problem solving psychology topic

7.3 Problem-Solving

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Describe problem solving strategies
Define algorithm and heuristic
Explain some common roadblocks to effective problem solving

People face problems every day—usually, multiple problems throughout the day. Sometimes these problems are straightforward: To double a recipe for pizza dough, for example, all that is required is that each ingredient in the recipe be doubled. Sometimes, however, the problems we encounter are more complex. For example, say you have a work deadline, and you must mail a printed copy of a report to your supervisor by the end of the business day. The report is time-sensitive and must be sent overnight. You finished the report last night, but your printer will not work today. What should you do? First, you need to identify the problem and then apply a strategy for solving the problem.

The study of human and animal problem solving processes has provided much insight toward the understanding of our conscious experience and led to advancements in computer science and artificial intelligence. Essentially much of cognitive science today represents studies of how we consciously and unconsciously make decisions and solve problems. For instance, when encountered with a large amount of information, how do we go about making decisions about the most efficient way of sorting and analyzing all the information in order to find what you are looking for as in visual search paradigms in cognitive psychology. Or in a situation where a piece of machinery is not working properly, how do we go about organizing how to address the issue and understand what the cause of the problem might be. How do we sort the procedures that will be needed and focus attention on what is important in order to solve problems efficiently. Within this section we will discuss some of these issues and examine processes related to human, animal and computer problem solving.

PROBLEM-SOLVING STRATEGIES

When people are presented with a problem—whether it is a complex mathematical problem or a broken printer, how do you solve it? Before finding a solution to the problem, the problem must first be clearly identified. After that, one of many problem solving strategies can be applied, hopefully resulting in a solution.

Problems themselves can be classified into two different categories known as ill-defined and well-defined problems (Schacter, 2009). Ill-defined problems represent issues that do not have clear goals, solution paths, or expected solutions whereas well-defined problems have specific goals, clearly defined solutions, and clear expected solutions. Problem solving often incorporates pragmatics (logical reasoning) and semantics (interpretation of meanings behind the problem), and also in many cases require abstract thinking and creativity in order to find novel solutions. Within psychology, problem solving refers to a motivational drive for reading a definite “goal” from a present situation or condition that is either not moving toward that goal, is distant from it, or requires more complex logical analysis for finding a missing description of conditions or steps toward that goal. Processes relating to problem solving include problem finding also known as problem analysis, problem shaping where the organization of the problem occurs, generating alternative strategies, implementation of attempted solutions, and verification of the selected solution. Various methods of studying problem solving exist within the field of psychology including introspection, behavior analysis and behaviorism, simulation, computer modeling, and experimentation.

A problem-solving strategy is a plan of action used to find a solution. Different strategies have different action plans associated with them (table below). For example, a well-known strategy is trial and error. The old adage, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” describes trial and error. In terms of your broken printer, you could try checking the ink levels, and if that doesn’t work, you could check to make sure the paper tray isn’t jammed. Or maybe the printer isn’t actually connected to your laptop. When using trial and error, you would continue to try different solutions until you solved your problem. Although trial and error is not typically one of the most time-efficient strategies, it is a commonly used one.


Method	Description	Example
Trial and error	Continue trying different solutions until problem is solved	Restarting phone, turning off WiFi, turning off bluetooth in order to determine why your phone is malfunctioning
Algorithm	Step-by-step problem-solving formula	Instruction manual for installing new software on your computer
Heuristic	General problem-solving framework	Working backwards; breaking a task into steps

Another type of strategy is an algorithm. An algorithm is a problem-solving formula that provides you with step-by-step instructions used to achieve a desired outcome (Kahneman, 2011). You can think of an algorithm as a recipe with highly detailed instructions that produce the same result every time they are performed. Algorithms are used frequently in our everyday lives, especially in computer science. When you run a search on the Internet, search engines like Google use algorithms to decide which entries will appear first in your list of results. Facebook also uses algorithms to decide which posts to display on your newsfeed. Can you identify other situations in which algorithms are used?

A heuristic is another type of problem solving strategy. While an algorithm must be followed exactly to produce a correct result, a heuristic is a general problem-solving framework (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). You can think of these as mental shortcuts that are used to solve problems. A “rule of thumb” is an example of a heuristic. Such a rule saves the person time and energy when making a decision, but despite its time-saving characteristics, it is not always the best method for making a rational decision. Different types of heuristics are used in different types of situations, but the impulse to use a heuristic occurs when one of five conditions is met (Pratkanis, 1989):

When one is faced with too much information
When the time to make a decision is limited
When the decision to be made is unimportant
When there is access to very little information to use in making the decision
When an appropriate heuristic happens to come to mind in the same moment

Working backwards is a useful heuristic in which you begin solving the problem by focusing on the end result. Consider this example: You live in Washington, D.C. and have been invited to a wedding at 4 PM on Saturday in Philadelphia. Knowing that Interstate 95 tends to back up any day of the week, you need to plan your route and time your departure accordingly. If you want to be at the wedding service by 3:30 PM, and it takes 2.5 hours to get to Philadelphia without traffic, what time should you leave your house? You use the working backwards heuristic to plan the events of your day on a regular basis, probably without even thinking about it.

Another useful heuristic is the practice of accomplishing a large goal or task by breaking it into a series of smaller steps. Students often use this common method to complete a large research project or long essay for school. For example, students typically brainstorm, develop a thesis or main topic, research the chosen topic, organize their information into an outline, write a rough draft, revise and edit the rough draft, develop a final draft, organize the references list, and proofread their work before turning in the project. The large task becomes less overwhelming when it is broken down into a series of small steps.

Further problem solving strategies have been identified (listed below) that incorporate flexible and creative thinking in order to reach solutions efficiently.

Additional Problem Solving Strategies :

Abstraction – refers to solving the problem within a model of the situation before applying it to reality.
Analogy – is using a solution that solves a similar problem.
Brainstorming – refers to collecting an analyzing a large amount of solutions, especially within a group of people, to combine the solutions and developing them until an optimal solution is reached.
Divide and conquer – breaking down large complex problems into smaller more manageable problems.
Hypothesis testing – method used in experimentation where an assumption about what would happen in response to manipulating an independent variable is made, and analysis of the affects of the manipulation are made and compared to the original hypothesis.
Lateral thinking – approaching problems indirectly and creatively by viewing the problem in a new and unusual light.
Means-ends analysis – choosing and analyzing an action at a series of smaller steps to move closer to the goal.
Method of focal objects – putting seemingly non-matching characteristics of different procedures together to make something new that will get you closer to the goal.
Morphological analysis – analyzing the outputs of and interactions of many pieces that together make up a whole system.
Proof – trying to prove that a problem cannot be solved. Where the proof fails becomes the starting point or solving the problem.
Reduction – adapting the problem to be as similar problems where a solution exists.
Research – using existing knowledge or solutions to similar problems to solve the problem.
Root cause analysis – trying to identify the cause of the problem.

The strategies listed above outline a short summary of methods we use in working toward solutions and also demonstrate how the mind works when being faced with barriers preventing goals to be reached.

One example of means-end analysis can be found by using the Tower of Hanoi paradigm . This paradigm can be modeled as a word problems as demonstrated by the Missionary-Cannibal Problem :

Missionary-Cannibal Problem

Three missionaries and three cannibals are on one side of a river and need to cross to the other side. The only means of crossing is a boat, and the boat can only hold two people at a time. Your goal is to devise a set of moves that will transport all six of the people across the river, being in mind the following constraint: The number of cannibals can never exceed the number of missionaries in any location. Remember that someone will have to also row that boat back across each time.

Hint : At one point in your solution, you will have to send more people back to the original side than you just sent to the destination.

The actual Tower of Hanoi problem consists of three rods sitting vertically on a base with a number of disks of different sizes that can slide onto any rod. The puzzle starts with the disks in a neat stack in ascending order of size on one rod, the smallest at the top making a conical shape. The objective of the puzzle is to move the entire stack to another rod obeying the following rules:

1. Only one disk can be moved at a time.
2. Each move consists of taking the upper disk from one of the stacks and placing it on top of another stack or on an empty rod.
3. No disc may be placed on top of a smaller disk.

Figure 7.02. Steps for solving the Tower of Hanoi in the minimum number of moves when there are 3 disks.

Figure 7.03. Graphical representation of nodes (circles) and moves (lines) of Tower of Hanoi.

The Tower of Hanoi is a frequently used psychological technique to study problem solving and procedure analysis. A variation of the Tower of Hanoi known as the Tower of London has been developed which has been an important tool in the neuropsychological diagnosis of executive function disorders and their treatment.

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY AND PROBLEM SOLVING

As you may recall from the sensation and perception chapter, Gestalt psychology describes whole patterns, forms and configurations of perception and cognition such as closure, good continuation, and figure-ground. In addition to patterns of perception, Wolfgang Kohler, a German Gestalt psychologist traveled to the Spanish island of Tenerife in order to study animals behavior and problem solving in the anthropoid ape.

As an interesting side note to Kohler’s studies of chimp problem solving, Dr. Ronald Ley, professor of psychology at State University of New York provides evidence in his book A Whisper of Espionage (1990) suggesting that while collecting data for what would later be his book The Mentality of Apes (1925) on Tenerife in the Canary Islands between 1914 and 1920, Kohler was additionally an active spy for the German government alerting Germany to ships that were sailing around the Canary Islands. Ley suggests his investigations in England, Germany and elsewhere in Europe confirm that Kohler had served in the German military by building, maintaining and operating a concealed radio that contributed to Germany’s war effort acting as a strategic outpost in the Canary Islands that could monitor naval military activity approaching the north African coast.

While trapped on the island over the course of World War 1, Kohler applied Gestalt principles to animal perception in order to understand how they solve problems. He recognized that the apes on the islands also perceive relations between stimuli and the environment in Gestalt patterns and understand these patterns as wholes as opposed to pieces that make up a whole. Kohler based his theories of animal intelligence on the ability to understand relations between stimuli, and spent much of his time while trapped on the island investigation what he described as insight , the sudden perception of useful or proper relations. In order to study insight in animals, Kohler would present problems to chimpanzee’s by hanging some banana’s or some kind of food so it was suspended higher than the apes could reach. Within the room, Kohler would arrange a variety of boxes, sticks or other tools the chimpanzees could use by combining in patterns or organizing in a way that would allow them to obtain the food (Kohler & Winter, 1925).

While viewing the chimpanzee’s, Kohler noticed one chimp that was more efficient at solving problems than some of the others. The chimp, named Sultan, was able to use long poles to reach through bars and organize objects in specific patterns to obtain food or other desirables that were originally out of reach. In order to study insight within these chimps, Kohler would remove objects from the room to systematically make the food more difficult to obtain. As the story goes, after removing many of the objects Sultan was used to using to obtain the food, he sat down ad sulked for a while, and then suddenly got up going over to two poles lying on the ground. Without hesitation Sultan put one pole inside the end of the other creating a longer pole that he could use to obtain the food demonstrating an ideal example of what Kohler described as insight. In another situation, Sultan discovered how to stand on a box to reach a banana that was suspended from the rafters illustrating Sultan’s perception of relations and the importance of insight in problem solving.

Grande (another chimp in the group studied by Kohler) builds a three-box structure to reach the bananas, while Sultan watches from the ground. Insight , sometimes referred to as an “Ah-ha” experience, was the term Kohler used for the sudden perception of useful relations among objects during problem solving (Kohler, 1927; Radvansky & Ashcraft, 2013).

Solving puzzles.

Problem-solving abilities can improve with practice. Many people challenge themselves every day with puzzles and other mental exercises to sharpen their problem-solving skills. Sudoku puzzles appear daily in most newspapers. Typically, a sudoku puzzle is a 9×9 grid. The simple sudoku below (see figure) is a 4×4 grid. To solve the puzzle, fill in the empty boxes with a single digit: 1, 2, 3, or 4. Here are the rules: The numbers must total 10 in each bolded box, each row, and each column; however, each digit can only appear once in a bolded box, row, and column. Time yourself as you solve this puzzle and compare your time with a classmate.

How long did it take you to solve this sudoku puzzle? (You can see the answer at the end of this section.)

Here is another popular type of puzzle (figure below) that challenges your spatial reasoning skills. Connect all nine dots with four connecting straight lines without lifting your pencil from the paper:

Did you figure it out? (The answer is at the end of this section.) Once you understand how to crack this puzzle, you won’t forget.

Take a look at the “Puzzling Scales” logic puzzle below (figure below). Sam Loyd, a well-known puzzle master, created and refined countless puzzles throughout his lifetime (Cyclopedia of Puzzles, n.d.).

A puzzle involving a scale is shown. At the top of the figure it reads: “Sam Loyds Puzzling Scales.” The first row of the puzzle shows a balanced scale with 3 blocks and a top on the left and 12 marbles on the right. Below this row it reads: “Since the scales now balance.” The next row of the puzzle shows a balanced scale with just the top on the left, and 1 block and 8 marbles on the right. Below this row it reads: “And balance when arranged this way.” The third row shows an unbalanced scale with the top on the left side, which is much lower than the right side. The right side is empty. Below this row it reads: “Then how many marbles will it require to balance with that top?”

What steps did you take to solve this puzzle? You can read the solution at the end of this section.

Pitfalls to problem solving.

Not all problems are successfully solved, however. What challenges stop us from successfully solving a problem? Albert Einstein once said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” Imagine a person in a room that has four doorways. One doorway that has always been open in the past is now locked. The person, accustomed to exiting the room by that particular doorway, keeps trying to get out through the same doorway even though the other three doorways are open. The person is stuck—but she just needs to go to another doorway, instead of trying to get out through the locked doorway. A mental set is where you persist in approaching a problem in a way that has worked in the past but is clearly not working now.

Functional fixedness is a type of mental set where you cannot perceive an object being used for something other than what it was designed for. During the Apollo 13 mission to the moon, NASA engineers at Mission Control had to overcome functional fixedness to save the lives of the astronauts aboard the spacecraft. An explosion in a module of the spacecraft damaged multiple systems. The astronauts were in danger of being poisoned by rising levels of carbon dioxide because of problems with the carbon dioxide filters. The engineers found a way for the astronauts to use spare plastic bags, tape, and air hoses to create a makeshift air filter, which saved the lives of the astronauts.

Researchers have investigated whether functional fixedness is affected by culture. In one experiment, individuals from the Shuar group in Ecuador were asked to use an object for a purpose other than that for which the object was originally intended. For example, the participants were told a story about a bear and a rabbit that were separated by a river and asked to select among various objects, including a spoon, a cup, erasers, and so on, to help the animals. The spoon was the only object long enough to span the imaginary river, but if the spoon was presented in a way that reflected its normal usage, it took participants longer to choose the spoon to solve the problem. (German & Barrett, 2005). The researchers wanted to know if exposure to highly specialized tools, as occurs with individuals in industrialized nations, affects their ability to transcend functional fixedness. It was determined that functional fixedness is experienced in both industrialized and nonindustrialized cultures (German & Barrett, 2005).

