Toward an integrative model for CBT: Encompassing behavior, cognition, affect, and process

BEHAVIOR THERAPY 35,185-203,2004

Toward an Integrative Model for CBT: Encompassing Behavior, Cognition, Affect, and Process WALTER MISCHEL Columbia University Dramatic changes in our science in recent years have profound implications for how psychologists conceptualize, assess, and treat people. I comment on these developments and the contributions to this special series, focusing on how they speak to new directions and challenges for the future of CBT. Discoveries about mind, brain, and behavior that have vitalized psychological science in the last few decades are providing insights into such directly CBT-relevant processes as memory and the construction of personal narratives, attention control, and executive functions, including planning and conflict-monitoring, emotion and self-regulation, meta-cognition, and unconscious, automatic processing, as well as the nature, organization, and expressions of important individual differences. As the understanding of the subsystems and partprocesses that collectively constitute the person's cognitive and emotional architecture escalates, it is an opportune moment to consider the implications for clinical psychology and the behavior therapies, especially CBT. I do so, drawing on work at the vanguard of the science and pointing to some of the implications for therapies committed to growing as the cognitive and behavioral sciences on which they are based evolve.

In one of the last comments I heard Paul Meehl make, he sadly remarked that clinicians too often choose their theories like children in a candy store: They pick whatever appeals to them. I hope he was not thinking of clinicians within a behavioral and cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) framework, who have always been distinguished by their commitment to base their practice choices on relevant research findings and theoretical advances rather than on personal preference or habit. For them, this special issue offers an extraordinary set of data-based opportunities for expanding the conception and practice of behavior assessment and change in light of developments within the cognitive and behavioral sciences. I say this with some trepidation because

Preparation of this article was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grant MH39349. Address correspondence to Walter Mischel, Department of Psychology, Columbia University, 406 Schermerhorn Hall, 1190 Amsterdam Avenue, Mail Code 5501, New York, NY 10027; e-mail: [email protected]. 185 005-7894/04/0185~320351.00/0 Copyright2004 by Associationfor Advancementof BehaviorTherapy All rightsfor reproductionin any formreserved.

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what for some readers of this journal may be seen as exciting opportunities will be read by many others as hazardous fictions and traps that need to be avoided carefully to build a rigorous behavioral science. Almost 40 years ago a review of the literature of personality and clinical psychology convinced me that many of the "mediating variables" and constructs about mental states and psychodynamics favored by Freud and his diverse followers were indeed mental fictions unsupported by solid empirical finding and unverifiable by experimental methods. My critical survey, hugely upsetting to the field, was that just like classic trait theories, these highly inferential, psychoanalytically influenced mainstream approaches misled clinical practice in therapy, in assessment, in research, and in efforts to build a serious science of human behavior (Mischei, 1968). I therefore enthusiastically embraced--as I still do--the focus on behavior and its functional relationships with the situation and the consequences in the environment pioneered in behavioral-learning approaches to the analysis of human behavior. But while some things have not changed in psychological science since then, others have done so, dramatically, and require in my view substantially expanding the behavioral approach to encompass these developments, without abandoning its methodological rigor. Therefore I want to make my preferences explicit, and let the reader proceed--or not--with informed consent: The black box inside the head has been opened, and for good reason, Transformations in the state of our science are creating a level of excitement in academic circles that I remember feeling once before, long ago, when cognitive behavior therapy was born at the dawn of the cognitive revolution. We are witnessing another scientific revolution whose implications are profound for how we conceptualize, assess, and treat people and ourselves. That is why I am delighted with this special series, and pleased to comment on the developments so thoughtfully discussed by its contributors. I will focus on how they speak to new directions and challenges for the future of CBT. Discoveries about mind, brain, and behavior that have vitalized psychological science in the last few decades are providing insights into such directly CBT-relevant processes as memory and the construction of personal narratives, attention control and executive functions, including planning and conflict-monitoring, emotion and self-regulation, meta-cognition, and unconscious, automatic processing--to name a few (e.g., Cervone, 2004; Cervone & Mischel, 2002; Mischel, Shoda, & Smith, 2004). As the understanding of the subsystems and part-processes that collectively constitute the person's cognitive and emotional architecture escalates, it is an opportune moment to consider the implications for clinical psychology and the behavior therapies, especially CBT. The articles in this special series offer the outlines for such a clinically relevant framework, drawing on work at the vanguard of the science, and point to some of the implications for therapies committed to growing as the cognitive and behavioral sciences on which they are based evolve.

