Quizlet 4: personality

Illusions

--One way to demonstrate how our minds create reality --Necker cube -> mind tells us it is 3 dimensional but it isn't --Line length --Identical but one looks longer than the other

phenomenology

--Argues that there are things in themselves and then there is our consciousness of that thing --Things as they are known = phenomenon --Study of how the mind creates reality --Lots of categories of experiences that are totally created by mind

cognitive approach

--Cog approaches to personality focus on differences in how people process info --Cognition refers to awareness and thinking as well as to specific mental acts like perceiving, interpreting, remembering, believing, anticipating

Tribe in amazon

--Don't have notion of right and left --East and west --So his east arm is bitten by a bug

Personality revealed through perception`

--Field dependence-independence --Pain tolerance and sensation reducing-augmenting

Study:

--Watching slideshow of images --Now we are going to go back through but now want you to think about how you processed this image --One image = kid with a head wound being held by his mother --One person said: I started thinking about when my brother got a head wound like that and my mother was very distraught --Second person said: i was thinking about the vascular structure of the head and how head wounds bleed a lot --SUPER different answers

The mind creates reality

--What is reality and how do our minds contaminate reality --Different for different people

Cognition

--general term referring to awareness and thinking, as well as to specific mental acts such as perceiving, attending to, interpreting, remembering, believing, judging, deciding, and anticipating --All these mental behaviors add up to what is called information processing, or the transformation of sensory input into mental representations and the manipulation of such representations --A sorority got a dog and two different members described the dog in two different ways / see it very differently --Personalizing Big, friendly, loves to go on walk Interprets her impressions --Objectifying 3 year old golden retriever, 60 pounds and rusty-yellow Goes through lives based on facts

Walter Mischel and the Cognitive-Affective Personality System (CAPS)

--psychologist Walter Mischel had a huge impact on personality psychology when he wrote a book in 1968, titled Personality and Assessment, that was highly critical of the evidence for personality traits. -- he argued that people's behavior was more strongly influenced by the situations they were in than by the personality traits they brought to those situations. --In more recent years, Mischel and his former student—Youchi Shoda—have proposed a theory that personality variables (though not necessarily traits) do have an influence on behavior, mainly by interacting with and modifying the psychological meaning of situations. --reconceptualize personality not as a collection of traits, but as an organization of cognitive and affective activities that influence how people respond to certain kinds of situations --The CAPS theory argues that people differ from each other in the distinct organization of their cognitive and affective processes. --Mischel and Shoda present a contextualized view of personality as expressed in "if . . . then . . ." propositions: If situation A, then the person does X; but if situation B, then the person does Y. Personality leaves its signature, Mischel argues, in terms of the specific situational ingredients that prompt behavior from the person.

If we all go out in the hallway and are asked if time is passing in the room

--this perspective argues that no, time is not passing --Time is a human experience -> desks and chairs don't experience time --Power of our minds to construct the world --Whole branch of philosophy that explores this

Current research

-Field independent people are better able to screen out distracting info and focus on a task, ex: police officers who are more field independent perform better in high-stimulation settings, make fewer perceptual errors -Field independent students learn more effectively than field dependent students in multimedia-based, stimulus rich instructional environments --Also are better at learning a second (or third) language bc they see patterns better -Ex: embedded figures test --If you can find the images quickly, field independent

Interpersonal relations:

-Field independent people are more interpersonally -Field dependent people tend to rely on social info and frequently ask other people for their opinions --Attentive to social cues and are oriented toward other people -Field independent people function with more autonomy and display a more impersonal or detached orientation towards others

Rod and Frame test

-Using apparatus, participant sits in dark room and is instructed to watch a glowing rod surrounded by a square frame which is also glowing -Experimenter can adjust the tilt of the rod, frame, and person's chair -Task of participant = adjust the rod by turning a dial so that the rod is perfectly upright -Are the people more influenced by the frame or are they more influenced in adjusting the rod by their own sensations -People who rely on the frame = field dependent --Rely on the field --person adjusts the rod so that it is leaning in the direction of the tilted frame, then that person is said to be dependent on the visual field -People who rely on their own sensations = field independent --disregard the external cues and instead use info from their bodies in adjusting the rod to upright