In order to make good decisions, we use our knowledge and our reasoning. Often, this knowledge and reasoning is sound and solid. Sometimes, however, we are swayed by biases or by others manipulating a situation. For example, let’s say you and three friends wanted to rent a house and had a combined target budget of $1,600. The realtor shows you only very run-down houses for $1,600 and then shows you a very nice house for $2,000. Might you ask each person to pay more in rent to get the $2,000 home? Why would the realtor show you the run-down houses and the nice house? The realtor may be challenging your anchoring bias. An anchoring bias occurs when you focus on one piece of information when making a decision or solving a problem. In this case, you’re so focused on the amount of money you are willing to spend that you may not recognize what kinds of houses are available at that price point.

The confirmation bias is the tendency to focus on information that confirms your existing beliefs. For example, if you think that your professor is not very nice, you notice all of the instances of rude behavior exhibited by the professor while ignoring the countless pleasant interactions he is involved in on a daily basis. Hindsight bias leads you to believe that the event you just experienced was predictable, even though it really wasn’t. In other words, you knew all along that things would turn out the way they did. Representative bias describes a faulty way of thinking, in which you unintentionally stereotype someone or something; for example, you may assume that your professors spend their free time reading books and engaging in intellectual conversation, because the idea of them spending their time playing volleyball or visiting an amusement park does not fit in with your stereotypes of professors.

Finally, the availability heuristic is a heuristic in which you make a decision based on an example, information, or recent experience that is that readily available to you, even though it may not be the best example to inform your decision . Biases tend to “preserve that which is already established—to maintain our preexisting knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and hypotheses” (Aronson, 1995; Kahneman, 2011). These biases are summarized in the table below.


Bias	Description
Anchoring	Tendency to focus on one particular piece of information when making decisions or problem-solving
Confirmation	Focuses on information that confirms existing beliefs
Hindsight	Belief that the event just experienced was predictable
Representative	Unintentional stereotyping of someone or something
Availability	Decision is based upon either an available precedent or an example that may be faulty

Were you able to determine how many marbles are needed to balance the scales in the figure below? You need nine. Were you able to solve the problems in the figures above? Here are the answers.

The first puzzle is a Sudoku grid of 16 squares (4 rows of 4 squares) is shown. Half of the numbers were supplied to start the puzzle and are colored blue, and half have been filled in as the puzzle’s solution and are colored red. The numbers in each row of the grid, left to right, are as follows. Row 1: blue 3, red 1, red 4, blue 2. Row 2: red 2, blue 4, blue 1, red 3. Row 3: red 1, blue 3, blue 2, red 4. Row 4: blue 4, red 2, red 3, blue 1.The second puzzle consists of 9 dots arranged in 3 rows of 3 inside of a square. The solution, four straight lines made without lifting the pencil, is shown in a red line with arrows indicating the direction of movement. In order to solve the puzzle, the lines must extend beyond the borders of the box. The four connecting lines are drawn as follows. Line 1 begins at the top left dot, proceeds through the middle and right dots of the top row, and extends to the right beyond the border of the square. Line 2 extends from the end of line 1, through the right dot of the horizontally centered row, through the middle dot of the bottom row, and beyond the square’s border ending in the space beneath the left dot of the bottom row. Line 3 extends from the end of line 2 upwards through the left dots of the bottom, middle, and top rows. Line 4 extends from the end of line 3 through the middle dot in the middle row and ends at the right dot of the bottom row.

Many different strategies exist for solving problems. Typical strategies include trial and error, applying algorithms, and using heuristics. To solve a large, complicated problem, it often helps to break the problem into smaller steps that can be accomplished individually, leading to an overall solution. Roadblocks to problem solving include a mental set, functional fixedness, and various biases that can cloud decision making skills.

References:

Openstax Psychology text by Kathryn Dumper, William Jenkins, Arlene Lacombe, Marilyn Lovett and Marion Perlmutter licensed under CC BY v4.0. https://openstax.org/details/books/psychology

Review Questions:

1. A specific formula for solving a problem is called ________.

a. an algorithm

b. a heuristic

c. a mental set

d. trial and error

2. Solving the Tower of Hanoi problem tends to utilize a ________ strategy of problem solving.

a. divide and conquer

b. means-end analysis

d. experiment

3. A mental shortcut in the form of a general problem-solving framework is called ________.

4. Which type of bias involves becoming fixated on a single trait of a problem?

a. anchoring bias

b. confirmation bias

c. representative bias

d. availability bias

5. Which type of bias involves relying on a false stereotype to make a decision?

6. Wolfgang Kohler analyzed behavior of chimpanzees by applying Gestalt principles to describe ________.

a. social adjustment

b. student load payment options

c. emotional learning

d. insight learning

7. ________ is a type of mental set where you cannot perceive an object being used for something other than what it was designed for.

a. functional fixedness

c. working memory

Critical Thinking Questions:

1. What is functional fixedness and how can overcoming it help you solve problems?

2. How does an algorithm save you time and energy when solving a problem?

Personal Application Question:

1. Which type of bias do you recognize in your own decision making processes? How has this bias affected how you’ve made decisions in the past and how can you use your awareness of it to improve your decisions making skills in the future?

anchoring bias

availability heuristic

confirmation bias

functional fixedness

hindsight bias

problem-solving strategy

representative bias

trial and error

working backwards

Answers to Exercises

algorithm: problem-solving strategy characterized by a specific set of instructions

anchoring bias: faulty heuristic in which you fixate on a single aspect of a problem to find a solution

availability heuristic: faulty heuristic in which you make a decision based on information readily available to you

confirmation bias: faulty heuristic in which you focus on information that confirms your beliefs

functional fixedness: inability to see an object as useful for any other use other than the one for which it was intended

heuristic: mental shortcut that saves time when solving a problem

hindsight bias: belief that the event just experienced was predictable, even though it really wasn’t

mental set: continually using an old solution to a problem without results

problem-solving strategy: method for solving problems

representative bias: faulty heuristic in which you stereotype someone or something without a valid basis for your judgment

trial and error: problem-solving strategy in which multiple solutions are attempted until the correct one is found

working backwards: heuristic in which you begin to solve a problem by focusing on the end result

Share This Book

Increase Font Size

Subject List
Take a Tour
For Authors
Subscriber Services
Publications
African American Studies
African Studies
American Literature
Anthropology
Architecture Planning and Preservation
Art History
Atlantic History
Biblical Studies
British and Irish Literature
Childhood Studies
Chinese Studies
Cinema and Media Studies
Communication
Criminology
Environmental Science
Evolutionary Biology
International Law
International Relations
Islamic Studies
Jewish Studies
Latin American Studies
Latino Studies
Linguistics
Literary and Critical Theory
Medieval Studies
Military History
Political Science
Public Health
Renaissance and Reformation
Social Work
Urban Studies
Victorian Literature
Browse All Subjects

How to Subscribe

Free Trials

In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Problem Solving and Decision Making

Introduction.

General Approaches to Problem Solving
Representational Accounts
Problem Space and Search
Working Memory and Problem Solving
Domain-Specific Problem Solving
The Rational Approach
Prospect Theory
Dual-Process Theory
Cognitive Heuristics and Biases

Other Subject Areas

Forthcoming articles expand or collapse the "forthcoming articles" section.

Data Visualization
Executive Functions in Childhood
Remote Work
Find more forthcoming articles...
Export Citations
Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Problem Solving and Decision Making by Emily G. Nielsen , John Paul Minda LAST REVIEWED: 26 June 2019 LAST MODIFIED: 26 June 2019 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199828340-0246

Problem solving and decision making are both examples of complex, higher-order thinking. Both involve the assessment of the environment, the involvement of working memory or short-term memory, reliance on long term memory, effects of knowledge, and the application of heuristics to complete a behavior. A problem can be defined as an impasse or gap between a current state and a desired goal state. Problem solving is the set of cognitive operations that a person engages in to change the current state, to go beyond the impasse, and achieve a desired outcome. Problem solving involves the mental representation of the problem state and the manipulation of this representation in order to move closer to the goal. Problems can vary in complexity, abstraction, and how well defined (or not) the initial state and the goal state are. Research has generally approached problem solving by examining the behaviors and cognitive processes involved, and some work has examined problem solving using computational processes as well. Decision making is the process of selecting and choosing one action or behavior out of several alternatives. Like problem solving, decision making involves the coordination of memories and executive resources. Research on decision making has paid particular attention to the cognitive biases that account for suboptimal decisions and decisions that deviate from rationality. The current bibliography first outlines some general resources on the psychology of problem solving and decision making before examining each of these topics in detail. Specifically, this review covers cognitive, neuroscientific, and computational approaches to problem solving, as well as decision making models and cognitive heuristics and biases.

General Overviews

Current research in the area of problem solving and decision making is published in both general and specialized scientific journals. Theoretical and scholarly work is often summarized and developed in full-length books and chapter. These may focus on the subfields of problem solving and decision making or the larger field of thinking and higher-order cognition.

Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page. Please subscribe or login .

Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here .

About Psychology »
Meet the Editorial Board »
Abnormal Psychology
Academic Assessment
Acculturation and Health
Action Regulation Theory
Action Research
Addictive Behavior
Adolescence
Adoption, Social, Psychological, and Evolutionary Perspect...
Advanced Theory of Mind
Affective Forecasting
Affirmative Action
Ageism at Work
Allport, Gordon
Alzheimer’s Disease
Ambulatory Assessment in Behavioral Science
Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA)
Animal Behavior
Animal Learning
Anxiety Disorders
Art and Aesthetics, Psychology of
Assessment and Clinical Applications of Individual Differe...
Attachment in Social and Emotional Development across the ...
Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in Adults
Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in Childre...
Attitudinal Ambivalence
Attraction in Close Relationships
Attribution Theory
Authoritarian Personality
Bayesian Statistical Methods in Psychology
Behavior Therapy, Rational Emotive
Behavioral Economics
Behavioral Genetics
Belief Perseverance
Bereavement and Grief
Biological Psychology
Birth Order
Body Image in Men and Women
Bystander Effect
Categorical Data Analysis in Psychology
Childhood and Adolescence, Peer Victimization and Bullying...
Clark, Mamie Phipps
Clinical Neuropsychology
Clinical Psychology
Cognitive Consistency Theories
Cognitive Dissonance Theory
Cognitive Neuroscience
Communication, Nonverbal Cues and
Comparative Psychology
Competence to Stand Trial: Restoration Services
Competency to Stand Trial
Computational Psychology
Conflict Management in the Workplace
Conformity, Compliance, and Obedience
Consciousness
Coping Processes
Correspondence Analysis in Psychology
Counseling Psychology
Creativity at Work
Cross-Cultural Psychology
Cultural Psychology
Daily Life, Research Methods for Studying
Data Science Methods for Psychology
Data Sharing in Psychology
Death and Dying
Deceiving and Detecting Deceit
Defensive Processes
Depressive Disorders
Development, Prenatal
Developmental Psychology (Cognitive)
Developmental Psychology (Social)
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM...
Discrimination
Dissociative Disorders
Drugs and Behavior
Eating Disorders
Ecological Psychology
Educational Settings, Assessment of Thinking in
Effect Size
Embodiment and Embodied Cognition
Emerging Adulthood
Emotional Intelligence
Empathy and Altruism
Employee Stress and Well-Being
Environmental Neuroscience and Environmental Psychology
Ethics in Psychological Practice
Event Perception
Evolutionary Psychology
Expansive Posture
Experimental Existential Psychology
Exploratory Data Analysis
Eyewitness Testimony
Eysenck, Hans
Factor Analysis
Festinger, Leon
Five-Factor Model of Personality
Flynn Effect, The
Forensic Psychology
Forgiveness
Friendships, Children's
Fundamental Attribution Error/Correspondence Bias
Gambler's Fallacy
Game Theory and Psychology
Geropsychology, Clinical
Global Mental Health
Habit Formation and Behavior Change
Health Psychology
Health Psychology Research and Practice, Measurement in
Heider, Fritz
History of Psychology
Human Factors
Humanistic Psychology
Implicit Association Test (IAT)
Industrial and Organizational Psychology
Inferential Statistics in Psychology
Insanity Defense, The
Intelligence
Intelligence, Crystallized and Fluid
Intercultural Psychology
Intergroup Conflict
International Classification of Diseases and Related Healt...
International Psychology
Interviewing in Forensic Settings
Intimate Partner Violence, Psychological Perspectives on
Introversion–Extraversion
Item Response Theory
Law, Psychology and
Lazarus, Richard
Learned Helplessness
Learning Theory
Learning versus Performance
LGBTQ+ Romantic Relationships
Lie Detection in a Forensic Context
Life-Span Development
Locus of Control
Loneliness and Health
Mathematical Psychology
Meaning in Life
Mechanisms and Processes of Peer Contagion
Media Violence, Psychological Perspectives on
Mediation Analysis
Memories, Autobiographical
Memories, Flashbulb
Memories, Repressed and Recovered
Memory, False
Memory, Human
Memory, Implicit versus Explicit
Memory in Educational Settings
Memory, Semantic
Meta-Analysis
Metacognition
Metaphor, Psychological Perspectives on
Microaggressions
Military Psychology
Mindfulness
Mindfulness and Education
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)
Money, Psychology of
Moral Conviction
Moral Development
Moral Psychology
Moral Reasoning
Nature versus Nurture Debate in Psychology
Neuroscience of Associative Learning
Nonergodicity in Psychology and Neuroscience
Nonparametric Statistical Analysis in Psychology
Observational (Non-Randomized) Studies
Obsessive-Complusive Disorder (OCD)
Occupational Health Psychology
Olfaction, Human
Operant Conditioning
Optimism and Pessimism
Organizational Justice
Parenting Stress
Parenting Styles
Parents' Beliefs about Children
Path Models
Peace Psychology
Perception, Person
Performance Appraisal
Personality and Health
Personality Disorders
Personality Psychology
Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapies: From Car...
Phenomenological Psychology
Placebo Effects in Psychology
Play Behavior
Positive Psychological Capital (PsyCap)
Positive Psychology
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Prejudice and Stereotyping
Pretrial Publicity
Prisoner's Dilemma
Problem Solving and Decision Making
Procrastination
Prosocial Behavior
Prosocial Spending and Well-Being
Psycholinguistics
Psychological Literacy
Psychological Perspectives on Food and Eating
Psychology, Political
Psychoneuroimmunology
Psychophysics, Visual
Psychotherapy
Psychotic Disorders
Publication Bias in Psychology
Reasoning, Counterfactual
Rehabilitation Psychology
Relationships
Reliability–Contemporary Psychometric Conceptions
Religion, Psychology and
Replication Initiatives in Psychology
Research Methods
Risk Taking
Role of the Expert Witness in Forensic Psychology, The
Sample Size Planning for Statistical Power and Accurate Es...
Schizophrenic Disorders
School Psychology
School Psychology, Counseling Services in
Self, Gender and
Self, Psychology of the
Self-Construal
Self-Control
Self-Deception
Self-Determination Theory
Self-Efficacy
Self-Esteem
Self-Monitoring
Self-Regulation in Educational Settings
Self-Report Tests, Measures, and Inventories in Clinical P...
Sensation Seeking
Sex and Gender
Sexual Minority Parenting
Sexual Orientation
Signal Detection Theory and its Applications
Simpson's Paradox in Psychology
Single People
Single-Case Experimental Designs
Skinner, B.F.
Sleep and Dreaming
Small Groups
Social Class and Social Status
Social Cognition
Social Neuroscience
Social Support
Social Touch and Massage Therapy Research
Somatoform Disorders
Spatial Attention
Sports Psychology
Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE): Icon and Controversy
Stereotype Threat
Stereotypes
Stress and Coping, Psychology of
Student Success in College
Subjective Wellbeing Homeostasis
Taste, Psychological Perspectives on
Teaching of Psychology
Terror Management Theory
Testing and Assessment
The Concept of Validity in Psychological Assessment
The Neuroscience of Emotion Regulation
The Reasoned Action Approach and the Theories of Reasoned ...
The Weapon Focus Effect in Eyewitness Memory
Theory of Mind
Therapy, Cognitive-Behavioral
Thinking Skills in Educational Settings
Time Perception
Trait Perspective
Trauma Psychology
Twin Studies
Type A Behavior Pattern (Coronary Prone Personality)
Unconscious Processes
Video Games and Violent Content
Virtues and Character Strengths
Women and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM...
Women, Psychology of
Work Well-Being
Workforce Training Evaluation
Wundt, Wilhelm
Privacy Policy
Cookie Policy
Legal Notice
Accessibility

