Cognitive self-regulation and social factors in maladaptive sexual behavior

Person: Single mom, who lost custody over her children, has sex with multiple male partners, asks for money afterwards, and denies that she is prostitute because she doesn't charge money up front. The mother is hypercritical and unloving and her father has been an absent figure in her life. Her stepfather abused her.

Cognitive self-regulation

Cognitive self-regulation theory, fashioned by Bandura, believes that human behavior is motivated and regulated by the influence that one has over the self. This self-influence works through three key mechanisms: monitoring one's behavior, causes of one's behavior, and the effects of that behavior; judging one's behavior in contrast to personal standards; and regulating the feelings / moods (affect) of one's conduct / behavior. Higher goals lead to enhanced behavior and this results in a certain mindset. Self-regulation is continuous and never-ending. And is also effectuated by self-reinforcement that result in self-efficacy. It is intentional and becomes habitual (Chap. 17).

Self-regulation also involves the model of self-efficacy where, through the person believing that he can regulate his behavior through past incidences of having done so; the person will be more successful. Self-efficacy affects thought, motivation, action, and affect.

The person, in question, may have difficulty dominating her sexual tendencies. She may also be in need of money. Yet, not wishing to consider herself a prostitute, she requests money as sex favor only afterwards and likely employs cognitive mechanisms that enable her to request the money that enable her to see it as part of the normal sexual interaction. Having had success and doing so in the past and still retaining the favors of her partners allows her to repeat her actions in the future with less remorse and guilt feelings each times that she does so.

Social-cognitive learning theory

Social cognitive behavior theory social / interactionist theory of cognitive theory adds social factors to the previous theory in order to explain the affect of the operation of self-regulative system theorizing that people are most affected by a social reinforcer, such as praise, approval and interest. The effect of self-reinforcement, similar to self-efficacy, also comes into focus.

The woman, in question, may have others in her environment who engage in similar behavior to hers rationalizing their habits of requesting money as favor from their sex partners once sexual activity has been perpetrated. In this way, she sees her behavior as 'normal'. For all we know, members of her family (for instance, her mother) may have engaged in similar behavior). The woman modeled it from them.

The woman, too, may be reinforced in perpetrating her behavior due to the fact that others may see her as poor and/or needing this recompense due to the fact that she ahs 'lost' her children. Commiseration and understanding of others may negate any possible self-conflict that she ever experienced, and the fact that her requests are acceded with partners perhaps returning reinforces her self-efficacy to repeat this act in the future.

Similarly, vicarious reinforcement may play a part where the woman sees similar acts perpetrated on movies where mistresses, for instance, have historically asked favors from partners during the act. The emotional aspect reinforces the intensity of expectation and defuses the wrongness of the act. (chap. 13)

Classical and / operant conditioning

The woman succeeds in gaining money from others. This gives her the positive reinforcement in doing so next time. More so, according to the law of effect, her learning conduct would encourage her to screen out only those who refuse to give her or who give her and do so in a harsh manner. Using these instances as punishing instances, the woman would learn not to meet these people again. Others who reward her lavishly or accede to her requests as par the course would serve as positive reinforcement instances where the woman sees her behavior positively reinforced and repeats her conduct with them on succeeding occasions. This is particularly so since, as * observes, a lot of the classical conditioning in humans involves responses with emotional characteristics. It is thus that the woman's behavior has been shaped, through successive approximation, in a certain direction and become conditioned to think, act, and evaluate in certain ways (Chap. 12).

Personal construct theory

A person's expectations and perceptions are constructed by a scheme of internal personal constructs (appraisals) that come from childhood experience and continue throughout one's life. The woman, for instance, may have experienced people to be unfeeling due to her negative childhood experiences. She therefore expects this treatment from others and thinks, feels, behaves in kind, living in survivor mood where she may feel that she needs to ask sexual favors from others in order to survive. She doesn't see this as prostitution; rather she sees it as necessary for survival and as game to beat people who are naturally non-caring.

The woman is particularly apt to do so since constructs, according to Kelly its creator, work according to extreme points (they are dichotomous and bipolar rather than working according to a continuum) where individuals perceive events / others according to two extreme points. The woman, therefore, may see others as either good or bad. Constructs influence everything we fix our attention on and they construct the very person herself so that her thoughts / actions / feelings become normal to her (Chap. 15).