Cognitive approaches

n Personality is how we make sense out of our environment

n We each interpret events through our own expectancies, schemas, constructs

n How we interpret events shapes our experience

George Kelly

n Personal constructs

n cognitive structures we use to interpret and predict events

n anticipation

n we are motivated to make predictions

n anxiety

n caused by inability to predict events

Schemas

n Help us perceive, organize, process and use information

n Self-schemas

n Possible selves

n Self-discrepancies

n Actual v. ideal selves

n Actual v. ought selves

Self-construals

n Independent

n Focus on internal attributes

n Internal causes for behavior

n Separate from social context

n Interdependent

n Connected to others

n Social, other causes for behavior

n Contextually determined

Cognitive therapies

n Ellis’s Rational Emotive Therapy

n ABC model of emotional responding

n A activating event

n B irrational belief

n C emotional consequence

n treatment involves altering rational beliefs

n Aaron T. Beck

n cognitive triad of depression

n automatic thoughts

n cognitive distortions

n Overgeneralizing

n Catastrophizing

n Excessive responsibility

n Dichotomous thinking

Schema-based therapies

n Janoff-Bulman’s shattered assumptions

n world is meaningful, safe

n self is good

n McCann’s schema theory of trauma

n challenges schemas of safety, trust, esteem, intimacy, and power

Strengths and Weaknesses

n Strengths

n Empirical basis

n Connection to other areas of psychology

n Weaknesses

n Hard to operationalize concepts

n Parsimony?

n Lack of unifying model