SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY: APPLICATIONS, RELATED MODELS, AND CONTEMPORARY RESEARCH

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Chapter 13

• SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY APPLICATIONS, RELATED
  MODELS, AND CONTEMPORARY RESEARCH

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QUESTIONS TO BE ADDRESSED IN THIS CHAPTER

• How can the study of knowledge structures, or
  schemas, inform the understanding of personality?
  
• What role do qualitatively different and
  disordered cognitive structures have on
  motivation, emotional experience, and adaptive
  functioning?
• How does the social-cognitive approach to
  personality contribute to effective
  psychotherapies?

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COGNITIVE COMPONENTS OF PERSONALITY

• BELIEFS ABOUT THE SELF
• Schemas knowledge structures that guide and
  organize the processing of information
• a new song on the radio sounds structured because
  you have developed schemas for how songs are
  typically structured
• schemas help you to process and appreciate the
  sounds that make up the song
• songs from a different culture might seem chaotic
  and distasteful because their sounds are
  structured differently from your schema for songs

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COGNITIVE COMPONENTS OF PERSONALITY

• BELIEFS ABOUT THE SELF
• Markus (1977) the most important schemas
  concern ourselves
• People form cognitive generalizations about the
  self just as they do about other objects and
  events (self-schemas)
• People develop different self-schemas
• Self-schemas account for the distinctive ways in
  which individuals perceive their relationship to
  the environment

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COGNITIVE COMPONENTS OF PERSONALITY

• BELIEFS ABOUT THE SELF
• Self-Schemas
• Reaction time a procedure in which the
  experimenter records not only the content of a
  participants response, but also how long s/he
  takes to respond
• People who possess a self-schema about a
  particular domain of life should react more
  quickly to stimuli that are related to that domain

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COGNITIVE COMPONENTS OF PERSONALITY

• BELIEFS ABOUT THE SELF
• Self-Schemas
• Markus (1977) identified people with a
  self-schema revolving around independence
• Participants rated themselves as high or low on
  independence
• Participants indicated the degree to which
  independence-dependence was important to them
• Those with high or low self-ratings on
  independence and who indicated that
  independence-dependence was important were
  categorized as schematic
• Participants then judged whether a series of
  adjectives, some thematically related to
  independence-dependence, were descriptive of
  themselves
• Schematics made these judgments faster

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COGNITIVE COMPONENTS OF PERSONALITY

• BELIEFS ABOUT THE SELF
• Self-Schemas
• People live complex lives which necessitate the
  development of different self-schemas
• Different situations cause different self-schemas
  to emerge as part of the working self-concept
  the subset of self-concept available in memory at
  any point in time
• The working self-concept contains specific
  information about the self that assists people to
  adjust their behavior as they encounter changing
  events and situations

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COGNITIVE COMPONENTS OF PERSONALITY

• BELIEFS ABOUT THE SELF
• Self-Based Motives and Information Processing
• Self-schemas motivate people to process
  information in certain ways
• People are motivated to experience themselves as
  consistent and predictable, reflecting a
  self-verification motive
• People are also biased toward maintaining a
  positive view of themselves, which can be
  described as a self-enhancement motive

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COGNITIVE COMPONENTS OF PERSONALITY

• BELIEFS ABOUT THE SELF
• Self-Based Motives and Information Processing
• What happens when these motives conflict?
• People generally prefer positive feedback about
  themselves, but prefer negative feedback on
  specific negative self-schemas
• Positive feedback can be bad for ones health if
  it conflicts with a negative self-schema and
  challenges ones negative identity
• People may be oriented toward self-verification
  in intimate relationships and self-enhancement in
  casual relationships

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CLINICAL APPLICATIONS

• STRESS AND COPING
• Stress occurs when a person views their
  circumstances as taxing or exceeding their
  resources and endangering well-being
• 2 stages of cognitive appraisal
• Primary appraisal a person evaluates whether
  anything is at stake in the encounter (e.g.,
  threat or danger)
• Secondary appraisal a person evaluates what, if
  anything, can be done to overcome or prevent harm
  or to improve future prospects