5 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, etc

Three levels of cognition of interest to personality psychologists

1 - perception Process of imposing order on info received by our sense organs 2 - interpretation Process of making sense of, or explaining, events in the world: giving meaning to events 3 - beliefs and desires (IN TEXTBOOK THEY SAY JUST CONSCIOUS GOALS (the standards that people develop for evaluating themselves and others. People develop specific beliefs about what is important in life and which tasks are appropriate to pursue.) AS THE THIRD AND LEAVE OUT BELIEFS AND DESIRES AND INTELLIGENCE) Standards and goals people develop for evaluating themselves and other 4 - intelligence

cognitive social learning theory

A number of modern personality theories have expanded on the notion that personality is expressed in goals and in how people think about themselves relative to their goals. Collectively these theories form what has been called the cognitive social learning approach to personality, an approach that emphasizes the cognitive and social processes whereby people learn to value and strive for certain goals over others. ---albert bandura argued that people have intentions and forethought; they are reflective and can anticipate future events; they monitor their behavior and evaluate Page 385their own progress; plus they learn by observing others. Because he expanded on classical learning theory by adding cognitive and social variables, the movement he helped start is called cognitive social learning theory. --In Bandura's theory, one of the most important concepts is that of self-efficacy, which refers to the belief that one can execute a specific course of action to achieve a goal. For example, a child learning to bat a baseball may believe she can hit most balls pitched to her. We would say she has high self-efficacy beliefs for batting. A child who doubts his hitting ability, on the other hand, has low self-efficacy beliefs in this area. --high self-efficacy beliefs often lead to effort and persistence on tasks, and to setting higher goals, compared to people with low self-efficacy beliefs

Intelligence

Achievement vs aptitude views of intelligence Achievement = how much knowledge a person has acquired Aptitude = the ability to become educated or to learn Even though a test might be called an achievement test (ex: ACT), it can be used measure aptitude Widely accepted definition of intelligence (Gardner) Application of cognitive skill and knowledge to solve problems, learn, and achieve goals valued by the individual and the culture

Pain tolerance and sensation reducing-augmenting

Another individual difference in processing sensory info Aneseth Petrie's reducer-augmenter theory of pain tolerance People with low pain tolerance have a nervous system that is amplified or augmented subjective impact of sensory input People with high pain tolerance have a nervous system that is dampened or reduced effects of sensory info Reducers seeks strong stimulation, perhaps in order to compensate for lower sensory reactivity Reducers may use substance (nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, other drugs) to artificially "lift" their arousal level

Other areas of life:

Battered spouse Why doesn't she leave? If you ask them, they don't see a way out They behave like the dog in the helplessness training and they need guidance on how to leave bc they themselves don't see the way out Abusive co-worker / unrealistic boss

external or internal

Believing that the causes of events are outside of one's control vs blaming yourself for bad event I had the accident bc it was raining - external I had the accident bc i am a bad driver - internal More adaptive one here = external

Personal projects analysis (brian little's work)

Emphasizes the "doing" of personality over the trait approach "having" of personality --A personal project is a set of relevant actions intended to achieve a goal that a person has selected. Psychologist Brian Little (e.g., Little, 2007, 2011) believes that personal projects make natural units for understanding the workings of personality because they reflect how Page 384people face up to the serious business of navigating through daily life. Most people, if asked, are able to make a list of the important projects that they work on in their daily lives, such goals as to lose weight, do homework, make new friends, start and maintain an exercise program, send away for graduate school applications, develop a better relationship with God, or find some principles to live by. People typically have many goals that come and go in their day-to-day lives—one project is more important today, and a different one is important tomorrow—as well as other projects that are more ongoing. --Little developed the Personal Projects Analysis method for assessing personal projects. Personal projects: a set of relevant actions intended to achieve a goal Participants first generate a list of their personal projects, as many or as few as they deem relevant. Most participants list an average of 15 personal projects that are currently important in their daily lives. Next, participants rate each project on several scales, such as how important the project is to them, how difficult it is, how much they enjoy working on it, how much progress they have made on it, and the negative and positive impacts it has had in their lives (Little & Gee, 2007). Successful completion = happiness Life tasks: personal versions of culturally mandated problem-solving goals, ex: becoming independent from family, succeeding in school, making friends, etc Strategies: characteristic ways that people respond to the challenges of making progress on a particular life task, ex: defensive pessimism vs outcome focused Defensive pessimism - have a goal they expect to fail on Ex: goal = getting good grades, but think they will not do well Work hard towards goals, but are prepared in advance if things don't work out People anticipate failure, and if it doesn't happen, they are pleasantly surprised

