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Chapter 12
Cognitive Topics in Personality
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How do you see this cube
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3. Cognitive Topics in Personality Introduction
Cognitive approaches to personality focus on differences in how people process information
Cognition refers to awareness and thinking as well as to specific mental acts such as perceiving, interpreting, remembering, believing, anticipating (read p 393)
Personalizing Cognition: relate to experience
Objectifying Cognition: relate to objective facts.
Four levels of cognition of interest to personality psychologists
1. Perception: Process of imposing order on information received by our sense organs (making sense of what you receive through your senses read p 393).
2. Interpretation: Process of making sense of, or explaining, events in the world
3. Beliefs and desires (conscious Goals): Standards and goals people develop for evaluating themselves and others
4. Fourth cognitive domain of interest: Intelligence: ability to think, learn
encompasses a number of mental abilities such as reasoning, planning and problem-solving.
(read pp )
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Cognitive Topics in Personality Personality Revealed Through Perception 1
Field Dependence-Independence
Pain Tolerance and Sensation Reducing-Augmenting
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Cognitive Topics in Personality: Personality Revealed Through Perception Field Dependence-Independence
Do you look at the big picture or are you hooked to the details?
Field independent :people have the ability to focus on details despite the clutter of background information
Field dependent: depend on the details of the visual field
Measures used to assess field-dependence
Rod and Frame Test (RFT) (Witkin et al., 1954)
dark room with glowing square frame (which can be rotated a little off-vertically) and glowing rod inside,
participant (whose seat can also be rotated) has to adjust the rod exactly vertically
• people who take visual cues from the square (and probably not upright) frame are field-dependent
• people orienting to absolute scales (direction of gravity) are called field-independent
Embedded Figures Test (EFT)
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6. Field Dependence-Independence Embedded Figures Test
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Cognitive Topics in Personality: Personality Revealed Through Perception Field Dependence-Independence
Field dependence-independence and life choices
Education: Field independent people favor natural sciences, math, engineering, whereas field dependent people favor social sciences and education
Interpersonal relations: Field independent people are more interpersonally detached, whereas field dependent people are attentive to social cues, oriented toward other people
Current research on field dependence-independence
Field independent people are better able to screen out distracting information and focus on a task (see Example of police shooting p398)
Field-independent students learn more effectively than field dependent students in hypermedia-based instructional environment (see other examples p )
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Cognitive Topics in Personality: Personality Revealed Through Perception Pain Tolerance and Sensation Reducing-Augmenting
Can you tolerate having an injection (some cannot even thing about it)?
Aneseth Petrie’s reducer-augmenter theory of pain tolerance (differences in pain tolerance)
People with low pain tolerance have a nervous system that is amplified or augmented subjective impact of sensory input (read p )
People with high pain tolerance have a nervous system that is dampened or reduced effects of sensory information
Reducers seek strong stimulation, perhaps in order to compensate for lower sensory reactivity
Reducers may use substances (nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, other drugs) to artificially “lift” their arousal level
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Cognitive Topics in Personality: Personality Revealed Through Interpretation
People interpret information different: example how lawyers defend their defendants (example accept the “crime” but interpret I otherwise: example intent, see p 377).
Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory
Locus of Control
Learned Helplessness
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Cognitive Topics in Personality: Personality Revealed Through Interpretation Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory
Human nature: Humans-as-scientists; people attempt to understand, predict, and control events
Construct: is a word that summarizes a set of observations and conveys its meaning
Personal constructs: Constructs person uses to interpret and predict events.
people have their unique interpretation of the world). Constructs are bipolar. ( nice not nice). We use them to create the social groupings.
