An interview
We talked with Walter Scott about his recently published paper, titled “Clinical Application of Social Cognitive Theory: A Novel Personality Assessment Procedure and a Case Study of Personality Coherence”. Walter is a professor and the director of the Psychology Clinic at Washington State University.
Read on to learn more about Walter’s work on social cognitive theory and his other interests!
Q: Can you tell us a bit about yourself and what made you interested in personality psychology?
Sure! I'm a professor in the Psychology Department at Washington State University. I am also the Director of the Washington State University Psychology Clinic, which is our in-house training clinic for students enrolled in our clinical psychology doctoral program.
My interest in personality psychology probably comes from a combination of chance events and a natural interest in personality.
I was an undergraduate at San Diego State University, which was near where I grew up in Southern California. I met someone there and we were in a relationship for two years. Then she moved and got accepted into a professional psychology program in Chicago, which led me to focus on applying to graduate schools that were also in the Chicago area.
I was accepted into the doctoral clinical program at the University of Illinois at Chicago, although shortly thereafter my relationship with the person that brought me there ended. This university happened to have a very unique clinical psychology PhD program at the time called the matrix system. That is, students were also required to choose an experimental discipline (i.e., cognitive, biological, developmental, or personality/social), which had its own course requirements and a separate prelim exam. I remember initially thinking I would choose the cognitive program. However, based on my interests, and with the advice of my graduate mentor, Dan Cervone, I ended up choosing the personality/social psychology program. So, those experiences were fortuitous in shaping my career path. I happened to attend one of the few clinical Ph.D. programs – and maybe the only one - that required a focus on an experimental subdiscipline, and in part due to a relationship that brought me to the Chicago area.
My research in personality psychology is also due to my natural interest in personality. I’m the oldest of seven siblings, and on average, siblings share about 50% of their genes. There are certainly some similarities between my siblings, but what always struck me the most as the oldest were the differences between us. Therefore, I think I was naturally drawn to personality and individual differences. Although I don't remember many of my undergraduate textbooks, I do remember Walter Mischel's “Introduction to Personality” text, which really resonated with me.
What do you like to do outside of work?
I still enjoy playing sports. I grew up in a large family; neither of my parents had graduated high school and there were seven of us children. We didn't have a lot of money and the neighbourhood we lived in was a little sketchy, but my mom enrolled us in a lot of structured youth sports activities, probably to keep us out of trouble! I grew up playing many sports, and I continue to do that. Basketball was probably my favorite and I played a lot of it until recently. However, basketball is a young man's game, so I’m playing less of it these days.
I also really enjoy playing the guitar. I have three guitars and I get together with a group every couple of weeks to jam in our living rooms. I also love reading, especially about history. And biographies as well. I am currently reading a book written by Elvis Costello, which is an autobiography of sorts. And my wife and I love comedy. We try to see as much stand-up comedy as we can, although we get to do less of that during the pandemic.
Q: Awesome, thank you! Can you tell us a bit about your study and the motivation behind it?
Yeah, sure! We have been working on a method of applying social cognitive personality theory to clinical personality assessment. Social cognitive personality theory is one of the two predominant frameworks in contemporary personality science, the other being trait theory of course. Rather than traits, social cognitive theory uses different units of analysis. There is an emphasis on beliefs, particularly beliefs involving the self. This makes researchers interested in how those beliefs develop, and how they are activated in different social contexts. It also examines the different social contexts that influence how we characteristically think, feel, and behave.
Although social cognitive theory has had tremendous influence, it has not impacted how clinicians assess personality – which is a shame in my opinion. But I think there are reasons why social cognitive personality assessment approaches have not been adequately developed for clinical assessment and therefore are not represented in personality assessment books that get assigned to clinical graduate students. You could easily give someone a measure of the Big 5, but from a social cognitive perspective, personality is more complicated. Walter Mischel and Al Bandura’s classic social cognitive frameworks do not lend themselves in a straightforward way to implementing personality assessment in practice.
More recently, Dan Cervone developed the Knowledge and Appraisal Architecture Model to integrate these earlier social cognitive theories. He also specified principles for personality assessment. Dan’s model does lend itself to application in a more straightforward way, I think. Over the past eight years, I have been applying Dan’s model to clinical personality assessment. The most recent iteration of this method, which we refer to as the “Person In Context Assessment” (PICA), is described in our paper in EJP. In this method, in addition to Dan Cervone’s list of social cognitive variables which include beliefs, aims/goals, and evaluative standards, we also assess temperament.
In our EJP paper, we describe how PICA can generate descriptions of how social cognitive personality structures, including temperament, beliefs, goals, and evaluative standards, are activated in certain types of situations. The dynamic activation of these personality structures produces “if-then” personality signatures. In the case study, we describe in the EJP paper, one of the clients' “if then” signatures was a tendency to ruminate on past situations in which he failed to meet personal standards. These situations appeared to activate multiple personality structures, including a self-with-father schema, an important evaluative standard of being self-disciplined, as well as a highly behaviorally inhibited temperament. As a result, when reflecting on these past situations, the client would engage in characteristic personality processes that included self-blaming appraisals, feelings of regret, sadness, fear, and behavioral tendencies to ruminate and withdraw. Any individual’s personality can be described by multiple if-then signatures, each of which provides models of coherent personality functioning. In the EJP paper, we found that our case study client could be described by five such if-then signatures, each produced by multiple personality structures in interaction with the environment.
