Term
| Assessment from this viewpoint is the process of determining the person's cognitive tendencies and contents of consciousness. |
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Definition
| 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. |
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Term
| Problems in behaviour can come from information-processing deficits (e.g. difficulty encoding, ineffective allocation of attention). Problems can also arise from development of negative self-schemas. |
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Definition
| In this view, depression results from various kinds of cognitive distortions, all of which cause events to seem more unpleasant or as having more negative implications than is actually true. |
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Term
| The cognitive perspective on personality rests implicitly on two assumptions. |
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Definition
- first is that it’s critical to understand how people deal with the information that surrounds them. Look around the room.You’re surrounded by sights and sounds and maybe by other people doing things. Each of these is a source of information. The information comes to you in tiny bits, but you don’t experience it that way.You see walls, not just patches of color.
- A second assumption is that the flow of life consists of an elaborate web of deci- sions. Some of them are conscious, but far more of them occur outside awareness. Your personality is reflected in the decision making that goes on in your mind. |
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Term
| People impose order from recurrences of similar qualities across repeated events |
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Definition
| They form schemas: mental organizations of information (knowledge structures). Schemas are (roughly) categories. Sometimes, the sense of category is explicit, but sometimes it’s only implicit. |
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Term
| (Personal Constructs) Just as scientists, all of us develop theories of reality. In Kelly’s terms, people generate a set of personal constructs and impose them on reality |
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Definition
| In his view, people don’t experience the world directly but know it through the lens of their constructs. Kelly saw constructs as important, because he believed all events in life are open to multiple interpretations. |
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Term
| (Exemplars) Most views assume that schemas include information about specific cases, called exemplars, and also information about the more general sense of what the category is. |
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Definition
| Thus, for any given category (e.g., football players), you can bring to mind specific examples.You can also bring to mind a sense of the category as a whole (a typical football player).This sense of the category as a whole is captured in an idealized best member of the category, often called its prototype. |
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Term
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Definition
| In some theories, this is the best actual member you’ve experienced so far. In other theories, it’s an idealized member— an average of those you’ve experienced so far. |
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Term
| The term fuzzy set has been used to convey the sense that a schema is defined in a vague way by a set of criteria that are relevant but not neces- sary |
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Definition
e.g. most birds can fly (so it cant be a defined term) but some cant, e.g. penguins, chickens.
The more criteria that are met by an exemplar, the more likely it will be seen as a category member |
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Term
| (DEFAULT) Something you assume is true unless you’re told otherwise is called a default. |
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Definition
A second effect of schemas, then, is to bring default information from memory to fill gaps.
For example, if you hear about Joe doing laundry, you’re likely to assume he put soap in the washer, even if that’s not mentioned. |
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Term
(SEMANTIC MEMORY) Schemas are organizations among memories, but memories are organized in several ways (Tulving, 1972).
