Home Diseases and pests What is cognitive psychology: basic ideas, therapy, exercises. Main tasks, methods of cognitive psychology

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What is cognitive psychology: basic ideas, therapy, exercises. Main tasks, methods of cognitive psychology

- science is multifaceted and versatile. It has many directions and branches, each of which is focused on its own understanding of psychic reality and the features of its functioning. Each direction has its own approach to the analysis of aspects of the psyche. Cognitive psychology is one of the relatively young, but quite progressive and very popular areas. This article is about summary this direction, as well as an overview of the therapeutic approach associated with it - cognitive psychotherapy.

Concept and brief history of cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology is a section psychological science engaged in the study of cognitive processes of the human psyche. Research based on the cognitive approach in psychology is focused on the study of feelings, attention, memory, imagination, presentation of information, and the ability to make decisions. In fact, this is a whole concept, focused on the activity of consciousness and the process of cognition.

Cognitive psychology studies the process of obtaining information about the world by a person, how it is presented to them, how it is stored in memory and becomes knowledge, and also how this knowledge affects a person’s behavior and attention. This direction covers the entire range mental processes from sensation to perception, attention, learning, pattern recognition, memory, concept formation. It concerns language, memory, imagination, emotions and developmental processes, as well as all possible behavioral areas.

Appeared this direction in the 1950s in the USA. Although, of course, attempts to study the problems of consciousness have been made before. Even the philosophers of antiquity wondered where thoughts and memory are located. For example, in Ancient Egypt believed that they are located in the heart. This idea was also supported by Aristotle. However, Plato believed that the place of their storage is the brain. Without going into details, we can say that people showed great interest in the problem of consciousness hundreds of years before cognitive psychology developed into a scientific direction.

Considerable merit in the development of cognitive science belongs to such famous philosophers like Immanuel Kant, David Hume and René Descartes. Thus, Descartes' theory of mental structure eventually became a method for studying the psyche. Hume's work contributed to the establishment of the laws of associations of ideas and the classification of mental processes. And Kant pointed out that reason is a structure, and experience is the facts that fill this structure. But, of course, it is wrong to believe that only these people should be thanked for the development of cognitive psychology. The activities of scientists from other fields also played a huge role.

One of the people who influenced the formation of cognitive psychology more seriously is the German psychologist and physiologist Wilhelm Wundt, because he repeatedly said that consciousness has creativity. Subsequently, this topic was partially developed in functionalism and structuralism, and only with the advent of behaviorism, which focused not on consciousness, but on behavior, at the beginning of the 20th century, interest in it faded for almost half a century.

But already in the 1950s, new stage in the development of cognitive science. One of the pioneers of the movement was the American psychologist Edward Tolman. He pointed out the importance of considering cognitive variables and contributed to the abandonment of the stimulus-response approach inherent in behaviorism. However, the most significant contribution to the formation of the approach was made by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, who studied child psychology, focusing on the stages of cognitive development. And even despite the fact that Piaget's work was devoted mostly to child psychology, the range of applicability of the cognitive approach has significantly expanded, and Piaget himself received the award "For outstanding contribution to the development of science."

In the 1970s, cognitive psychology began to stand out more and more as a separate field of research and therapeutic practice. Many of its provisions became the basis of psycholinguistics, and its conclusions began to be used in other sections of psychological science, such as educational psychology, personality psychology, etc.

At present, cognitive psychology is largely based on analogies between the mechanisms of human cognition and the transformation of information in computing devices. (And this despite the fact that its foundations were laid before cybernetics and sophisticated computer and information technology appeared.)

The most common concept is that the psyche is represented as a device that has a fixed ability to transform the received signals. The internal cognitive schemes and activities of the organism involved in the process of cognition are of primary importance in it. The human cognitive system is considered as a system with data input, storage and output devices, taking into account its capacity. And the basic metaphor of cognitive psychology is a computer metaphor, according to which work human brain similar to the work of a computer processor.

For those who are interested in representatives of cognitive psychology, we will name their names. These are Boris Velichkovsky, George Sperling, Robert Solso, Karl Pribram, Jerome Bruner, George Miller, Ulrik Neisser, Allen Newell, Simon Herbert and some others. At the end of the article, we will also give a small list of books by some of these authors. Now, the main ideas of cognitive science are of greatest interest to us.

But given the seriousness of the topic and the physical impossibility to talk about everything in one article, it will not be superfluous if you take the time to watch an hour and a half video. This is a recording of the lecture "What is cognitive psychology, where did it come from and where is it going" by Doctor of Psychology, Senior researcher Center for Cognitive Research of the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University Maria Falikman. However, you can watch it at the end of the article or at any suitable time.