[195.190.12.77]
195.190.12.77

7.3 Problem Solving

Learning objectives.

Describe problem solving strategies
Define algorithm and heuristic
Explain some common roadblocks to effective problem solving

Problem-Solving Strategies

When you are presented with a problem—whether it is a complex mathematical problem or a broken printer, how do you solve it? Before finding a solution to the problem, the problem must first be clearly identified. After that, one of many problem solving strategies can be applied, hopefully resulting in a solution.

A problem-solving strategy is a plan of action used to find a solution. Different strategies have different action plans associated with them ( Table 7.2 ). For example, a well-known strategy is trial and error . The old adage, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” describes trial and error. In terms of your broken printer, you could try checking the ink levels, and if that doesn’t work, you could check to make sure the paper tray isn’t jammed. Or maybe the printer isn’t actually connected to your laptop. When using trial and error, you would continue to try different solutions until you solved your problem. Although trial and error is not typically one of the most time-efficient strategies, it is a commonly used one.

Method	Description	Example
Trial and error	Continue trying different solutions until problem is solved	Restarting phone, turning off WiFi, turning off bluetooth in order to determine why your phone is malfunctioning
Algorithm	Step-by-step problem-solving formula	Instruction manual for installing new software on your computer
Heuristic	General problem-solving framework	Working backwards; breaking a task into steps

When one is faced with too much information
When the time to make a decision is limited
When the decision to be made is unimportant
When there is access to very little information to use in making the decision
When an appropriate heuristic happens to come to mind in the same moment

Everyday Connection

Solving puzzles.

Problem-solving abilities can improve with practice. Many people challenge themselves every day with puzzles and other mental exercises to sharpen their problem-solving skills. Sudoku puzzles appear daily in most newspapers. Typically, a sudoku puzzle is a 9×9 grid. The simple sudoku below ( Figure 7.8 ) is a 4×4 grid. To solve the puzzle, fill in the empty boxes with a single digit: 1, 2, 3, or 4. Here are the rules: The numbers must total 10 in each bolded box, each row, and each column; however, each digit can only appear once in a bolded box, row, and column. Time yourself as you solve this puzzle and compare your time with a classmate.

Here is another popular type of puzzle ( Figure 7.9 ) that challenges your spatial reasoning skills. Connect all nine dots with four connecting straight lines without lifting your pencil from the paper:

Take a look at the “Puzzling Scales” logic puzzle below ( Figure 7.10 ). Sam Loyd, a well-known puzzle master, created and refined countless puzzles throughout his lifetime (Cyclopedia of Puzzles, n.d.).

Pitfalls to Problem Solving

Link to Learning

Check out this Apollo 13 scene where the group of NASA engineers are given the task of overcoming functional fixedness.

Bias	Description
Anchoring	Tendency to focus on one particular piece of information when making decisions or problem-solving
Confirmation	Focuses on information that confirms existing beliefs
Hindsight	Belief that the event just experienced was predictable
Representative	Unintentional stereotyping of someone or something
Availability	Decision is based upon either an available precedent or an example that may be faulty

Please visit this site to see a clever music video that a high school teacher made to explain these and other cognitive biases to his AP psychology students.

Were you able to determine how many marbles are needed to balance the scales in Figure 7.10 ? You need nine. Were you able to solve the problems in Figure 7.8 and Figure 7.9 ? Here are the answers ( Figure 7.11 ).

This book may not be used in the training of large language models or otherwise be ingested into large language models or generative AI offerings without OpenStax's permission.

Want to cite, share, or modify this book? This book uses the Creative Commons Attribution License and you must attribute OpenStax.

Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/psychology/pages/1-introduction

Authors: Rose M. Spielman, Kathryn Dumper, William Jenkins, Arlene Lacombe, Marilyn Lovett, Marion Perlmutter
Publisher/website: OpenStax
Book title: Psychology
Publication date: Dec 8, 2014
Location: Houston, Texas
Book URL: https://openstax.org/books/psychology/pages/1-introduction
Section URL: https://openstax.org/books/psychology/pages/7-3-problem-solving

© Feb 9, 2022 OpenStax. Textbook content produced by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License . The OpenStax name, OpenStax logo, OpenStax book covers, OpenStax CNX name, and OpenStax CNX logo are not subject to the Creative Commons license and may not be reproduced without the prior and express written consent of Rice University.

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

64 Problem Solving

Learning Objectives

Describe problem solving strategies
Define algorithm and heuristic
Explain some common roadblocks to effective problem solving and decision making

Problem-Solving Strategies

A problem-solving strategy is a plan of action used to find a solution. Different strategies have different action plans associated with them ( Table LI.2 ). For example, a well-known strategy is trial and error . The old adage, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” describes trial and error. In terms of your broken printer, you could try checking the ink levels, and if that doesn’t work, you could check to make sure the paper tray isn’t jammed. Or maybe the printer isn’t actually connected to your laptop. When using trial and error, you would continue to try different solutions until you solved your problem. Although trial and error is not typically one of the most time-efficient strategies, it is a commonly used one.

Table LI.2 Problem-Solving Strategies
Method	Description	Example
Trial and error	Continue trying different solutions until problem is solved	Restarting phone, turning off WiFi, turning off bluetooth in order to determine why your phone is malfunctioning
Algorithm	Step-by-step problem-solving formula	Instruction manual for installing new software on your computer
Heuristic	General problem-solving framework	Working backwards; breaking a task into steps

When one is faced with too much information
When the time to make a decision is limited
When the decision to be made is unimportant
When there is access to very little information to use in making the decision
When an appropriate heuristic happens to come to mind in the same moment

Working backwards is a useful heuristic in which you begin solving the problem by focusing on the end result. Consider this example: You live in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and have been invited to a wedding at 4 PM on Saturday in Cape Breton. Knowing that the Canso Causeway can be backed up any day of the week, you need to plan your route and time your departure accordingly. If you want to be at the wedding service by 3:30 PM, and it takes 3 hours to get to Cape Breton without traffic, what time should you leave your house? You use the working backwards heuristic to plan the events of your day on a regular basis, probably without even thinking about it.

If the video above does not load, click here: https://youtu.be/MtvY54Pfr7M

EVERYDAY CONNECTION

Solving Puzzles

Problem-solving abilities can improve with practice. Many people challenge themselves every day with puzzles and other mental exercises to sharpen their problem-solving skills. Sudoku puzzles appear daily in most newspapers. Typically, a sudoku puzzle is a 9×9 grid. The simple sudoku below ( Figure LI.7 ) is a 4×4 grid. To solve the puzzle, fill in the empty boxes with a single digit: 1, 2, 3, or 4. Here are the rules: The numbers must total 10 in each bolded box, each row, and each column; however, each digit can only appear once in a bolded box, row, and column. Time yourself as you solve this puzzle and compare your time with a classmate.

A four column by four row Sudoku puzzle is shown. The top left cell contains the number 3. The top right cell contains the number 2. The bottom right cell contains the number 1. The bottom left cell contains the number 4. The cell at the intersection of the second row and the second column contains the number 4. The cell to the right of that contains the number 1. The cell below the cell containing the number 1 contains the number 2. The cell to the left of the cell containing the number 2 contains the number 3.

Here is another popular type of puzzle ( Figure LI.8 ) that challenges your spatial reasoning skills. Connect all nine dots with four connecting straight lines without lifting your pencil from the paper:

A square shaped outline contains three rows and three columns of dots with equal space between them.

Pitfalls to Problem Solving

Not all problems are successfully solved, however. What challenges stop us from successfully solving a problem? Albert Einstein once said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” Imagine a person in a room that has four doorways. One doorway that has always been open in the past is now locked. The person, accustomed to exiting the room by that particular doorway, keeps trying to get out through the same doorway even though the other three doorways are open. The person is stuck—but they just need to go to another doorway, instead of trying to get out through the locked doorway. A mental set is where you persist in approaching a problem in a way that has worked in the past but is clearly not working now.

Functional fixedness is a type of mental set where you cannot perceive an object being used for something other than what it was designed for. Duncker (1945) conducted foundational research on functional fixedness. He created an experiment in which participants were given a candle, a book of matches, and a box of thumbtacks. They were instructed to use those items to attach the candle to the wall so that it did not drip wax onto the table below. Participants had to use functional fixedness to solve the problem ( Figure LI.10 ). During the Apollo 13 mission to the moon, NASA engineers at Mission Control had to overcome functional fixedness to save the lives of the astronauts aboard the spacecraft. An explosion in a module of the spacecraft damaged multiple systems. The astronauts were in danger of being poisoned by rising levels of carbon dioxide because of problems with the carbon dioxide filters. The engineers found a way for the astronauts to use spare plastic bags, tape, and air hoses to create a makeshift air filter, which saved the lives of the astronauts.

Figure a shows a book of matches, a box of thumbtacks, and a candle. Figure b shows the candle standing in the box that held the thumbtacks. A thumbtack attaches the box holding the candle to the wall.

LINK TO LEARNING

The confirmation bias is the tendency to focus on information that confirms your existing beliefs. For example, if you think that your professor is not very nice, you notice all of the instances of rude behaviour exhibited by the professor while ignoring the countless pleasant interactions they are involved in on a daily basis. Hindsight bias leads you to believe that the event you just experienced was predictable, even though it really wasn’t. In other words, you knew all along that things would turn out the way they did. Representativeness heuristic describes a faulty way of thinking, in which you unintentionally stereotype someone or something; for example, you may assume that your professors spend their free time reading books and engaging in intellectual conversation, because the idea of them spending their time playing volleyball or visiting an amusement park does not fit in with your stereotypes of professors.

LI.3 Summary of Decision Biases
Bias	Description
Anchoring	Tendency to focus on one particular piece of information when making decisions or problem-solving
Confirmation	Focuses on information that confirms existing beliefs
Hindsight	Belief that the event just experienced was predictable
Representative	Unintentional stereotyping of someone or something
Availability	Decision is based upon either an available precedent or an example that may be faulty

Inductive vs Deductive Reasoning

Deductive reasoning starts with general principles that are applied to specific instances (the reverse of inductive reasoning). When the general principles, or premises , are true, and the structure of the argument is valid, the conclusion is, by definition, proven; it must be so. A deductive truth must apply in all relevant circumstances. For example, all living cells contain DNA. From this, you can reason—deductively—that any specific living cell (of an elephant, or a person, or a snake) will therefore contain DNA. Given the complexity of psychological phenomena, which involve many contributing factors, it is nearly impossible to make these types of broad statements with certainty.

Were you able to determine how many marbles are needed to balance the scales in Figure LI.9 ? You need nine. Were you able to solve the problems in Figure LI.7 and Figure LI.8 ? Here are the answers ( Figure LI.11 ).

Share This Book

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

7 Thinking, Language, and Problem Solving

Three different artistic portrayals of a person in thought are shown. From left to right, a painting of a woman with an open book, a sculpture of a man hunched over, head on chin, and a ink painting of a man sitting cross-legged holding his head.

What is the best way to solve a problem? How does a person who has never seen or touched snow in real life develop an understanding of the concept of snow? How do young children acquire the ability to learn language with no formal instruction? Psychologists who study thinking explore questions like these and are called cognitive psychologists.

In other chapters, we discussed the cognitive processes of perception, learning, and memory. In this chapter, we will focus on high-level cognitive processes. As a part of this discussion, we will consider thinking and briefly explore the development and use of language. We will also discuss problem solving and creativity. After finishing this chapter, you will have a greater appreciation of the higher-level cognitive processes that contribute to our distinctiveness as a species.

7.1 What is Cognition? 7.2 Language 7.3 Problem Solving

7.1 What is Cognition?

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Describe cognition
Distinguish concepts and prototypes
Explain the difference between natural and artificial concepts
Describe how schemata are organized and constructed

Imagine all of your thoughts as if they were physical entities, swirling rapidly inside your mind. How is it possible that the brain is able to move from one thought to the next in an organized, orderly fashion? The brain is endlessly perceiving, processing, planning, organizing, and remembering—it is always active. Yet, you don’t notice most of your brain’s activity as you move throughout your daily routine. This is only one facet of the complex processes involved in cognition . Simply put, cognition is thinking, and it encompasses the processes associated with perception, knowledge, problem solving, judgment, language, and memory. Scientists who study cognition are searching for ways to understand how we integrate, organize, and utilize our conscious cognitive experiences without being aware of all of the unconscious work that our brains are doing (for example, Kahneman, 2011).

Upon waking each morning, you begin thinking—contemplating the tasks that you must complete that day. In what order should you run your errands? Should you go to the bank, the cleaners, or the grocery store first? Can you get these things done before you head to class or will they need to wait until school is done? These thoughts are one example of cognition at work. Exceptionally complex, cognition is an essential feature of human consciousness, yet not all aspects of cognition are consciously experienced.

