Lecture 5

Gestalt psychology:

human seek meaning in the environment, we organize our sensations from environment into meaning perceptions. Complex stimuli are not reducible to the sum of their parts.

Field theory by Kurt Lewin:

life space (internal and external forces that act on an individual), contemporaneous causation (the momentary condition in the individual’s mind).

Field dependent person:

influenced by externalized aspects of problem solving.

Field independent person:

influenced by internalized aspects of problem solving.

Schemas and Scripts by Jean Piaget:

children progress through series of cognitive stages as they mature.

Schemas:

new cognitive structures which build on structures acquired earlier, determinant of person’s expectations, inferences and actions.

Script:

schema for a familiar event, specifies roles, actions, props&setting.

Jean Piaget stages:

sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operations, formal operations. Later theorists added dialectical reasoning.

Categorization:

tendency to organize experience by assigning events, objects & people encountered into categories, automatic. Foundation of negative stereotypes, prejudices.

Personal construct theory by George Kelly:

people construct their own versions of reality, each tries to understand the world in different ways, process are channeled by ways in which the person anticipates events.

Role construct repertory test:

assessment evokes personal construct system, understanding of personality emerges through making comparisons

Social intelligence:

level of mastery of the particular cluster of knowledge and skills relevant to interpersonal situations.

Howard Gardener’s intelligence theory:

8 types

language, logical-mathematical analysis, spatial representations, musical thinking, bodily kinesthetic intelligence, understanding of self, others and naturalistic intelligence.

Julian Rotter:

people attain goals bc of the consequences and thoughts&perceptions about outcomes and it’s likelihood.

Outcome expectancy - positive result, reinforcement value - how much we value the expected reinforcement.

Rotter’s internal locus of control:

generalized expectancy that individual’s actions will lead to desired outcome, achievement oriented.

Rotter’s external locus of control:

belief that things outside of individual determine whether a desired outcome will occur based on, less independent, stressed, hand over control to powerful others or chance.

Learned helplessness by Martin Seligman:

repeated exposure to unavoidable punishment leads organisms to accept later punishment even when it’s avoidable, they learn that they are helpless so they give up trying to escape or avoid it.

Albert Bandura’s self esteem:

cognitive processes by which a person perceives, evaluates, and regulated personal behavior so it’s appropriate to the environment and effective in achieving the individual’s goals.

Observational learning + inner person + demands of situation = combine to determine behaviors.

Albert Bandura’s social learning theory:

allows for cognitive process to mediate between environment and behavior, cognitively represent the behavior of others and then sometimes adopt this behavior.

Observational learning:

how new behaviors are acquired in absence of direct reinforcement, watching the experience of another.

Four components of observational learning:

attention, retention, motor reproduction, motivation.

Modeling:

person forms self in image of another.

Outcome expectancy:

expected consequences of the behavior is the most significant influence on whether an observer will reproduce an observed behavior. Individuals are more likely to imitate behavior that they believe leads to positive outcomes.

Self-regulation:

internal processes of goals, planning & self-reinforcement result in self regulation of behavior. Internal standards used to measure own success or failure.

Self-efficacy:

expectancy or belief about how competently one will be able to enact a behavior in a particular situation.

Self-efficacy results from four types of information:

our experiences, watching others, verbal persuasion, how we feel.