Basic ideas of cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology in its research relies on several fundamental ideas. In the thesis form, we present each of them:

The main objects of study are cognitive processes. These include thinking, speech, perception, imagination,. In addition to them cognitive science is engaged in the study of human and artificial intelligence, the emotional sphere of personality, developmental psychology and the process of pattern recognition.
The most important premise of cognitive psychology is the study and analysis of cognitive processes in the form of computer functions. Representatives of the direction consider the cognitive processes of the human psyche exactly as, for example, an electronics engineer studies a computer. The computer performs many operations related to receiving, processing, storing and issuing data. Human cognitive functions are responsible for similar operations.
The third idea follows from the second. It says that the psyche processes data in stages. Those. any stimulus derived from outside world, goes through a chain of ordinal transformations.
Mental information processing systems have their own limiting capacity. This assumption explains the direction of work and tasks of cognitive psychologists - they seek to find natural and most effective methods work with information entering the psyche from the outside world (cognitive therapists use this knowledge to correct the behavior of patients).
All information that enters the psyche through cognitive processes is encoded and reflected in a special (individual) way.
For any research, it is necessary to use chronometric means to assess the response time to the proposed tasks and / or the speed with which the psyche responds to signals. Cognitive psychology does not use introspective technologies (when a person himself observes the processes taking place in the psyche and does not use tools and standards), and considers them to be insufficiently accurate.

These ideas may seem quite simple at first glance, but in reality they form the basis on which a whole complex of the most complex scientific research. This, in turn, suggests that cognitive psychology, despite its relatively young age, is a very serious scientific branch. By studying the processes of cognition that take place in the psyche, she can draw certain conclusions based on empirical evidence.

The cognitive approach in psychology makes it possible to explain human behavior through a description of the processes of cognition, to study and interpret the processes of perception, pattern recognition, problem solving, memory functioning; to explore the mechanisms of constructing a cognitive picture of the world, unconscious perception and cognition, not only in humans, but also in animals.

All research in the field of cognitive psychology is carried out with the help of special methods. First of all, these are methods of microdynamic and microstructural analysis of perceptual processes. The microstructure and microdynamics of mental activity are the subject of cognitive science, which studies the features of mental life. The structure here is a relatively static representation of the system of organization of the elements of mental processes. And microdynamics is the study of the processes occurring in mental life through the processing of information coming from the outside world. Thanks to both methods, human actions are considered as parts of a single intrapsychic system, and not as separate phenomena.

The next method is a microgenetic method based on one of the types of Gestalt theory (Leipzig school), which focuses on the features of the formation mental phenomena. According to this theory, the images of objects do not appear in the human mind immediately, but after passing through several stages, which can be identified by creating certain conditions. But the main task method - to study not the final result of the thought process or its relationship with the conditions, but the process itself, leading to this result.

These three methods are designed to analyze thinking and cognitive processes. But there is another one that attracts most attention. This is a personality construct replacement method developed by the American psychologist George Kelly in 1955. Despite the fact that the cognitive approach in psychology was still being formed, Kelly's works became decisive for him, and today such an important field of practical cognitive psychology as cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy is built around them. When considering it, we will touch a little deeper on the above method.

Cognitive Behavioral Psychotherapy

cognitive approach in psychology

Today, with the help of cognitive-behavioral therapy, therapists work with people's mental disorders: eliminate them, smooth out or reduce the likelihood of future relapses. It helps to eliminate psychosocial consequences, correct behavior, increase the effectiveness of medical treatment. The basis of this trend was the ideas of George Kelly.

Kelly's theory of personality constructs states that each mental process proceeds through different ways of predicting events in the surrounding reality. Neither instincts, nor incentives, nor even the need for self-actualization own the consciousness and behavior of a person. He acts as a scientist who studies and cognizes the world around him and himself.

According to Kelly, a person, examining the behavior of others, trying to understand its essence and give him forecasts, builds own system personal constructs. The concept of "construct" is the main one in the theory of the scientist. The construct consists of features of perception, memory, thinking and speech and is a classifier of how a person perceives himself and the world around.

This is the main means for classifying the phenomena of reality, which is a bipolar scale, for example, “stupid-smart”, “beautiful-ugly”, “brave-cowardly”, etc. The process of a person's choice of constructs characterizes him as an object of knowledge, which is the subject of interest of all therapy. The constructs add up to a system, and if it turns out to be ineffective, a healthy person either changes it or replaces it with a new one. In the case of mental disorders resort to the help of therapy.

In general terms, therapy can be described as comparative analysis features of perception and interpretation of external information by people. This analysis consists of three steps:

In the first stage, the patient works with various tools to help identify erroneous judgments and then find their causes.
At the second stage, the patient, with the help of a therapist, masters the techniques of correct correlations of the phenomena of the surrounding world. The task of a specialist is to show a person the benefits and harms, advantages and disadvantages of an existing construct.
At the third stage, the patient must become aware of the new construct and begin to build his behavior on its basis.

It is important to note that the specialist only starts the treatment process, and then simply corrects it. And a lot here (which is also typical of other areas of psychiatry and psychology) depends on the person being treated.

Kelly's theory describes a conceptual schema that allows a person to comprehend reality and create specific behavioral patterns. By the way, it was supported by the famous Canadian and American psychologist Albert Bandura. He developed a "learning by observation" system used to change behavior.

