Past work has documented and described major patterns of adaptive and maladaptive behavior: the mastery-oriented and the helpless patterns. In this article, we present a research-based model that accounts for these patterns in terms of underlying psychological processes. The model specifies how individuals' implicit theories orient them toward particular goals and how these goals set up the different patterns. Indeed, we show how each feature (cognitive, affective, and behavioral) of the adaptive and maladaptive patterns can be seen to follow directly from different goals. We then examine the generality of the model and use it to illuminate phenomena in a wide variety of domains. Finally, we place the model in its broadest context and examine its implications for our understanding of motivational and personality processes. The task for investigators of motivation and personality is to identify major patterns of behavior and link them to underlying psychological processes. In this article we (a) describe a research-based model that accounts for major patterns of behavior, (b) examine the generality of this model—its utility for understanding domains beyond the ones in which it was originally developed, and (c) explore the broader implications of the model for motivational and personality processes.

/pdf/a-social-cognitive-approach-to-motivation-and-personality-4r18vjg2jg.pdf

A social-cognitive approach to motivation and personality

/pdf/what-is-emotional-intelligence-4cdho6tdum.pdf

What is emotional intelligence

The intelligence of emotional intelligence

A test of leadership categorization theory: Internal structure, information processing, and leadership perceptions

A prestudy and four experiments were conducted in order to understand the nature and use of people's implicit theories of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom. In the prestudy, a brief questionnaire was sent out to professors in each of the fields of art, business, philosophy, and physics, and was a

Implicit theories of intelligence. creativity, and wisdom

: Three experiments are reported investigating experts' and laypersons' conceptions of intelligence. In the first experiment, persons studying in a college library, entering a supermarket, and waiting for trains in a railroad station were asked to list behaviors characteristic of either 'intelligence,' 'academic intelligence,' 'everyday intelligence,' or 'unintelligence,' and to rate themselves on each of the three kinds of intelligence. In the second experiment, experts and laypersons (excluding students) were asked to rate various properties of the behaviors listed in Experiment 1; the laypersons also rated themselves on the three kinds of intelligence and took an IQ test. In the third experiment, laypersons received written descriptions of behaviors characterizing fictitious people, and were asked to rate these people's intelligence. We found that people have well-formed prototypes corresponding to the various kinds of intelligence, that these prototypes are quite similar for experts and laypersons, that the prototypes are closely related to certain psychological theories of intelligence, and that the prototypes are used in the evaluation of one's own and others' intelligence. Moreover, proximity of one's behavioral self-characterizations to an ideal prototype is quite strongly related to intelligence as measured by an IQ test. (Author)

Morty Bernstein

Papers

People's conceptions of intelligence.