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CLINICAL APPLICATIONS

• STRESS AND COPING
• Problem-focused coping attempting to alter
  elements of a stressful situation (e.g.,
  problem-solving)
• Emotion-focused coping striving to regulate
  ones emotional state (e.g., emotional
  distancing, seeking social support)

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CLINICAL APPLICATIONS

• STRESS AND COPING
• Stress-inoculation training involves making
  clients aware of stress-producing automatic
  thoughts and their adverse effects
• Clients learn relaxation as an active coping
  skill and cognitive strategies for restructuring
  problems so that they become more manageable
• Problem-solving process define the problem,
  generate alternative solutions, evaluate the pros
  and cons of each solution, implement the solution
  most likely to solve problem, evaluate outcomes
• Stress-inoculation training is active, brief,
  focused, and structured

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CLINICAL APPLICATIONS

• MALADAPATION AND CHANGE
• Albert Ellis - people do not respond emotionally
  to events, but to their beliefs about those
  events
• ABCs of rational-emotive behavior therapy
• Activating (A) event may lead to a consequence
  (C), such as an emotional reaction
• We . . . create Beliefs (Bs) between A and C.
  Our Bs about A largely determine our response to
  it (Ellis Tafrate 1997, p. 31)
• Beliefs that cause needless psychological
  distress are considered to be irrational beliefs

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CLINICAL APPLICATIONS

• MALADAPTATION AND CHANGE
• Examples of negative thinking that cognitive
  therapists attempt to modify
• Faulty reasoning Im a poor test taker because
  Im nervous.
• Dysfunctional expectancies If something can go
  wrong for me, it will.
• Negative self-views I always feel that others
  are better than me.
• Maladaptive attributions When I succeed, its
  luck when I fail, its me.
• Memory distortions Life is horrible now and
  always has been.
• Self-defeating strategies Ill put myself down
  before others do.

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CLINICAL APPLICATIONS

• MALADAPTATION AND CHANGE
• Aaron Becks Cognitive Therapy
• Best known for its application to depression, but
  useful in treating anxiety, marital discord,
  substance misuse, and personality disorders
• Psychological difficulties are due to
• Automatic thoughts
• Dysfunctional thought processes
• Negative self-schemas

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CLINICAL APPLICATIONS

• MALADAPTATION AND CHANGE
• The Cognitive Triad of Depression
• Negative views of the self (e.g., I am
  inadequate, undesirable, worthless.)
• Negative views of the world (e.g., The world
  makes too many demands on me and life represents
  constant defeat.)
• Negative views of the future (e.g., Life will
  always involve the suffering and deprivation it
  has for me now.)

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CLINICAL APPLICATIONS

• MALADAPTATION AND CHANGE
• Cognitive Therapy
• The goal of therapy is to collaborate with the
  client in identifying and replacing distorted
  specific automatic thoughts, habitual
  dysfunctional thinking, and negative self-schemas
  that lead to maladaptive outcomes
• The therapist works collaboratively with the
  client to
• Monitor problematic cognitive functioning
• Recognize how problematic cognitive functioning
  contributes to maladaptive behavior and emotion
• Examine the evidence and logic for and against
  problematic cognitive functioning
• Develop more realistic and useful thoughts,
  thinking, and self-schemas

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CLINICAL APPLICATIONS

• MALADAPTATION AND CHANGE
• Expectancies
• Social-cognitive therapists emphasize the role of
  dysfunctional expectancies in maladaptive emotion
  and behavior
• People may erroneously expect aversive
  consequences to follow certain events or pain to
  be associated with certain situations
• They then may act
• to avoid such situations
• in a way that creates the very outcome they were
  trying to avoid

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CLINICAL APPLICATIONS

• MALADAPTATION AND CHANGE
• Expectancies
• Perceived inefficacy plays a key role in anxiety
• People with low perceived self-efficacy for
  responding to potential threats experience high
  anxiety
• It is not the threatening event, but the
  perceived inefficacy in coping with such an event
  that causes anxiety