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Two Sides of Personality Psychology: One Irrelevant to CBT, the Other Highly Relevant Although "personality" is in the title for this special issue, in my enthusiastic introductory comments I have avoided the term. Personality psychology has had virtually no impact on the behavioral therapies and CBT, as Shadel (2004) notes. That is because what continues to be mainstream personality psychology is exactly the type of theory and measurement approach against which the behavioral therapies, and CBT specifically, were directed from the outset. Indeed, a young reader of this journal may wonder why an issue of this journal should be devoted to the question of what can personality psychology offer its readership, except perhaps for a reconfirmation of its irrelevance t o - - i f not its conflict with--the goals to which this journal is devoted. The justification for this special issue--and the understandable confusion and skepticism about the potential contributions from personality--come from the fact that for many years personality psychology has developed two distinctive sides, one irrelevant to this journal but the other extremely germane. Its most popular and highly visible side virtually defines the type of trait approach against which the behavioral therapies developed as a protest movement by researchers and practitioners--including myself--searching for more effective ways to deal with psychological and behavioral problems (e.g., Mischel, 1968). This trait-focused side of personality psychology continues to deal with summaries of observed individual differences in behaviors, usually in everyday trait terms reduced by factor analysis into a small set, as in the current "Big Five" factors. In that approach, personality consists of a set of descriptions such as "friendly, conscientious, and open-minded" that summarize what the person is like on the whole. In contrast, the social cognitive processing approach seeks causal explanations for the observed individual differences in behaviors, addressing why, and when, the person behaves distinctively in relation to specific types of situations or conditions. The two approaches to personality also represent the two different goals of any science: taxonomic-classificatory and explanatory. Taxonomic systems have been devised since ancient times to fit everyone into fixed positions on a small number of dimensions, or to categorize people into a few classes or types, as in the cataloguing system of a comprehensive library. For this goal, the five factors may offer a convenient psycholexical taxonomy of trait terms, but that is likely to be of little interest to the readership of this journal: Factor analysis of disease symptoms caused by different kinds of virus, for example, is not a substitute for an understanding of how HIV replicates and how it eventually destroys a person's immune system. Likewise, placing a person in the factor space defined by psycholexical dimensions does not help one to understand, explain, and predict why and when he or she behaves in characteristic ways. In George Kelly's (1955) phrase, trait psychologists pin people on to their continua and leave them dangling there. For process-oriented personality psychologists, the goal of explanation includes understanding the

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psychological mechanisms and mediating variables through which distinctive individual differences in behavior emerge, endure, change, and can be affected and modified. Progress toward such understanding is evident in the growth over the last three decades of process-oriented theories and research in personality and social psychology, and it is illustrated in the articles in this issue, to which I turn now.

Personality Assessment: What's New? Sensitivity to these developments and the two-sided nature of personality psychology is reflected in Cervone's (2004) analysis of what is problematic and what is promising in current personality assessment. His identification of what is problematic in mainstream personality assessment today turns out to be exactly the same as what was wrong 40 years ago. It is precisely what led me to write my 1968 monograph, Personality and Assessment, and to conclude: Global traits and states are excessively crude, gross units to encompass adequately the extraordinary complexity and subtlety of the discriminations that people constantly make . . . . The traditional trait-state conceptualizations of personality, while often paying lip service to [peoples'] complexity and to the uniqueness of each person, in fact lead to a grossly oversimplified view that misses both the richness and the uniqueness of individual lives . . . [and their] extraordinary adaptiveness and capacities for discrimination, awareness, and self-regulation. (Mischel, 1968, p. 301) The conclusions I reached then are the same as the ones that Cervone draws almost 40 years later from his incisive analysis of the now widely reaffirmed--but fundamentally unchanged--approach to personality assessment that is based on trait adjective ratings of what the "person is like as a w h o l e " as exemplified in the five-factor model of personality. While that model may be useful for certain broad screening purposes, and offers a map of individual differences in everyday trait terms, its utility for understanding or helping individuals remains as modest today as it was at the time of my monograph. Given that traits continue to be conceptualized as unchanging and unchangeable predispositions in the first place, it has zero implications for treatment now as it did in 1968. It remains equally irrelevant for personality assessors interested in predicting what people are likely to do in different situations. Those predictions from trait judgments to specific behavior patterns in particular situations accounted for no more than a trivial percent of the variance in 1968, did no better a quarter of a century later (Pervin, 1994), and do no better today (Mischel et al., 2004). And it is intrinsically mute about causal