Cognitive psychology is the field of psychology dedicated to examining how people think. It attempts to explain how and why we think the way we do by studying the interactions among human thinking, emotion, creativity, language, and problem solving, in addition to other cognitive processes. Cognitive psychologists strive to determine and measure different types of intelligence, why some people are better at problem solving than others, and how emotional intelligence affects success in the workplace, among countless other topics. They also sometimes focus on how we organize thoughts and information gathered from our environments into meaningful categories of thought, which will be discussed later.

Concepts and Prototypes

The human nervous system is capable of handling endless streams of information. The senses serve as the interface between the mind and the external environment, receiving stimuli and translating it into nervous impulses that are transmitted to the brain. The brain then processes this information and uses the relevant pieces to create thoughts, which can then be expressed through language or stored in memory for future use. To make this process more complex, the brain does not gather information from external environments only. When thoughts are formed, the mind synthesizes information from emotions and memories ( Figure 7.2 ). Emotion and memory are powerful influences on both our thoughts and behaviors.

A flow chart is overlaid on a drawing of a head with a ponytail. The flowchart reads: Information, sensations (arrow) emotions, memories (arrow) thoughts (arrow) behavior. Thoughts is also connected to Emotions, memories via a feedback arrow.

Concepts are informed by our semantic memory (you will learn more about semantic memory in a later chapter) and are present in every aspect of our lives; however, one of the easiest places to notice concepts is inside a classroom, where they are discussed explicitly. When you study United States history, for example, you learn about more than just individual events that have happened in America’s past. You absorb a large quantity of information by listening to and participating in discussions, examining maps, and reading first-hand accounts of people’s lives. Your brain analyzes these details and develops an overall understanding of American history. In the process, your brain gathers details that inform and refine your understanding of related concepts like democracy, power, and freedom.

Concepts can be complex and abstract, like justice, or more concrete, like types of birds. Some concepts, like tolerance, are agreed upon by many people, because they have been used in various ways over many years. Other concepts, like the characteristics of your ideal friend or your family’s birthday traditions, are personal and individualized. In this way, concepts touch every aspect of our lives, from our many daily routines to the guiding principles behind the way governments function.

Another technique used by your brain to organize information is the identification of prototypes for the concepts you have developed. A prototype is the best example or representation of a concept. For example, what comes to your mind when you think of a dog? Most likely your early experiences with dogs will shape what you imagine. If your first pet was a Golden Retriever, there is a good chance that this would be your prototype for the category of dogs.

Natural and Artificial Concepts

In psychology, concepts can be divided into two categories, natural and artificial. Natural concepts are created “naturally” through your experiences and can be developed from either direct or indirect experiences. For example, if you live in Essex Junction, Vermont, you have probably had a lot of direct experience with snow. You’ve watched it fall from the sky, you’ve seen lightly falling snow that barely covers the windshield of your car, and you’ve shoveled out 18 inches of fluffy white snow as you’ve thought, “This is perfect for skiing.” You’ve thrown snowballs at your best friend and gone sledding down the steepest hill in town. In short, you know snow. You know what it looks like, smells like, tastes like, and feels like. If, however, you’ve lived your whole life on the island of Saint Vincent in the Caribbean, you may never have actually seen snow, much less tasted, smelled, or touched it. You know snow from the indirect experience of seeing pictures of falling snow—or from watching films that feature snow as part of the setting. Either way, snow is a natural concept because you can construct an understanding of it through direct observations, experiences with snow, or indirect knowledge (such as from films or books) ( Figure 7.3 ).

Two images labeled a and b. A depicts a snowy field on a sunny day. B depicts a sphere, rectangular prism, and triangular prism.

An artificial concept , on the other hand, is a concept that is defined by a specific set of characteristics. Various properties of geometric shapes, like squares and triangles, serve as useful examples of artificial concepts. A triangle always has three angles and three sides. A square always has four equal sides and four right angles. Mathematical formulas, like the equation for area (length × width) are artificial concepts defined by specific sets of characteristics that are always the same. Artificial concepts can enhance the understanding of a topic by building on one another. For example, before learning the concept of “area of a square” (and the formula to find it), you must understand what a square is. Once the concept of “area of a square” is understood, an understanding of area for other geometric shapes can be built upon the original understanding of area. The use of artificial concepts to define an idea is crucial to communicating with others and engaging in complex thought. According to Goldstone and Kersten (2003), concepts act as building blocks and can be connected in countless combinations to create complex thoughts.

A schema (plural: schemata) is a mental construct consisting of a cluster or collection of related concepts (Bartlett, 1932). There are many different types of schemata, and they all have one thing in common: schemata are a method of organizing information that allows the brain to work more efficiently. When a schema is activated, the brain makes immediate assumptions about the person or object being observed.

There are several types of schemata. A role schema makes assumptions about how individuals in certain roles will behave (Callero, 1994). For example, imagine you meet someone who introduces himself as a firefighter. When this happens, your brain automatically activates the “firefighter schema” and begins making assumptions that this person is brave, selfless, and community-oriented. Despite not knowing this person, already you have unknowingly made judgments about him. Schemata also help you fill in gaps in the information you receive from the world around you. While schemata allow for more efficient information processing, there can be problems with schemata, regardless of whether they are accurate: Perhaps this particular firefighter is not brave, he just works as a firefighter to pay the bills while studying to become a children’s librarian.

An event schema , also known as a cognitive script , is a set of behaviors that can feel like a routine. Think about what you do when you walk into an elevator ( Figure 7.4 ). First, the doors open and you wait to let exiting passengers leave the elevator car. Then, you step into the elevator and turn around to face the doors, looking for the correct button to push. You never face the back of the elevator, do you? And when you’re riding in a crowded elevator and you can’t face the front, it feels uncomfortable, doesn’t it? Interestingly, event schemata can vary widely among different cultures and countries. For example, while it is quite common for people to greet one another with a handshake in the United States, in Tibet, you greet someone by sticking your tongue out at them, and in Belize, you bump fists (Cairns Regional Council, n.d.)

Because event schemata are automatic, they can be difficult to change. Imagine that you are driving home from work or school. This event schema involves getting in the car, shutting the door, and buckling your seatbelt before putting the key in the ignition. You might perform this script two or three times each day. As you drive home, you hear your phone’s ring tone. Typically, the event schema that occurs when you hear your phone ringing involves locating the phone and answering it or responding to your latest text message. So without thinking, you reach for your phone, which could be in your pocket, in your bag, or on the passenger seat of the car. This powerful event schema is informed by your pattern of behavior and the pleasurable stimulation that a phone call or text message gives your brain. Because it is a schema, it is extremely challenging for us to stop reaching for the phone, even though we know that we endanger our own lives and the lives of others while we do it (Neyfakh, 2013) ( Figure 7.5 ).

A hand holds a cellphone in front of a steering wheel and front-shield window of a car. The car is on a road.

Remember the elevator? It feels almost impossible to walk in and not face the door. Our powerful event schema dictates our behavior in the elevator, and it is no different with our phones. Current research suggests that it is the habit, or event schema, of checking our phones in many different situations that makes refraining from checking them while driving especially difficult (Bayer & Campbell, 2012). Because texting and driving has become a dangerous epidemic in recent years, psychologists are looking at ways to help people interrupt the “phone schema” while driving. Event schemata like these are the reason why many habits are difficult to break once they have been acquired. As we continue to examine thinking, keep in mind how powerful the forces of concepts and schemata are to our understanding of the world.

7.2 LAnguage

Define language and demonstrate familiarity with the components of language
Understand the development of language
Explain the relationship between language and thinking

Language is a communication system that involves using words and systematic rules to organize those words to transmit information from one individual to another. While language is a form of communication, not all communication is language. Many species communicate with one another through their postures, movements, odors, or vocalizations. This communication is crucial for species that need to interact and develop social relationships with their conspecifics. However, many people have asserted that it is language that makes humans unique among all of the animal species (Corballis & Suddendorf, 2007; Tomasello & Rakoczy, 2003). This section will focus on what distinguishes language as a special form of communication, how the use of language develops, and how language affects the way we think.

Components of Language

Language, be it spoken, signed, or written, has specific components: a lexicon and lexicon grammar . Lexicon refers to the words of a given language. Thus, lexicon is a language’s vocabulary. Grammar refers to the set of rules that are used to convey meaning through the use of the lexicon (Fernández & Cairns, 2011). For instance, English grammar dictates that most verbs receive an “-ed” at the end to indicate past tense.

Words are formed by combining the various phonemes that make up the language. A phoneme (e.g., the sounds “ah” vs. “eh”) is a basic sound unit of a given language, and different languages have different sets of phonemes. For example, the phoneme English speakers associate with the letter ‘L’ is not used in the Japanese language. Similarly, many Southern African languages use phonemes, sometimes referred to as ‘click consonants’ that are not used in English.

Phonemes are combined to form morphemes , which are the smallest units of language that convey some type of meaning. Some words are morphemes, but not all morphemes are words. For example, “-ed” is a morpheme used to convey the past-tense in English, but it is not a word. The word “review” contains two morphemes: re- (meaning to do something again) and view (to see). Finally, some words like “I” and “a” are both a phonemes and morphemes.

We use semantics and syntax to construct language. Semantics and syntax are part of a language’s grammar. Semantics refers to the process by which we derive meaning from morphemes and words by connecting those morphemes and words to stored concepts. Syntax refers to the way words are organized into sentences (Chomsky, 1965; Fernández & Cairns, 2011). For example, you would never say “the dog walked I today” to let someone know you took your dog for a walk–that sentence does not obey English syntax and is therefore difficult to make sense of.

We apply the rules of grammar to organize the lexicon in novel and creative ways, which allow us to communicate information about both concrete and abstract concepts. We can talk about our immediate and observable surroundings as well as the surface of unseen planets. We can share our innermost thoughts, our plans for the future, and debate the value of a college education. We can provide detailed instructions for cooking a meal, fixing a car, or building a fire. Through our use of words and language, we are able to form, organize, and express ideas, schema, and artificial concepts.

Language Development

Given the remarkable complexity of a language, one might expect that mastering a language would be an especially arduous task; indeed, for those of us trying to learn a second language as adults, this might seem to be true. However, young children master language very quickly with relative ease. B. F. Skinner (1957) proposed that language is learned through reinforcement. Noam Chomsky (1965) criticized this behaviorist approach, asserting instead that the mechanisms underlying language acquisition are biologically determined. The use of language develops in the absence of formal instruction and appears to follow a very similar pattern in children from vastly different cultures and backgrounds. It would seem, therefore, that we are born with a biological predisposition to acquire a language (Chomsky, 1965; Fernández & Cairns, 2011). Moreover, it appears that there is a critical period for language acquisition, such that this proficiency at acquiring language is maximal early in life; generally, as people age, the ease with which they acquire and master new languages diminishes (Johnson & Newport, 1989; Lenneberg, 1967; Singleton, 1995).

Children begin to learn about language from a very early age ( Table 7.1 ). In fact, it appears that this is occurring even before we are born. Newborns show preference for their mother’s voice and appear to be able to discriminate between the language spoken by their mother and other languages. Babies are also attuned to the languages being used around them and show preferences for videos of faces that are moving in synchrony with the audio of spoken language versus videos that do not synchronize with the audio (Blossom & Morgan, 2006; Pickens, 1994; Spelke & Cortelyou, 1981).

Stages of Language and Communication Development
Stage	Age	Developmental Language and Communication
1	0–3 months	Reflexive communication
2	3–8 months	Reflexive communication; interest in others
3	8–13 months	Intentional communication; sociability
4	12–18 months	First words
5	18–24 months	Simple sentences of two words
6	2–3 years	Sentences of three or more words
7	3–5 years	Complex sentences; has conversations

DIG DEEPER: The Case of Genie

In the fall of 1970, a social worker in the Los Angeles area found a 13-year-old girl who was being raised in extremely neglectful and abusive conditions. The girl, who came to be known as Genie, had lived most of her life tied to a potty chair or confined to a crib in a small room that was kept closed with the curtains drawn. For a little over a decade, Genie had virtually no social interaction and no access to the outside world. As a result of these conditions, Genie was unable to stand up, chew solid food, or speak (Fromkin, Krashen, Curtiss, Rigler, & Rigler, 1974; Rymer, 1993). The police took Genie into protective custody.

Genie’s abilities improved dramatically following her removal from her abusive environment, and early on, it appeared she was acquiring language—much later than would be predicted by critical period hypotheses that had been posited at the time (Fromkin et al., 1974). Genie managed to amass an impressive vocabulary in a relatively short amount of time. However, she never developed a mastery of the grammatical aspects of language (Curtiss, 1981). Perhaps being deprived of the opportunity to learn language during a critical period impeded Genie’s ability to fully acquire and use language.

You may recall that each language has its own set of phonemes that are used to generate morphemes, words, and so on. Babies can discriminate among the sounds that make up a language (for example, they can tell the difference between the “s” in vision and the “ss” in fission); early on, they can differentiate between the sounds of all human languages, even those that do not occur in the languages that are used in their environments. However, by the time that they are about 1 year old, they can only discriminate among those phonemes that are used in the language or languages in their environments (Jensen, 2011; Werker & Lalonde, 1988; Werker & Tees, 1984).

After the first few months of life, babies enter what is known as the babbling stage, during which time they tend to produce single syllables that are repeated over and over. As time passes, more variations appear in the syllables that they produce. During this time, it is unlikely that the babies are trying to communicate; they are just as likely to babble when they are alone as when they are with their caregivers (Fernández & Cairns, 2011). Interestingly, babies who are raised in environments in which sign language is used will also begin to show babbling in the gestures of their hands during this stage (Petitto, Holowka, Sergio, Levy, & Ostry, 2004).

Generally, a child’s first word is uttered sometime between the ages of 1 year to 18 months, and for the next few months, the child will remain in the “one word” stage of language development. During this time, children know a number of words, but they only produce one-word utterances. The child’s early vocabulary is limited to familiar objects or events, often nouns. Although children in this stage only make one-word utterances, these words often carry larger meaning (Fernández & Cairns, 2011). So, for example, a child saying “cookie” could be identifying a cookie or asking for a cookie.

As a child’s lexicon grows, she begins to utter simple sentences and to acquire new vocabulary at a very rapid pace. In addition, children begin to demonstrate a clear understanding of the specific rules that apply to their language(s). Even the mistakes that children sometimes make provide evidence of just how much they understand about those rules. This is sometimes seen in the form of overgeneralization . In this context, overgeneralization refers to an extension of a language rule to an exception to the rule. For example, in English, it is usually the case that an “s” is added to the end of a word to indicate plurality. For example, we speak of one dog versus two dogs. Young children will overgeneralize this rule to cases that are exceptions to the “add an s to the end of the word” rule and say things like “those two gooses” or “three mouses.” Clearly, the rules of the language are understood, even if the exceptions to the rules are still being learned (Moskowitz, 1978).

