Hypocrites and Backsliders: Lesson 014

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Hypocrites and BackslidersLesson 014

• 10 Steps to Temptation The First Sin in Genesis
  31-6

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The Seat of Cognitive Emotion

• Scientists have known for some time that the
  prefrontal lobes are involved in the processing
  of emotion.
• This is why in the 1940s someone had the idea of
  disconnecting the prefrontal cortex from the
  lower brain in mental patients, a procedure we
  know as a prefrontal lobotomy, and one we also
  know was eventually abandoned because it left
  patients with no emotional life at all.
• But not until recently have scientists understood
  the prefrontal cortex is not, it turns out, the
  place emotion is formed, but where it is reasoned
  and processed from its origin in the lower brain.

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The Sequence of Cognitive (Intelligent) Emotions

• Hypocrisy and Backsliding are related to how we
  think, so, next we will study Thinking.
• There is a sequence to thinking
• 1. The event.
• 2. Perception of the Event.
• 3. Appraisal of the Event.
• 4. Filtering the Appraisal to get a
  Representation.
• 5. Reaction to the Representation.

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The Sequence of Temptation
SC Attribution Mood Beliefs Attitude Knowledge
OR
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1. The Event

• Something happens, (a remark, a gesture, an
  accident, etc.) that potentially relates to one
  of the persons goals as either
• a threat or
• an enhancer.

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2. Perception of the Event

• The individual becomes fully aware of the event
  (through seeing, hearing, or reading, etc.).

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3. Appraisal of the Event

• The person determines whether or not the event
  relates to a goal.
• The value of the goal will directly affect the
  strength of the emotion.

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Filtering the Appraisal

• The status of the persons body (sleepy, alert,
  etc.)or background emotions influences the
  intensity of his or her appraisal (e.g., very
  threatening our only mildly threatening).

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The Appraisal Filters
Representation
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Knowledge

• In common parlance, knowledge is the possession
  of information.
• Certain philosophers, however, choose to define
  these concepts in a technical way, different from
  their everyday use.

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Knowledge

• According to philosophic jargon, Knowledge can be
  defined as information associated with an
  intentionality.
• Both knowledge and information consist of true
  statements.
• But knowledge can be considered as information
  that has a purpose or use.
• The study of knowledge is called epistemology.

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Knowledge

• Another common defintion of knowledge is that it
  consists of justified true belief.
• This definition derives from Plato.
• What constitutes knowledge, certainty and truth
  are controversial issues.
• These issues are debated by philosophers, social
  scientists, and historians.

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Mood

• A person's mood is the repertoire of emotions and
  thoughts experienced at a particular time. In
  normal functioning, moods are largely adaptive to
  external events.
• An optimist and a pessimist evaluate a situation
  relatively favorably and unfavorably,
  respectively.

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Mood

• This applies also to expectations.
• The optimist looks at the world "through
  rose-tinted spectacles" wheras a pessimist will
  tend to concentrate on the possibility for
  oncoming doom.

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Frame, framing effect

• A decision-frame is the decision-maker's
  subjective conception of the acts, outcomes and
  contingencies associated with a particular
  choice.
• The frame that a decision maker adopts is
  controlled partly by the formulation of the
  problem and by the norms, habits, and personal
  characteristics of the decision maker.
• It is often possible to frame a given decision
  problem in more than one way.

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Frame, framing effect

• A framing effect is a change of preferences
  between options as a function of the variation of
  frames, for instance through variation of the
  formulation of the problem.
• For example, a problem can be presented as a gain
  (200 of 600 threatened people will be saved) or
  as a loss (400 of 600 threatened people will
  die), in the first case people tend to adopt a
  gain frame, generally leading to risk-aversion,
  and in the latter people tend to adopt a loss
  frame, generally leading to risk-seeking
  behavior.

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Script

• A script is a knowledge structure, which
  describes the adequate sequence of events of
  familiar situations, for instance the script of a
  restaurant situation.
• It includes information about the fixed aspect
  of the situation, for example, all Mexican
  restaurants serve Mexican food.

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Script

• Moreover, it has slots for variables that apply
  to specific restaurants, for example, how
  expensive a particular restaurant is, or how good
  the food is.
• Scripts combine single scenes to an integrated
  sequence from the point of view of the person.

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Self-concept

• The self-concept consists of the self-image and
  the self-esteem.
• The self-concept (self-identity) is the mental
  notion a person has about his
• physical,
• psychological, and
• social attributes
• as well as his
• attitudes,
• beliefs and
• Ideas.