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mechanisms within an individual and his or her relationships to the social world. As Cervone discusses, it does not allow explanations useful either to the clinician or to the client: Indeed, even its broad trait descriptions refer to between-person differences that do not apply to anybody at the level of the individual. In his opening essay Shadel (2004) notes the surprising resurgence of the trait model given the massive evidence about its limitations that constituted the central agenda and crisis of the personality field more than three decades ago. His surprise, however, cannot be reduced by any new data to support for the utility of traits as predictive constructs that link to relevant behaviors. Perhaps most remarkable is the discrepancy between the bold claims of predictive utility for trait constructs like those in the Big Five by its enthusiastic advocates (e.g., Goldberg, 1993) and the low validity coefficients found in the data (mean r = .22) to support them (Pervin, 1994, p. 20). These coefficients further document the low validity of global trait measures for predicting specific behavior (Mischel, 1968; Peterson, 1968) when the lack of utility of the traditional trait paradigm was demonstrated (e.g., Mischel & Peake, 1982, 1983). Likewise, Merrill and Strauman (2004), in a search of 25 years of literature, could not find a single study that was able to use the five-factor model as an explanatory framework of CBT processes or outcomes. Understandably, they also conclude that there is a fundamental incompatibility between such trait models and the theoretical approach that guides cognitive-behavioral interventions. And Showers, Limke, and Zeigler-Hill (2004) emphasize that current research-based conceptions view the self as more flexible, adaptive, context-linked and constructed "on line" to facilitate responses to specific situations in the pursuit of one's goals and current life tasks. They go on to underline that this flexible, discriminative view of the adaptive self directly contradicts the static, trait conception of the self as a unitary entity. Cervone from the outset makes clear that the traditional trait strategy constitutes the primary objection to the methods his paper advocates. Those of us who were present at the origins of CBT will remember--with a sense of d6j?~ vu--that it was the objections to the traditional global trait approach, and to its early psychoanalytic counterparts, that also motivated the alternative behavioral and cognitive approaches pioneered within CBT, and that in part led to its founding. Cognizant of this history, but justifiably compelled by the renewed popularity of the trait approach to make the arguments all over again, Cervone concludes with the hope that they will not have to be reiterated in 2038. So then why read further? The contributions in this issue are a cause for optimism rather than depression because they make clear not just the limitations of traditional personality theory and assessment. All the contributors to this special series go beyond their criticisms to identify the constructive alternatives that have developed over the last three decades within a social cognitive framework to personality and the analysis of social behavior.

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A Conditional Approach to Dispositions: The Social Cognitive View of Personality The failure to find support for the assumption that personality consists of broad traits, expressed in consistent behavior across many different situations (e.g., Mischel, 1968; Peterson, 1968), led to a reconceptualization of personality within a social cognitive framework (Mischel, 1973; Mischel & Shoda, 1995). This approach incorporates the situation into the measurement of individual differences and of within-person stability and coherence. It shifted the unit of study from global traits inferred from behavioral signs to the person's cognitions, affect, and action assessed in relation to the particular psychological conditions in which they occur (Mischel, 1973). The focus thus changed from describing situation-free people with broad trait adjectives to analyzing the interactions between conditions and the cognitions and behaviors of interest.

Psychological Person Variables From the start of my career I have been committed to an essentially behavioral approach to personality, in which the ability to predict how the individual will behave in particular situations, and to potentially modify that behavior when there is good reason to do so, is a gold standard for the evaluation of an approach. Given that commitment, I have been cautious about introducing mediating constructs unless there is compelling evidence to hypothesize them. However, almost a century of experimental research in psychological science has made it possible and necessary to identify a set of interrelated person variables. These variables refer to the "products" of the individual's psychological and social learning history and that in turn mediate the manner in which new situations are interpreted and the cognitive, affective, and action consequences that become activated (Mischel, 1973). It will be evident to this readership that the inclusion of these variables expands considerably what constitutes "behavior" to encompass such cognitiveaffective variables as the person's outcome and efficacy expectations and the other person variables that are described in this special series. As Shoda and Smith point out, within the social cognitive model internal cognitive and affective processes can themselves be viewed and measured as "behaviors" that, just like overt behavior, are influenced by internal and external environmental cues and outcomes. The social cognitive model adheres to a methodological behaviorism in which person variables like expectancies, goals, values, and self-regulatory strategies are operationally defined with behavioral referents and situational activating conditions that make their meaning and functions unmysterious. Person variables include expectations and personal assumptions, beliefs, and theories about the self, other people, and the social world, as well as goals, values, and self-regulatory standards. They influence how the person perceives and appraises situations and responds to them, and they guide the types of situations that individuals seek and generate through their own

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behavior. Self-regulatory competencies and strategies are person variables of special relevance for the clinician because they include the diverse executive functions that make it possible--or difficult--for individuals to pursue their goals and to self-regulate their own behavior, as in goal-directed delay of gratification and other forms of self-control (for reviews of relevant research, see Metcalfe & Mischel 1999; Mischel, Cantor, & Feldman, 1996; Mischel et al., 2004). Each person variable yields distinctive information about the probable specific interaction between the individual and any given psychological situation. Although each may be conceptualized as a person variable that is the product of the individual's social-cognitive development and on which individuals differ, each also may be analyzed in terms of the psychological processes that influence its operations. The contributions in this special series illustrate research into these person variables and discuss their applications for the analysis and potential modification of disorders including depression and anxiety. Because they speak clearly for themselves, rather than reiterate their messages I will focus on a few key themes and questions that emerge.

