cognitive topics inn personality, perception, interpretation, conscious goals, pain perception etc

1. cognitive topics in personality
• Cognition is a general term referring to awareness and thinking, as well as to specific
mental acts such as perceiving, attending to, interpreting, remembering, believing,
judging, deciding, and anticipating. Allthese mental behaviours add up to what is called
information processing.
• Three levels of cognition are of interest to personality psychologist
1. Perception, or the process of imposing order on the information our sense organs take
in.
2. Interpretation, or the making sense of, or explaining, various events in the world. It
concerns giving meaning to events.
3. Conscious goals, the standards that people develop for evaluating themselves and
others. These tasks may be age specific and culture specific.

2. personality and perception
• Psychologist Herman Witkin studied differences in perceptual style for almost 30 years.He came to call this topic
field dependence versus field independence.
• Embedded Figures Test (EFT), designed to measure field independence and field dependence.
• field independence and dependence appeared to have consequences on education and interpersonal relations.
• the students tended to favour the whereas the more
field-dependent students tended to favour the social sciences and education.
• Field-dependent people, tend to rely on social information and frequently ask other people for their opinions. They
are attentive to social cues and, in general, are oriented toward other people. They show a strong interest in
others, prefer to be physically close to other people, gravitate to social situations, and get along well with others.
• Field independent people, on the other hand, function with more autonomy and display a more impersonal or
detached orientation toward others. They are not very interested in others’ opinions, keep their distance from
others, and show a preference for nonsocial situations.

3. pain perception
• Petrie studied people in hospitals undergoing painful operations, as
well as normal subjects in whom she induced pain—through applying
heat or by piling weights on the middle joint of her subjects’ fingers.
In these studies, she was able to quantify how well each subject could
tolerate pain. She developed a theory that people with low pain
tolerance had a nervous system that amplified, or augmented, the
subjective impact of sensory cues. In contrast, people who could
tolerate pain well were thought to have a nervous system that
dampened, or reduced, the effects of sensory stimulation. For these
reasons, her theory came to be called the reducer/augmenter theory.

4. • Reducers seek strong stimulation to compensate for their lower sensory
reactivity,
• Supporting this prediction, reducers have been found to drink more coffee,
smoke more, and have a lower threshold for boredom, compared
withaugmenters (Clapper, 1990, 1992; Larsen & Zarate, 1991).
• Reducers also have been found to more frequently consume psychoactive drugs
and listen to music at a louder level compared to augmenters (Schwerdtfeger,
2007).
• Other studies have shown that reducers tend to start smoking at an earlier age
and to engage in more minor delinquencies as adolescents, compared with
augmenters (Herzog, Williams, & Weintraub, 1985). One study found that
smokers were more reducing than augmenting (Patton, Barnes, & Murray, 1993),
and another study found that scores of a group of alcohol-abusing persons on a
measure of reducing/augmenting were more in the reducing direction (Milin,
Loh, & Wilson, 1992).
• Findings such as these are consistent with the notion that reducers may use
substances to artificially obtain a lift in their arousal level to compensate for their
reduced sensory reactivity.