Semantic memory is organized by meaning. |
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Definition
| It’s categories of objects and concepts. For example, most people have a schema for boats, with images of what boats look like and words that describe their nature and function.This schema often incorporates feeling qualities as well—for example, if the person thinks of boats as a source of either fun or danger. |
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Term
| A second type of organization, episodic memory, is memory for events or epi- sodes. |
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Definition
| Some are long and elaborate—for example, going to high school. Others are brief— for example, hearing the screech of tires on pavement, followed by crashing metal and tinkling glass |
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Term
| (SCRIPT) If you experience enough episodes of a given type,a schema for that class of episodes starts to form.This kind of schema is called a script ( |
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Definition
| It’s used partly to perceive and interpret a common event, such as going to the hardware store or mowing the lawn.A script provides a per- ception with a sense of duration and a sense of flow and change throughout the event. |
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Term
| Knowledge about doing is called (procedural knowledge) |
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Definition
| Doing some- times means engaging in specific overt behaviors, but it sometimes means engaging in mental manipulations. For example, dividing one number by another, turning a state- ment into a question, and making a decision between two alternatives all require use of procedural knowledge. It’s harder to gain conscious access to much of this knowledge base, but presumably, it forms schematic structures that are used in different contexts. |
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Term
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Definition
| People form categories of all sorts of things—for example, people, gender roles, environments, social situa- tions, types of social relations, emotions, and the structure of music. |
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Term
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Definition
| The self- schema, like any schema, makes it easier to remember things that fit it. It provides you with a lot of default information, and it tells you where to look for new information. Your self-schema can even bias your recall, twisting your recollections so they fit better with how you see yourself now ( |
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Term
| people are high in (self-complexity). Other people’s self-aspects are less distinct, such that everything blends together.These people are lower in self-complexity |
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Definition
| This difference among people has interesting implications. For people low in self-complexity, feelings relating to a bad event in one aspect of life tend to spill over into other aspects of the self (Linville, 1987). Having trouble in a course may make you also feel bad about your social life. This doesn’t happen as much for people higher in self-complexity, apparently because the separations and boundaries between their self-aspects prevents it |
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Term
| Entity versus Incremental Schemas |
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Definition
| To some people, an ability is an entity—something they have more of or less of but that doesn’t change.To other people, ability is something you can increment, increase through experience. Once you establish one or the other of these views, you tend to maintain it as part of your personality |
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Term
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Definition
| An important aspect of experiencing events is judging their causes. Inferring a cause tells you whether the event was intentional or accidental. It also tells you something about how likely the event is to occur again. Inferring the cause of an event is called attribution |
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Term
| Research has focused on four causes of Attribution: |
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Definition
1. ability, (internal)
2. effort, (internal)
3. task difficulty,(external) and
4. luck or chance factors (external) |
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Term
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Definition
Nodes, or areas of storage, are linked if they have a logical connection. Some connections are semantic, linking attributes that contribute to a category (see Figure 1, A). Others are episodic, linking attributes that form an event
(Don’t think about distance between nodes,by the way,only strength of association;distance isn’t part of this picture.) |
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Term
| (Priming) The idea that partial activation causes easier access to memories has led to a technique called priming |
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Definition
Priming is activating a node by a task that precedes the task of inter- est.
For example, had people do a task in which they read words related to hostility. Later, in what was presented as a different study, the people were more likely to see an ambiguously portrayed person as hostile
These effects occur only if the primed information can plausibly be applied to the later event (Higgins & Brendl, 1995). If you prime dishonest, for instance, it won’t influence your judgments of athletic ability.On the other hand, priming seems to activate the full dimen- sion, not just the end that’s primed (Park,Yoon, Kim, & Wyer, 2001). If you prime honest and then present a target that might be dishonest, people are more likely to see dishonesty. |
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Term
| subliminal primes—that is, primes outside their awareness. |
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Definition
| These subliminal primes often have the same effects as overt primes. |
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Term
| Priming and subliminal priming |
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Definition
| When you think carefully about what priming is (whether conscious or not), you realize that it happens constantly in life (Carver & Scheier, 2002).Whenever you hear something, read something, think something, or watch something, it makes the corresponding parts of your memories active. This, in turn, causes partial activation in related areas and will leave residual activation in the areas that are now active.That can have a wide range of subtle effects on behavior |
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Term
| Parallel distributed processing (PDP) |
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Definition
Cognition thus far reflects a view in which cognition concerns symbol processing.is a view that dominated cognitive psy- chology for many years. In the mid-1980s, however, PDP now influences how we think about personality.
This view also holds that representations aren’t centralized in specific nodes. Rather, a representation exists in a pattern of activation of an entire network of neurons. |
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Term
| parallel distributed processing (PDP) 2 |
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Definition
Each activation can be either excitatory or inhibitory. Thus, it either adds to or subtracts from the total activity of the unit for which it serves as input. Each unit sums its inputs (pluses and minuses) and passes the total onward. Energy passes in only one direction for each connection, as in neurons. But links are often assumed in which acti- vation goes from a “later” unit back to an “earlier” one, which is also true of neurons.