Organization and Structure of the Cognitive-Affective Processing System Shoda and Smith (2004) address the organization of the person variables-the links of activation and deactivation among them--and their interactions within the mediating Cognitive Affective Personality System (CAPS) in relation to different activating situations (Mischel & Shoda, 1995; Shoda & Mischel, 1998). As they discuss, in the CAPS conceptualization, person variables, in the form of cognitive-affective units or CAUs, are not isolated, but rather are interconnected within an organized, relatively stable network of mental representations. These representations consist of diverse CAUs, which include the person's construal and representations of the self, people, and situations, enduring goals, expectations-beliefs and feeling states, as well as memories of people and past events. For a given person, some of these representations are more available and highly accessible, while others are less accessible or even unavailable (Higgins, 1996). The activation of these mental representations by features of situations--externally encountered or internally generated--leads to the thoughts and feelings experienced and the behaviors manifested (Mischel & Shoda, 1995). Individual differences in this model reflect differences both in the chronic accessibility of CAUs and in the distinctive organization of interrelationships among them within each individual. As Shoda and Smith discuss, the person experiences situations that contain different psychological features, different CAUs, and their characteristic interrelationships become activated in relation to these features. Consequently, the activation of CAUs changes from one time to another, and from one situation to another, as illustrated by Shoda and Smith (2004).

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Note that the change occurs not only within the individual psychologically but also in what is expressed and enacted interpersonally. For example, the "self" activated in relation to mother when visiting the family for the holidays is different from the one salient in relation to one's partner on the drive home (e.g., Andersen &Chen, 2002; Zayas et al., 2002). But while cognitions and affects that are activated at a given time change, h o w they change--that is, the sequence and pattern of their activation--remains stable, reflecting the stable structure of the organization within the system (Mischel & Shoda, 1995; Shoda & Mischel, 1998). As Shoda and Smith emphasize, the organization and structure of the system itself remains relatively stable. It is this organization that guides and constrains the activation in stable ways, although it is modifiable by new learning experiences and cognitive transformations and restructuring (e.g., as in CBT). The result is a distinctive pattern of i f . . . . t h e n . . , relations, or behavioral signatures. These are expressed in patterns of predictable behavior variability as the individual moves across different situations, as has been demonstrated both in computer simulations and in empirical studies by Shoda and colleagues (e.g., Shoda et al., 2002). These patterns are especially informative for the clinician because they provide clues about the meaning system and motivations that underlie them, as the articles in this issue illustrate. T h e C o n t e x t u a l i z e d If . . . . T h e n . . . E x p r e s s i o n s of Personality C o h e r e n c e In this social cognitive view of personality, different situations acquire different meanings for the same person as a function of social learning and of biological (e.g., temperament) predispositions. Consequently, the kinds of appraisals, expectations and beliefs, affects, goals, and behavioral scripts that are likely to become activated in relation to particular situations will vary. Theoretically, as well as empirically, there is no reason therefore to expect the individual to manifest similar behavior in relation to different psychological situations, unless they are functionally equivalent in meaning. In fact, there is extensive evidence that adaptive behavior is enhanced by discriminative facility--the ability to make fine-grained distinctions among situations. And it is undermined by broad response tendencies insensitive to context and the different consequences produced by even subtle differences in behavior when situations differ in their nuance (Cantor & Kihlstrom, 1987; Cheng, 2001, 2003; Chiu, Hong, Mischel, & Shoda, 1995; Mischel, 1973; Showers et al., 2004). Thus, to find the coherence in personality we have to take account of the situation and its meaning for the individual, which is seen in the stable interactions--the tf . . . . t h e n . . , relationships--that characterize the individual distinctively (e.g., Cervone & Shoda, 1999; Kunda, 1999; Magnusson & Endler, 1977; Mischel, 1973; Mischel & Shoda, 1995). To definitively demonstrate the stability and meaningfulness of such i f . . . . t h e n . . , situation-behavior patterns in a large-scale field study, the behavior

