Cognitive Approaches to Personality

Cognitive Approaches to Personality

• This chapter explores how cognitive processes influence personality, focusing on how individuals perceive, interpret, and set goals. It also discusses intelligence, emotional intelligence, locus of control, and learned helplessness.

Key Cognitive Concepts

• Cognition: Refers to awareness, thought processes, and specific mental activities like perceiving, interpreting, remembering, believing, and anticipating. It emphasizes individual differences in cognitive processing.
• Levels of Cognition:
  • Perception: Organizing sensory information.
  • Interpretation: Understanding and explaining events.
  • Conscious Goals: Standards and aspirations guiding behavior.

Perception and Personality

• Field Dependence vs. Field Independence:
  • Field-Independent: Better at focusing on details, avoids distractions, and favors careers in science, technology, and engineering.
  • Field-Dependent: More socially oriented, attentive to social cues, and prefers social sciences and education.
• Pain Tolerance and Sensation Reducing-Augmenting:
  • Reducer-Augmenter Theory:
    • Low pain tolerance: amplified sensory input.
    • High pain tolerance: dampened sensory input. Reducers may seek strong stimulation and use substances like caffeine or alcohol.

Interpretation and Personality

• Kelly's Personal Construct Theory: Individuals develop personal constructs to understand, predict, and control events. Constructs shape perceptions and influence how people interpret experiences.
• Locus of Control:
  • Internal Locus: Individuals believe outcomes are under their personal control, associated with higher achievement and motivation.
  • External Locus: Individuals believe outcomes are due to external factors like luck or fate.
• Learned Helplessness: Passive acceptance of inescapable challenges, stemming from trauma, stress, or repeated failures. Individuals often have an explanatory style, influenced by internal vs external, stable vs unstable, and global vs specific causes in their attributions for events.

Goals and Personality

• Personal Projects Analysis: A method to study personality through examining goal-setting and how people actively structure their lives around chosen goals.
• Cognitive Social Learning Theory (Albert Bandura's Self-Efficacy): Belief in one's ability to execute actions to achieve goals and a reciprocal relationship between self-efficacy and performance.

Intelligence and Personality

• Achievement vs. Aptitude: Achievement refers to performance outcomes, while aptitude relates to learning or developing skills.
• Gardner's Multiple Intelligences: A diverse range of intelligence types including linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic.
• Emotional Intelligence (EQ): Defined by Goleman as a set of emotional and social skills encompassing recognizing one's own emotions, managing them, empathizing with others, and navigating social situations effectively, and demonstrating effectiveness in career success, marital satisfaction, and leadership.

Cultural Context

• Intelligence must be examined within the cultural values and expectations. Traditional intelligence tests sometimes reflect biases.

This quiz covers cognitive approaches to personality, highlighting how cognition shapes individual differences in perception, interpretation, and goal setting. Topics include intelligence, emotional intelligence, and concepts like locus of control and learned helplessness.