Education:

Field independent people favor natural sciences, math, engineering, whereas field dependent people favor social sciences and education

Global vs specific

Global - causes affect many situations in all of life I was robbed bc im an easy target Specific - events happen due to very specific causes That person who robbed me was a bad person --specific is more adaptive

Carol Dweck and the Theory of Mastery Orientation

Her early research focused on helpless and mastery-oriented behaviors in schoolchildren (Deiner & Dweck, 1978, 1980). She noted that some students persist in the face of failure, whereas others quit as soon as they encounter difficulties or their first failure. She started investigating the cognitive beliefs, particularly beliefs about ability, that lie behind these behavior patterns. For example, she discovered that students' implicit beliefs about the nature of intelligence had a significant impact on the way they approach challenging intellectual tasks: Students who view their intelligence as an unchangeable and fixed internal characteristic (what Dweck calls an "entity theory" of intelligence) tend to shy away from academic challenges, whereas students who believe that their intelligence can be increased through effort and persistence (what Dweck calls an "incremental theory" of intelligence) seek them out --may sound like such a small thing, simply believing that intelligence is a fixed trait that cannot change, yet this belief is associated with putting less effort into school, with giving up earlier on academic challenges, and with lower academic success. --as implications for how the praise of teachers and parents may unwittingly lead children to accept an entity view of intelligence.

Flynn effect - world-wide IQ increased steadily during the 1900s

However, starting around 2000 world-wide IQ has started to decline steadily For the past 20 years, the world's IQ has been losing a point about every 5 or 6 years Reverse Flynn effect

Kelly's personal construct theory

Human nature: Humans-as-scientists; people attempt to understand, predict, and control events --scientists employ constructs to interpret observatoons: constructs are concepts or provable hypotheses that summarize a set of observations and conveys meaning of those observations: A construct does not exist in itself; it is a word that summarizes a set of observations and conveys the meaning of those observations. Gravity, for example, is a scientific construct. The constructs a person routinely uses to interpret and predict events are called, in Kelly's theory, personal constructs --Personal constructs: unique to individual Constructs person uses to interpret and predict events Ways of thinking / preferred way of seeing things Kelly and postmodernism: Postmodernism is an intellectual position grounded in notion that reality is constructed, that every person and every culture has unique version of reality with non having privilege Reality = constructed by each person and no construction is any more privileged than another Kelly was actually a psychoanalyst We offered interpretations to clients to help them better understand Saw psychoanalyst like a construct system but takes this one step further and says you can make up constructs and as long a person finds it useful, then it's beneficial

face validity

Idea that nervous sensation going through one hand If a person has a nervous system that amplifies sensory info, they should be less tolerant of pain Those who underpredict -> reducers Those who over -> augmenters On the normal curve If you have a stimulus intensity from low to high and then have response output from low to high Reducers would show a little big less steep Augmenters would show a little bit more steep

Commonality corollary:

If two people have similar construct systems, they will be psychologically similar

Internal locus of control

In our control Generalized expectancies that reinforcing events are under one's control, and that one is responsible for major life outcomes Associated with a lot of positive things College students Tend to graduate on time more often Tend to finish their degree

If a tree falls down in a forest and no one is around, did it make a sound

In this domain (cognitive), they would answer no Argued that sound is a human experience -> if there is no experience of hearing, then there is no sound

Personality Revealed through interpretation

Kelly's Personal Construct Theory Locus of Control Learned Helplessness

Rotter's expectancy model of learning behavior

Learning depends on the degree to which a person values a reinforces - its reinforcement value Need to like the reward Ex: teach a dog to ring a bell to go outside Each time he got a treat Reason for wanting to learn People differ in their expectations for reinforcement - some believe they are in control of pos outcomes, whereas others do not Some people feel very in charge whereas other people believe in luck

Locus of control

Locus of control describes person's interpretation of responsibility for (mainly positive) events