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Self-esteem

• In psychology, self-esteem is the person's
  self-image from an emotional level circumventing
  reason and logic.
• The maintenance of a healthy degree of
  self-esteem is a central task within
  psychotherapy, where patients often suffer from
  excess degrees of self-criticism, hampering their
  ability to function.

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Self-esteem

• Popularised in the 1970s as the cause of the ills
  of society and of individual humans, and written
  into Californian law as something to oppose, low
  self-esteem rapidly became a universal
  explanation for any personal failing and a staple
  target for personal development movements,
  sometimes resulting in narcissistic,
  over-confident individuals with excessive
  self-esteem.

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Self Image

• A person's self image is the mental picture,
  generally of a kind that is quite resistant to
  change, that depicts not only details that are
  potentially available to objective investigation
  by others (height, weight, hair color, nature of
  external genitalia, I.Q. score, is this person
  double-jointed, etc.), but also items that have
  been learned by that person about himself or
  herself, either from personal experience or by
  internalizing the judgments of others.

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Self Image

• Those items include the answers to such questions
  as
• Am I skinny? Am I fat? Am I weak? Am I strong? Am
  I intelligent? Am I stupid? Am I a good person?
  Am I a bad person? Am I a male? Am I a female?

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An Overview of Self-Concept Theory for
Counselors. Highlights An ERIC/CAPS Digest.

• After more than a decade of relative neglect,
  self-concept is enjoying renewed popularity and
  attention by both researchers and practitioners.
• There is growing awareness that of all the
  perceptions we experience in the course of
  living, none has more profound significance than
  the perceptions we hold regarding our own
  personal existence--our concept of who we are and
  how we fit into the world.
• Self-concept may be defined as the totality of a
  complex, organized, and dynamic system of learned
  beliefs, attitudes and opinions that each person
  holds to be true about his or her personal
  existence.
• Fromm (1956) was as beautifully clear as anyone
  when he described self-concept as "life being
  aware of itself."

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SOME BASIC ASSUMPTIONS REGARDING SELF-CONCEPT

• Many of the successes and failures that people
  experience in many areas of life are closely
  related to the ways that they have learned to
  view themselves and their relationships with
  others.
• It is also becoming clear that self-concept has
  at least three major qualities of interest to
  counselors
• (1) it is learned
• (2) it is organized
• (3) it is dynamic

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1. Self-concept is learned

• As far as we know, no one is born with a
  self-concept. It gradually emerges in the early
  months of life and is shaped and reshaped through
  repeated perceived experiences.
• The fact that self-concept is learned has some
  important implications
• Because self-concept does not appear to be
  instinctive, but is a social product developed
  through experience, it possesses relatively
  boundless potential for development and
  actualization.

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1. Self Concept is Learned

• Faulty thinking patterns, such as dichotomous
  reasoning (dividing everything in terms of
  opposites or extremes) or overgeneralizing
  (making sweeping conclusions based on little
  information) create negative interpretations of
  oneself.

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2. Self Concept is Organized

• Self-Concept is organized. Most researchers agree
  that self-concept has a generally stable quality
  that is characterized by orderliness and harmony.
  
• Each person maintains countless perceptions
  regarding one's personal existence, and each
  perception is orchestrated with all the others.
• It is this generally stable and organized quality
  of self-concept that gives consistency to the
  personality.
• This organized quality of self-concept has
  corollaries.

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2. Self Concept is Organized

• Self-concept requires consistency, stability, and
  tends to resist change.
• If self-concept changed readily, the individual
  would lack a consistent and dependable
  personality.
• The more central a particular belief is to one's
  self-concept, the more resistant one is to
  changing that belief.

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2. Self Concept is Organized

• At the heart of self-concept is the self-as-doer,
  the "I," which is distinct from the
  self-as-object, the various "me's."
• This allows the person to reflect on past events,
  analyze present perceptions, and shape future
  experiences.
• Basic perceptions of oneself are quite stable, so
  change takes time.
• Rome was not built in a day, and neither is
  self-concept.

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2. Self Concept is Organized

• Perceived success and failure impact on
  self-concept.
• Failure in a highly regarded area lowers
  evaluations in all other areas as well.
• Success in a prized area raises evaluations in
  other seemingly unrelated areas.

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3. Self-Concept is Dynamic

• Self-Concept is dynamic.
• To understand the active nature of self-concept,
  it helps to imagine it as a gyrocompass a
  continuously active system that dependably points
  to the "true north" of a person's perceived
  existence.