Kelly and post-modernism: Post-modernism is an intellectual position grounded in notion that reality is constructed, that every person and every culture has unique version of reality, with none having privilege
Fundamental Postulate: “a person’s processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which he anticipates events”
Commonality corollary: If two people have similar construct systems, they will be psychologically similar
Sociality corollary: To understand a person, must understand how she construes the social world
Anxiety: Not being able to understand and predict life events
Assessing personal constructs is done through construct systems “they carry”
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Cognitive Topics in Personality: Personality Revealed Through Interpretation Locus of Control
Locus of control describes person’s interpretation of responsibility for events. (External locus of control vs. Internal locus of control)
External locus of control: Generalized expectancies that events are outside of one’s control
Internal locus of control: Generalized expectancies that reinforcing events are under one’s control, and that one is responsible for major life outcomes
Rotter’s “expectancy model” of learning behavior
Learning depends on the degree to which a person values a reinforcer—its reinforcement value (see p 4379)
People differ in their expectations for reinforcement—some believe they are in control of outcomes, whereas others do not (380)
Generalized expectancies and specific expectancies (p )
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Cognitive Topics in Personality: Personality Revealed Through Interpretation Learned Helplessness (pp )
Animals (including humans) when subjected to unpleasant and inescapable circumstances, become passive and accepting of a situation, in effect learning to be helpless
Explanatory style: Tendency that some people have to use certain attributional categories when explaining causes of events
Three broad categories of attributions
External or internal
Stable or unstable
Global or specific
Pessimistic explanatory style
Emphasizes internal, stable, and global causes for negative events
Associated with feelings of helplessness and poor adjustment
Explanatory style is stable over time
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Cognitive Topics in Personality: Personality Revealed Through Interpretation Learned Helplessness
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Cognitive Topics in Personality: Personality Revealed Through Goals (Read pp ) Personal Project Analysis
People differ in their goals, and these differences reveal and are part of personality. This is the intention , on what persons want to happen, on what they achieve in their lives (personal strivings, current concerns, personal projects, life tasks, self-guides, standards that people strive to meet, their understanding of their abilities and motivations, internal abilities related to goals, including people expectations, beliefs, plans, and strategies)
Personal Projects Analysis (Little)
Emphasizes the “doing” of personality over the trait approach’s “having” of personality
Emphasizes active nature of personality
Personality is what structures a person’s daily life through the selection of goals and desires, that then determine specific strategies that people use
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Cognitive Topics in Personality: Personality Revealed Through Goals Cognitive Social Learning Theory
People learn to value and strive for certain goals over others.
Bandura and Self-efficacy: The belief that one can execute
a specific course of action to achieve a goal.
High self- efficacy leads to efforts and persistence on tasks and to setting higher goals.
Self-efficacy and performance influence each other.
Self-efficacy is influenced by modeling (seeing others engage in the performance with positive results).
Dweck and the theory of Mastery Orientation:
entity theory of intelligence: intelligence unchangeable and fixed internal characteristic. They thinks one needs to work harder, may take lower level courses.
Incremental theory believe intelligence can be increased through effort and persistence.
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Cognitive Topics in Personality: Personality Revealed Through Goals Cognitive Social Learning Theory
Theory of regular focus (Higgins): He developed Motivational theory concerning goals. People regulate their goal-directed behaviors in two distinct ways:
Promotion focus the person is concerned with advancement, growth, and accomplishments (eagerness, approach, and “going for the goal”.
Prevention focus: the person is concerned with protection, safety, and the prevention of negative outcomes and failures. Behaviors are characterized by vigilance, caution, and attempts to prevent negative outcomes.
Cognitive –Affective Personality System (CAPS)(Mischel):
Personality is an organization of cognitive and affective activities that influence how people respond to certain kinds of situations.
People differ in the distinct organization of their cognitive and affective processes as well as the accessibility of these processes. (use of “if…Then…” propositions) see his research on verbal aggression (Read p )
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17. Cognitive Topics in Personality: Intelligence
Achievement versus aptitude views of intelligence
“g” or general intelligence versus domain-specific intelligences
Widely accepted definition of intelligence (Gardner, 1983): Application of cognitive skill and knowledge to solve problems, learn, and achieve goals valued by the individual and the culture
Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences ( )
Visual-Spatial - think in terms of physical space,
Bodily-kinesthetic - use the body effectively, like a dancer or a surgeon. Keen sense of body awareness.
Interpersonal - understanding, interacting with others.
Intrapersonal - understanding one's own interests, goals.
Linguistic - using words effectively.
Logical -Mathematical - reasoning, calculating.
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18. Cognitive Topics in Personality: Intelligence
Emotional intelligence (Goleman)
Traditional measures of intelligence predict school performance, but not outcomes later in life, such as occupational attainment, salary, marital quality
Emotion intelligence strongly predicts these life outcomes
Emotional intelligence includes a set of five specific abilities
1. Awareness of our own feelings and bodily signals, being able to identify our own emotions, and make distinctions
2. Ability to regulate emotions, especially negative emotions, and to manage stress
3. Ability to control one’s impulses, direct attention and effort, delay gratification, and stay on task toward goals
4. Ability to decode social and emotional cues of others, empathy
5. Ability to influence and guide others without incurring anger, resentment
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Intelligence
Cultural context of intelligence: We should view intelligence as being those skills valued in particular culture
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20. Summary and Evaluation
Cognitive approaches to personality focus on differences in how people process information
People differ in how they think, perceive, interpret, remember, believe, desire, and anticipate events in their lives.
Personality psychologists are interested in these differences as well as characteristics of cognition that all humans share
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