Cognitive-Affective Processing System

Concepts Cognitive-affective unit Self-perception  Situation Situationism (psychology) Situationism in psychology refers to an approach to personality that holds that people are more influenced by external, situational factors than by internal traits or motivations....   Person-situation interaction Proponents Walter Mischel Walter Mischel Walter Mischel is an American psychologist specializing in personality theory and social psychology. He is the Robert Johnston Niven Professor of Humane Letters in the Department of Psychology at Columbia University.-Early life:... Yuichi Shoda Relevant works A cognitive-affective system theory of personality

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The Cognitive Affective Processing System (CAPS) is a contribution to the psychology of personality proposed by Walter Mischel

Walter Mischel

Walter Mischel is an American psychologist specializing in personality theory and social psychology. He is the Robert Johnston Niven Professor of Humane Letters in the Department of Psychology at Columbia University.-Early life:...

 and Yuichi Shoda in 1995. According to the cognitive-affective model, behavior is best predicted from a comprehensive understanding of the person, the situation, and the interaction between person and situation.

Description

Cognitive-affective theorists argue that behavior is not the result of some global personality trait; instead, it arises from individual's perceptions of herself in a particular situation.
However, inconsistencies in behavior are not due solely to the situation; inconsistent behaviors reflect stable patterns of variation within the person. These stable variations in behavior present themselves in the following framework: If A, then X; but if B, then Y. People's pattern of variability is the behavioral signature of their personality, or their stable pattern of behaving differently in various situations.
According to this model, personality depends on situation variables, and consists of cognitive-affective units (all those psychological, social, and physiological aspects of people that allow them to interact with their environment in a relatively stable manner).

The authors identified five cognitive-affective units:

• encoding strategies, or people's individualized manner of categorizing information from external stimuli;
• competencies and self-regulatory strategies: intelligence, self-regulatory strategies, self-formulated goals, and self-produced consequences;
• expectancies and beliefs, or people's predictions about the consequences of each of the different behavioral possibilities;
• goals and values, which provide behavior consistency;
• affective responses, including emotions, feelings, and the affects accompanying physiological reactions.

Evaluation

The cognitive-affective processing system theory provides a comprehensive view that accounts for both the variability of behavior and the stability in the personality system that generates it. Rather than dichotomizing personality research into the study of dispositions or processes, the theory allows the pursuit of both - structure and dynamics - as aspects of the same unitary system.

See also

• Systems psychology
  Systems psychology
  Systems psychology is a branch of applied psychology that studies human behaviour and experience in complex systems. It is inspired by systems theory and systems thinking, and based on the theoretical work of Roger Barker, Gregory Bateson, Humberto Maturana and others. It is an approach in...
  
  
• Biospheric model of personality
  Biospheric model of personality
  The biospheric model of personality is a contribution to the psychology of personality proposed by Andras Angyal in 1941. According to this model, the biosphere is the system of the individual and her environment, consisting of Subject subsystem and Object subsystem .-Description:The following...
  
  
• Hypostatic model of personality
  Hypostatic model of personality
  The hypostatic model of personality is a contribution to the psychology of personality, summarized by Codrin Stefan Tapu in 2001. It argues that the person presents herself in different aspects or hypostases, depending on the internal and external realities she relates to, including different...
  
  
• Personality systematics
  Personality systematics
  Personality systematics is a contribution to the psychology of personality and to psychotherapy summarized by Jeffrey J. Magnavita in 2006 and 2009. It is the study of the interrelationships among subsystems of personality as they are embedded in the entire ecological system. The model falls into...