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of children was observed in vivo over the course of a summer within a residential camp setting (Mischel & Shoda, 1995). The data collection effort yielded an extensive archival database that allowed systematic analyses of coherence in behavior as it unfolds across naturalistic situations and over many occasions, under unusually well-controlled research conditions that assured the reliability and density of measurement (Shoda, Mischel, & Wright, 1989, 1993a, 1993b, 1994; Wright & Mischel, 1987, 1988). The children's social behavior (e.g., verbal aggression, withdrawal, friendly, prosocial behavior) was unobstrusively observed and recorded as it occurred in relation to each of the selected interpersonal situations, with an average of 167 hours of observation per child over the course of the 6-week camp. With this unique data archive, it was possible to assess the stability of the hypothesized situation-behavior relationships for each person. Importantly, the frequencies of behavior were first converted to standardized z-scores within each situation to indicate how much a given person's behavior deviated from normative levels in that situation. This standardization removes situational main effects, so that the remaining intra-individual variance in the profile reflects behavior above and beyond what would be normally expected in that situation--and thus attributable to the individual's distinctive personal qualities. If personality is conceptualized in terms of cross-situational behavioral dispositions, and the individual's variability across situations is indeed measurement noise or random fluctuation, the mean stability of the intraindividual pattern of variation after standardization should be zero (Mischel & Shoda, 1995). Alternatively, however, if the observed situation-behavior relationships reflect enduring coherence in personality, they should show some significant intra-individual stability despite the noise. And that is just what has been found.

Behavioral S i g n a t u r e s of P e r s o n a l i t y The findings revealed that individuals who have similar average levels of a type of behavior (e.g., their overall aggression) nevertheless differ predictably and meaningfully in the types of situations in which their aggressiveness occurs (Mischel & Shoda, 1995). It is obvious that people will become more aggressive in situations in which they are provoked or teased than when they are approached positively or praised. But the new finding of theoretical importance was that the person's rank order in relation to others changes systematically and predictably in different situations. The same person who is one of the least aggressive when teased may be well known for his characteristically high level of anger and irritation when flattered and praised. As every clinician knows, even if two children have similar overall levels of total aggressive behavior, for example, the one characterized by a consistent pattern of becoming exceptionally aggressive when peers approach him to play, but less aggressive than most other children when chastised by an adult for

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misbehaving, is different psychologically from the one who shows the opposite pattern. Overall, the results of the camp showed unequivocally that when closely observed, individuals are characterized by such stable, distinctive, and highly meaningful patterns of variability in their actions, thoughts, and feelings across different types of situations. These behavioral signatures of personality, like psychological fingerprints, identify what is distinctive about the individual (Shoda et al., 1993, 1994). They are especially informative to the clinician because they provide clues to the meaning systems and motivations that underlie and generate them. While the camp findings gave the strongest evidence for the stability of if .... t h e n . . . behavioral signatures, data from other studies (e.g., Fleeson, 2001; Vansteelandt & Van Mechelen, 1998) indicate that such reliable patterns of behavior variability characterize individuals distinctively as a rule, rather than an exception (e.g., Andersen & C h e n , 2002; Cervone & Shoda, 1999; Morf & Rhodewalt, 2001; Shoda et al., 2002). Moreover, these behavioral signatures seem to have considerable diagnostic significance, as the discussions of anxiety and depression in the contributions in this issue suggest. In sum, the discovery of stable behavioral signatures of variability dramatically contradicts the prediction made by trait psychology that intra-individual variability in behavior across situations is reflective of noise and should thus have an average stability of zero, and their implications for the clinician are apparent: The stable patterns of i f . . . . t h e n . . , relations displayed by clients are not isolated functional relations between single situations and responses but rather constitute stable and predictable patterns. The challenge is to identify the types of situations that trigger the problematic behavioral signatures, and the modifications needed in the CAUs and processing dynamics to make those signatures less automatic and more open to constructive modification.

From the Individual to Personality Types: Similar Distinctive Processing Dynamics and Behavioral Signatures One of course may want to go from such unique patterns that characterize the individual to consider groups of people who have similar behavioral signatures. In the CAPS framework, a personality type consists of people who share a common organization of relations among mediating units in the processing of certain situational features--that is, who have similar "processing dynamics." The types are defined in terms of distinctive social cognitive and affective processing dynamics that generate characteristic tf . . . . t h e n . . . patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behavior visible in particular types of situations. To illustrate, the h i g h r e j e c t i o n - s e n s i t i v i t y type (Downey, Feldman, & Ayduk, 2000; Feldman & Downey, 1994) describes individuals who have intense anxieties about interpersonal rejection and abandonment that become evident if they encounter in their intimate relationships what could be construed as uncaring behavior (e.g., partner is attentive to someone else). They