The personal construct itself is used by world experts who study fears and phobias, depressive states. Psychotherapists-cognitivists believe that the cause of any mental disorder lies in dysfunctional (incorrect) constructs. This is why Kelly's theory is so important to therapy.

Instead of a conclusion

If we talk about the relevance of cognitive science in general, then it is in demand by specialists who study the features and mechanisms of not only perception, memory, attention and speech, but also the formation of judgments, decision making, problem solving, the work of the intellect and many other issues.

Given that cognitive psychology is related to some other sciences, its study is required by people working in completely different fields. It is of interest to neurologists, linguists, teachers, teachers, engineers, artists, scientists, designers, architects, developers educational programs, specialists in the field, etc.

Cognitive psychology and its representatives have played huge role in understanding the patterns of the entire process of cognition and its individual mechanisms. The activities of cognitivists contributed to the development of personality psychology, psychology of emotions and developmental psychology, has made a significant contribution to research on the ecology of perception and the study of social cognition.

These are, in general terms, the foundations of cognitive psychotherapy and cognitive psychology. Let us remind you once again that this article is purely for informational purposes, and we by no means claim to fully cover the topic of cognitive science, which is devoted to great amount books and scientific papers. And therefore we recommend that you (if there is a corresponding interest) read the works written by representatives of the cognitivist direction. Here are some of these books:

"Cognitive psychology: history and modernity", reader;
"Cognitive Psychology", R. Solso;
"Cognitive psychology", D. Ushakov;
"Cognitive Psychology", A. D. Robert;
"Cognitive evolution and creativity", I. Merkulov;
“A little book about great memory”, A. Luria;
"Mimetics of stupidity", Krupenin A.L., Krokhina I.M.;
"Your memory", A. Baddeley;
"Invisible Gorilla", D. Simons, K. Sharby;
"Knowledge and Reality", W. Neisser.

And finally, watch a short video about cognitive therapy and how it works. Develop, train your perception and explore the world. We wish you good luck!

cognitive psychology

cognitive psychology is the scientific study of the thinking mind; it deals with the following issues:

How do we pay attention to information about the world and collect it?

How does the brain store and process this information?

How do we solve problems, think and formulate our thoughts with the help of language?

Cognitive psychology covers the entire range of mental processes from sensation to perception, neuroscience, pattern recognition, attention, consciousness, learning, memory, concept formation, thinking, imagination, memory, language, intelligence, emotions, and developmental processes; it concerns all kinds of spheres of behavior.

Rice. one . Main areas of research in cognitive psychology

Story

Cognitive psychology emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s. On September 11, 1956, a special group of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, dealing with information theory, met at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is believed that this meeting marked the beginning of the cognitive revolution in psychology. The cognitive direction in psychology does not have a “founding father”, like, for example, psychoanalysis. However, we can name the names of scientists who laid the foundation of cognitive psychology with their work. George Miller, Jerome Bruner, Ulrik Neisser, George Kelly, Herbert Simon, Allen Newell, Noam Chomsky, David Green, John Sweets. George Miller and Jerome Bruner founded the Center for Cognitive Research in 1960, where they developed a wide range of problems: language, memory, perceptual and concept formation processes, thinking and cognition. On August 22, 1966, Jerome Bruner's book "Studies in Cognitive Growth" was published. In 1967, Ulrik Neisser published the book "Cognitive Psychology", in which he tried to constitute a new direction in psychology. 1976 W. Neisser "Knowledge and Reality".

The main prerequisites for its emergence: - the inability of behaviorism and psychoanalysis to explain human behavior without referring to the elements of consciousness; - development of communications and cybernetics; - development of modern linguistics.

In the late 70s - early 80s, within the framework of cognitive psychology, a movement appeared for a "new look" in psychology, that is, the adoption of a computer metaphor (or the consideration of the human psyche by analogy with the functioning of a computer), the absolutization of the role of knowledge in human behavior.

Cognitive psychology owes its awareness of its subject and method to Neisser and his book Cognitive Psychology (1967). Like Piaget, he proved the decisive role of the cognitive component in the structure of the psyche, in the activities of people. Neisser defined cognition as the process by which incoming sensory data undergoes various types of transformation for the convenience of their accumulation, reproduction and further use. He suggested that cognitive processes are best studied by modeling the flow of information through various stages of transformation. To explain the essence of the ongoing processes, he proposed the terms: "iconic memory", "echoic memory", "pre-tuning processes", "figurative synthesis", and developed methods for studying them - visual search and selective observation. Initially, he was also engaged in the study of "artificial intelligence", but later criticized (for narrowness) - the abundance of informational stimuli that a person receives is underestimated.

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) is a prominent representative of the cognitive direction and child psychology in general, who combined biology with the science of the origin of knowledge (epistemology). J. Piaget, a student of P. Janet, at the beginning of the 20th century worked with A. Binet and T. Simon in their Paris laboratory to develop tests. Then he headed the Institute Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Geneva and International Center genetic epistemology. He was attracted not by norms, but by the patterns of erroneous answers, and he applied the method of clinical conversation or probing interview to reveal what is hidden behind the wrong answer, and used logical models in the analysis.