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3. Self-Concept is Dynamic

• This guidance system not only shapes the ways a
  person views oneself, others, and the world, but
  it also serves to direct action and enables each
  person to take a consistent "stance" in life.
• Rather than viewing self-concept as the cause of
  behavior, it is better understood as the
  gyrocompass of human personality, providing
  consistency in personality and direction for
  behavior.

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3. Self-Concept is Dynamic

• The dynamic quality of self-concept also carries
  corollaries.
• The world and the things in it are not just
  perceived they are perceived in relation to
  one's self-concept.
• Self-concept development is a continuous process.

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3. Self-Concept is Dynamic

• In the healthy personality there is constant
  assimilation of new ideas and expulsion of old
  ideas throughout life.
• Individuals strive to behave in ways that are in
  keeping with their self-concepts, no matter how
  helpful or hurtful to oneself or others.

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3. Self-Concept is Dynamic

• Self-concept usually takes precedence over the
  physical body.
• Individuals will often sacrifice physical comfort
  and safety for emotional satisfaction.
• Self-concept continuously guards itself against
  loss of self-esteem, for it is this loss that
  produces feelings of anxiety.
• If self-concept must constantly defend itself
  from assault, growth opportunities are limited.

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Self-verification

• The process of seeking out and interpreting
  situations so as to confirm one's self-concept.

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Attitude

• An attitude is "a psychological tendency that is
  expressed by evaluating a particular entity with
  some degree of favor or disfavor" (Eagly
  Chaiken, 1993, p. 1).
• A widely accepted definition of an attitude is
  offered by Judd, Ryan, Parke, (1991).
• "evaluations of various objects that are stored
  in memory".

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Attitude

• According to the tri-component model, an
  attitude includes affect (a feeling), cognition
  (a thought), and behavior (an action).

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Attitude

• Component Characteristics Examples
• Affect Emotional reactions"I like ..." -or-
  ".... makes me angry
• Cognition Internalized mental representations,
  beliefs, thoughts "My co-workers should ..."
  -or- "If .... then ....
• Behavior The tendency to respond or overtly act
  in a particular way toward the attitude object
  "I always do ...." -or- ".... makes me angry"

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Attribution

• The process by which people use information to
  make inferences about the causes of behavior or
  events.

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Belief

• An estimate of the probability that something is
  true.
• Belief in the psychological sense, is a
  representational mental state that takes the form
  of a propositional attitude.
• In the religious sense, "belief" refers to a part
  of a wider spiritual or moral foundation,
  generally called faith.

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Belief

• Belief is considered propositional in that it is
  an assertion, claim or expectation about reality
  that is presumed to be either true or false (even
  if this cannot be practically determined, such as
  a belief in the existence of a particular deity).
  
• Historically, philosophical attempts to analyze
  the nature of belief have been couched in terms
  of judgement.
• Both David Hume and Immanuel Kant are both
  particularly well known for their analyses using
  this framework.

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Values

• Enduring beliefs about important life goals that
  transcend specific situations.

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5. Reaction to the Appraisal

• The person channels his or her appraisal into
  some form of coping (from the middle French -
  cuper, to strike or cut). The strength of the
  reaction is a direct function of the value of the
  goal concerned and the degree of certainty that
  the event will thwart or enhance goal attainment.
• The reaction to the appraisal can be either
  cognitive or emotional. Normally, when goals
  appear to be thwarted or enhanced by an event,
  emotions precede cognition.
• These emotions can last for less than a second or
  for a lifetime, partly depending on whether we
  will the cognitive part of the reaction to
  ultimately subdue the emotional part.

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Appraisal results in Representation

• People often appraise an Event (about a person,
  an object, or a situation) selectively, focusing
  on some features while disregarding others.
• They interpret the features in terms of
  previously acquired concepts and knowledge.
• Moreover, they often infer characteristics of the
  event that were not actually mentioned in the
  information, and construe relations among these
  characteristics that were not specified ("going
  beyond the information given", Bruner, 1957b).

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Representation

• In short, the cognitive representations that
  people form of an event differ in a variety of
  ways from the information on which they were
  based.
• Yet it is ultimately these representations, and
  not the original event, that govern subsequent
  thoughts, judgments, and behaviors.
• Eve reacted emotionally to the Event of
  Temptation Filtering through her Self Esteem
  (emotional) aspect of her Self Concept (I want
  to make myself wise like God) and succumbed to
  the temptation -- the First Backslider!

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