.The pattern of constraints can be intricate, and constraints may relate to each other in ways that aren’t obvious.The network doesn’t care about the “big picture.” That’s not how it works. Each unit just keeps sending out activations, as a function of how active it is.
e.g. looking at lots of houses when trying to decide on which one to buy, and then all of a sudden you have a gut feeling to buy the red one! |
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Term
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Definition
a (#1 conscious processor) is used for effortful reasoning and following of programs of instructions and that an (#2
intuitive processor) manages intuitive problem solving, heuristic strategies, and skilled or automatic activities using connectionist processes.
e.g. related to personality ----> Epstein’s cognitive–experiential self-theory assumes that we experi- ence reality through two systems.The rational system operates mostly consciously, uses logical rules, and is fairly slow.This is the symbolic processor that we think of as our rational mind.The experiential system is intuitive. It’s a “quick and dirty” way of assess- ing and responding to reality. It relies on shortcuts and readily available information. It functions automatically and largely outside consciousness. |
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Term
| Explicit (episodic) and Implicit (semantic) Knowledge |
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Definition
| explicit knowledge (which is accessible on demand) and implicit knowledge (which isn’t). To put it differently, implicit knowledge is the existence of automatic mental associa- tions we aren’t really aware of. (e.g. prejudiced against minorities) |
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Term
| Explicit (episodic) and Implicit (semantic) Knowledge (Self-esteem) |
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Definition
Of particular interest is the fact that implicit self-esteem isn’t very highly correlated with explicit self-esteem (the self-esteem that’s reported on self-report scales).The same is often true of attitudes.
Why aren’t these two aspects of knowledge closely related? One possibility fol- lows from the view that much of implicit knowledge comes from simple association learning—classical and instrumental conditioning—whereas explicit knowledge comes from verbal, conceptual learning. Perhaps the experiences that provide asso- ciative versus verbal knowledge are more separate than has often been assumed. For example, parents might treat a child harshly while telling him verbally that he’s a won- derful boy. |
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Term
Pg. 266
Broader Views on Cognition and Personality |
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Definition
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Term
| proposed that an adequate theory of per- sonality must take into account five classes of cognitive variables in the person, all of which are influenced by learning. Given these criteria, Mischel gave them the long name of (cognitive–social learning person variables). He intended them to take the place of traits (Mischel, |
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Definition
1. competencies
2. encoding strategies and personal constructs.
3. expectanies//behavior-outcome expectancy
4. subjective values.
5. self-regulatory systems and plans. |
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Term
| 1. competencies (cognitive–social learning person variables) |
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Definition
| competencies: the skills that one develops over life. Just as people develop skills for manipulating the physical world, they develop social skills and problem-solving strategies, tools for analyzing the social world. |
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Term
| 2. encoding strategies and personal constructs. (cognitive–social learning person variables) |
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Definition
| People construe events and people differently, depending on the schema they’re using. (As noted earlier, a potential buyer looks at a house one way and a potential burglar, another way.) It’s not the objective situation that determines how people react but how they construe it.Two people react to the same situation differently because they literally experience it differently |
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Term
| 3. Expectancies (cognitive–social learning person variables) |
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Definition
One expectancy is an anticipation that one kind of event typically leads to another event. For exam- ple, hearing a siren is often followed by seeing an emergency vehicle. Seeing dark clouds and hearing thunder are often followed by rain. Expectancies about what’s connected to what provide continuity in experience.