J. Piaget considers the development of intellect as a form of adaptation to the environment by balancing assimilation and accommodation, assimilation of information and improvement of schemes, methods of its processing. This allows a person to survive as a biological species. At the same time, while emphasizing the role of the child's own efforts, J. Piaget clearly underestimated the influence of adults and the social environment.

The development of intelligence, according to J. Piaget, goes through four stages.

I. Sensorimotor intelligence (from 0 to 2 years) is manifested in actions: patterns of looking, grasping, circular reactions are learned when the baby repeats the action, expecting that its effect will be repeated (throws the toy and waits for the sound).

P. Preoperative stage (2-7 years). Children learn speech, but in a word they combine both essential and external features of objects. Therefore, their analogies and judgments seem unexpected and illogical: the wind blows because the trees sway; the boat floats because it is small and light, but the ship floats because it is big and strong.

III. Stage of concrete operations (7-11 years). Children begin to reason logically, they can classify concepts and give definitions, but all this is based on specific concepts and illustrative examples.

IV. Stage of formal operations (from 12 years old). Children operate with abstract concepts, categories of "what will happen if ...", understand metaphors, can take into account the thoughts of other people, their roles and ideals. This is the intelligence of an adult.

To illustrate the cognitive theory of development, J. Piaget proposed a famous experiment to understand the phenomenon of conservation. Understanding the conservation of matter (volume, quantity) when changing shape, location, appearance is the separation of the essential properties of the object from the non-essential. The children were shown two glasses of colored water and asked if the amount of water in the two glasses was the same. After the child agreed, the water from one glass was poured into a taller and narrower one. The same question was asked again. Children up to 6-7 years old said that there is more water in a tall glass. Even if the transfusion was repeated several times, they still said that there was more in a narrow glass. Only 7-8 year olds noticed the same volume. And this has been repeated in different countries and cultures.

Fritz Heider's theory of structural balance. The main tenet of this theory is that people tend to develop an orderly and coherent view of the world; in this process, they build a kind of "naive psychology", seeking to understand the motives and attitudes of another person. Naive psychology strives for an internal balance of objects perceived by a person, internal consistency. Imbalance causes tension and forces that lead to restoration of balance. Balance, according to Haider, is not a state that characterizes the real relationships between objects, but only the person's perception of these relationships. The main scheme of Heider's theory: P - O - X, where P is the perceiving subject, O is the other (perceiving subject), X is the object perceived by both P and O. The interaction of these three elements constitutes a certain cognitive field, and the task of the psychologist is to to identify what type of relationship between these three elements is stable, balanced, and what type of relationship makes the subject (P) feel uncomfortable and his desire to change the situation.

The Theodore Newcomb Theory of Communicative Acts extends Haider's theoretical propositions to the area interpersonal relationships. Newcomb believed that the tendency towards balance characterizes not only intrapersonal, but also interpersonal systems of relations. The main position of this theory is as follows: if two people perceive each other positively, and build any relationship to a third person (person or object), they tend to develop similar orientations regarding this third person. The development of these similar orientations can be enhanced by the development of interpersonal relationships. The consonant (balanced, non-contradictory) state of the system arises, as in the previous case, when all three relations are positive, or one relation is positive and two are negative; dissonance occurs where two relationships are positive and one is negative.

Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance is perhaps the most well-known cognitive theory to a wide range of people. In it, the author develops Haider's ideas regarding the relationship of balance and imbalance between the elements of the subject's cognitive map of the world. The main position of this theory is the following: people strive for some internal consistency as a desired internal state. In the event of a contradiction between what a person knows, or between what he knows and what he does, a person experiences a state of cognitive dissonance, subjectively experienced as discomfort. This state of discomfort causes behavior aimed at changing it - a person seeks to achieve internal non-contradiction again.

Dissonance can occur:

from logical inconsistency (All people are mortal, but A will live forever.);

from the inconsistency of cognitive elements with cultural patterns (The parent yells at the child, knowing that this is not good.);

from the inconsistency of this cognitive element with some broader system of ideas (a Communist votes for Putin (or Zhirinovsky) in presidential elections);

from the inconsistency of this cognitive element with past experience (always violated the rules traffic- and nothing; And now they've been fined!

The way out of the state of cognitive dissonance is possible as follows:

through a change in the behavioral elements of the cognitive structure (A person stops buying a product that, in his opinion, is too expensive (poor quality, unfashionable, etc.);

through a change in cognitive elements related to the environment (A person continues to buy a certain product, convincing others that this is what you need.);

through the expansion of the cognitive structure in such a way that it includes previously excluded elements (Gets out facts indicating that B, S and D buy the same product - and everything is fine!).

The theory of congruence by Ch. Osgood and P. Tannenbaum describes additional ways out of the situation of cognitive dissonance. According to this theory, other options for getting out of the state of dissonance are possible, for example, through a simultaneous change in the attitude of the subject to both another subject and the perceived object. An attempt is made to predict changes in attitudes (attitudes) that will occur in the subject under the influence of the desire to restore consonance within the cognitive structure.

