Cognitive Approach

Basic Assumptions
1. humans are information processors
2. we respond to stimuli by trying to make sense of the world (S-O-R)
  1. founded bc disagreed w/ behaviourists' simple stimulus-response model
  2. allows individuals to produce different responses to the same stimuli
  3. store and organise info with schemas which get grouped into scripts and episodic memory
  4. competencies, encodings, expectancies, values and plans influence our responses
3. focuses on mediating cognitive processes
Methods
1. rigorous
2. experimental
3. interviews
4. observations
Researchers
1. Mischel
2. Beck
3. Littleton
4. Dodge
Application to topics
1. Competencies
  1. if someone is bad at something it results in social inhibition
    1. evaluation apprehension
2. Encoding
  1. mood disorders - faulty information processing affects how they respond and interpret stimuli
3. Expectancies
  1. mood disorders - triad of impairments - expect the worst from the future and the world
4. Values
  1. forensics - sutherland's differential association theory (atitudes towards crimes)
5. Plans
  1. forensics - FBI approach (organised more likely to plan their attack)
Impact
1. Treatments
  1. CBT for depression
    1. Abnormal Psychology
2. memory
  1. educational psychology
3. learning
Debates
1. Mostly Nomothetic
  1. seek to discover general principles/theories of cognitive processing
    1. has also used idiographic techniques
      1. case studies
2. Nature & Nurture (interactionist)
  1. middle position - looks at how our cognitive info influences our response to the environment
    1. Someone who is depressed and displays negative thinking will respond differently to the environment to other people
    2. Piaget - stages of cognitive development are determined by nature
    3. innate schemas develop and expand through interaction with the external world
3. Reductionism
  1. it reduces human cognitive processes to those of a computer
4. Less deterministic as other's can respond differently to stimuli however, our behaviour is still influenced by factors
  1. still assumes those who have negative thinking will become depressed
  2. Soft determinism: people select what to attend to so choose their thoughts and behaviour, but these choices are determined by innate capabilities and past experience

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Cognitive Approach

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	Created by CarrotSticks almost 12 years ago