In summary, there is a schism between the practice of clinical personality assessment and the science of personality, which I've been aware of for quite a while. The foundations of many of our clinical personality assessment measures were established over 50 years ago. We’ve learned a lot about personality since then. My main motivation is to develop a method of assessing personality that applies some of this knowledge and which clinicians can use to get a better portrayal of the person in context.
Q: Do you think such social cognitive personality assessments could change the way we look at personality measurement?
I do. As clinicians, we are interested in the individual and in the personality structures that exist within that individual. The value of doing a personality assessment is that it may point to personality structures in the individual which influence how they're thinking, feeling, and behaving in problematic or distressing circumstances. My criticism of the trait approach is one that Dan Cervone and others have made. Namely, the Big 5 traits that have been identified at the population level are between-person constructs. When you look within the individual, the Big 5 don't seem to replicate. A good example for contrasting the trait approach with the social cognitive approach is temperament.
For instance, Jerome Kagan, Nathan Fox and others have looked at behavioral inhibition, something that 20 to 30% of the population show signs of at 18 months of age. Those individuals tend to be more reactive in unfamiliar or challenging circumstances and show some consistency over the life course. For example, at age 7, they tend to be shyer in unfamiliar situations. However, when they are in familiar situations, people who are high on behavioral inhibition will look just like the rest of us. It's in situations that are unfamiliar that behaviorally inhibitive behavior is activated. Thus, a temperament type is a person-in-context variable that exists within the individual. It involves certain brain structure systems that lead them to be a little more reactive than other people. Certainly, measures of temperament and traits correlate. But I think it is important to assess personality using measures that represent variables in the person in a content valid manner.
From a clinical perspective, this approach also has the advantage of predicting under which contexts an individual’s thinking, feeling, and behaving is likely to be influenced by a personality structure. I am less interested in a client’s average level of anxiety than in knowing under what circumstances they are likely to feel anxious. An advantage of taking a social cognitive approach is that it links participants to their actual life context.
Q: In your paper, you said that you are working on a study that uses social cognitive personality assessments in a non-clinical sample. Can you share with us how that is going?
Definitely! We completed an online study on PICA last spring semester with undergraduates. There were four sessions. In the first session, we had participants complete measures of mood and anxiety symptoms and psychological well-being. In the second session, they completed our PICA measure. In the third session, they received written and oral feedback via Zoom. In the fourth session, they completed the same measures as in the first session. We found that these participants reported significant reductions in mood and anxiety symptoms, and significant increases in psychological well-being. The participants also reported that they had experienced increased self-understanding as a result of participating in this method and receiving feedback.
We also have a second study that we're planning in the clinic where we're going to apply the same method with clients who are showing no improvement in depressive or anxiety symptoms over 5 to 10 therapy sessions. It's a replicated single-case design to see if we can see any effects there as well.
Q: What’s next for you?
For the next couple of years, we will be further developing this PICA method and testing it more rigorously, such as doing some controlled random assignment experiments and further developing the measures. For instance, we published a couple of papers on a new measure of self-schemata and adapted a different measure of goal systems to try to capture people's goal representations and how they think about those goals. This latter pursuit may require further development of measures of specific constructs, which will keep me busy.
Q: What advice would you give younger researchers?
When I saw that question, I started thinking about the mistakes I've made as a researcher. First of all, I would recommend some pretty trite advice – do what excites you, what interests you, what engages you. Doing research is hard - getting a really exciting idea, then developing and refining it, and then developing a method to investigate it, etc.. I remember early on in my career I was looking at how mood influences how people think, and I just had several studies that didn’t find significant effects and so ended up being "file-drawer" studies. We study things that are difficult to observe, and you need to look carefully at your procedures, including how you measure what you are evaluating and to see if they are capturing the construct that you're interested in. The details can present real obstacles.
The other thing I’d recommend is to trust your data and try to understand them. That is, do this if you've got a good question and you've developed a good method, with good measures, of course. I've had a couple of studies in my career where I was excited about an idea and went into it with a strong expectation of what I'd find. And then the results were different than what I expected. My first impulse was to distrust the data. We did some early studies looking at how negative mood would impact how challenging your personal standards for academic performance were. I expected that a negative mood would prime negative thoughts and memories of past failures, and as a result, participants would report lower performance standards. We found exactly the opposite: negative mood led to higher performance standards. But it took replicating it by different investigators for me to really believe in the effect.
Finally, master the literature in your area as well as key papers from maybe a handful of people in the world. Go to conferences and approach the researchers who are leaders in your area. This might position you to have interesting conversations, which might lead to collaboration opportunities.
Q: Can you tell us a bit about the scholars and researchers that have inspired you and your work?
Well, I first of all have to mention my mentor and friend, Dan Cervone. Dan was a student of Al Bandura and has worked a fair amount with Walter Mischel. As I’ve mentioned, Dan’s Knowledge and Appraisal Architecture model directly informs the PICA method that we are developing.
The three other scholars who heavily influenced me were Jerome Kagan, Walter Mischel, and Al Bandura. And unfortunately, in the last few years, we've lost all three of them.