The main provisions of the theory: a) the imbalance in the cognitive structure of the subject depends not only on common sign relationships, but also on their intensity; b) the restoration of consonance can be achieved not only by changing the sign of the subject’s relationship to one of the elements of the triad “P, O, X”, but also by simultaneously changing both the intensity and sign of these relationships, moreover, simultaneously to both members of the triad.

Basic provisions of cognitive psychology.

Modern cognitivism is difficult to define as a single school. A wide range of concepts related to this orientation combines a certain commonality of theoretical sources and the unity of the conceptual apparatus, through which a fairly well-defined range of phenomena is described.

The main purpose of these concepts- explain behavior by describing predominantly cognitive processes that are characteristic of a person. The main emphasis in research is on the processes of cognition (cognition - knowledge), "internal" characteristics human behavior. Main areas of research:

a) the study of the processes of perception, including social;

b) the study of attributive processes;

c) study of memory processes;

d) studying the construction of a cognitive picture of the world;

e) the study of unconscious cognition and perception;

f) the study of cognition in animals, etc.

main method for this scientific direction is a laboratory experiment. The main methodological guidelines of the researchers are as follows:

1. source of data - mental formations;

2. knowledge determines behavior;

3. behavior as a molar (holistic) phenomenon;

Main package: an individual's impressions of the world are organized into some coherent interpretations, as a result of which certain coherent ideas, beliefs, expectations, and hypotheses are formed that regulate behavior, including social behavior. Thus, this behavior is completely in the context of mental formations.

Basic concepts of direction: cognitive organization - the process of organizing a cognitive structure, carried out under the influence of an external stimulus (or a perceived external stimulus); frame of reference - “conceptual frame”, the scale of comparison (consideration) of perceived objects; the concept of an image (whole), the concept of isomorphism (structural similarity between material and mental processes), the idea of the dominance of “good” figures (simple, balanced, symmetrical, etc.), the idea of a field - the interaction of an organism and the environment.

The main idea of the direction: the cognitive structure of a person cannot be in an unbalanced, disharmonious state, and if this still takes place, a person immediately has a desire to change this state. A person behaves in such a way as to maximize the internal fit of his cognitive structure. This idea is related to the concepts of "logical man", "rational man" or "economic man".

Today, the concept of "cognitive science" is by no means limited to the study of cognition in the classical sense. New directions appear, for example, among the psychological sciences these are: cognitive psychology of emotions, which studies the relationship between cognition and emotions; a social cognitive science that considers all aspects of the knowledge of an individual who is part of a community. There are cognitive psychophysiology and cognitive neuroscience. At the intersection of science and practice, the direction of neuroeconomics and neuromarketing has appeared - the study of consumer reactions to certain product features, which is carried out using methods for recording brain activity, eye movements and behavior. It can be argued that today cognitivism has become not just one of the new fashion trends, but an independent area of theoretical knowledge and practice, which gave rise to new original ideas and approaches.

Cognitive community

The community of cognitive scientists is expanding every day. The largest association is the Cognitive Science Society, which publishes the journals Cognitive Science and TopiCS in Cognitive Science. It hosts an annual international conference (in 2012 in Japan) and also oversees the biennial European Conference on Cognitive Sciences (in 2011 in Bulgaria).

In Russia, cognitive science is represented by the Interregional Cognitive Research Association (MAKI), which also holds an International Conference on Cognitive Science every two years (the next one will be held in June 2012 in Kaliningrad), as well as by a number of research centers and laboratories. The Moscow seminar on cognitive science regularly operates in Moscow, organized by the Virtual Cognitive Science Laboratory VirtualCogLab (regular meeting - October 27), the NUG seminar on cognitive NRU research HSE, seminar "Neurobiology, Neuroinformatics and Cognitive Research" at National Research Nuclear University MEPhI. In St. Petersburg, one of the largest centers of cognitive research is the scientific group of V.M. Allahverdov.

Application of cognitive theory in practice

How, then, can a cognitive, intelligence-oriented theory of personality be applied to what directly affects a person's life? Kelly believed that his theory could be useful for understanding emotional states, mental health, and mental disorders as well as in therapeutic practice.

emotional states

Kelly retained some of the traditional psychological concepts of emotion, but presented them in a new way, consistent with his theory of personality constructs.

Anxiety. Kelly defined anxiety as "the realization that the events one is facing lie outside the range of applicability of one's construct system." Hence, the vague sense of uncertainty and helplessness, commonly referred to as "anxiety", according to Kelly, is the result of the realization that the constructs we possess are not applicable for anticipating the events we face. Kelly emphasized that it is not the fact that our structural system does not function perfectly that provokes anxiety; we don't worry simply because our expectations are not accurate. Anxiety is formed only when we realize that we do not have adequate constructs with which to interpret the events of our lives. Under such circumstances, a person cannot predict, therefore, cannot fully perceive what is happening, or cannot solve the problem. Consider, for example, two people in the midst of a divorce. Suddenly, an event occurs before them, completely unlike anything they have ever experienced before. Part of the difficulty of going through a divorce process (or something else experienced for the first time) is due to the lack of constructs that would help to understand and predict its consequences and their meaning.