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scan interpersonal situations for possible cues about rejection, and appraise them in terms of their potential rejection threats, anxiously expecting to find them and vigilantly ready to see them. Then they tend to become excessively concerned about whether or not they are loved. Their own ruminations then further trigger a cascade of feelings of anger, resentment, and rage as their fears of abandonment escalate. In reaction, they may activate coercive and controlling behaviors, often blaming them on the partner's actions. They readily create a self-fulfilling prophecy in which fears of abandonment become validated by the rejections that they in part generate for themselves through their relationship-destructive control attempts. Nevertheless, on average, they may not be more likely than others to express anger, disapproval, and coercive behaviors, and under some conditions can be exceptionally caring, tender and thoughtful to their partners. In short, rejection-sensitive people view interpersonal situations, especially in intimate relationships, anxiously to assess how likely they are to be rejected and hurt, amplifying the threats and poised to overreact to them. In contrast, narcissists are an interesting contrasting type. They see the situations that distress high rejection-sensitive people as challenges to try to show off how good they are, and use them to reinforce their grandiose self-concepts by outperforming the other person, even when the cost is considerable (Morf & Rhodewalt, 2001). They also typically create post-hoc interpretations of their experiences to magnify any positive feedback to them while trivializing the negative. Diagnostic personality signatures like these offer new ways to explore the psychological processes and the social and biological histories that underlie them. It will be a challenge to articulate the mechanisms and specific steps through which they are maintained or able to change through therapeutic interventions. In a CAPS framework, personality assessment leads to the construction of typologies based on distinctive processing dynamics and personality signatures that are linked to the types of situations in which they tend to be expressed. Ultimately such a typology may enable specific predictions about how people of a particular type, that is, people who have similar processing dynamics, are likely to think, feel, and behave in particular types of situations. It offers a route to explore systematically the processing dynamics of selected types, their psychosocial and biological histories, current functioning, and potential future outcomes. It also stimulates questions about possible interventions and self-generated efforts to modify the system's dynamics constructively in the treatment process.

Specifying the Active Ingredients of Situation To develop typologies of processing dynamics and structures that incorporate situations into personality assessment, one has to go beyond their surface features or nominal characteristics of situations (such as "in the dining room" "in the group therapy") to capture their specific psychologically active

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ingredients (Shoda et al., 1994). These are the features of the situation that have significant meaning for a given individual or type, and that are related to the experienced psychological situation--the thoughts and affects and goals that become activated within the personality system and that activate the behavior patterns that are expressed. This is seen, for example, in the rejection cues in intimate relations that activate the fears and defensive maneuvers of highly rejection-sensitive people. The importance of finding these features and elaborating on their meaning for the individual has long been recognized (e.g., Kelly, 1955), as clinicians who employ functional analyses know. Unfortunately, such functional analyses remain virtually absent in mainstream, trait-based personality assessment. The encouraging development is that new methods within the social cognitive approach to personality are becoming available to facilitate analyses of active ingredients of situations (e.g., Cervone, 2004; LeeTiernan, 2002; Shoda & LeeTiernan, 2002). These innovations make it possible to go beyond the single case to identify types of individuals for whom particular sets of features have common meanings and activate similar processing dynamics (Ayduk et al., 1999; Cervone & Shoda, 1999; Shoda & Smith, 2004; Wright & Mischel, 1987). To achieve generalizability, one has to identify psychological features of situations that play a functional role in the generation of behaviors and that are contained in a wide range of nominal situations (Shoda et al., 1994; Wright & Mischel, 1988). The aim in this type of analysis is to capture those features that are encoded by perceivers in characteristic ways and that activate other relevant social cognitive person variables (e.g., expectancies, goals) in the mediating process (Wright & Mischel, 1988). To the degree that particular sets of such active ingredients or psychological features for an individual (or for a personality type) are imbedded in diverse nominal situations (e.g., on playground at school, at mealtime at home), it becomes possible to predict behavior across those seemingly different situations and contexts, allowing much broader predictability even for quite specific behavioral manifestations (Mischel & Shoda, 1995, 1998; Shoda et al., 1994). The CAPS analysis is also developing useful methods to investigate the person's interactions with situations that consist of other people. In a close relationship, one person's behavioral output becomes the other person's situational input, and vice versa, forming a dyadic system. If each partner's personality is characterized by a stable if . . . . t h e n . . , behavioral signature, the interactions between them can be modeled to predict the "personality" of the interpersonal system they form and that in turn becomes characterized by its own distinctive relationship signature and dynamics (Shoda, LeeTiernan, & Mischel, 2002). The results of these computer simulations (using a parallel constraint satisfaction network) showed that the cognitive and affective states that an individual experiences in a given relationship are an emergent property of that interpersonal system, not a simple combination or average of the personalities of the individuals. These predictions illustrate another direction for this type of processing analysis to allow specific predictions about the

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cognitions, affects, and behaviors of an individual in a given relationship, based on information about the partner.

