Psychology 3051 Psychology 305A: Theories of Personality Lecture 19 1.

Psychology 305 1

Psychology 305A: Theories of Personality

Lecture 19

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1. How effective is client-centered therapy?

2. What are the goals of the cognitive perspective on personality?

3. What is the schematic view of cognitive processing?

The Organismic and Cognitive Perspectives

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By the end of today’s class, you should be able to:

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2. discuss the effectiveness of client-centered therapy.

3. identify criticisms and limitations of client-centered therapy.

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1. discuss Rogers’ therapeutic conditions and the process of therapeutic change, as illustrated in the film “Three Approaches to Psychotherapy.”

5. describe the schematic view of cognitive processing.

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4. distinguish between a schema, an exemplar, a prototype, and a fuzzy set.

6. discuss the effects of “spreading activation.”

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• Rogers identified 7 stages that characterize the process of therapeutic change:

1. The patient is unwilling to communicate about him- or herself, refuses to own his or her feelings, and is rigid and resistant to change.

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How effective is client-centered therapy?

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2. The patient is able to discuss external events and other people. However, the patient continues to refuse to own his or her feelings.

3. The patient is able to discuss his or her feelings but only in the past or future tense. S/he avoids discussing present feelings.

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5. The patient is able to express feelings in the present, without hesitation. The patient begins to trust his or her own judgments and make new discoveries about him- or herself.

4. The patient begins to express feelings in the present. However, s/he does so with hesitation, distrust, and fear. The patient begins to recognize incongruities between his or her self-concept and experience.

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7. The patient is able to generalize in-therapy experiences to the world beyond the therapeutic setting.

At this stage, the patient becomes fully functioning.

6. The patient is able to allow into awareness those experiences that were previously denied or distorted. The patient begins to develop unconditional positive

self-regard. A “physiological loosening” is observed.

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• Rogers was an empiricist who sought empirical support for his theory and therapeutic approach.

• The “Chicago Study”: The typical patient in client-centered therapy advances to Stage 3 or 4 of the

process of therapeutic change.

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What are the goals of the cognitive perspective on personality?

• The cognitive perspective on personality has two primary goals:

1. to describe how the mind processes information (i.e., cognitive processing).

2. to relate individual differences in cognitive processing to personality.

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• In contrast to some other perspectives, the cognitive perspective highlights people’s capacity to overcome impulses and environmental influences through reason:

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“The image is one of the human being as an active, aware problem-solver, capable of profiting from an enormous range of experiences and cognitive capacities, possessing great potential for good or ill, actively constructing his or her psychological world, and influencing the environment but also being influenced by it in lawful ways …. It is an image that has moved a long way from the instinctual drive-reduction models, the static global traits, and the automatic stimulus-response bonds of traditional personality theories. It is an image that highlights the shortcomings of all simplistic theories that view behavior as the exclusive result of any narrow set of determinants, whether these are habits, traits, drives, reinforcers, instincts, or genes and whether they are exclusively inside or outside the person” (Mischel, 1976).

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What is the schematic view of cognitive processing?

• This view maintains that cognitive processing relies on the use of schemas.

• Schema: An organized knowledge structure about a concept, its attributes, and its relationships to other concepts; a network of associations related to a concept.

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Kind

Warmth

My grandmother

My mom

Mother

Thoughtful

Disciplinarian

Stay-at-home moms

June Cleaver

Love

Working moms

Hillary Clinton

Gloria Delgado-Pritchett

Mother Teresa

Exemplars

Prototype

Fuzzy set

Pregnancy

Mother Schema15

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• Schemas serve many functions:

facilitate recognition.

direct attention.

enhance the encoding of information into memory.

provide “default” information to fill in gaps.

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• Thus, schemas act as “cognitive filters” through which we perceive, process, and recall information.

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A father and his son were involved in a car accident in which the father was killed and the son was seriously injured. The father was pronounced dead at the scene of the accident and his body was taken to a local mortuary. The son was taken by ambulance to a hospital and was immediately wheeled into an operating room. A surgeon was called. Upon seeing the patient, the attending surgeon exclaimed, “Oh my God, it’s my son!”

Can you explain this?

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Medicine

Successful

Surgeon

Caring

Admired

Knowledgeable

Rich

MaleHardworking

Educated

Female

Surgeon Schema

Dedicated

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• We have schemas for:

the sexes (e.g., females, males).

occupations (e.g., lawyer, pharmacist).

social groups (e.g., ethnic groups, political groups).

objects (e.g., boats, houses).

personality types (e.g., introverts vs. extraverts).

relationships.

our own self.

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Self-Schema21

Kind

Adventurous

Honest

Thoughtful

Gives money to charities

Cultured

Likes Shakespeare

Runs 5 km daily

Athletic

Lives in Richmond

Volunteers at Richmond food back

Attends live theatre

Travels

Self

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• Schemas may also take the form of scripts: schematic representations of temporally organized event

sequences.

Like other schemas, scripts act as cognitive filters.

Consider the following:

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The procedure is actually quite simple. First arrange things into different bundles depending on makeup. Don’t do too much at once. In the short run this may not seem important, however, complications easily arise. A mistake can be costly. Next, find facilities. Some people must go elsewhere for them. Manipulation of appropriate mechanisms should be self-explanatory. Remember to include all other necessary supplies. Initially the routine will overwhelm you, but soon it will become just another facet of life. Finally, rearrange everything into their initial groups. Return these to their usual places. Eventually they will be used again. Then the whole cycle will have to be repeated. (Bransford & Johnson, 1972, p. 722)

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• Schemas are stored in memory as “association networks” of nodes (i.e., units of information).

Nodes are connected; activation of one node increases the likelihood that associated nodes will be activated.

The stronger the association between nodes, the greater the likelihood that activating one will activate the other.

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“Spreading Activation” in an Association Network of Nodes25

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• Spreading (i.e., partial) activation is thought to account for priming effects.

Examples:

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Tools

Shelf

Book

Car

Motorcycle

Sports

Truck

Is this individual male or female?

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Bargh, Chen, & Burrows (1996)

Participants completed a scrambled-sentence tasks containing words relevant to the elderly stereotype (e.g., old, careful, alone, retired, wrinkle, Florida).

Timed how long participants took to walk down the corridor after exiting the lab.

Participants in the elderly priming condition walked slower than participants in a neutral priming condition.

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1. How effective is client-centered therapy?

2. What are the goals of the cognitive perspective on personality?

3. What is the schematic view of cognitive processing?

The Organismic and Cognitive Perspectives

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