Language and Thought

When we speak one language, we agree that words are representations of ideas, people, places, and events. The given language that children learn is connected to their culture and surroundings. But can words themselves shape the way we think about things? Psychologists have long investigated the question of whether language shapes thoughts and actions, or whether our thoughts and beliefs shape our language. Two researchers, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, began this investigation in the 1940s. They wanted to understand how the language habits of a community encourage members of that community to interpret language in a particular manner (Sapir, 1941/1964). Sapir and Whorf proposed that language determines thought. For example, in some languages there are many different words for love. However, in English we use the word love for all types of love. Does this affect how we think about love depending on the language that we speak (Whorf, 1956)? Researchers have since identified this view as too absolute, pointing out a lack of empiricism behind what Sapir and Whorf proposed (Abler, 2013; Boroditsky, 2011; van Troyer, 1994). Today, psychologists continue to study and debate the relationship between language and thought.

WHAT DO YOU THINK? The Meaning of Language

Think about what you know of other languages; perhaps you even speak multiple languages. Imagine for a moment that your closest friend fluently speaks more than one language. Do you think that friend thinks differently, depending on which language is being spoken? You may know a few words that are not translatable from their original language into English. For example, the Portuguese word saudade originated during the 15th century, when Portuguese sailors left home to explore the seas and travel to Africa or Asia. Those left behind described the emptiness and fondness they felt as saudade ( Figure 7.6 ) . The word came to express many meanings, including loss, nostalgia, yearning, warm memories, and hope. There is no single word in English that includes all of those emotions in a single description. Do words such as saudade indicate that different languages produce different patterns of thought in people? What do you think??

Two paintings are depicted in a and b. A depicts a young boy leaning on a trunk. He looks forlornly past the viewer. B depicts a woman wrapped in a black shawl standing near a window. She reads a letter while holding the shawl to her mouth.

One group of researchers who wanted to investigate how language influences thought compared how English speakers and the Dani people of Papua New Guinea think and speak about color. The Dani have two words for color: one word for light and one word for dark . In contrast, the English language has 11 color words. Researchers hypothesized that the number of color terms could limit the ways that the Dani people conceptualized color. However, the Dani were able to distinguish colors with the same ability as English speakers, despite having fewer words at their disposal (Berlin & Kay, 1969). A recent review of research aimed at determining how language might affect something like color perception suggests that language can influence perceptual phenomena, especially in the left hemisphere of the brain. You may recall from earlier chapters that the left hemisphere is associated with language for most people. However, the right (less linguistic hemisphere) of the brain is less affected by linguistic influences on perception (Regier & Kay, 2009)

7.3 Problem Solving

Describe problem solving strategies
Define algorithm and heuristic
Explain some common roadblocks to effective problem solving and decision making

Problem-Solving Strategies

Problem-Solving Strategies
Method	Description	Example
Trial and error	Continue trying different solutions until problem is solved	Restarting phone, turning off WiFi, turning off bluetooth in order to determine why your phone is malfunctioning
Algorithm	Step-by-step problem-solving formula	Instruction manual for installing new software on your computer
Heuristic	General problem-solving framework	Working backwards; breaking a task into steps

When one is faced with too much information
When the time to make a decision is limited
When the decision to be made is unimportant
When there is access to very little information to use in making the decision
When an appropriate heuristic happens to come to mind in the same moment

EVERYDAY CONNECTION: Solving Puzzles

Problem-solving abilities can improve with practice. Many people challenge themselves every day with puzzles and other mental exercises to sharpen their problem-solving skills. Sudoku puzzles appear daily in most newspapers. Typically, a sudoku puzzle is a 9×9 grid. The simple sudoku below ( Figure 7.7 ) is a 4×4 grid. To solve the puzzle, fill in the empty boxes with a single digit: 1, 2, 3, or 4. Here are the rules: The numbers must total 10 in each bolded box, each row, and each column; however, each digit can only appear once in a bolded box, row, and column. Time yourself as you solve this puzzle and compare your time with a classmate.

A sudoku puzzle is pictured. The puzzle is a 4x4 square with each sub-square also divided into four. Inside the top left square, the numbers are 3, blank, blank, 4 from left-to-right and top-to-bottom. In the top right square, the numbers are blank, two, one, blank. In the bottom left square, the numbers are blank, 3, four, blank; and the bottom right square contains 2, blank, blank, 1.

Here is another popular type of puzzle ( Figure 7.8 ) that challenges your spatial reasoning skills. Connect all nine dots with four connecting straight lines without lifting your pencil from the paper:

Nine dots are arrayed in three rows of three.

The top figure shows a book of matches, a box of tacks, and a candle. The bottom figure shows the box tacked to the wall with the candle standing in the box.

Functional fixedness is a type of mental set where you cannot perceive an object being used for something other than what it was designed for. Duncker (1945) conducted foundational research on functional fixedness. He created an experiment in which participants were given a candle, a book of matches, and a box of thumbtacks. They were instructed to use those items to attach the candle to the wall so that it did not drip wax onto the table below. Participants had to use functional fixedness to solve the problem ( Figure 7.10 ). During the Apollo 13 mission to the moon, NASA engineers at Mission Control had to overcome functional fixedness to save the lives of the astronauts aboard the spacecraft. An explosion in a module of the spacecraft damaged multiple systems. The astronauts were in danger of being poisoned by rising levels of carbon dioxide because of problems with the carbon dioxide filters. The engineers found a way for the astronauts to use spare plastic bags, tape, and air hoses to create a makeshift air filter, which saved the lives of the astronauts.

Summary of Decision Biases
Bias	Description
Anchoring	Tendency to focus on one particular piece of information when making decisions or problem-solving
Confirmation	Focuses on information that confirms existing beliefs
Hindsight	Belief that the event just experienced was predictable
Representative	Unintentional stereotyping of someone or something
Availability	Decision is based upon either an available precedent or an example that may be faulty

Were you able to determine how many marbles are needed to balance the scales in Figure 7.9 ? You need nine. Were you able to solve the problems in Figure 7.7 and Figure 7.8 ? Here are the answers ( Figure 7.11 ).

Chapter Summary

7.1 what is cognition.

In this section, you were introduced to cognitive psychology, which is the study of cognition, or the brain’s ability to think, perceive, plan, analyze, and remember. Concepts and their corresponding prototypes help us quickly organize our thinking by creating categories into which we can sort new information. We also develop schemata, which are clusters of related concepts. Some schemata involve routines of thought and behavior, and these help us function properly in various situations without having to “think twice” about them. Schemata show up in social situations and routines of daily behavior.

7.2 Language

Language is a communication system that has both a lexicon and a system of grammar. Language acquisition occurs naturally and effortlessly during the early stages of life, and this acquisition occurs in a predictable sequence for individuals around the world. Language has a strong influence on thought, and the concept of how language may influence cognition remains an area of study and debate in psychology.

thinking; or, all of the processes associated with perception, knowledge, problem solving, judgement, language, and memory.

A modern school of psychological thought that empirically examines mental processes such as perception, memory, language, and judgement.

a category or grouping of linguistic information, images, ideas or memories, such as life experiences.

knowledge about words, concepts, and language-based knowledge and facts

the best example or representation of a concept, specific to an individual

concepts developed through direct or indirect experiences with the world

a concept defined by a specific set of characteristics.

a mental construct consisting of a cluster of related concepts

a set of ideas relating to how individuals in certain roles will behave.

also known as a cognitive script; a set of behaviors associated with a particular place or event

also known as an event schema; a set of behaviors associated with a particular place or event

a communication system that involves using words and systematic rules to organize those words to transmit information from one individual to another.

the words of a language

the rules of a language used to convey meaning through the use of the lexicon

the basic sounds that make up a language

the smallest unit of language that conveys meaning

the process by which we derive meaning from morphemes and words

the rules guiding the organization of morphemes into words and words into sentences.

Share This Book

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

7 Module 7: Thinking, Reasoning, and Problem-Solving

This module is about how a solid working knowledge of psychological principles can help you to think more effectively, so you can succeed in school and life. You might be inclined to believe that—because you have been thinking for as long as you can remember, because you are able to figure out the solution to many problems, because you feel capable of using logic to argue a point, because you can evaluate whether the things you read and hear make sense—you do not need any special training in thinking. But this, of course, is one of the key barriers to helping people think better. If you do not believe that there is anything wrong, why try to fix it?

The human brain is indeed a remarkable thinking machine, capable of amazing, complex, creative, logical thoughts. Why, then, are we telling you that you need to learn how to think? Mainly because one major lesson from cognitive psychology is that these capabilities of the human brain are relatively infrequently realized. Many psychologists believe that people are essentially “cognitive misers.” It is not that we are lazy, but that we have a tendency to expend the least amount of mental effort necessary. Although you may not realize it, it actually takes a great deal of energy to think. Careful, deliberative reasoning and critical thinking are very difficult. Because we seem to be successful without going to the trouble of using these skills well, it feels unnecessary to develop them. As you shall see, however, there are many pitfalls in the cognitive processes described in this module. When people do not devote extra effort to learning and improving reasoning, problem solving, and critical thinking skills, they make many errors.

As is true for memory, if you develop the cognitive skills presented in this module, you will be more successful in school. It is important that you realize, however, that these skills will help you far beyond school, even more so than a good memory will. Although it is somewhat useful to have a good memory, ten years from now no potential employer will care how many questions you got right on multiple choice exams during college. All of them will, however, recognize whether you are a logical, analytical, critical thinker. With these thinking skills, you will be an effective, persuasive communicator and an excellent problem solver.

The module begins by describing different kinds of thought and knowledge, especially conceptual knowledge and critical thinking. An understanding of these differences will be valuable as you progress through school and encounter different assignments that require you to tap into different kinds of knowledge. The second section covers deductive and inductive reasoning, which are processes we use to construct and evaluate strong arguments. They are essential skills to have whenever you are trying to persuade someone (including yourself) of some point, or to respond to someone’s efforts to persuade you. The module ends with a section about problem solving. A solid understanding of the key processes involved in problem solving will help you to handle many daily challenges.

7.1. Different kinds of thought

7.2. Reasoning and Judgment

7.3. Problem Solving

READING WITH PURPOSE

Remember and understand.

By reading and studying Module 7, you should be able to remember and describe:

Concepts and inferences (7.1)
Procedural knowledge (7.1)
Metacognition (7.1)
Characteristics of critical thinking: skepticism; identify biases, distortions, omissions, and assumptions; reasoning and problem solving skills (7.1)
Reasoning: deductive reasoning, deductively valid argument, inductive reasoning, inductively strong argument, availability heuristic, representativeness heuristic (7.2)
Fixation: functional fixedness, mental set (7.3)
Algorithms, heuristics, and the role of confirmation bias (7.3)
Effective problem solving sequence (7.3)

By reading and thinking about how the concepts in Module 6 apply to real life, you should be able to:

Identify which type of knowledge a piece of information is (7.1)
Recognize examples of deductive and inductive reasoning (7.2)
Recognize judgments that have probably been influenced by the availability heuristic (7.2)
Recognize examples of problem solving heuristics and algorithms (7.3)

Analyze, Evaluate, and Create

By reading and thinking about Module 6, participating in classroom activities, and completing out-of-class assignments, you should be able to:

Use the principles of critical thinking to evaluate information (7.1)
Explain whether examples of reasoning arguments are deductively valid or inductively strong (7.2)
Outline how you could try to solve a problem from your life using the effective problem solving sequence (7.3)

7.1. Different kinds of thought and knowledge

Take a few minutes to write down everything that you know about dogs.
Do you believe that:
Psychic ability exists?
Hypnosis is an altered state of consciousness?
Magnet therapy is effective for relieving pain?
Aerobic exercise is an effective treatment for depression?
UFO’s from outer space have visited earth?

On what do you base your belief or disbelief for the questions above?

Of course, we all know what is meant by the words think and knowledge . You probably also realize that they are not unitary concepts; there are different kinds of thought and knowledge. In this section, let us look at some of these differences. If you are familiar with these different kinds of thought and pay attention to them in your classes, it will help you to focus on the right goals, learn more effectively, and succeed in school. Different assignments and requirements in school call on you to use different kinds of knowledge or thought, so it will be very helpful for you to learn to recognize them (Anderson, et al. 2001).

Factual and conceptual knowledge

Module 5 introduced the idea of declarative memory, which is composed of facts and episodes. If you have ever played a trivia game or watched Jeopardy on TV, you realize that the human brain is able to hold an extraordinary number of facts. Likewise, you realize that each of us has an enormous store of episodes, essentially facts about events that happened in our own lives. It may be difficult to keep that in mind when we are struggling to retrieve one of those facts while taking an exam, however. Part of the problem is that, in contradiction to the advice from Module 5, many students continue to try to memorize course material as a series of unrelated facts (picture a history student simply trying to memorize history as a set of unrelated dates without any coherent story tying them together). Facts in the real world are not random and unorganized, however. It is the way that they are organized that constitutes a second key kind of knowledge, conceptual.

Concepts are nothing more than our mental representations of categories of things in the world. For example, think about dogs. When you do this, you might remember specific facts about dogs, such as they have fur and they bark. You may also recall dogs that you have encountered and picture them in your mind. All of this information (and more) makes up your concept of dog. You can have concepts of simple categories (e.g., triangle), complex categories (e.g., small dogs that sleep all day, eat out of the garbage, and bark at leaves), kinds of people (e.g., psychology professors), events (e.g., birthday parties), and abstract ideas (e.g., justice). Gregory Murphy (2002) refers to concepts as the “glue that holds our mental life together” (p. 1). Very simply, summarizing the world by using concepts is one of the most important cognitive tasks that we do. Our conceptual knowledge is our knowledge about the world. Individual concepts are related to each other to form a rich interconnected network of knowledge. For example, think about how the following concepts might be related to each other: dog, pet, play, Frisbee, chew toy, shoe. Or, of more obvious use to you now, how these concepts are related: working memory, long-term memory, declarative memory, procedural memory, and rehearsal? Because our minds have a natural tendency to organize information conceptually, when students try to remember course material as isolated facts, they are working against their strengths.

One last important point about concepts is that they allow you to instantly know a great deal of information about something. For example, if someone hands you a small red object and says, “here is an apple,” they do not have to tell you, “it is something you can eat.” You already know that you can eat it because it is true by virtue of the fact that the object is an apple; this is called drawing an inference , assuming that something is true on the basis of your previous knowledge (for example, of category membership or of how the world works) or logical reasoning.