The Self as a Guiding Cognitive Structure Reflecting the explosion of social cognitive research on the nature of the self as an organizing knowledge structure (Mischel & Morf, 2003), Showers and her colleagues (2004) explore the rich applications to psychological treatment in an expanding CB'F approach. As these authors suggest, aspects of the cognitive structure of the self may be as open to change as the contents of specific self-beliefs. Indeed, modification of the cognitive structure of the self may enable constructive change in the contents of self-concepts perhaps more effectively than therapeutic efforts targeted at the more molecular levels of behavior analysis. Using their model of compartmentalization-integration, this contribution elegantly illustrates the specific processes through which more adaptive, flexible, constructive self-change through self-structure change may be achieved in the treatment process. Their perspective, and the methods they innovate, greatly enrich tire approach to personality assessment. Their work is a key aspect of the social cognitive movement to reincorporate the self into the conception of personality and its organization (Leary & Tangney, 2003; Mischel & Morf, 2003), in contrast to a trait-based view of personality in which the self as a cognitive structure is literally lost.

Self-Regulatory Processes and Effortful Control Competencies Showers and colleagues focus on the self as a knowledge structure and articulate its guiding functions, for example, in the selective processing of self-relevant information. The explosion of research on the self in the last two decades within the social cognitive framework (e.g., Kunda, 1999) also has illuminated the processes that enable cognitive and emotional self-regulation and thus are directly relevant to CBT goals (Mischel & Morf, 2003). To a large extent these processes involve automaticity (e.g., Bargh, 1997). Nevertheless, effortful, sometimes s~elf-conscious, interruptions of the automatic flow also occur and are fundamental for effective self-regulation and longterm goal pursuit. Such efforts require the person to override more accessible, automatic and impulsive response tendencies (e.g., fight or flight) with more adaptive but less easily accessible responses in the service of goals important to the self. Sustained effortful control c.alls for a variety of strategies. These encompass planning, rehearsing, self-monitoring, and strategic attention control to overcome highly accessible but potentially dysfunctional impulsive tendencies with more appropriate, thoughtfully mediated action scripts (Gollwitzer & Moskowitz, 1996; Mischel et al., 1996). The challenge is to maintain such self-control strategies over time, and, as clinicians know, that requires converting them from conscious and effortful to automatic and spontaneous

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control. In this sense, the enactment of "willpower" to allow continued goal pursuit depends on the automatic interaction between these more automatic and more effortful subsystems. The interactions between these two subsystems are key for self-regulation. The processes that enable self-regulation have been conceptualized more recently in a theoretical two-system "hot/cool" model cast within the CAPS framework (Metcalfe & Mischel, 999). The model takes account of the automatic, "hot" stimulus-response aspects of functioning and of the more "cool" reflective, cognitive mediating system, focusing on the specifics of their interplay. Two kinds of representations were proposed--one cognitive and the other affective--that are controlled by two different subsystems. The cool system is an emotionally neutral, "know" system: it is cognitive, complex, slow, and contemplative. Attuned to the informational, cognitive, and spatial aspects of stimuli, the cool system consists of an elaborately interconnected network of informational, cool nodes, which generates rational, reflective, strategic, and planful behavior. With maturation, its activation increases but it is attenuated under high stress levels, whether acute or chronic. The cool system seems to be associated with hippocampal and frontal lobe processing (Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999). These two brain structures begin to develop around the age of 4, which is also about the time when young children start to be able to delay gratification. The hot system, in contrast, is a "go" or action system. It is specialized for quick, emotional processing, consisting of relatively few representations, or hot spots (that is, feeling fragments). When activated they trigger virtually reflexive approach (for example, consummatory) or avoidance (for example, fight-or-flight) reactions. The hot system develops early in life and is most dominant in the young infant. Current neural models suggest that the amygdala, which enables fight-or-flight responses, may be the locus of hot system processing (Gray, 1982, 1987; LeDoux, 1996; Metcalfe & Jacobs, 1996, 1998). individual differences in chronic levels of activation in both systems in part reflect biological predispositions but learning importantly influences them in the course of development and socialization. The specific mechanisms still require much research, but this type of model appears to have heuristic value for the analysis of the interactions between cognition and emotion that enable self-regulation under stressful, highly arousing conditions. These self-regulatory mechanisms are central for understanding both the potential for personal agency and self-directed change, and the coherence and stability of the individual. With regard to the first, self-regulatory competencies and "cooling" strategies allow people to overcome diverse momentary "hot" situational pressures and to prevent impulsive responding in the service of the proactive pursuit of long-term goals and life projects (e.g., LeDoux, 1996; Metcalfe & Mischei, 1999; Ochsner, Bunge, Gross, & Gabrieli, 2002; Posner & Rothbart, 2000). In this sense, they enable agency and self-directed coping behaviors that can have long-term adaptive and protective effects. For example, self-regulatory