"g" or general intelligence vs domain specific intelligences

Lots of disagreement among psychologists here Some think that all the different kinds of intelligence are correlated so that means they are all basically the same Others say that the correlations of different intelligences means that they are all different things --And individuals were thought to differ from each other in amount, in how much intelligence they possessed. Moreover, intelligence was thought of as a single broad factor—often called g for general intelligence

reassurance

Lots of good things in life that aren't related to IQ

Learned helplessness

Mostly about bad events - when bad things happen, who is responsible Animals (including humans), when subjected to unpleasant and inescapable circumstances, become passive and accepting of a situation, in effect learning to be helpless Dogs received shocks In textbook The dog first is stuck in a room that can't escape and receive shock Then move the dog to a room with a low fence that they couldn't jump over, but the dog doesn't try to jump over it, just accepts pain Learned helplessness If the dog hadn't been stuck in the room with the shocks before, would immediately jump over the fence Learned helplessness - accepting a painful fate without attempting to remove yourself from the unpleasant situation Human examples: Instead of shocks, use aversive noise (as a pain inducing stimulus) Create learned helplessness in the lab here

Anxiety based on kelly's theory

Not being able to understand and predict life events Basically, it is being surprised When the world doesn't conform to your prediction, that is anxiety provoking

External locus of control

Out of control Generalized expectancies that pos events are outside of one's control

Personality revealed through goals

People differ in their goals, and these differences reveal and are part of personality --focus in this approach is on intention, on what persons want to happen, on what they want to achieve in their lives. People differ in their goals, and these differences are part of and reveal their personalities.

pessimistic vs optimistic explanatory style

Pessimistic explanatory style: Emphasizes internal, stable, and global causes Risk factor for depression Optimistic explanatory style Emphasizes external, temporary, and specific causes Less vulnerable to depression and has a lot of other benefits to it

Racial bias and intelligence

Professor Robert William's work at WashU Published on topic of racial bias in intelligence measures He intentionally made a bias measure - to be bias against white americans -> showed it's not hard to do Now there are nonverbal measures that show no racial bias

A second broad but important category of experience, one that is associated with, but distinct from, cognition, is emotion

Psychology has seen a sharp rise in research on emotion in the past few decades. We can ask a straightforward question about emotional lifestyle: Is a person generally happy or generally sad? --Emotional experiences are often thought of as states that come and go; now you are anxious, now you are not, or now you are angry, now you are not. However, emotions can also be thought of as traits, as the frequent experiences of specific states. For example, a person may become anxious frequently or have a lower threshold for experiencing anxiety. And so we might talk of anxiety proneness as a personality trait—the tendency to easily and frequently become anxious.

Field dependence

Relying on the visual field to make a judgment

Field independence

Relying on your own sensations to make a judgment

Rapist example:

Said there are two types of people in the world -> there are wolves and there are sheep This isn't how Professor Larsen sees the world, but it is how this man sees the world This is an extreme example of how people use their constructs to divide up the social world --Might view people on a scale of being response -> irresponsible Fundamental postulate: A person's processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which s/he anticipates events

Assessing personal constructs

Sometimes constructs go out of date Ex: construct that a president doesn't look like a female Old-fashioned construct that won't work for much longer They can no longer be useful and when a woman is finally elected, a lot of people will be surprised

stable or unstable

Stable - the cause of a situation is permanent and stable My bad grade was due to the fact that i'm a bad writer Unstable - causes of events are temporary and not long lasting E: my bad grade was due to the fact i was tired which will go away Unstable = more adaptive

A third major category of experience is distinct from cognition and emotion yet is very important to the average person. This category of experience refers to experiences of the self.

These experiences are unique in that individuals can focus on themselves as an object, pay attention to themselves, come to know themselves. The experience of self is unlike all of our other experiences, because in the experience of the self the knower and the known are one and the same. Psychologists have paid a great deal of attention to this unique object of our experience, self-knowing, and research and theorizing on the self has a long and rich tradition in personality psychology. --descriptive aspects of the self: who are we, what are the important images we have of our past self, and what are the images of possible future selves --second main component of the experience of self is evaluative: Do we like or dislike who we are? This is called self-esteem, and it is a central organizing force in much of what we do --third component of our self experience concerns the social roles we inhabit, the social selves we show to others, which we call identity

Gardners' theory of multiple intelligences

Thinks there are lots of different kinds of intelligences --which includes seven forms, such as interpersonal intelligence (social skills, ability to communicate, and get along with others) and intrapersonal intelligence (insight into oneself, one's Page 389emotions, and one's motives). Gardner also includes kinesthetic intelligence—describing the abilities of athletes, dancers, and acrobats—and musical intelligence (Gardner, 1999). Other experts are adding to the growing list of forms of intelligence, such as the concept of emotional intelligence, proposed by psychologists Peter Salovey and Jack Mayer (1990) and popularized by journalist Dan Goleman (1995). The concept of emotional intelligence is receiving a great deal of attention from researchers (see Zeidner et al., 2003, for a review).