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CLINICAL APPLICATIONS

• MALADAPTATION AND CHANGE
• Expectancies, Goals, and Standards
• Perceived inefficacy with respect to potential
  rewards leads to depression
• Individuals prone to depression
• Impose excessively high goals and evaluative
  standards
• Blame themselves for falling short
• Low perceived self-efficacy diminishes
  performance, leading a person to fall even
  further below his or her goals and standards and
  to additional self-blame

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CLINICAL APPLICATIONS

• MALADAPTATION AND CHANGE
• Expectancies, Goals, and Standards
• Discrepancies between performance and evaluative
  standards increase motivation when people believe
  they can attain the goal
• When people believe that a goal is beyond their
  capabilities because it is unrealistic, they will
  abandon the goal without becoming depressed
• Depression occurs when people perceive a goal to
  be reasonable and perceive themselves to be
  incapable of attaining it

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CLINICAL APPLICATIONS

• SELF-EFFICACY AND HEALTH
• Strong, positive perceived self-efficacy is good
  for your health
• Self-efficacy to practice safe sex is related to
  the performance of safe-sex behavior
• Modeling, goal-setting, regulating anxiety, and
  providing support can increase perceived
  self-efficacy and reduce risky health-related
  behavior

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CLINICAL APPLICATIONS

• SELF-EFFICACY AND HEALTH
• Self-Efficacy and the Immune System
• Snake phobics were tested under 3 conditions
• Baseline control - no exposure to a snake
• Self-efficacy acquisition - participants were
  assisted to strengthen their perceived
  self-efficacy for coping with a snake
• Perceived maximal self-efficacy participants
  received bogus positive feedback on their coping
  skills
• Blood was drawn from participants and analyzed
  for the presence of cells known to help regulate
  the immune system
• Increasing perceived self-efficacy produced more
  helper T cells and, thus, enhanced immune system
  functioning

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CLINICAL APPLICATIONS

• MODELING AND GUIDED MASTERY
• Maladaptive behavior, including fears and phobias
  are learned via
• Direct experience
• Exposure to inadequate or dysfunctional models

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CLINICAL APPLICATIONS

• MODELING AND GUIDED MASTERY
• Modeling
• Desired behavior is demonstrated by a model who
  experiences positive consequences
• Complex patterns of behavior are broken down into
  more basic skills and then modeled to ensure
  optimal progress
• Guided mastery
• The client not only views the model performing
  the desired behavior, but also is assisted in
  performing the behavior to ensure successful
  enactment
• First-hand experience of performance success
  yields a rapid increase in perceived
  self-efficacy and behavioral competence

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CLINICAL APPLICATIONS

• MODELING, GUIDED MASTERY, AND SELF-EFFICACY
• Bandura (1977) - therapies for overcoming fear
  succeed when they increase perceived
  self-efficacy for coping with fear
• Snake phobics were assigned to one of three
  treatment conditions
• Guided mastery
• Modeling
• Control
• Before and after treatment, participants were
  tested on a Behavioral Avoidance Test - 29 tasks
  requiring increasingly threatening interactions
  with a snake
• The final task required participants to let the
  snake crawl in their laps

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CLINICAL APPLICATIONS

• MODELING, GUIDED MASTERY, AND SELF-EFFICACY
• Researchers measured self-efficacy for performing
  each of the increasingly challenging tasks of
  handling a snake
• Assessments were taken
• Before treatment
• After treatment, but before second administration
  of the Behavioral Avoidance Test
• Following the second administration of the BAT
• One month after treatment

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CLINICAL APPLICATIONS

• MODELING, GUIDED MASTERY, AND SELF-EFFICACY
• Changes in perceived self-efficacy and approach
  behavior were highly correlated
• At the group level, treatment conditions (e.g.,
  PM) that produced increases in perceived
  self-efficacy showed parallel improvements in
  approach behavior
• At the individual level, high perceived
  self-efficacy was tied to greater likelihood of
  approach behavior
• Follow-up data indicated that participants not
  only maintained gains in perceived self-efficacy
  and approach behavior, but also continued to
  improve on both