This understanding of anxiety is by no means a threat of a breakthrough of sexual and aggressive impulses into consciousness, but that he experiences events that he can neither understand nor predict. From this point of view, the task of psychotherapy is to help the client either acquire new constructs that will enable him to better predict disturbing events, or make existing constructs more permeable to bring new experiences into their range of applicability.

Guilt. Kelly's fellowship conclusion suggests that we all have a core system of constructs. Certain aspects of this core structure, which he called core roles, are important determinants of our perception of personality. Examples of such core roles are our professional roles, the roles of parent and child, close friend, student, and so on. Since core roles are very important in our lives, their inadequate performance can backfire. According to Kelly, if another person interprets our performance of the core role as unsuccessful, guilt arises: "Guilt arises when an individual realizes that he is retreating from the roles through which he maintains the most important relationships with other people." The guilty person is aware that he did not act in accordance with his own image. For example, a college student who considers himself a scientist will feel guilty if he spends too much time at the local university bar with his buddies, thus neglecting the most important aspect of his core role as a scientist, namely study. Probably a student who considers himself a rake would not feel such guilt. From Kelly's point of view, we feel guilty whenever our behavior contradicts our perception of ourselves.

The threat. Another familiar emotional state - threat - is seen by Kelly as the realization that our construct system can be significantly changed due to some events. The sense of threat comes when a big shake-up of our personality constructs is imminent. For example, we may feel threatened if our belief in the integrity of political and business leaders turns out to be high rank no longer validated. Kelly believed that the threat to a person is psychological abuse. Thinking about our own death is perhaps the most terrible kind of threat, unless we interpret it as a necessary condition that gives meaning to our lives.

Hostility. Kelly defines hostility as "constant attempts to obtain facts that speak in favor of a type of social forecast that has already proven itself to be untenable." Traditionally viewed as a tendency to act vindictively towards others or to cause harm to them, hostility in Kelly's theory is simply an attempt to adhere to an unsuitable construct when confronted with an inconsistent (inferior) fact. The hostile person, instead of recognizing that his expectations of other people are not realistic and therefore need to be revised, tries to get others to behave in a way that satisfies his preconceived opinion. For example, what might be the reaction of a father who discovers that his student daughter is living the life of a "sexually free" woman? Ignoring the hard facts, the hostile father insists on his belief that she is "his little girl". Changing our constructs is difficult, scary, and sometimes even impossible. How much better it would be if we could change the world to fit our preconceptions rather than our own views of it! Hostility is just such an attempt.

Mental health and disorder

Every day clinical psychologists deal with a problem mental health and disorders. How should these concepts be understood in the context of personality construct theory?

Health, from the point of view of Kelly's theory, is four characteristics that determine the normal functioning of a person:

healthy people want to evaluate their constructs and test the correctness of their feelings in relation to other people. In other words, such people evaluate the predictive effectiveness of their personality constructs on the basis of social experience;

healthy people can discard their constructs and reorient core role systems as soon as they are found not to work. In Kelly's terminology, the constructs of a healthy person are permeable. By this is meant not only that he is able to admit that he is wrong, but also that he can revise them when life experience so requires;

a characteristic of mental health is the desire to expand the range, scope, and scope of the construct system. For Kelly, healthy people remain open to new opportunities for personal growth and development;

a characteristic of mental health is a well-developed repertoire of roles. Kelly suggests that a person is healthy if he can effectively perform a variety of social roles and understand other people involved in the process of social interactions.

Kelly treated mental disorders in a special way, interpreting them in terms of personality construct orientation. For him, a mental disorder is "any personality construct that tends to recur despite consistent inferiority." Mental disorders represent the apparent unsuitability of the system of personality constructs for achieving the goal. Or, more precisely, mental disorders involve anxiety and a person's persistent attempts to feel again that he has the ability to predict events. Unable to predict, a person with a mental disorder frantically searches for new ways to interpret events in his world. Or vice versa, he may stick strictly to old predictions, thereby maintaining his imperfect system of personality constructs with the possibility of repeated failure. In any case, an ill-adapted person cannot predict events with great accuracy and therefore fails to understand or cope with the world. The dissatisfaction that accompanies such an ineffective prediction of events is precisely what makes a person seek therapeutic help.

Kelly interpreted psychological problems according to his own unique set of diagnostic constructs. The extension serves good example one such construct for considering psychological disorders. In Kelly's theory of psychopathology, expansion occurs when a person does not possess subordinating constructs that allow structuring the area of awareness of life experience. With outdated or out of control constructs, a person tries to expand and reorganize personality constructs at the most unusual and comprehensive level. What happens? Kelly suggested that the result was the disorders traditionally called "mania" and "depression."

