lack of positive reinforcers in a person ’s life. That is, you may feel down and un-
motivated because you see few activities in your life worth doing. A more exten-
sive behavioral model of depression, covered in Chapter 14, proposes that
depression develops from experiences with aversive situations over which people
have little control. This theory maintains that exposure to uncontrollable events
creates a perception of helplessness that is generalized to other situations and
may develop into classic symptoms of depression.
Some cognitive personality psychologists have taken this explanation one
step further. These psychologists argue that whether people become depresseddepends on how they interpret their inability to control events. For example,
people who attribute their inability to get a promotion to a temporary eco-nomic recession will not become as depressed as people who believe it is the
result of personal inadequacies. Other cognitive psychologists propose that
some individuals use something like a depressive filter to interpret and pro-cess information. That is, depressed people are prepared to see the world in
the most depressing terms possible. For this reason, depressed people can eas-
ily recall depressing experiences. People and places they encounter are likelyto remind them of some sad or unpleasant time. In short, people become de-
pressed because they are prepared to generate depressing thoughts.
Which of these accounts of depression strikes you as the most accurate?
If you have been depressed, was it because of your low self-esteem, becauseyou experienced an uncontrollable situation, or because you tend to look at
the world through a depressing lens? As in the aggression example, more than
one of these approaches may be correct. You may have found that one theory
could explain an experience you had with depression last year, whereas an-
other seems to better account for a more recent bout. In addition, the theories
can at times complement each other. For example, people might interpret
events in a depressing way because of their low self-esteem.
One more lesson can be taken from these two examples: You need not
align yourself with the same approach to personality when explaining differentphenomena. For example, you may have found that the cognitive explanation
for aggression made the most sense to you, but that the humanistic approachprovided the best account of depression. This observation demonstrates the
main point of this section: Each of the six approaches has something to offer
the student interested in understanding personality.
PERSONALITY AND CULTURE
Psychologists have increasingly recognized the important role culture plays in
understanding personality. To some students, this observation at first seems
inconsistent with the notion of personality as distinct from situational influ-ences on behavior. However, psychologists now recognize that many of the
assumptions people in Western developed countries make when describing
and studying personality may not apply when dealing with people from dif-ferent cultures (Benet-Martinez & Oishi, 2008; Church, 2001; Kitayama &
Markus, 1994). It is not just that different experiences in different cultures10 CHAPTER 1 What Is Personality?