INTERPERSONAL - SOCIAL THEORY

•Interpersonal theory is the influence of social & environmental factors on personality

development. He believes that behavior is motivated by the person’s efforts to avoid
anxiety & meet his needs. A healthy personality develops from gratifying & meaningful
interpersonal experiences with the environment & emotional disturbance is caused by
impaired interpersonal interaction.

•Focused on interpersonal relationship instead of on the unconscious.

•He believed that cultural environment greatly shapes personality and that personality
development does not end at 5 years of age but continues until young adulthood.

SELF-SYSTEM (self-concept)

•Also called Personification

•Personification includes all related attitudes, feelings, and concepts about oneself or
another acquired from extensive experience
•Develops from infancy by the process of learning behaviors, from experiences, which
relieves & avoids anxiety.
•Persona is what one is talking about when one refers to “I” and “me”
•“good me”
•which is composed of those experiences & behaviors when anxiety is reduced &
satisfaction & security is experienced.
•when mother is rewarding the infant

•“bad me”
•when anxiety is not reduced rejection & tension is experienced.
•arises in negative experiences with the mother

•“not me”
•when severe anxiety occurred causing confusion & the individual is unable to learn &
integrate information into the personality.
•arises out of extreme anxiety that the child rejects as part of self.

INTERPERSONAL STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT

INFANCY (0-18 months)

•Infant is dependent on others to meet his needs, when needs are satisfied; the infant
develops a sense of basic trust, security & self worth.

•Mothering One – the primary caregiver of the infant, this person & the infant must
establish an emphatic linkage, a symbolic emotional umbilical cord that makes the infant
& the mothering one highly sensitive to each other’s feelings.
•Self-concept- development begins at this stage & is influenced by the quality of the
infant’s feeding experiences.

JUVENILE (6 – 9 years)
•The child learns to relate to peers, & learns competition, compromise & cooperation in
the process.
•The child turns to peers of same sex to provide the sense of satisfaction & security
earlier obtained from parent – thus this is the period of gang formation.
•As the child struggles to maintain acceptance of the gang, he learns to compromise
(adjust), compete & the values of loyalty.
•The peers also help to reinforce or alter the self-concept earlier developed by the child.
•The school experiences are important in the development of self-concept.

CHILDHOOD (18 months – 6 years)

•Early Childhood or Toddler:

•As mothering begins to make demands from the child during toilet training, the child
learns that he can make mother happy or bad depending on how he conforms to her
expectations. This leads the child to develop a sense of power as he attempts to control
himself & his environment.

•Preschool:
•Child learns to use words to communicate. This skills enables the child to check out his
perceptions & feeling with others called consensual validation. The child learns to
accept delayed gratification of needs & wish fulfillment.

PRE-ADOLESCENCE (9 – 12 years old )

•The child develops a “love relationship” with particular person of the same sex, called
chum, a person that the child perceived as very similar to himself.
•As this stage, the child learns to be concerned with another individual & puts the needs
of that individual ahead of him.
•The intimacy & acceptance provided by the chum relationship reinforces positive self-
esteem. The qualities that the child develops in this stage are very important in the
development of a healthy heterosexual relationship later on.

EARLY ADOLESCENCE ( 12-14 years old )

•Learns independence & how to relate to opposite sex.
•At this stage, the adolescent begins to experience sexual urges, called lust.
•The child meets & adapts to this changes by turning to the opposite sex to form
heterosexual relationship.
•The peer group remains to be an important part of life because it provides security &
consensual validation – thus – the peer group is significant in regulating the adolescent’s
feelings & behaviors.
LATE ADOLESCENCE:
•Develops intimate relationship with opposite sex.
•The major task at this stage is the incorporation of intimacy that develops in
preadolescence in the strivings of the person to establish a meaningful & satisfying
heterosexual relationship.
•A person who is able to balance & incorporate lust & intimacy in a relationship has
developed maturity.

YOUNG ADULTHOOD:
•Learns to be economically, intellectually & emotionally self sufficient
•
BEHAVIORAL THEORY
(B.F. SKINNER - 1953)

BEHAVIORAL THEORY
•Behaviors, both adaptive and maladaptive, are most likely learned.
•Differences in human are accounted for by the experiences in the person’s life that
initiate a response.
•The human beings are like a machine that operates according to fixed laws.
•Behavior can be controlled by the kind and extend of reinforcement that follows a
particular behavior.

•All aspects of human behavior are controlled through reinforcement ; therefore, a

person is a product of past reinforcements.
•Past experiences are important only to the degree that they are still active in directly
contributing to the client’s present distress.
•A person is best understood by observing what he or she does in a particular situation.
TWO TYPES OF BEHAVIOR

RESPONDENT BEHAVIOR
•Occur when a known and specific stimulus elicits a response.
•Can be simple, as in reflex action, or learned, such as those behaviors involved in
conditioning.

OPERANT BEHAVIOR
•Those that obtain a response or reinforcement from the environment or from another
person.
 COGNITIVE THEORY

(AARON BECK (1991)

COGNITIVE THEORY
•Mental process determine, to great extent, emotional, behavioral, and physiological
responses.
•Cognitive distortions produce the symptoms of various psychological disturbances and
mediate physiological responses that contribute to anxiety disorders and mood disorders.
•Cognition themes of loss and defeat are likely to be depressed.
•Schemata shape personality. Schemata are cognitive structures, or patterns, that consist
of person’s beliefs, values and assumptions.
–Schemata develop early in life from personal experiences, and become active in
response to stressful situations.

Beck’s Common Cognitive Distortions

•ARBITRARY INFERENCE
–The process of drawing a specific conclusion in the absence of evidence to support the
conclusion. The evidence may be contrary to the conclusion.

•SELECTIVE ABSTRACTION
–Focusing on a detail taken out of the context, ignoring more salient features of the
situation, and conceptualizing the whole experience on the one detail.

•OVERGENERALIZATION
–The pattern of drawing a general rule or conclusion from one or more isolated incidents
and applying the concept across the board to related and unrelated situations.

•PERSONALIZATION
–The proclivity to relate external events to oneself when there is no basis for making
such a connection.

•ABSOLUTIST (DICHOTOMOUS) THINKING

–Places all experiences in one of two opposite categories; for example: flawless or
defective, immaculate or filthy, saint or sinner. In describing himself, the patient’s selects
the extreme negative categorization.

NEUROBIOLOGICAL THEORIES
An important theory of modern psychiatric therapy is that all behaviors are a reflection
of brain function, and all thought processes represent a range of functions mediated by
nerve cells (neurons) in the brain.

The End!!!