Historically, manias have been viewed as states where a person's thinking is over-involved (a person cannot maintain conceptual boundaries and therefore thinking becomes less precise, less defined, and over-generalized). The affect is often quite euphoric. Maniacal people begin to frantically develop many projects that they will most likely never finish, feverishly discussing their plans in a pompous manner. They jump from topic to topic and make broad generalizations with few real ideas. Kelly suggested that the research of manic people simply exceeded the ability of the construct system to function effectively. As a result, a person loses touch with reality and finds himself in the space of "free constructions". The expressed excitement is a frantic attempt to cope with a rapidly expanding field of perception.

Another pathological reaction to an imperfect structural system is depression. Kelly believed that depression tends to appear in people who have reduced their perceptual field to a minimum (because they have narrowed their interests). A person with depression has significant difficulty making even the smallest daily decisions. A person with severe depression often thinks about suicide - the last act of narrowing the field of perception. In short, depression is a mental disorder in which people try to interpret their experience from the opposite pole of the expansional construct, contraction.

Thus, when people try to interpret important events that lie outside the range of applicability of their personality constructs, become confused, disoriented and anxious, we treat them as sick people, i.e. people suffer from psychological problems due to flaws in their constructive systems.

Fixed Role Therapy

Many of the therapeutic methods described by Kelly are similar to those used by other psychotherapists, but his approach has two features: the first is his concept of what should be the goal of psychotherapy, and the second is the development of fixed role therapy.

Cognitive psychology (CP) is a branch of psychological science that studies the cognitive processes of the human psyche. Its purpose is to study the role of knowledge in the behavior of the individual.

The objects of cognitive psychology are:

memory;
imagination;
Attention;
perception;
recognition of images, sounds, smells, taste;
thinking;
speech;
development;
intelligence.

"Cognitive" in translation means "cognitive". In simple words, according to the ideas of the CP, a person receives signals from the outside (light, image, sound, taste, smell, temperature sensation, tactile sensations), analyzes the action of these stimuli, remembers them, creates certain patterns of his response to external influence. Creating templates allows you to speed up the response to a subsequent similar impact. However, if the initial creation of the template is incorrect, failures in the adequacy of the perception of an external stimulus occur. Finding the wrong template and replacing it with the right one is the KP method. Cognitive psychology studies both conscious and unconscious psychological processes, but the unconscious is treated here as automatic thoughts.

History of cognitive psychology

Start modern psychology was established in the middle of the 19th century, by the end of the 19th century there was a clear preponderance of the physiological approach in describing the human psyche. Pavlov's research prompted J. Watson to the idea of behaviorism with the "stimulus-response" scheme. The subconscious, soul, consciousness, as quantities that cannot be measured, were simply written off. In contrast to this concept, there was Freudianism, aimed at studying inner peace human, but completely subjective.

Cognitive psychology arose as a result of the crisis of the ideas of behaviorism and the development of artificial intelligence, when in the 60s scientists came up with the idea of a person as a biocomputer. Thinking processes are described similarly to the processes produced by computers. The most significant theory of behaviorism in the 50s had as its object the externally observable behavior of a person, in contrast to them, cognitive psychology was engaged in internal processes in the psyche of the individual.

The most active cognitive psychology was developed by the efforts of American researchers. The period from 1950 to 1970 is called the cognitive revolution. The term "cognitive psychology" was first used by the American Ulric Neisser.

The advantages of KP are:

visualization of the scheme of brain processes;
the presence of a backbone theory;
creation general model psyche;
explanation of the philosophical question about the connection between being and consciousness - they are connected through information.

Names of cognitive psychology

George Armitage Miller (1920-2012, USA) - his most famous work is devoted to short term memory person (formula "7 +/- 2").

Jerome S. Bruner (1915-2016, USA) - explored cognitive processes, made a significant contribution to the theory of learning, the psychology of pedagogy.

Ulrik Neisser (Neisser) (1928-2012, USA) - in 1976 in his book Cognitive Psychology, he first used this term to describe psychological theory recent years, pointed out its main problems, making an impetus for the further development of the CP. He also described the phenomenon of information anticipation.

Based on the KP, a direction of cognitive psychotherapy arose, the founders of which are recognized as Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck.

Features of cognitive psychology

The most striking features of this direction of psychology are:

computer metaphor in the description of thinking processes;
symbolic approach;
chronometric experiments on the reaction rate.

Axioms of Cognitive Psychology

A.T. Beck suggested that mental deviations are due to a violation of the process of self-consciousness, an error in the processing of external data. For example, a woman with anorexia perceives herself as too fat, and it is possible to cure her by identifying a failure in judgment. That is, cognitive psychology considers the existence of an axiom objective reality. Cognitive Psychotherapy solves the problem of irrational ideas.

Haber in 1964 formulated the following principles-axioms of KP:

Information is collected and processed in consciousness in a strict sequence (similar to processes in a computer).
The possibilities for storing and processing information are limited (compare with the memory capacity electronic devices), which is why the brain selectively approaches signals from the outside world, looking for effective ways work with incoming data (strategy).
Information is stored in encrypted form.

Directions of cognitive psychology

Modern SP deals with the study of the psychology of the development of cognitive structures, language and speech, and theories of intelligence.

