spoke to them
12.6 Problems in Behavior, and Behavior Change, from the Cognitive Perspective (p. 198)
- 12.6.1 Information-Processing Deficits
  - Therapy
  - Looks for deficits in memory or cognitive functions
  - Specific pathologies (e.g., schizophrenia, depression)
  - Attentional limits
  - Methods of deploying attention
    - Example: the overly aggressive do not pay attention to other's intentions)
  - Therapy assumes that individual schemas are the source of problems
- 12.6.2 Depressive Self-Schemas
  - Aaron Beck's therapy focuses on changing:
    - Automatic thoughts (schemas) that:
      - Are inaccurate or distorted
      - Are negatively preconceived
        
        Example: "What's the point of trying?"
      - Over reliant on memory
      - Under reliant on reality
    - His cognitive triad is negative thinking about:
      - The self
      - The world
      - The future
    - Specific negative distortions include:
      - Arbitrary inferences
      - Catastrophization
      - Low self-worth
      - Hopelessness
  - Newer work implicates:
    - Implicit and explicit views of the self
    - Specific brain areas
- 12.6.3 Cognitive Therapy
  - There are many kinds
  - All involve:
    - Cognitive restructuring (reframing) or:
      - Being more controlled
      - Being less automatic
12.7 Problems and Prospects for the Cognitive Perspective (p. 199)
- Mixed negative views on the cognitive perspective:
  - Disorganized
  - Immature
  - To many loose ends
  - Just a transplantation of cognition to personality
- But
  - Understanding mental functions is important
  - How people develop biased schemas is of interest
  - Priming has new life and is outside of it Freudian origins
Points to Remember
- The cognitive orientation to personality considers how people attend to, process, organize, encode, store, and retrieve information.
- Schemas are mental organizations of information that develop over experience and are used to identify new events.
- Some theorists think schemas organize around prototypes (best members), and others believe schemas have fuzzy, or inexact, definitions.
- Schemas make new events easy to remember. They also provide default information to fill in the gaps of events.
- Schemas can represent concepts (in semantic memory) and events (in episodic memory). Each aspect of memory holds exemplars and generalities. Stereotypic event categories are called scripts.
- The term social cognition refers to cognitive processes bearing on stimuli relevant to social behavior.
- People develop schematic representations of many kinds of socially relevant categories. People also develop self-schemas, representations of themselves.
- The self-schema is more elaborate than other schemas, but it seems to follow the same principles.
- The self-schema may have several facets (e.g., possible selves). Entity schemas imply that something is fixed; incremental schemas imply there is potential for change.
- Many psychologists view memory as a vast set of content nodes linked to each other by various associations.
- Activating one node in memory causes partial activation of related nodes (priming), causing that information to become more accessible. Priming can even happen outside awareness.
- Connectionist models view memory in terms of patterns in overall networks. A given pattern reflects the satisfaction of many constraints simultaneously. This view applies nicely to social perception and decision making.
- Some theorists believe there are two distinct kinds of thought processes: one quick, intuitive, and connectionist, and the other slower, rational, and linear.
- Research on implicit attitudes suggests people have knowledge at two levels, which may correspond to the two modes of thought processes.
- Broad statements on cognitive views of personality emphasize the importance of people’s schemas, encoding strategies, personal competencies, expectancies about how things are related in the world, values or incentives, and self-regulatory systems.
- People’s behavior is seen as following if … then contingencies, in which the if describes a situation and the then describes a behavioral response. In this view, personality is a profile of these contingencies, forming a unique “behavioral signature” for each person.
- Assessment, from this viewpoint, is the process of determining the person’s cognitive tendencies and contents of consciousness.
- Cognitive assessment techniques include think-aloud procedures, thought sampling, and monitoring of the occurrence of particular categories of events. These procedures give a clearer idea of what sorts of thoughts are coming to mind in various kinds of situations—typically, situations that are problematic.
- Also important is the idea that assessment be contextualized to capture the person’s if … then contingencies.
- Problems in behavior can come from information-processing deficits (e.g., difficulty encoding, ineffective allocation of attention).
- Problems can also arise from development of negative self-schemas. In this view, depression results from various kinds of cognitive distortions, all of which cause events to seem more unpleasant or have more negative implications than is actually true.
- Cognitive therapy involves, in part, attempting to get people to stop engaging in these cognitive distortions and to develop more adaptive views of the events they experience. This may entail correcting automatic, intuitive processes through oversight from consciousness, effortful processes.
KEY TERMS
- Attribution: The process of making a judgment about the cause (or causes) of an event.
- Automatic thoughts: Self-related internal dialogue that often interferes with behavior.
- Behavioral signature: The pattern of situation–behavior links the person has established over time and experience in some specific domain.
- Cognitive assessment: Procedures used to assess cognitive processes, mental structures, and contents of consciousness.
- Cognitive restructuring or reframing: The process of taking a different and more positive view of one’s experience.
- Cognitive therapies: Procedures aimed at reducing cognitive distortions and the resulting distress.
- Cognitive triad: Negative patterns of thinking about the self, the world, and the future.
- Connectionism: An approach to understanding cognition based on the metaphor of interconnected neurons.
- Default: Something assumed to be true until one learns otherwise.
- Dual-process models: Models assuming two different modes of cognition––one effortful, one automatic.
- Episodic memory: Memory organized according to sequences of events.
- Exemplar: A specific example of a category member.
- Fuzzy set: A category defined by a set of attributes that aren’t absolutely necessary for membership.
- Implicit knowledge: Associations between things in memory that are not directly accessible.
- Mirror neurons: Neurons that are active both when perceiving an action and when doing the action.
- Node: An area of memory that stores some element of information.
- Possible self: An image of oneself in the future (expected, desired, feared, etc.).
- Priming: Activating an element in memory by using the information contained in it, leaving it partly activated.
- Procedural knowledge: Knowledge about doing; engaging in specific behaviors and mental manipulations.
- Prototype: The representation of a category in terms of a best member of the category.
- Schema: An organization of knowledge in memory.
- Script: A memory structure used to represent a highly stereotyped category of events.
- Self-complexity: The degree to which one’s self-schema is differentiated and compartmentalized.
- Self-schema: The schematic representation of the self.
- Semantic memory: Memory organized according to meaning.
- Social cognition: Cognitive processes focusing on socially meaningful stimuli.
- Subliminal: Occurring too fast to be consciously recognized.

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