Personality Psychology

1. Personality Psychology Chapter 12 Cognitive Approaches to Personality

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. Cognitive Topics in Personality Cognition Personalizing Objectifying “3 year old Golden Retriever, 60 pounds and rusty-yellow” “Big, friendly, loves to go on walks”

6. Cognitive Topics in Personality Information Processing The transformation of sensory input into mental representations and the manipulation of such representations

7. 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.

8. 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

9. Field Dependence Relying on the visual field to make a judgment Field Independence Relying on your own sensations to make a judgment Personality Revealed Through Perception Measured using the Rod and Frame Test or the Embedded Figures Test.

11. Field Independence Natural sciences Math Engineering Field Dependence Social Sciences Education Field Dependence-Independence and Life Choices Education Witkin et. al. (1954) found that choice of major in college was related to field independence/dependence.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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

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

16. Pain Tolerance and Sensation Reducing-Augmenting The Reducer-Augmenter Theorywas 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

17. 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

18. Personality Revealed Through Interpretation Personality psychologists study two main kinds of interpretation: responsibility and expectations for the future. • Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory • Locus of Control • Learned Helplessness • Explanatory Style

19. Kelly’s 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

20. Kelly’s 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

21. Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory • Fundamental Postulate: “a person’s 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

22. Kelly’s 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

23. Locus of Control • Locus of control research started in the mid-1950’s 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 person’s 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.

24. Locus of Control • Generalized Expectancies • Internal Locus of Control • The expectancy that events are under one’s control and that one is responsible for major life outcomes • External Locus of Control • The expectancy that events are outside of one’s 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)

25. 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.

26. 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.

27. External Explanatory Style Believing that the causes of events are outside of one’s control Internal Explanatory Style Blaming yourself for events Explanatory Style

28. Stable Explanatory Style The cause of a situation is permanent and stable Unstable Explanatory Style Causes of events are temporary and not long lasting Explanatory Style “My paper’s poor grade was due to the fact that I am not a good writer” “My paper’s poor grade was due to the fact that I was tired when I wrote it”

29. Global Explanatory Style Causes affect many situations in all of life Specific Explanatory Style Events happen due to very specific causes Explanatory Style “I was robbed because all people are bad” “That person who robbed me is bad”

30. Pessimistic Explanatory Style Emphasizes internal, stable, and global causes Optimistic Explanatory Style Emphasizes external, temporary, and specific causes Explanatory Style

31. 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.

32. Personality Revealed Through Beliefs and Desires • One important part of a person’s 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.

33. 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.

34. 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.

35. 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 one’s personal projects

36. 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

37. 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.

38. 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

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