Lecture 4: Cognitive & behavioural approaches

Lecture Overview

• The lecture series covers topics such as introduction to personality, psychoanalytic and psychodynamic approaches, humanistic and existential approaches, cognitive and behavioral approaches, psychobiological and lexical approaches, and personality assessment.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the conceptual foundations of behaviorism, cognitive-behaviorism, and cognitive-affective approaches to personality.
• Identify the key differences between each approach.
• Understand the limitations of each approach.
• Understand the contribution of behavioral approaches to the 'great debate' in modern personality research.

Socio-Cognitive and Behavioural Approaches to Personality

• Objections to previous approaches to personality included the lack of standardization or scientific bases, and the difficulty of directly observing and measuring internal mental processes.

Cognitive-Affective Account

• Cognitive-Affective Personality System (CAPS) is a dynamic system comprising Cognitive-Affective Units (CAUs) that interact in complex, probabilistic ways, resulting in unpredictable outcomes.
• CAUs consist of:
• Encodings: Categories for the self, people, events, and situations.
• Expectancies and Beliefs: About the social world, outcomes for behavior in particular situations, and self-efficacy.
• Affects: Feelings, emotions, and affective responses.
• Goals and Values: Desirable outcomes and affective states; aversive outcomes and affective states; goals, values, and life projects.
• Competencies and Self-regulatory Plans: Potential behaviors and scripts that one can do, and plans and strategies for organizing action and affecting outcomes and one's own behavior and internal states.

Behaviourism

• Radical Behaviourism:
• Personality doesn't really exist.
• Environmental contingencies can shape the person into anything and anyone.
• Our final personality makeup is the end-product of our habit systems.
• Systematic differences in behavior and experience are more or less fixed by the age of 30.
• Behaviourism:
• Personality is the sum of behaviors.
• The only valid way to know a person is through directly observing their behavior (B-data).
• The causes of our behaviors, and thus our personality, can be found in the individual's environment and can be directly observed.
• The goal of behaviorist is to perform functional analyses that map out how exactly behavior/personality is a function of one's environmental situation.

Classical Conditioning

• Habit systems form through association.
• 3 main types of learning:
• Habituation (non-associative learning): The process through which the intensity of behavioral responses to repeated stimuli declines or gets extinguished over time.

Functional Analysis

• Functional analysis is used to map out how behavior/personality is a function of one's environmental situation.

Cognitive-Affective Account

• Complexity of interactions between CAUs gives rise to probabilistic situation-specific behaviors.
• Behavioral stability is relative to situations > Personality signatures.

Contributions

• Behaviourism contributed to the development of the first objective personality theories, the first truly scientific theories of personality, and the treatment of various disorders.
• Major contributions include:
• Cognitive-Behavioural therapy (CBT)
• Systematic Desensitization
• Aversion Therapy
• Schema Therapy
• Dialectic Behaviour Therapy
• Rational-Emotive Therapy
• Free association