Personality Psychology

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Personality Psychology

• Chapter 12
• Cognitive Approaches to Personality

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Introduction

• Cognitive approaches to personality focus on
  differences in how people process information
• The different styles of perceiving and thinking
• The different strategies people use to solve
  problems

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Three levels of cognition of interest to
personality psychologists

• Perception Process of imposing order on
  information received by our sense organs
• Interpretation Process of making sense of, or
  explaining, events in the world
• Beliefs and desires Standards and goals people
  develop for evaluating themselves and others
• Fourth cognitive domain of interest Intelligence

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Cognition

• Awareness and thinking, as well as specific
  mental acts such as perceiving, interpreting,
  remembering, believing, and anticipating.
• Personalizing cognition relating a new event to
  past experience
• Objectifying cognition recalling factual
  information in response to a new event

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Cognitive Topics in Personality

• Cognition
• Personalizing Objectifying

3 year old Golden Retriever, 60 pounds and
rusty-yellow
Big, friendly, loves to go on walks
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Cognitive Topics in Personality

• Information Processing
• The transformation of sensory input into mental
  representations and the manipulation of such
  representations

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Information Processing and Personality

• Grew rapidly during the 1970s and 1980s.
• Unlike computers, however, humans are not always
  accurate or unbiased in how they process
  information.
• Humans differ greatly from each other in terms of
  how they perceive, think about, and construe
  themselves, the world, and other people.

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Three Levels of Cognition

• Perception
• The process of imposing order on information
• Interpretation
• Making sense, or explaining, various events in
  the world
• Beliefs and Desires
• Standards and goals that people develop for
  evaluating themselves and others

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Personality Revealed Through Perception

• Field Dependence
• Relying on the visual field to make a judgment

• Field Independence
• Relying on your own sensations to make a judgment

Measured using the Rod and Frame Test or the
Embedded Figures Test.
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Field Dependence-Independence and Life Choices
Education Witkin et. al. (1954) found that choice
of major in college was related to field
independence/dependence.

• Field Independence
• Natural sciences
• Math
• Engineering

• Field Dependence
• Social Sciences
• Education

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Field Dependence-Independence and Life Choices

• Interpersonal Relations
• Witkin found that field dependent people tend to
  rely on social cues and are oriented toward other
  people.
• Field independent people function with more
  autonomy and are more impersonal or detached
  towards others.

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Perceptual Style Leads To Different Styles Of
Learning

• Police Officers
• Field independent officers perform better in
  high-stimulation settings
• Field independent officers could notice details
  more accurately and were less distracted by noise
  and activity.
• Multimedia-based Computer Instruction
• Field independent eighth-graders learned more
  effectively than field dependent
• Field independent students got points imbedded
  within the different sources of media faster, and
  were able to switch between educational media or
  sensory fields faster than field dependent
  students.

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Field Independent Characteristics

• Field independent people tend to
• Be skilled at analyzing complex situations and
  exacting information from the clutter of
  background distraction
• Better able to screen out distracting information
  and focus on a task
• Learn more effectively in hypermedia-based
  instructional environment
• Be somewhat low on social skills
• Prefer to keep their distance from others

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Field Dependent Characteristics

• Field dependent people tend to
• Have strong social skills
• Gravitate toward others
• Be more attentive to context than field
  independent people

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Pain Tolerance and Sensation Reducing-Augmenting

• The Reducer-Augmenter Theory was proposed by
  Aneseth Petrie, a psychologist studying
  individual differences in tolerance for sensory
  stimulation
• Reducer-Augmenter Theory
• People with low pain tolerance had a nervous
  system that amplified or augmented the subjective
  impact sensory input
• Those who could tolerate pain well had a nervous
  system that reduced the effects

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Pain Tolerance and Sensation Reducing-Augmenting

• Reducers show relatively small brain responses to
  flashes of light and bursts of noise compared to
  augmenters
• Reducers seek strong stimulation, drink more
  coffee, smoke more, and have a lower threshold to
  become bored
• Reducers tend to start smoking at an earlier age,
  and to engage in minor delinquencies as
  adolescents

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Personality Revealed Through Interpretation

• Personality psychologists study two main kinds of
  interpretation responsibility and expectations
  for the future.
• Kellys Personal Construct Theory
• Locus of Control
• Learned Helplessness
• Explanatory Style

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Kellys Personal Construct Theory

• Human nature Humans-as-scientists people
  attempt to understand, predict, and control
  events
• Personal constructs Constructs person uses to
  interpret and predict events

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Kellys Personal Construct Theory

• 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

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Kellys Personal Construct Theory

• Fundamental Postulate a persons 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

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Kellys Personal Construct Theory

• 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

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Locus of Control

• Locus of control research started in the
  mid-1950s when psychologist Julian Rotter was
  developing his social learning theory.
• He believed that some people expect that certain
  behaviors will result in obtaining a reinforcer,
  or they believed that they were in control of the
  outcomes of life.
• Generalized Expectancies
• a persons expectations for reinforcement hold
  across a variety of situations. When people
  encounter a new situation they base their
  expectancies about what will happen on their
  generalized expectancies about whether they have
  the abilities to influence events.

