INTERPERSONAL

SOCIAL THEORY
 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
• 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
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.
 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.
 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.
 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
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!!!

Thank You!!!