A second type of expectancy is behavior-outcome expectancy: the belief that par- ticular acts typically lead to particular outcomes.e.g. Being friendly to others (behavior) is usually followed by friendly responses (outcome).Typing the right code into an ATM (behavior) usually leads to receiving money (outcome). |
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Term
| 4. subjective values. (cognitive–social learning person variables) |
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Definition
| These values are what cause people to use their expectancies in action. If the available outcome isn’t one the person cares about, the expectancies won’t matter. |
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Term
| 5. self-regulatory systems and plans. (cognitive–social learning person variables) |
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Definition
| People set goals, make plans, and do the various things that need to be done to see that the plans are realized in action |
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Term
| cognitive–affective processing system. (improved from the 1st "cognitive–social learning person variables") |
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Definition
this term reflects the recognition that emotion plays a key role in much of cognitive experience.
That is, each person’s behavior also follows an if ... then principle. Schemas to construe situations include information about appropriate actions in those situations. Norms are mentally represented as links between settings and the behaviors that relate to those settings |
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Term
| Behavioral Signature (cognitive–affective processing system) |
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Definition
To predict consistency of action, then, you need to know two things. First, you need to know how the person construes the situation (which depends on the person’s schemas and their accessibility). Second, you need to know the person’s if ... then profile. In this view, the unique profile of if ... then relations is seen as a behavioral signature for a person’s personality
Indeed, these profiles of if ... then relations may, in some sense, define personality (Mischel, Shoda, & Mendoza-Denton, 2002).These profiles are relatively stable over time (Shoda et al., 1994) and thus account for temporal consistency in behavior. Consistency over time, of course, is a key element in conceptions of personality. |
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Term
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Definition
Both of these are tied to schemas for acting. Although you may focus on one schema at a time, the use of one implicitly involves the use of the others as well (Shoda et al., 1989).
Consistent with this line of thought, there’s evidence that some brain structures are involved in both perception–cognition and related actions. For instance, certain neurons that are active when a monkey does an action are also active when the monkey sees the same action
e.g. Related findings indicate that just reading a story activates areas of the brain that are associated with both watching and doing the actions in the story |
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Term
| Assessment (cognitive assessment techniques) |
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Definition
| e.g. These techniques range from interviews and self-reports to think-aloud protocols, Experience Sampling) |
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Term
| Experience Sampling (cognitive assessment techniques) |
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Definition
Experience sampling typically has somewhat different purposes. In this tech- nique, people report at certain times what they’ve been thinking and doing. Sometimes, the reports are made at scheduled times, and sometimes, people are randomly paged and asked to report
In one study, There were several interesting find- ings: Positive feelings related mostly to voluntary actions, not things people had to do. Satisfaction, freedom, alertness, and creativity related to events in which people’s attention was tightly focused on what they were doing. Interestingly, positive feelings of immersion were very likely during work. |
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Term
| Information-Processing Deficits |
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Definition
One implication of the cognitive view is that some problems reflect deficits in basic cognitive or memory functions: attending, extracting and organizing information, and so on. For example, people with schizophrenia need more time than others to recognize stimuli such as letters
Another simple idea is that there’s a limit on attentional capacity. |
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Term
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Definition
Theorists hold that people sometimes develop ideas about the world that are inaccurate or distorted, which lead to adverse effects
In Beck’s view, the inaccurate schemas are used quickly and spontaneously, producing a stream of automatic thoughts. These automatic thoughts (e.g., “I can’t do this,” “What’s the point of trying?” “Everything’s going to turn out wrong”) influence feelings and behaviors
Indeed, just expecting emotional distress makes distress more likely
, 1990).
People who are prone to depression or anxiety seem to over-rely on infor- mation in memory and under-rely on the reality of the situation
Specifically, a person with negative associations in the implicit self is likely to often be subject to negative feelings.This person needs to make an effortful corrective process to counter those negative associations in the implicit self. If that effortful process doesn’t occur, the implicit self maintains control over the person’s experiences and depression is more likely. |
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Term
| Cognitive Therapy (cognitive restructuring or reframing, |
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Definition
| People must learn to recognize automatic self-defeating thoughts and substitute other self-talk .This is termed cognitive restructuring or reframing. i.e. To put it differently, these people should become more controlled in processing what’s going on and less automatic |
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Term
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Definition
There are several different techniques.A surprising one is getting people to go ahead and do things they expect (unre- alistically) to have bad consequences. If the bad outcome doesn’t happen, the people are thereby led to re-examine—and perhaps change—their expectations.
