PERSONALITY TYPE AND ADJUSTMENT PATTERNS.

ABSTRACT

Bandura (1986) advanced a view of human functioning that accords a central role to cognitive, vicarious, self-regulatory, and self-reflective processes in human adaptation and change. People are viewed as self-organising, proactive, self-reflecting and self-regulating rather than as reactive organisms shaped and shepherded by environmental forces or driven by concealed inner impulses. From this theoretical perspective, human functioning is viewed as the product of a dynamic interplay of personal, behavioral, and environmental influences. For example, how people interpret the results of their own behaviour informs and alters their environments and the personal factors they possess which, in turn, inform and alter subsequent behavior.

This is the foundation of Bandura’s (1986) conception of reciprocal determinism, the view that (a) personal factors in the form of cognition, affect, and biological events, (b) behavior, and (c) environmental influences create interactions that result in a triadic reciprocality.  Bandura altered the label of his theory from social learning to social “cognitive” both to distance it from prevalent social learning theories of the day and to emphasize that cognition plays a critical role in people’s capability to construct reality, self-regulate, encode information, and perform behaviors.

In school, for example, teachers have the challenge of improving the academic learning and confidence of the students in their charge. Using social cognitive theory as a framework, teachers’ can work to improve their students’ emotional states and to correct their erroneous self-concept and habits of thinking (personal factors), improve their academic skills and self-regulatory practices (behavior), and alter the school and classroom structures that may work to undermine student success (environmental factors).

It would appear that many of the successes and failures that people experiences in many areas of life are closely related to the ways they have learned to view themselves and their relationships with others (Bandura, 2001). Self-concept is learned and, from what can be inferred, no one is born with a self-concept. Self-concept organisation refers to the way experiences are applied as ideas seem to be better developed based on multiple experiences.(Anastasi & Urbina,2004). This study conceive self concept using three domain specific measures (Academic, social and personal image)that approximate rating scale format and which are very crucial to a school environment and through which inferences based on linear combination of the three distinctive self-concept measures capable of forming conceptual schemas(Stevens,2002) can be drawn.

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