Chapter 15: Social-Cognitive Perspective

External Locus of Cotnrol

The perception that chance or outside forces beyond one's personal control determine one's fate

Internal Locus of Control

The perception that one controls one's own fate

Positive Psychology

-Martin Seligman -The scientific study of optimal human functioning -Aims to discover and promote conditions that enable individuals and communities to thrive -Seligman studied how people felt and how they were fulfilled -3 Components: 1. Positive subjective well being: Past and future (feeling good about the past and the future) -If you had a bad childhood, it's hard to be positive about the future 2. Positive Character: Exploring and enhancing virtues of creativity, courage, compassion, integrity, wisdom, leadership, and spirituality 3. Positive groups, communities, and cultures: Hang out with positive people, groups, cultures, etc (reciprocal determinism)

Endomorph

-Plump -Physical type of body

Learned Helplessness

-The hopelessness and passive resignation an animal or human learns when unable to avoid repeated aversive events -Steps 1. Uncontrollable events 2. Perceived lack of control (feeling like you have no control) 3. Generalized helpless behavior (feeling that because of those uncontrollable events, you have no control over anything else in your life) -Example: After being abused by her husband, she begins to feel helpless and that she has no control over anything

Recipricol Determinism

-The interacting influences between personality and environmental factors (the process of interacting with our environment). Our personalities are shaped by the interaction of personal/cognitive factors (our feelings and thoughts), our environment, and our behavior -Example: Internal personal/cognitive factors (liking high-risk activities) -> Environmental factors (bungee-jumping friends) -> Behavior (Learning to bungee jump): Liking high-risk things, hanging out with people who like the same thing, then doing those things -"Behavior, internal personal factors, and environmental influences all operate as interlocking determinants of each other." -Example: Children's TV-viewing habits (past behavior) influence their viewing preferences (personal factor), which influence how television (environmental factor) affect their current behavior. -3 specific ways in which individuals and their environment interact: 1. Different people choose different environments -The school you attend, the reading you do, the TV programs you watch, the music you listen to, the friends you associate with, etc are all part of an environment you have chosen, based partly on your dispositions 2. Our personalities shape how we interpret and react to events -Anxious people, for example, are attuned to potentially threatening events. Thus, they perceive the world as threatening, and they react accordingly. 3. Our personalities help create situations to which we react -Many experiments reveal that how we view and treat people influences how they in turn treat us. If we expect someone to be angry with us, we may give the person a cold shoulder, touching of the very anger we expect. If we have an easygoing temperament, we will likely enjoy close supportive friendships.

Ectomorph

-Thin -Physical type of body

Social-Cognitive Perspective

-Views behavior as influenced by the interaction between persons and their social context -Emphasizes the interaction of persons and their situations. Social-cognitive theorists believe we learn many of our behaviors either through conditioning or by observing others and modeling our behavior after theirs

Albert Bandura

Came up with the Social-Cognitive Theory

Personal Control

Our sense of controlling our environments rather than feeling helpless