Important thing to remember!

This is about positive events If you say you are responsible for the good things -> internal locus Newer researcher: Focuses on specific domains: Like health locus of control Academic locus of control Financial locus of control Findings are all similar that internal is better when it comes to good events

Sociality corollary

To understand a person, must understand how she construes the social world What constructs they use / employ

Emotional intelligence (Goleman)

Traditional measures of intelligences predict school performance, but not outcomes later in life, such as occupational attainment, lifetime salary, martial quality, happiness, or mental health Emotion intelligence does predict these important life outcomes EQ = new measure to try and predict other things

Cultural context of intelligence:

We should view intelligences as being those skills valued, and leading one to be successful, in a particular culture at a particular time

cognitive/experiential domain

emphasizes an understanding of people's perceptions, thoughts, feelings, desires, and other conscious experiences --focus on understanding experience, especially from the person's point of view

Kelly continued

his most basic idea was the fundamental postulate, which refers to the statement that "a person's processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which he anticipates events" --To this fundamental postulate, Kelly added a number of corollaries. For example, if two people have similar construct systems, they would be psychologically similar (the commonality corollary). Some couples might be quite different in many ways, but if their personal construct systems are similar, then they are likely to get along quite well because they interpret the world similarly.

E. Tory Higgins and the Theory of Regulatory Focus

lso developed a motivational theory concerning goals, called regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 2012). His theory adds the notion that people regulate their goal-directed behaviors in two distinct ways that serve two different needs. One focus of regulation is called promotion focus, in which the person is concerned with advancement, growth, and accomplishments. Behaviors with a promotion focus are characterized by eagerness, approach, and "going for the gold." The other focus of regulation is called prevention focus, in which the person is concerned with protection, safety, and the prevention of negative outcomes and failures. Behaviors with a prevention focus are characterized by vigilance, caution, and attempts to prevent negative outcomes. --promotion focus correlates with such traits as extraversion and behavioral activation -- Prevention focus correlates with such traits as neuroticism and harm avoidance and (negatively) with impulsivity

Petrie's Research

reducer augmenter theory: dimension along which people differ in their reaction to sensory stimulation; some appear to reduce sensory stimulation, whereas some appear to augment stimulation. --Reducers should be motivated to seek strong stimulation to compensate for their lower sensory reactivity, related to optimal level of arousal

A new variable in intelligence research is called inspection time

refers to the time it takes a person to make a simple discrimination between two displayed objects. For example, two lines appear on a computer screen and the subject's task is to say which one is longer.

This lead psychologists to study what was going on in the minds of people who underwent learned helplessness conditioning Results in a new model:

reformulated learned helplessness: The reformulation of learned helplessness theory focuses on the cognitions, or thoughts, a person has that may lead to feelings of helplessness -psychologists prefer the term causal attribution to refer to a person's explanation of the cause of an event. To what cause would you attribute your paper's low grade? Was it because you happened to be in a rush and submitted a quickly written paper? explanatory style --Explanatory style: tendency that some people have to use certain attributional categories when explaining causes of events --three broad categories of attributions: 1. External or internal 2. stable or unstable 3. global vs. specific people in learned helplessness don't have to "take it." They need an outside perspective, like coaching the learned helpless dogs to jump over the barrier to escape. They need someone who can see the situation objectively and who can recommend strategies for solving the problem. Whenever a problem situation looks as if it has no solution or is inescapable, that is the time to ask others for help, to seek an outside opinion

Information processing

the transformation of sensory input into mental representations and the manipulation of such representations

Psychologists are very interested in understanding how humans process information. Personality psychologists take this interest a step further

they are interested in how people differ from each other in processing information. They are interested in different styles of perceiving and thinking and in different strategies people use to solve problems.

One kind of experience that people have concerns cognitive experiences

what they perceive and pay attention to, how they interpret the events in their lives, and their goals and strategies and plans for getting what they want in the future