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Locus of Control

• Generalized Expectancies
• Internal Locus of Control
• The expectancy that events are under ones
  control and that one is responsible for major
  life outcomes
• External Locus of Control
• The expectancy that events are outside of ones
  control
• Specific Expectancies
• the locus of control is in discrete areas of
  life. A person may be internal in one area
  (health) and external in another (politics)

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Learned Helplessness

• Accepting a painful fate without attempting to
  remove yourself from the unpleasant situation.
• Work on learned helplessness began when
  psychologists were studying avoidance learning in
  dogs. The dogs learned to accept shocks to their
  paws, even though they could jump away.

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Explanatory Style

• The reformulation of learned helplessness theory
  focuses on the cognitions a person has that may
  lead to feelings of helplessness, or the
  explanations that people give for events in their
  lives.
• These explanations are referred to as causal
  attribution.
• The next three slides highlight the 3 categories
  for attribution for the causes of events.

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Explanatory Style

• Internal
• Explanatory Style
• Blaming yourself for events

• External
• Explanatory Style
• Believing that the causes of events are outside
  of ones control

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Explanatory Style

• Stable
• Explanatory Style
• The cause of a situation is permanent and stable

• Unstable
• Explanatory Style
• Causes of events are temporary and not long
  lasting

My papers poor grade was due to the fact that
I was tired when I wrote it
My papers poor grade was due to the fact that I
am not a good writer
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Explanatory Style

• Specific
• Explanatory Style
• Events happen due to very specific causes

• Global
• Explanatory Style
• Causes affect many situations in all of life

I was robbed because all people are bad
That person who robbed me is bad
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Explanatory Style

• Optimistic
• Explanatory Style
• Emphasizes external, temporary, and specific
  causes

• Pessimistic
• Explanatory Style
• Emphasizes internal, stable, and global causes

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Explanatory Style

• Our explanatory styles have shown to be a stable
  characteristic over time.
• The pessimistic style puts a person at risk for
  feelings of helplessness and poor adjustment.
• Studies have shown that a pessimistic style in
  college predicted poorer health 20 to 35 years
  later.

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Personality Revealed Through Beliefs and Desires

• One important part of a persons desires is his
  or her goals for the future.
• People differ in their beliefs and desires, and
  these differences are part of and reveal their
  personalities.

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Personality Revealed Through Beliefs and Desires

• This section looks at two programs of research
• Personal Project Analysis
• the assessment of personal projects and
• Life Tasks, Goals, and Strategies
• the strategies people enact to achieve their
  goals and life tasks.

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Personality Revealed Through Beliefs and Desires

• Personal Projects Analysis
• Psychologist Brian Little believes that personal
  projects make natural units for understanding the
  working of personality because they reflect how
  people navigate through daily life.
• He found that bringing your personal projects to
  successful completion seems to be a pivotal
  factor in whether we thrive emotionally or lead
  lives of quiet desperation.

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Personal Projects Analysis

• Personal Projects a set of relevant actions
  intended to achieve a goal that the person has
  selected
• People who score high on neuroticism rate their
  personal projects as stressful, difficult, likely
  to end in failure, and outside of their control.
• Overall happiness is most related to feeling to
  control of ones personal projects

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Life Tasks, Goals, and Strategies

• Life Tasks personal versions of culturally
  mandated problem-solving goals
• Strategies characteristic ways that people
  respond to the challenges of making progress on a
  particular life task

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Life Tasks, Goals, and Strategies

• What strategies might help anyone pursue life
  tasks in the face of risk, uncertainty, and
  self-doubt?
• Social Constraint
• Anxiety is overcome by taking the lead from other
  people whenever in social situations
• Defensive Pessimism
• Preparing for failure ahead of time set low
  expectations for own performance and focus on
  worst-case outcomes
• Outcome-Focused
• Turning every situation into opportunities to
  focus on the task reassurance-seeking in
  particular life task domain.

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Intelligence

• Intelligence continues to be defined in many
  ways, and there may be many different kinds of
  intelligence.
• General Intelligence early belief that
  intelligence was a trait
• Achievement View how much knowledge a person has
  acquired relative to others similar in age
• Aptitude View the ability to become educated or
  to learn

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Summary

• Personality and perceptual differences
• Personality and interpreting events
• Personality and how people select projects and
  tasks to pursue in life
• Intelligence