THEORY AND THERAPY

BEHAVIORISM

PERSONALITY—WHAT IS, AND HOW IS IT MEASURED?

• Personality- an individual’s characteristic style of behaving, thinking, and feeling• How do they understand personality?• 4 main approaches• Trait-biological• Psychodynamic• Humanistic• Social-cognitive

PERSONALITY INVENTORIES

• Self-report(most popular technique)- a series of answers to a questionnaire that asks people to indicate the extent to which sets of statements or adjectives accurately describe their own behavior or mental state (pg.335)

• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory(MMPI)- a well researched clinical questionnaire used to assess personality and psychological (pg. 336)

PROJECTIVE TECHNIQUES

• Projective Techniques- standard series of ambitious stimuli designed to elicit unique responses that reveal inner aspects of an individual’s personality (pg.336)

• Types of Projective Techniques • Rorschach Inkblot Test- a projective personality test in which

individual interpretations of the meaning of a set of unstructured inkblots are analyzed to identify a respondents inner feelings and interpret his or her personality structure (pg.336)

• Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)- a projective personality test in which respondents reveal underlying motives, concerns, and the way they see the social world through the stories they make up about ambiguous pictures of people (pg.336)

TRAIT BIOLOGICAL AND PSYCHODYNAMIC

• The trait approach uses trait terms to characterize differences among individuals • According to a psychodynamic approach,

personality is formed by needs, strivings, and desires largely operating outside of awareness – motives that can produce emotional disorders

HUMANISTIC

• Humanistic- how humans make healthy choices that create their personality• Humanistic psychologists• Existentialist psychologists

SOCIAL COGNITIVE APPROACH

• Social cognitive approach: views personalities in terms of how the person thinks about the situations encountered in daily life and behaves in response to them

PERSON-SITUATION CONTROVERSY

• person-situation controversy: focuses on the question of whether behavior is caused more by personality or by situational factors• Does a person's behavior in one situation allow us

to predict future behaviors? • Answer: both, personality and situation are necessary to predict behavior

example on pg. 350

PERSONAL CONSTRUCTS

• George Kelly suggested the idea of Personal Constructs, which are dimensions people use in making sense of their experiences

Why doesn't everyone love Clowns?

example on pg. 351

OUTCOME EXPECTANCIES

• People translate goals into behavior• outcome expectancies: a person's assumptions about the

likely consequences of a future behavior

• Outcome expectancies combined with a person's goals produce the person's characteristic style of behavior.

• Self concepts: A person’s explicit knowledge of his or her own behaviors, traits, and other personal characteristics

BEHAVIORAL AND COGNITIVE THERAPIES

• Emphasize the current factors that contribute to the problem

BEHAVIOR THERAPY

• Assumes that disordered behavior is learned and that symptom relief is achieved through changing overt maladaptive behaviors into more constructive behaviors. • Eliminating unwanted behaviors: punishment/ reward• Promoting desired behaviors: Token Economy= giving

clients “tokens” for desired behaviors, which they later can trade in for rewards

• Reducing unwanted emotional responses: Exposure therapy= confronting an emotion-arousing stimulus directly and repeatedly, ultimately leading to decrease in the emotional response (example pg. 405)

COGNITIVE THERAPY

• Focuses on helping a client identify and correct any distorted thinking about self, others, or the world.• Uses principle technique called cognitive

restructuring• Teaching clients to question the automatic beliefs,

assumptions , and predictions that often lead to negative emotions and to replace negative thinking with more realistic and positive beliefs.

COGNITVE BEHAVIORAL THERAPY(CBT)

• Blend of cognitive and behavioral therapeutic strategies• “Problem Focused” =undertaken for specific

problems• “Action oriented” =therapist tries to assist the

client in in selecting specific strategies to help address those problems. (example pg.407)

• Transparent in that nothing is withheld from client• Clients have a good understanding of the

treatment and of the specific techniques used to make desired changes

TEST QUESTION

• Does a persons personality or their behavior in one situation allow us to predict their future behavior?

A. PersonalityB. SituationC. BothD. None

Answer: C: Both