Procedural knowledge

Physical skills, such as tying your shoes, doing a cartwheel, and driving a car (or doing all three at the same time, but don’t try this at home) are certainly a kind of knowledge. They are procedural knowledge, the same idea as procedural memory that you saw in Module 5. Mental skills, such as reading, debating, and planning a psychology experiment, are procedural knowledge, as well. In short, procedural knowledge is the knowledge how to do something (Cohen & Eichenbaum, 1993).

Metacognitive knowledge

Floyd used to think that he had a great memory. Now, he has a better memory. Why? Because he finally realized that his memory was not as great as he once thought it was. Because Floyd eventually learned that he often forgets where he put things, he finally developed the habit of putting things in the same place. (Unfortunately, he did not learn this lesson before losing at least 5 watches and a wedding ring.) Because he finally realized that he often forgets to do things, he finally started using the To Do list app on his phone. And so on. Floyd’s insights about the real limitations of his memory have allowed him to remember things that he used to forget.

All of us have knowledge about the way our own minds work. You may know that you have a good memory for people’s names and a poor memory for math formulas. Someone else might realize that they have difficulty remembering to do things, like stopping at the store on the way home. Others still know that they tend to overlook details. This knowledge about our own thinking is actually quite important; it is called metacognitive knowledge, or metacognition . Like other kinds of thinking skills, it is subject to error. For example, in unpublished research, one of the authors surveyed about 120 General Psychology students on the first day of the term. Among other questions, the students were asked them to predict their grade in the class and report their current Grade Point Average. Two-thirds of the students predicted that their grade in the course would be higher than their GPA. (The reality is that at our college, students tend to earn lower grades in psychology than their overall GPA.) Another example: Students routinely report that they thought they had done well on an exam, only to discover, to their dismay, that they were wrong (more on that important problem in a moment). Both errors reveal a breakdown in metacognition.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

In general, most college students probably do not study enough. For example, using data from the National Survey of Student Engagement, Fosnacht, McCormack, and Lerma (2018) reported that first-year students at 4-year colleges in the U.S. averaged less than 14 hours per week preparing for classes. The typical suggestion is that you should spend two hours outside of class for every hour in class, or 24 – 30 hours per week for a full-time student. Clearly, students in general are nowhere near that recommended mark. Many observers, including some faculty, believe that this shortfall is a result of students being too busy or lazy. Now, it may be true that many students are too busy, with work and family obligations, for example. Others, are not particularly motivated in school, and therefore might correctly be labeled lazy. A third possible explanation, however, is that some students might not think they need to spend this much time. And this is a matter of metacognition. Consider the scenario that we mentioned above, students thinking they had done well on an exam only to discover that they did not. Justin Kruger and David Dunning examined scenarios very much like this in 1999. Kruger and Dunning gave research participants tests measuring humor, logic, and grammar. Then, they asked the participants to assess their own abilities and test performance in these areas. They found that participants in general tended to overestimate their abilities, already a problem with metacognition. Importantly, the participants who scored the lowest overestimated their abilities the most. Specifically, students who scored in the bottom quarter (averaging in the 12th percentile) thought they had scored in the 62nd percentile. This has become known as the Dunning-Kruger effect . Many individual faculty members have replicated these results with their own student on their course exams, including the authors of this book. Think about it. Some students who just took an exam and performed poorly believe that they did well before seeing their score. It seems very likely that these are the very same students who stopped studying the night before because they thought they were “done.” Quite simply, it is not just that they did not know the material. They did not know that they did not know the material. That is poor metacognition.

In order to develop good metacognitive skills, you should continually monitor your thinking and seek frequent feedback on the accuracy of your thinking (Medina, Castleberry, & Persky 2017). For example, in classes get in the habit of predicting your exam grades. As soon as possible after taking an exam, try to find out which questions you missed and try to figure out why. If you do this soon enough, you may be able to recall the way it felt when you originally answered the question. Did you feel confident that you had answered the question correctly? Then you have just discovered an opportunity to improve your metacognition. Be on the lookout for that feeling and respond with caution.

concept : a mental representation of a category of things in the world

Dunning-Kruger effect : individuals who are less competent tend to overestimate their abilities more than individuals who are more competent do

inference : an assumption about the truth of something that is not stated. Inferences come from our prior knowledge and experience, and from logical reasoning

metacognition : knowledge about one’s own cognitive processes; thinking about your thinking

Critical thinking

One particular kind of knowledge or thinking skill that is related to metacognition is critical thinking (Chew, 2020). You may have noticed that critical thinking is an objective in many college courses, and thus it could be a legitimate topic to cover in nearly any college course. It is particularly appropriate in psychology, however. As the science of (behavior and) mental processes, psychology is obviously well suited to be the discipline through which you should be introduced to this important way of thinking.

More importantly, there is a particular need to use critical thinking in psychology. We are all, in a way, experts in human behavior and mental processes, having engaged in them literally since birth. Thus, perhaps more than in any other class, students typically approach psychology with very clear ideas and opinions about its subject matter. That is, students already “know” a lot about psychology. The problem is, “it ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. It’s the things we know that just ain’t so” (Ward, quoted in Gilovich 1991). Indeed, many of students’ preconceptions about psychology are just plain wrong. Randolph Smith (2002) wrote a book about critical thinking in psychology called Challenging Your Preconceptions, highlighting this fact. On the other hand, many of students’ preconceptions about psychology are just plain right! But wait, how do you know which of your preconceptions are right and which are wrong? And when you come across a research finding or theory in this class that contradicts your preconceptions, what will you do? Will you stick to your original idea, discounting the information from the class? Will you immediately change your mind? Critical thinking can help us sort through this confusing mess.

But what is critical thinking? The goal of critical thinking is simple to state (but extraordinarily difficult to achieve): it is to be right, to draw the correct conclusions, to believe in things that are true and to disbelieve things that are false. We will provide two definitions of critical thinking (or, if you like, one large definition with two distinct parts). First, a more conceptual one: Critical thinking is thinking like a scientist in your everyday life (Schmaltz, Jansen, & Wenckowski, 2017). Our second definition is more operational; it is simply a list of skills that are essential to be a critical thinker. Critical thinking entails solid reasoning and problem solving skills; skepticism; and an ability to identify biases, distortions, omissions, and assumptions. Excellent deductive and inductive reasoning, and problem solving skills contribute to critical thinking. So, you can consider the subject matter of sections 7.2 and 7.3 to be part of critical thinking. Because we will be devoting considerable time to these concepts in the rest of the module, let us begin with a discussion about the other aspects of critical thinking.

Let’s address that first part of the definition. Scientists form hypotheses, or predictions about some possible future observations. Then, they collect data, or information (think of this as making those future observations). They do their best to make unbiased observations using reliable techniques that have been verified by others. Then, and only then, they draw a conclusion about what those observations mean. Oh, and do not forget the most important part. “Conclusion” is probably not the most appropriate word because this conclusion is only tentative. A scientist is always prepared that someone else might come along and produce new observations that would require a new conclusion be drawn. Wow! If you like to be right, you could do a lot worse than using a process like this.

A Critical Thinker’s Toolkit

Now for the second part of the definition. Good critical thinkers (and scientists) rely on a variety of tools to evaluate information. Perhaps the most recognizable tool for critical thinking is skepticism (and this term provides the clearest link to the thinking like a scientist definition, as you are about to see). Some people intend it as an insult when they call someone a skeptic. But if someone calls you a skeptic, if they are using the term correctly, you should consider it a great compliment. Simply put, skepticism is a way of thinking in which you refrain from drawing a conclusion or changing your mind until good evidence has been provided. People from Missouri should recognize this principle, as Missouri is known as the Show-Me State. As a skeptic, you are not inclined to believe something just because someone said so, because someone else believes it, or because it sounds reasonable. You must be persuaded by high quality evidence.

Of course, if that evidence is produced, you have a responsibility as a skeptic to change your belief. Failure to change a belief in the face of good evidence is not skepticism; skepticism has open mindedness at its core. M. Neil Browne and Stuart Keeley (2018) use the term weak sense critical thinking to describe critical thinking behaviors that are used only to strengthen a prior belief. Strong sense critical thinking, on the other hand, has as its goal reaching the best conclusion. Sometimes that means strengthening your prior belief, but sometimes it means changing your belief to accommodate the better evidence.

Many times, a failure to think critically or weak sense critical thinking is related to a bias , an inclination, tendency, leaning, or prejudice. Everybody has biases, but many people are unaware of them. Awareness of your own biases gives you the opportunity to control or counteract them. Unfortunately, however, many people are happy to let their biases creep into their attempts to persuade others; indeed, it is a key part of their persuasive strategy. To see how these biases influence messages, just look at the different descriptions and explanations of the same events given by people of different ages or income brackets, or conservative versus liberal commentators, or by commentators from different parts of the world. Of course, to be successful, these people who are consciously using their biases must disguise them. Even undisguised biases can be difficult to identify, so disguised ones can be nearly impossible.

Here are some common sources of biases:

Personal values and beliefs. Some people believe that human beings are basically driven to seek power and that they are typically in competition with one another over scarce resources. These beliefs are similar to the world-view that political scientists call “realism.” Other people believe that human beings prefer to cooperate and that, given the chance, they will do so. These beliefs are similar to the world-view known as “idealism.” For many people, these deeply held beliefs can influence, or bias, their interpretations of such wide ranging situations as the behavior of nations and their leaders or the behavior of the driver in the car ahead of you. For example, if your worldview is that people are typically in competition and someone cuts you off on the highway, you may assume that the driver did it purposely to get ahead of you. Other types of beliefs about the way the world is or the way the world should be, for example, political beliefs, can similarly become a significant source of bias.
Racism, sexism, ageism and other forms of prejudice and bigotry. These are, sadly, a common source of bias in many people. They are essentially a special kind of “belief about the way the world is.” These beliefs—for example, that women do not make effective leaders—lead people to ignore contradictory evidence (examples of effective women leaders, or research that disputes the belief) and to interpret ambiguous evidence in a way consistent with the belief.
Self-interest. When particular people benefit from things turning out a certain way, they can sometimes be very susceptible to letting that interest bias them. For example, a company that will earn a profit if they sell their product may have a bias in the way that they give information about their product. A union that will benefit if its members get a generous contract might have a bias in the way it presents information about salaries at competing organizations. (Note that our inclusion of examples describing both companies and unions is an explicit attempt to control for our own personal biases). Home buyers are often dismayed to discover that they purchased their dream house from someone whose self-interest led them to lie about flooding problems in the basement or back yard. This principle, the biasing power of self-interest, is likely what led to the famous phrase Caveat Emptor (let the buyer beware) .

Knowing that these types of biases exist will help you evaluate evidence more critically. Do not forget, though, that people are not always keen to let you discover the sources of biases in their arguments. For example, companies or political organizations can sometimes disguise their support of a research study by contracting with a university professor, who comes complete with a seemingly unbiased institutional affiliation, to conduct the study.

People’s biases, conscious or unconscious, can lead them to make omissions, distortions, and assumptions that undermine our ability to correctly evaluate evidence. It is essential that you look for these elements. Always ask, what is missing, what is not as it appears, and what is being assumed here? For example, consider this (fictional) chart from an ad reporting customer satisfaction at 4 local health clubs.

Clearly, from the results of the chart, one would be tempted to give Club C a try, as customer satisfaction is much higher than for the other 3 clubs.

There are so many distortions and omissions in this chart, however, that it is actually quite meaningless. First, how was satisfaction measured? Do the bars represent responses to a survey? If so, how were the questions asked? Most importantly, where is the missing scale for the chart? Although the differences look quite large, are they really?

Well, here is the same chart, with a different scale, this time labeled:

Club C is not so impressive any more, is it? In fact, all of the health clubs have customer satisfaction ratings (whatever that means) between 85% and 88%. In the first chart, the entire scale of the graph included only the percentages between 83 and 89. This “judicious” choice of scale—some would call it a distortion—and omission of that scale from the chart make the tiny differences among the clubs seem important, however.

Also, in order to be a critical thinker, you need to learn to pay attention to the assumptions that underlie a message. Let us briefly illustrate the role of assumptions by touching on some people’s beliefs about the criminal justice system in the US. Some believe that a major problem with our judicial system is that many criminals go free because of legal technicalities. Others believe that a major problem is that many innocent people are convicted of crimes. The simple fact is, both types of errors occur. A person’s conclusion about which flaw in our judicial system is the greater tragedy is based on an assumption about which of these is the more serious error (letting the guilty go free or convicting the innocent). This type of assumption is called a value assumption (Browne and Keeley, 2018). It reflects the differences in values that people develop, differences that may lead us to disregard valid evidence that does not fit in with our particular values.

Oh, by the way, some students probably noticed this, but the seven tips for evaluating information that we shared in Module 1 are related to this. Actually, they are part of this section. The tips are, to a very large degree, set of ideas you can use to help you identify biases, distortions, omissions, and assumptions. If you do not remember this section, we strongly recommend you take a few minutes to review it.

skepticism : a way of thinking in which you refrain from drawing a conclusion or changing your mind until good evidence has been provided

bias : an inclination, tendency, leaning, or prejudice

Which of your beliefs (or disbeliefs) from the Activate exercise for this section were derived from a process of critical thinking? If some of your beliefs were not based on critical thinking, are you willing to reassess these beliefs? If the answer is no, why do you think that is? If the answer is yes, what concrete steps will you take?

7.2 Reasoning and Judgment

What percentage of kidnappings are committed by strangers?
Which area of the house is riskiest: kitchen, bathroom, or stairs?
What is the most common cancer in the US?
What percentage of workplace homicides are committed by co-workers?

An essential set of procedural thinking skills is reasoning , the ability to generate and evaluate solid conclusions from a set of statements or evidence. You should note that these conclusions (when they are generated instead of being evaluated) are one key type of inference that we described in Section 7.1. There are two main types of reasoning, deductive and inductive.

Deductive reasoning

Suppose your teacher tells you that if you get an A on the final exam in a course, you will get an A for the whole course. Then, you get an A on the final exam. What will your final course grade be? Most people can see instantly that you can conclude with certainty that you will get an A for the course. This is a type of reasoning called deductive reasoning , which is defined as reasoning in which a conclusion is guaranteed to be true as long as the statements leading to it are true. The three statements can be listed as an argument , with two beginning statements and a conclusion:

Statement 1: If you get an A on the final exam, you will get an A for the course

Statement 2: You get an A on the final exam

Conclusion: You will get an A for the course

This particular arrangement, in which true beginning statements lead to a guaranteed true conclusion, is known as a deductively valid argument . Although deductive reasoning is often the subject of abstract, brain-teasing, puzzle-like word problems, it is actually an extremely important type of everyday reasoning. It is just hard to recognize sometimes. For example, imagine that you are looking for your car keys and you realize that they are either in the kitchen drawer or in your book bag. After looking in the kitchen drawer, you instantly know that they must be in your book bag. That conclusion results from a simple deductive reasoning argument. In addition, solid deductive reasoning skills are necessary for you to succeed in the sciences, philosophy, math, computer programming, and any endeavor involving the use of logic to persuade others to your point of view or to evaluate others’ arguments.