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competencies can buffer individuals against the otherwise negative consequences of their dispositional vulnerabilities, such as chronic anxious rejection sensitivity (RS). People high in this sensitivity are at risk to develop low self-esteem and to become either aggressive or depressed when dealing with interpersonal situations that activate their rejection concerns. However, that pattern may not have to be their destiny. High RS people who also are high in self-regulatory competencies, assessed by their ability to delay gratification as young children in the delay-of-gratification paradigm, did not develop the expected negative outcomes associated with rejection sensitivity that characterized those who had the same levels of RS but who were unable to delay gratification (Ayduk, Mischel, & Downey, 2002). The convergence of research into the diverse processes--from the biological and neural to the cognitive and social--that collectively enable adaptive selfregulation promises to make the core mechanisms and necessary skills less mysterious and more open to change (e.g., Baumeister & Vohs, 2004). That also increases the hope that ultimately people do not have to be the victims of either their predispositions or their biographies. It points to the specific therapeutic interventions to enable such adaptive self-regulation, as illustrated in the articles in this special series.

Flexible Attention Deployment and Discriminativeness The adaptive value of cooling strategies to reduce stress, frustration, and short-term temptations in order to sustain the effective pursuit of the individual's long-term goals is evident. But adaptive self-regulation involves more than automatic application of cooling strategies without any other consideration. In the delay-of-gratification paradigm, for example, successful delay and goal pursuit often involve shifting attention flexibly rather than unconditional use of cooling strategies. Some of the children who delay best seem to focus briefly on the hot features in the situation to sustain motivation but then quickly switch back to the cool features and self-distraction to avoid excessive arousal and frustration (Peake, Hebl, & Mischel, 2002). Effective self-regulation also requires sensitivity to the demands, constraints, and affordances of the particular situation. Such discriminative facility--taking into account characteristics of each situation and responding accordingly--may play a central role in coping and social-emotional competence in general (see Chiu et al., 1995). Distraction, or cooling, then, is likely to be adaptive when applied to coping in aversive or frustrating situations that must be tolerated for goal attainment, but not in many other types of situations. What is important in self-regulation, whether in self-control paradigms in the delay-of-gratifications situation, or in the self-relevant strategies discussed by Showers and colleagues, comes down to a simple conclusion: Flexibility and discriminative facility is essential so that the person can adaptively match behavior to the requirements and opportunities of different situations.

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Conclusion Since its founding, CBT's distinguishing feature for me is its commitment to base what it does in clinical practice--not on habit or personal preference but on the most solid relevant findings available from the science in which it is grounded. The transformations in that science within recent years as they speak to central issues in personality theory and assessment are well-represented in this special issue. Yet they only provide a small sample of what is now available within a social cognitive perspective. To one who has closely watched these developments since their origins more than 40 years ago, a clear pattern seems to be unfolding over the years. The behavioral therapies began both as a protest against the limitation of clinical and personality psychology rooted in classic trait and psychoanalytic theory. Its commitment to identifying the links between what people do and the specific situations/conditions under which they do it proved hugely beneficial. As the conception of behavior broadened, and social cognition became a domain amenable to scientific inquiry and applications, cognition became part of the mission. How people perceive and interpret situations and themselves, and the theories and assumptions they have about themselves and the social world, was incorporated into the contents of concern within CBT. Recent years have witnessed a growing recognition of the importance of affect and the dynamic interactions between cognition and emotion that play out in processes like self-regulation that are central for adaptive coping and well-being. These interactions now also have become open to scientific scrutiny both at the level of what is mentally represented in thoughts and selfinstructions (as in the CAUs in CAPS theory) and at the level of brain processes in research in social cognitive neuroscience (e.g., reviewed in Mischel et al., 2004). Most exciting to me is that both the theoretical model and the methods for thinking about the person as an organized, coherent system are now becoming available, as this special issue suggests. A comprehensive framework is developing that draws on diverse subdisciplines--personality, clinical psychology, social cognition, the self--to integrate how relevant part-processes operate together as an organized whole system within the individual functioning in the social world. Increasingly I hope the focus will be on how the component processes within the individual operate, as it were, in concert and play out in interactions with situations as people negotiate and construct their lives. The emerging processing approach, represented within the broad CAPS framework as a prototype, offers a fresh view of the individual in terms of distinctive processing dynamics that transform predictably and meaningfully the impact of situations on the behavior patterns that emerge. I trust that this special series will turn out to mark another step in the growth of behavioral therapies at the vanguard of our science.

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Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55,454-469. Zayas, V., Shoda, Y., & Ayduk, O. (2002). Personality in context: An interpersonal systems perspective. Journal of Personality, 70, 851-898. RECEIVED: July 18, 2003 ACCEPTED: September 30, 2003