Chapter 13 - Personality Processes

Learning and environment

Study how the environment causes a person’s behavior, don’t ask people why they do what they do

Learning

In behaviorism, a change in behavior as a result of experience

Functional analysis

How behavior is a function of/connected to one’s environment

Habituation

A decrease in responsiveness w/ each repeated exposure to something

How can one maintain the intensity of a response to something to combat habituation?

Increasing the stimulus or interrupting habituation

Affective forecasting

The tendency for people to overestimate the emotional impact of something

Classical conditioning - Pavlov

The process whereby a naturally elicited response comes to be elicited by another stimulus - affects involuntary processes, focuses on passive learning

Passive learning

Learning w/o actively engaging or interacting w/ the material

John B. Watson

Radical behaviorist, stimulus-response conception of personality, “little albert” experiment

Tabula rasa - Watson

The idea that we are all born as a “blank slate,” philosophy created by John Locke and adapted by John B. Watson

Operant conditioning - Skinner

Focused on active learning, an organism’s behavior is based on the effect of the behavior on the environment. Inspired by Law of Effect

Who developed operant conditioning?

B.F. Skinner

Law of effect - Thordnike

Actions followed by good outcomes are likely to occur, and actions followed by bad outcomes are less likely to occur

Who developed the Law of Effect?

Edward Thorndike

Wolfgang Köhler

Contributed to social learning theory - Found that chimpanzees
did more than learn from rewards in solving puzzles, they gained
insight

John Dollard and Neal Miller

Tried to integrate psychoanalytic concepts with behaviorist theory

Expectancy value theory - Rotter

What you do depends on what you expect to happen and how reinforcing that is

Who developed the expectancy value theory and the idea of locus of control?

Julian Rotter

Locus of control - Rotter

How much you think your actions will determine the consequences in your life

Self-efficacy - Bandura

The level of confidence in your abilities to achieve a goal, influenced by your self-concept

Observational learning - Bandura

Learning a behavior by watching someone else do it (ex. bobo doll experiment)

Cognitive-Affective Personality System (CAPS)

Developed by Walter Mischel - “a stable system that mediates how the individual selects, construes, and processes social information and generates social behaviors” - dependent on if…then contingencies

Behavioral signature - Mischel

The unique pattern of contingencies that each individual has

Beliefs, emotions, and action tendencies (BEATS)

Developed by Carol Dweck - personality is structured around a person’s perceived beliefs, emotions, and action tendencies that are relevant to their most important goals

Self-coherence - Dweck

Emerges w/ predictability, acceptance, and competence - allows for development of trust, control, and self-esteem

Cybernetic Big Five Theory

A person’s genetics and life experiences result in their individual abilities that sets the premises for how an individual pursues/acts to achieve their goals

Characteristic adaptations

Traits stemming from cybernetics result in specific patterns of behavior

Motivation

Focuses on understanding individual goals and strategies - goals tend to drive what you pay attention to, think about, and do

Shot-term goals

Connected to long-term goals - more specific, smaller goals that add up to achieving a long-term goal

Long-term goals

A goal that is a result of cumulative short-term goals being achieved

Idiographic goals

Goals unique to each person

Current concern

Ongoing motivation that persists until the goal is achieved or abandoned

Personal projects

Something someone does to achieve a goal

Personal strivings

Long-term goals that can be organized into broad areas of life

Nomothetic goals

Goals that are more universal/everyone has

David McClelland

Theorized that three primary motivators drive human behavior - achievement, affiliation/intimacy, and power

Strategies

A sequence of activities that progress toward a goal

Defensive pessimism

Theorized by Julie Norem - people expect the worst and so prepare thoroughly, which reduces anxiety about a situation/outcome, leading to relief when the worst doesn’t happen - can lead to high achievement

Emotion

Procedural knowledge, what a person knows but cannot really talk about - “knowing how”

Basic stages of emotion

Appraisal, physical responses, facial expressions, nonverbal behavior, motives - stages can happen at once or in a different order

What are possible sources for feeling emotion?

Immediate stimuli, classical conditioning, memories, or thoughts

Core emotions

Happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust - may be universal because they were evolutionary advantageous

Anger

• typical stimulus: threat, trespass

• typical responses: threaten, attack

• adaptive function: protect territory, resources, or mates

Guilt

• typical stimulus: harm to others that violates social code

• typical responses: apologize, make amends

• adaptive function: obtain forgiveness from the offended party and reentry into the social group

Anxiety

• typical stimulus: possibility of harm, danger

• typical responses: worry, flee

• adaptive function: anticipate danger, escape harm

Sadness

• typical stimulus: loss

• typical responses: make sad facial expressions, cry

• adaptive function: receive support from others, disengage from loss

Hope

• typical stimulus: possibility of future gain

• typical responses: continue effort, maintain commitment

• adaptive function: persevere in the face of obstacles

Emotional positivity, intensity, change

No two people ever feel things exactly the same way, and these individual differences are core aspects of personality - emotional experience, preference for emotions, affect intensity, rate of change

Emotional intelligence

Ability to accurately understand your own and others’ emotions + regulate your emotions through cognitive control

What is emotional intelligence positively associated with?

Emotional expressiveness, relationship quality, optimism, cognitive control

Cognitive control

Using rational thinking to regulate one’s emotions and control how one reacts to emotional feelings

Alexithymia

An individual’s inability to think or talk about their feelings due to having exremely low levels of emotional awareness

Happiness - Ed Diener

Overall life satisfaction in different life domains w/ high levels of positive emotion and low levels of negative emotion

Self-Determination Theory

Richard Ryan & Edward Deci - The more one seeks hedonically to maximize pleasure and minimize pain to the exclusion of other goals, the more one risks living a life “bereft of depth, meaning and community” based on “selfishness, materialism, objectified sexuality and ecological destructiveness”

Hedonic well-being

Pleasure seeking; maximize pleasure and minimize pain - leads to excluding other goals

Eudaimonic well-being

Seeking a meaningful life, seeking goals for their own right

Ryan & Deci’s key psychological needs

Autonomy, competence, and relatedness

Autonomy - Ryan & Deci

Extend to which you can make decisions for yourself

Competence - Ryan & Deci

Everybody wants to have some measure of success no matter how they define it, and achieve this definition of success

Relatedness - Ryan & Deci

Everybody wants to feel connected to others - innate desire for interpersonal relationships

World Happiness Report

Uses data from the Gallup World Poll data

Individual set point - Source of happiness

Moderately stable, related to extraversion, genetically influenced

Objective life circumstances - Sources of happiness

Smaller influence than set point (age, education, marital status, income, etc.)

Happiness Interventions

Making a list of what you are thankful for, expressing gratitude to someone, do something nice for others, go out for a walk in nature

Problems w/ happiness

Happier people can fail to recognize risky situations, feel happy at the wrong time, can harm others if arrogant, trying to be happy can be counterproductive

Benefits of happiness

Wide ranging - health, occupational success, supportive relationships

Happiness and outcomes

Happiness is both a cause and consequence of good outcomes, self-perpetuating virtuous cycle - promotes behaviors and problem-solving skills that can lead to good outcomes