Cognitive psychologists, and before them philosophers, have been quite interested in deductive reasoning, not so much for its practical applications, but for the insights it can offer them about the ways that human beings think. One of the early ideas to emerge from the examination of deductive reasoning is that people learn (or develop) mental versions of rules that allow them to solve these types of reasoning problems (Braine, 1978; Braine, Reiser, & Rumain, 1984). The best way to see this point of view is to realize that there are different possible rules, and some of them are very simple. For example, consider this rule of logic:

therefore q

Logical rules are often presented abstractly, as letters, in order to imply that they can be used in very many specific situations. Here is a concrete version of the of the same rule:

I’ll either have pizza or a hamburger for dinner tonight (p or q)

I won’t have pizza (not p)

Therefore, I’ll have a hamburger (therefore q)

This kind of reasoning seems so natural, so easy, that it is quite plausible that we would use a version of this rule in our daily lives. At least, it seems more plausible than some of the alternative possibilities—for example, that we need to have experience with the specific situation (pizza or hamburger, in this case) in order to solve this type of problem easily. So perhaps there is a form of natural logic (Rips, 1990) that contains very simple versions of logical rules. When we are faced with a reasoning problem that maps onto one of these rules, we use the rule.

But be very careful; things are not always as easy as they seem. Even these simple rules are not so simple. For example, consider the following rule. Many people fail to realize that this rule is just as valid as the pizza or hamburger rule above.

if p, then q

therefore, not p

Concrete version:

If I eat dinner, then I will have dessert

I did not have dessert

Therefore, I did not eat dinner

The simple fact is, it can be very difficult for people to apply rules of deductive logic correctly; as a result, they make many errors when trying to do so. Is this a deductively valid argument or not?

Students who like school study a lot

Students who study a lot get good grades

Jane does not like school

Therefore, Jane does not get good grades

Many people are surprised to discover that this is not a logically valid argument; the conclusion is not guaranteed to be true from the beginning statements. Although the first statement says that students who like school study a lot, it does NOT say that students who do not like school do not study a lot. In other words, it may very well be possible to study a lot without liking school. Even people who sometimes get problems like this right might not be using the rules of deductive reasoning. Instead, they might just be making judgments for examples they know, in this case, remembering instances of people who get good grades despite not liking school.

Making deductive reasoning even more difficult is the fact that there are two important properties that an argument may have. One, it can be valid or invalid (meaning that the conclusion does or does not follow logically from the statements leading up to it). Two, an argument (or more correctly, its conclusion) can be true or false. Here is an example of an argument that is logically valid, but has a false conclusion (at least we think it is false).

Either you are eleven feet tall or the Grand Canyon was created by a spaceship crashing into the earth.

You are not eleven feet tall

Therefore the Grand Canyon was created by a spaceship crashing into the earth

This argument has the exact same form as the pizza or hamburger argument above, making it is deductively valid. The conclusion is so false, however, that it is absurd (of course, the reason the conclusion is false is that the first statement is false). When people are judging arguments, they tend to not observe the difference between deductive validity and the empirical truth of statements or conclusions. If the elements of an argument happen to be true, people are likely to judge the argument logically valid; if the elements are false, they will very likely judge it invalid (Markovits & Bouffard-Bouchard, 1992; Moshman & Franks, 1986). Thus, it seems a stretch to say that people are using these logical rules to judge the validity of arguments. Many psychologists believe that most people actually have very limited deductive reasoning skills (Johnson-Laird, 1999). They argue that when faced with a problem for which deductive logic is required, people resort to some simpler technique, such as matching terms that appear in the statements and the conclusion (Evans, 1982). This might not seem like a problem, but what if reasoners believe that the elements are true and they happen to be wrong; they will would believe that they are using a form of reasoning that guarantees they are correct and yet be wrong.

deductive reasoning : a type of reasoning in which the conclusion is guaranteed to be true any time the statements leading up to it are true

argument : a set of statements in which the beginning statements lead to a conclusion

deductively valid argument : an argument for which true beginning statements guarantee that the conclusion is true

Inductive reasoning and judgment

Every day, you make many judgments about the likelihood of one thing or another. Whether you realize it or not, you are practicing inductive reasoning on a daily basis. In inductive reasoning arguments, a conclusion is likely whenever the statements preceding it are true. The first thing to notice about inductive reasoning is that, by definition, you can never be sure about your conclusion; you can only estimate how likely the conclusion is. Inductive reasoning may lead you to focus on Memory Encoding and Recoding when you study for the exam, but it is possible the instructor will ask more questions about Memory Retrieval instead. Unlike deductive reasoning, the conclusions you reach through inductive reasoning are only probable, not certain. That is why scientists consider inductive reasoning weaker than deductive reasoning. But imagine how hard it would be for us to function if we could not act unless we were certain about the outcome.

Inductive reasoning can be represented as logical arguments consisting of statements and a conclusion, just as deductive reasoning can be. In an inductive argument, you are given some statements and a conclusion (or you are given some statements and must draw a conclusion). An argument is inductively strong if the conclusion would be very probable whenever the statements are true. So, for example, here is an inductively strong argument:

Statement #1: The forecaster on Channel 2 said it is going to rain today.
Statement #2: The forecaster on Channel 5 said it is going to rain today.
Statement #3: It is very cloudy and humid.
Statement #4: You just heard thunder.
Conclusion (or judgment): It is going to rain today.

Think of the statements as evidence, on the basis of which you will draw a conclusion. So, based on the evidence presented in the four statements, it is very likely that it will rain today. Will it definitely rain today? Certainly not. We can all think of times that the weather forecaster was wrong.

A true story: Some years ago psychology student was watching a baseball playoff game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Los Angeles Dodgers. A graphic on the screen had just informed the audience that the Cardinal at bat, (Hall of Fame shortstop) Ozzie Smith, a switch hitter batting left-handed for this plate appearance, had never, in nearly 3000 career at-bats, hit a home run left-handed. The student, who had just learned about inductive reasoning in his psychology class, turned to his companion (a Cardinals fan) and smugly said, “It is an inductively strong argument that Ozzie Smith will not hit a home run.” He turned back to face the television just in time to watch the ball sail over the right field fence for a home run. Although the student felt foolish at the time, he was not wrong. It was an inductively strong argument; 3000 at-bats is an awful lot of evidence suggesting that the Wizard of Ozz (as he was known) would not be hitting one out of the park (think of each at-bat without a home run as a statement in an inductive argument). Sadly (for the die-hard Cubs fan and Cardinals-hating student), despite the strength of the argument, the conclusion was wrong.

Given the possibility that we might draw an incorrect conclusion even with an inductively strong argument, we really want to be sure that we do, in fact, make inductively strong arguments. If we judge something probable, it had better be probable. If we judge something nearly impossible, it had better not happen. Think of inductive reasoning, then, as making reasonably accurate judgments of the probability of some conclusion given a set of evidence.

We base many decisions in our lives on inductive reasoning. For example:

Statement #1: Psychology is not my best subject

Statement #2: My psychology instructor has a reputation for giving difficult exams

Statement #3: My first psychology exam was much harder than I expected

Judgment: The next exam will probably be very difficult.

Decision: I will study tonight instead of watching Netflix.

Some other examples of judgments that people commonly make in a school context include judgments of the likelihood that:

A particular class will be interesting/useful/difficult
You will be able to finish writing a paper by next week if you go out tonight
Your laptop’s battery will last through the next trip to the library
You will not miss anything important if you skip class tomorrow
Your instructor will not notice if you skip class tomorrow
You will be able to find a book that you will need for a paper
There will be an essay question about Memory Encoding on the next exam

Tversky and Kahneman (1983) recognized that there are two general ways that we might make these judgments; they termed them extensional (i.e., following the laws of probability) and intuitive (i.e., using shortcuts or heuristics, see below). We will use a similar distinction between Type 1 and Type 2 thinking, as described by Keith Stanovich and his colleagues (Evans and Stanovich, 2013; Stanovich and West, 2000). Type 1 thinking is fast, automatic, effortful, and emotional. In fact, it is hardly fair to call it reasoning at all, as judgments just seem to pop into one’s head. Type 2 thinking , on the other hand, is slow, effortful, and logical. So obviously, it is more likely to lead to a correct judgment, or an optimal decision. The problem is, we tend to over-rely on Type 1. Now, we are not saying that Type 2 is the right way to go for every decision or judgment we make. It seems a bit much, for example, to engage in a step-by-step logical reasoning procedure to decide whether we will have chicken or fish for dinner tonight.

Many bad decisions in some very important contexts, however, can be traced back to poor judgments of the likelihood of certain risks or outcomes that result from the use of Type 1 when a more logical reasoning process would have been more appropriate. For example:

Statement #1: It is late at night.

Statement #2: Albert has been drinking beer for the past five hours at a party.

Statement #3: Albert is not exactly sure where he is or how far away home is.

Judgment: Albert will have no difficulty walking home.

Decision: He walks home alone.

As you can see in this example, the three statements backing up the judgment do not really support it. In other words, this argument is not inductively strong because it is based on judgments that ignore the laws of probability. What are the chances that someone facing these conditions will be able to walk home alone easily? And one need not be drunk to make poor decisions based on judgments that just pop into our heads.

The truth is that many of our probability judgments do not come very close to what the laws of probability say they should be. Think about it. In order for us to reason in accordance with these laws, we would need to know the laws of probability, which would allow us to calculate the relationship between particular pieces of evidence and the probability of some outcome (i.e., how much likelihood should change given a piece of evidence), and we would have to do these heavy math calculations in our heads. After all, that is what Type 2 requires. Needless to say, even if we were motivated, we often do not even know how to apply Type 2 reasoning in many cases.

So what do we do when we don’t have the knowledge, skills, or time required to make the correct mathematical judgment? Do we hold off and wait until we can get better evidence? Do we read up on probability and fire up our calculator app so we can compute the correct probability? Of course not. We rely on Type 1 thinking. We “wing it.” That is, we come up with a likelihood estimate using some means at our disposal. Psychologists use the term heuristic to describe the type of “winging it” we are talking about. A heuristic is a shortcut strategy that we use to make some judgment or solve some problem (see Section 7.3). Heuristics are easy and quick, think of them as the basic procedures that are characteristic of Type 1. They can absolutely lead to reasonably good judgments and decisions in some situations (like choosing between chicken and fish for dinner). They are, however, far from foolproof. There are, in fact, quite a lot of situations in which heuristics can lead us to make incorrect judgments, and in many cases the decisions based on those judgments can have serious consequences.

Let us return to the activity that begins this section. You were asked to judge the likelihood (or frequency) of certain events and risks. You were free to come up with your own evidence (or statements) to make these judgments. This is where a heuristic crops up. As a judgment shortcut, we tend to generate specific examples of those very events to help us decide their likelihood or frequency. For example, if we are asked to judge how common, frequent, or likely a particular type of cancer is, many of our statements would be examples of specific cancer cases:

Statement #1: Andy Kaufman (comedian) had lung cancer.

Statement #2: Colin Powell (US Secretary of State) had prostate cancer.

Statement #3: Bob Marley (musician) had skin and brain cancer

Statement #4: Sandra Day O’Connor (Supreme Court Justice) had breast cancer.

Statement #5: Fred Rogers (children’s entertainer) had stomach cancer.

Statement #6: Robin Roberts (news anchor) had breast cancer.

Statement #7: Bette Davis (actress) had breast cancer.

Judgment: Breast cancer is the most common type.

Your own experience or memory may also tell you that breast cancer is the most common type. But it is not (although it is common). Actually, skin cancer is the most common type in the US. We make the same types of misjudgments all the time because we do not generate the examples or evidence according to their actual frequencies or probabilities. Instead, we have a tendency (or bias) to search for the examples in memory; if they are easy to retrieve, we assume that they are common. To rephrase this in the language of the heuristic, events seem more likely to the extent that they are available to memory. This bias has been termed the availability heuristic (Kahneman and Tversky, 1974).

The fact that we use the availability heuristic does not automatically mean that our judgment is wrong. The reason we use heuristics in the first place is that they work fairly well in many cases (and, of course that they are easy to use). So, the easiest examples to think of sometimes are the most common ones. Is it more likely that a member of the U.S. Senate is a man or a woman? Most people have a much easier time generating examples of male senators. And as it turns out, the U.S. Senate has many more men than women (74 to 26 in 2020). In this case, then, the availability heuristic would lead you to make the correct judgment; it is far more likely that a senator would be a man.

In many other cases, however, the availability heuristic will lead us astray. This is because events can be memorable for many reasons other than their frequency. Section 5.2, Encoding Meaning, suggested that one good way to encode the meaning of some information is to form a mental image of it. Thus, information that has been pictured mentally will be more available to memory. Indeed, an event that is vivid and easily pictured will trick many people into supposing that type of event is more common than it actually is. Repetition of information will also make it more memorable. So, if the same event is described to you in a magazine, on the evening news, on a podcast that you listen to, and in your Facebook feed; it will be very available to memory. Again, the availability heuristic will cause you to misperceive the frequency of these types of events.

Most interestingly, information that is unusual is more memorable. Suppose we give you the following list of words to remember: box, flower, letter, platypus, oven, boat, newspaper, purse, drum, car. Very likely, the easiest word to remember would be platypus, the unusual one. The same thing occurs with memories of events. An event may be available to memory because it is unusual, yet the availability heuristic leads us to judge that the event is common. Did you catch that? In these cases, the availability heuristic makes us think the exact opposite of the true frequency. We end up thinking something is common because it is unusual (and therefore memorable). Yikes.

The misapplication of the availability heuristic sometimes has unfortunate results. For example, if you went to K-12 school in the US over the past 10 years, it is extremely likely that you have participated in lockdown and active shooter drills. Of course, everyone is trying to prevent the tragedy of another school shooting. And believe us, we are not trying to minimize how terrible the tragedy is. But the truth of the matter is, school shootings are extremely rare. Because the federal government does not keep a database of school shootings, the Washington Post has maintained their own running tally. Between 1999 and January 2020 (the date of the most recent school shooting with a death in the US at of the time this paragraph was written), the Post reported a total of 254 people died in school shootings in the US. Not 254 per year, 254 total. That is an average of 12 per year. Of course, that is 254 people who should not have died (particularly because many were children), but in a country with approximately 60,000,000 students and teachers, this is a very small risk.

