Cognitive Approach

Cognitive Approach

1. Basic Assumptions

   • The approach focuses upon the cognitive processes of the individual
     • Makes inferences (assumes)
   • Human beings are seen as information processors
     • More complicated =>Emotions
   • Individuals are not automatically responding to stimuli (S-R),but are trying to make sense of the world (S-O-R)

2. Developed in the 1960s as a reaction to the behaviourists ignoring what was happening inside the head

3. Researchers:Mischel,Beck

4. Applications

   • Treatments
     • Forensic
       • Social skills training:lack macro(negotiating) and micro(eyecontact) skills therefore do deviant behaviour
       • Anger management:individual still experiences emotions but it is more controlled
     • Mood disorders
       • CBT: =Elkin=> how CBT has shown that it is affective as medication
       • Interpersonal psychotherapy:depressed due to difficulty with interpersonal relationships

5. Impact

   • Cognitive neuroscience
     • Look at how damage to the brain affects cognitive processes
   • Gave us more of an understanding of memory through studies conducted

6. Debates

   • Free will v Determinism
     • Deterministic but less deterministic than other approaches=> others can respond differently to stimuli,however our behaviour is influenced by other factors
       • Depression=>Information processing is biased.Have negative interpretations of self.Individual is prone to become depressed.Won't get better if negative thinking does not change.=>It assumes that everyone who thinks negatively will become depressed.This is not the case everyone has had an experience with negative thinking but not everyone has become depressed.
   • Holistic v Reductionist
     • Reductionist because it reduces human cognitive processes to those of a computer yet we're more complex due to having emotions(Has models to back up their claims)
       • Makes it easier for us to understand.Also uses case studies
       • More recent computer innovations, such as the Internet and connectionist networks can be described as holist because the network behaves differently from the individual parts that go to make it up. The whole appears to be greater than the sum of its parts.
   • Nature v Nuture
     • As shown by the treatments that it is due to internal factors such as emotion as shown by anger management but it can also be the result of the environment around them (Interpersonal psychotherapy)
   • Idiographic v Nomothetic
     • Applies a nomothetic approach to discover human cognitive processes, but has also adopted idiographic techniques through using case studies (e.g. KF, HM).
       • KF: suffered brain damage from a motorcycle accident that damaged his short-term memory. KF's impairment was mainly for verbal information - his memory for visual information was largely unaffected. This shows that there are separate STM components for visual information (VSS) and verbal information (phonological loop).

7. Methods: Scientific Experimental,Observational

   • Mental processes cannot be observed,but measures can be taken
   • Craik and Tulving (1975) . They presented participants with a series of words on a screen and manipulated the way the words were processed by asking questions about their appearance, sound or meaning. They found that PPs recognized more of the words they had processed the meaning of than those they had processed the appearance of, suggesting that deeper processing of information leads to more durable memory traces than shallow processing does.