The following areas of CP can be distinguished:

Cognitive-behavioral psychology is a direction of cognitive psychology, which is based on the assumption that the personality problems of an individual are due to his misbehavior. The purpose of working with the patient is to find errors in behavior, teaching the correct models.
Cognitive social psychology - its task is social adaptation personalities, help social growth person, by analyzing the mechanisms of his social judgments.

Modern cognitive psychology is closely related to research in neuroscience. The latter is a field of science that studies the structure and functioning of the nervous system of organisms. Gradually, the two fields of science are intertwined, while cognitive psychology is losing ground, giving way to cognitive neuroscience.

Criticism of cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology does not take into account the emotional components of the process of cognition, abstracts from the intentions and needs of a person, tries to schematize cognitive processes that cannot always be put into a schema. Cognitivists claim the "automaticity" of processing the received external data, ignoring the conscious choice of the individual. These are the main points for which she is criticized. The limitations of the KP approach led to the development genetic psychology(J.Piaget), cultural-historical psychology (L.Vygotsky), activity approach (A.Leontiev).

Despite criticism, cognitive psychology is the leading modern direction sciences about the process of cognition. KP shows excellent results in the treatment of patients with depression, people with low self-esteem. CP has become the basis for the development of cognitive linguistics, neuropsychology, cognitive ethology (the study cognitive activity animals). These CPs are used to build curricula, to improve the effectiveness of courses, for example, in the study of foreign languages. KP has an impact in all areas of psychology, psychotherapy.

The essence of cognitive psychology boils down to the fact that in order to understand the motives that prompt a person to act, it is necessary to study the processes occurring in the human mind. This current in psychology is engaged in the study of the human psyche, the very process of human perception of information or knowledge. Psychologists seek to understand how information is perceived, thinking, the process of memorization, logical thinking, etc.

As a rule, the study of behavior occurs in cognitive psychology through laboratory experiments. The cognitive approach in psychology is scientific, which is why it requires laboratory research or experiments. For example, in the laboratory, the memory of the subjects was tested, who were in a strict framework created by scientists.

Empirical results are often criticized by opponents in the psychological community. It is pointed out that the conditions created artificially are far from everyday reality. From this, the result loses its purity (there is no ecological validity).

Cognitive psychology received a particularly strong impetus in the development in the middle of the last century. Several factors contributed to this.

First, a behavioral approach focused on the study external behavior man, began to lose supporters. Scientists were increasingly inclined to the need to know the internal processes.

Secondly, it became possible to carry out more qualitative experiments and get more accurate results.

Thirdly, there is something to compare human thinking with, thanks to the development of computer technology.

With the advent of a technical device, the possibilities of scientists - psychologists have expanded. They adopted part of the technical terminology to explain the processes under study. Comparing the processes occurring in the machine and in the human mind, when solving the same task, the researchers have made significant progress in the knowledge of the area under study.

History of cognitive psychology

1948 - Norbert Wiener publishes "Cybernetics" - a work that deals with the relationship between machine processes and human thinking. Since that time, the terms "entrance" and "exit" have taken on a meaning different from the traditional entrance and exit to the premises.

In the same 48th, another American, Edward Tolman, experimenting on rats, obtained evidence of the internal representation of animal behavior. The scientist called them a cognitive map.

1956 - George Miller experimentally revealed the "size of short-term memory" of a person. This discovery is framed in his famous work " magic number 7 plus or minus 2".

1960 - Opening of the Center for Cognitive Research at Harvard. The center, where the processes of thought were studied, was created by the joint efforts of University Professor George Miller and Dr. Jerome Bruner. Since 1962, the latter became the director of the Center.

1967 - the publication of Ulrich Neisser's book "Cognitive Psychology", which marked the beginning of the rapid development of a new direction in the study of human psychology.

1968 - Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin developed a model of human memory. Their model, consisting of three components, was called: "multi-storey memory model".

Relation to the cognitive approach

American psychologist Carl Ransome Rogers, who is a supporter of humanistic psychology, also did not recognize the method of the cognitive approach. His opinion boiled down to the fact that it is impossible to accept the results of laboratory experiments as true due to the fact that they have too little ecological validity. The artificial environment in which the subjects are placed does not comply with real life. Rogers emphasizes the need for a holistic approach in the study of human behavior.

Burres Frederick Skinner, a well-known American psychologist, an adherent of behaviorism, criticized the cognitive approach. He believed that reliable facts can only be obtained by studying the visible reactions of human behavior. He pointed out that it is impossible to notice and measure the influence of a stimulus on a response. Skinner found support for his theory and inconsistencies in the cognitive approach. In particular, the statements of the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, who tried to decompose human mind into constituent parts.

By completely relying on the comparison of human thinking with the processes occurring in a computer, advocates of cognitive psychology miss a number of factors. For example, computers do not experience feelings, they cannot get tired, upset, angry, or, on the contrary, experience joy and fun. All of the above is unique to humans. Actions performed by a person largely depend on the emotional state. Man is not a computer and will never be able to think in terms of installed by the program rules.