For example, if you’re a person who thinks having a single failure means you can’t do anything right, you might be told to examine your skills in other domains immediately after a failure. |
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Term
| The Cognitive Perspective: Problems and Prospects |
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Definition
| People absorb new experiences in terms of their current understanding of the world. Thus, it’s useful to know what biases are created by their current understanding (i.e., schemas). |
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Term
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Definition
| Schemas are mental organiza- tions 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 that 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. |
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Term
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Definition
| The term social cognition refers to cognitive processes bearing on stimuli rel- evant 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). Some social schemas imply permanence (entity); some imply potential for change (incremental). |
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Term
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Definition
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.
Some theorists believe there are two distinct kinds of thought processes: one quick, intuitive, and connectionist, the other slower, rational, and linear. Research on implicit attitudes suggests that people have knowledge at two levels, which may correspond to the two modes of thought processes.
Another theory; 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, per- sonality is a profile of these contingencies, forming a unique “behavioral signature” for each person. |
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Term
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Definition
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., dif- ficulty 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 cor- recting automatic, intuitive processes through oversight from consciousness, effortful processes. |
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Term
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Definition
- 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 experiences in some specific domain.
- Cognitive assessment Procedures used to assess cog- nitive processes, mental structures, and contents of consciousness.
- Cognitive restructuring or reframing The process of taking a different and more positive view of your experience.
- Cognitive therapies Procedures aimed at reducing cognitive distortions and the distress that results from them.
- 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 you learn otherwise. |
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Term
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Definition
- 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 aren’t 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.
- Personal construct A personal mental representation used to interpret events.
- Possible self An image of yourself 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, about engaging in specific behaviors and mental manipulations. |
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Term
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Definition
- Prototype The representation of a category in terms of the 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 your 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 that focus on socially meaningful stimuli.
- Subliminal Occurring too fast to be consciously recognized. |
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Term
One assumption of the cognitive perspective is that:
Group of answer choices
all decisions are unconscious.
all decisions are conscious.
most decisions are unconscious, but some are conscious.
most decisions are conscious, but some are unconscious |
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Definition
| most decisions are unconscious, but some are conscious. |
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Term
Kelly viewed people as implicit:
Group of answer choices
scientists.
artists.
altruists.
All of these options. |
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Definition
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Term
One consequence of the use of a schema is:
Group of answer choices
easier coding of new material.
improved memory for randomly selected details.
improved reading ability.
greater intelligence. |
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Definition
| easier coding of new material. |
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Term
A self-schema:
Group of answer choices
makes it easier to remember things consistent with it.
is small, simple and efficient.
has fewer emotional elements and more intellectual elements than other schema.
All of these options. |
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Definition
| makes it easier to remember things consistent with it. |
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Term
The process of judging the cause of an event is called:
Group of answer choices
attribution.
construal.
primary appraisal.
secondary appraisal. |
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Definition
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Term
Dual-process researchers talk about people having:
Group of answer choices
automatic and implicit knowledge.
implicit and explicit knowledge.
certain and uncertain knowledge.
All of these options. |
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Definition
| implicit and explicit knowledge. |
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Term
To assess the cognitions and emotions that accompany a wide range of naturally-occurring events, the best cognitive assessment technique would be:
Group of answer choices
think-aloud protocols.
retrospective thought listing.
experience sampling.
reconstructive thought protocols. |
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Definition
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Term
Which of the following criticisms has been leveled at the cognitive approach to personality?
Group of answer choices
It has generated very little empirical research.
It is an attempt to graft an area of psychology where it does not belong.
It is too rooted in Freud's psychoanalytic theory.
All of these options. |
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Definition
| It is an attempt to graft an area of psychology where it does not belong. |
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