But many students and teachers are terrified that they will be victims of school shootings because of the availability heuristic. It is so easy to think of examples (they are very available to memory) that people believe the event is very common. It is not. And there is a downside to this. We happen to believe that there is an enormous gun violence problem in the United States. According the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 39,773 firearm deaths in the US in 2017. Fifteen of those deaths were in school shootings, according to the Post. 60% of those deaths were suicides. When people pay attention to the school shooting risk (low), they often fail to notice the much larger risk.

And examples like this are by no means unique. The authors of this book have been teaching psychology since the 1990’s. We have been able to make the exact same arguments about the misapplication of the availability heuristics and keep them current by simply swapping out for the “fear of the day.” In the 1990’s it was children being kidnapped by strangers (it was known as “stranger danger”) despite the facts that kidnappings accounted for only 2% of the violent crimes committed against children, and only 24% of kidnappings are committed by strangers (US Department of Justice, 2007). This fear overlapped with the fear of terrorism that gripped the country after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and US Pentagon and still plagues the population of the US somewhat in 2020. After a well-publicized, sensational act of violence, people are extremely likely to increase their estimates of the chances that they, too, will be victims of terror. Think about the reality, however. In October of 2001, a terrorist mailed anthrax spores to members of the US government and a number of media companies. A total of five people died as a result of this attack. The nation was nearly paralyzed by the fear of dying from the attack; in reality the probability of an individual person dying was 0.00000002.

The availability heuristic can lead you to make incorrect judgments in a school setting as well. For example, suppose you are trying to decide if you should take a class from a particular math professor. You might try to make a judgment of how good a teacher she is by recalling instances of friends and acquaintances making comments about her teaching skill. You may have some examples that suggest that she is a poor teacher very available to memory, so on the basis of the availability heuristic you judge her a poor teacher and decide to take the class from someone else. What if, however, the instances you recalled were all from the same person, and this person happens to be a very colorful storyteller? The subsequent ease of remembering the instances might not indicate that the professor is a poor teacher after all.

Although the availability heuristic is obviously important, it is not the only judgment heuristic we use. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman examined the role of heuristics in inductive reasoning in a long series of studies. Kahneman received a Nobel Prize in Economics for this research in 2002, and Tversky would have certainly received one as well if he had not died of melanoma at age 59 in 1996 (Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously). Kahneman and Tversky demonstrated repeatedly that people do not reason in ways that are consistent with the laws of probability. They identified several heuristic strategies that people use instead to make judgments about likelihood. The importance of this work for economics (and the reason that Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize) is that earlier economic theories had assumed that people do make judgments rationally, that is, in agreement with the laws of probability.

Another common heuristic that people use for making judgments is the representativeness heuristic (Kahneman & Tversky 1973). Suppose we describe a person to you. He is quiet and shy, has an unassuming personality, and likes to work with numbers. Is this person more likely to be an accountant or an attorney? If you said accountant, you were probably using the representativeness heuristic. Our imaginary person is judged likely to be an accountant because he resembles, or is representative of the concept of, an accountant. When research participants are asked to make judgments such as these, the only thing that seems to matter is the representativeness of the description. For example, if told that the person described is in a room that contains 70 attorneys and 30 accountants, participants will still assume that he is an accountant.

inductive reasoning : a type of reasoning in which we make judgments about likelihood from sets of evidence

inductively strong argument : an inductive argument in which the beginning statements lead to a conclusion that is probably true

heuristic : a shortcut strategy that we use to make judgments and solve problems. Although they are easy to use, they do not guarantee correct judgments and solutions

availability heuristic : judging the frequency or likelihood of some event type according to how easily examples of the event can be called to mind (i.e., how available they are to memory)

representativeness heuristic: judging the likelihood that something is a member of a category on the basis of how much it resembles a typical category member (i.e., how representative it is of the category)

Type 1 thinking : fast, automatic, and emotional thinking.

Type 2 thinking : slow, effortful, and logical thinking.

What percentage of workplace homicides are co-worker violence?

Many people get these questions wrong. The answers are 10%; stairs; skin; 6%. How close were your answers? Explain how the availability heuristic might have led you to make the incorrect judgments.

Can you think of some other judgments that you have made (or beliefs that you have) that might have been influenced by the availability heuristic?

7.3 Problem Solving

Please take a few minutes to list a number of problems that you are facing right now.
Now write about a problem that you recently solved.
What is your definition of a problem?

Mary has a problem. Her daughter, ordinarily quite eager to please, appears to delight in being the last person to do anything. Whether getting ready for school, going to piano lessons or karate class, or even going out with her friends, she seems unwilling or unable to get ready on time. Other people have different kinds of problems. For example, many students work at jobs, have numerous family commitments, and are facing a course schedule full of difficult exams, assignments, papers, and speeches. How can they find enough time to devote to their studies and still fulfill their other obligations? Speaking of students and their problems: Show that a ball thrown vertically upward with initial velocity v0 takes twice as much time to return as to reach the highest point (from Spiegel, 1981).

These are three very different situations, but we have called them all problems. What makes them all the same, despite the differences? A psychologist might define a problem as a situation with an initial state, a goal state, and a set of possible intermediate states. Somewhat more meaningfully, we might consider a problem a situation in which you are in here one state (e.g., daughter is always late), you want to be there in another state (e.g., daughter is not always late), and with no obvious way to get from here to there. Defined this way, each of the three situations we outlined can now be seen as an example of the same general concept, a problem. At this point, you might begin to wonder what is not a problem, given such a general definition. It seems that nearly every non-routine task we engage in could qualify as a problem. As long as you realize that problems are not necessarily bad (it can be quite fun and satisfying to rise to the challenge and solve a problem), this may be a useful way to think about it.

Can we identify a set of problem-solving skills that would apply to these very different kinds of situations? That task, in a nutshell, is a major goal of this section. Let us try to begin to make sense of the wide variety of ways that problems can be solved with an important observation: the process of solving problems can be divided into two key parts. First, people have to notice, comprehend, and represent the problem properly in their minds (called problem representation ). Second, they have to apply some kind of solution strategy to the problem. Psychologists have studied both of these key parts of the process in detail.

When you first think about the problem-solving process, you might guess that most of our difficulties would occur because we are failing in the second step, the application of strategies. Although this can be a significant difficulty much of the time, the more important source of difficulty is probably problem representation. In short, we often fail to solve a problem because we are looking at it, or thinking about it, the wrong way.

problem : a situation in which we are in an initial state, have a desired goal state, and there is a number of possible intermediate states (i.e., there is no obvious way to get from the initial to the goal state)

problem representation : noticing, comprehending and forming a mental conception of a problem

Defining and Mentally Representing Problems in Order to Solve Them

So, the main obstacle to solving a problem is that we do not clearly understand exactly what the problem is. Recall the problem with Mary’s daughter always being late. One way to represent, or to think about, this problem is that she is being defiant. She refuses to get ready in time. This type of representation or definition suggests a particular type of solution. Another way to think about the problem, however, is to consider the possibility that she is simply being sidetracked by interesting diversions. This different conception of what the problem is (i.e., different representation) suggests a very different solution strategy. For example, if Mary defines the problem as defiance, she may be tempted to solve the problem using some kind of coercive tactics, that is, to assert her authority as her mother and force her to listen. On the other hand, if Mary defines the problem as distraction, she may try to solve it by simply removing the distracting objects.

As you might guess, when a problem is represented one way, the solution may seem very difficult, or even impossible. Seen another way, the solution might be very easy. For example, consider the following problem (from Nasar, 1998):

Two bicyclists start 20 miles apart and head toward each other, each going at a steady rate of 10 miles per hour. At the same time, a fly that travels at a steady 15 miles per hour starts from the front wheel of the southbound bicycle and flies to the front wheel of the northbound one, then turns around and flies to the front wheel of the southbound one again, and continues in this manner until he is crushed between the two front wheels. Question: what total distance did the fly cover?

Please take a few minutes to try to solve this problem.

Most people represent this problem as a question about a fly because, well, that is how the question is asked. The solution, using this representation, is to figure out how far the fly travels on the first leg of its journey, then add this total to how far it travels on the second leg of its journey (when it turns around and returns to the first bicycle), then continue to add the smaller distance from each leg of the journey until you converge on the correct answer. You would have to be quite skilled at math to solve this problem, and you would probably need some time and pencil and paper to do it.

If you consider a different representation, however, you can solve this problem in your head. Instead of thinking about it as a question about a fly, think about it as a question about the bicycles. They are 20 miles apart, and each is traveling 10 miles per hour. How long will it take for the bicycles to reach each other? Right, one hour. The fly is traveling 15 miles per hour; therefore, it will travel a total of 15 miles back and forth in the hour before the bicycles meet. Represented one way (as a problem about a fly), the problem is quite difficult. Represented another way (as a problem about two bicycles), it is easy. Changing your representation of a problem is sometimes the best—sometimes the only—way to solve it.

Unfortunately, however, changing a problem’s representation is not the easiest thing in the world to do. Often, problem solvers get stuck looking at a problem one way. This is called fixation . Most people who represent the preceding problem as a problem about a fly probably do not pause to reconsider, and consequently change, their representation. A parent who thinks her daughter is being defiant is unlikely to consider the possibility that her behavior is far less purposeful.

Problem-solving fixation was examined by a group of German psychologists called Gestalt psychologists during the 1930’s and 1940’s. Karl Dunker, for example, discovered an important type of failure to take a different perspective called functional fixedness . Imagine being a participant in one of his experiments. You are asked to figure out how to mount two candles on a door and are given an assortment of odds and ends, including a small empty cardboard box and some thumbtacks. Perhaps you have already figured out a solution: tack the box to the door so it forms a platform, then put the candles on top of the box. Most people are able to arrive at this solution. Imagine a slight variation of the procedure, however. What if, instead of being empty, the box had matches in it? Most people given this version of the problem do not arrive at the solution given above. Why? Because it seems to people that when the box contains matches, it already has a function; it is a matchbox. People are unlikely to consider a new function for an object that already has a function. This is functional fixedness.

Mental set is a type of fixation in which the problem solver gets stuck using the same solution strategy that has been successful in the past, even though the solution may no longer be useful. It is commonly seen when students do math problems for homework. Often, several problems in a row require the reapplication of the same solution strategy. Then, without warning, the next problem in the set requires a new strategy. Many students attempt to apply the formerly successful strategy on the new problem and therefore cannot come up with a correct answer.

The thing to remember is that you cannot solve a problem unless you correctly identify what it is to begin with (initial state) and what you want the end result to be (goal state). That may mean looking at the problem from a different angle and representing it in a new way. The correct representation does not guarantee a successful solution, but it certainly puts you on the right track.

A bit more optimistically, the Gestalt psychologists discovered what may be considered the opposite of fixation, namely insight . Sometimes the solution to a problem just seems to pop into your head. Wolfgang Kohler examined insight by posing many different problems to chimpanzees, principally problems pertaining to their acquisition of out-of-reach food. In one version, a banana was placed outside of a chimpanzee’s cage and a short stick inside the cage. The stick was too short to retrieve the banana, but was long enough to retrieve a longer stick also located outside of the cage. This second stick was long enough to retrieve the banana. After trying, and failing, to reach the banana with the shorter stick, the chimpanzee would try a couple of random-seeming attempts, react with some apparent frustration or anger, then suddenly rush to the longer stick, the correct solution fully realized at this point. This sudden appearance of the solution, observed many times with many different problems, was termed insight by Kohler.

Lest you think it pertains to chimpanzees only, Karl Dunker demonstrated that children also solve problems through insight in the 1930s. More importantly, you have probably experienced insight yourself. Think back to a time when you were trying to solve a difficult problem. After struggling for a while, you gave up. Hours later, the solution just popped into your head, perhaps when you were taking a walk, eating dinner, or lying in bed.

fixation : when a problem solver gets stuck looking at a problem a particular way and cannot change his or her representation of it (or his or her intended solution strategy)

functional fixedness : a specific type of fixation in which a problem solver cannot think of a new use for an object that already has a function

mental set : a specific type of fixation in which a problem solver gets stuck using the same solution strategy that has been successful in the past

insight : a sudden realization of a solution to a problem

Solving Problems by Trial and Error

Correctly identifying the problem and your goal for a solution is a good start, but recall the psychologist’s definition of a problem: it includes a set of possible intermediate states. Viewed this way, a problem can be solved satisfactorily only if one can find a path through some of these intermediate states to the goal. Imagine a fairly routine problem, finding a new route to school when your ordinary route is blocked (by road construction, for example). At each intersection, you may turn left, turn right, or go straight. A satisfactory solution to the problem (of getting to school) is a sequence of selections at each intersection that allows you to wind up at school.

If you had all the time in the world to get to school, you might try choosing intermediate states randomly. At one corner you turn left, the next you go straight, then you go left again, then right, then right, then straight. Unfortunately, trial and error will not necessarily get you where you want to go, and even if it does, it is not the fastest way to get there. For example, when a friend of ours was in college, he got lost on the way to a concert and attempted to find the venue by choosing streets to turn onto randomly (this was long before the use of GPS). Amazingly enough, the strategy worked, although he did end up missing two out of the three bands who played that night.

Trial and error is not all bad, however. B.F. Skinner, a prominent behaviorist psychologist, suggested that people often behave randomly in order to see what effect the behavior has on the environment and what subsequent effect this environmental change has on them. This seems particularly true for the very young person. Picture a child filling a household’s fish tank with toilet paper, for example. To a child trying to develop a repertoire of creative problem-solving strategies, an odd and random behavior might be just the ticket. Eventually, the exasperated parent hopes, the child will discover that many of these random behaviors do not successfully solve problems; in fact, in many cases they create problems. Thus, one would expect a decrease in this random behavior as a child matures. You should realize, however, that the opposite extreme is equally counterproductive. If the children become too rigid, never trying something unexpected and new, their problem solving skills can become too limited.

Effective problem solving seems to call for a happy medium that strikes a balance between using well-founded old strategies and trying new ground and territory. The individual who recognizes a situation in which an old problem-solving strategy would work best, and who can also recognize a situation in which a new untested strategy is necessary is halfway to success.

Solving Problems with Algorithms and Heuristics

For many problems there is a possible strategy available that will guarantee a correct solution. For example, think about math problems. Math lessons often consist of step-by-step procedures that can be used to solve the problems. If you apply the strategy without error, you are guaranteed to arrive at the correct solution to the problem. This approach is called using an algorithm , a term that denotes the step-by-step procedure that guarantees a correct solution. Because algorithms are sometimes available and come with a guarantee, you might think that most people use them frequently. Unfortunately, however, they do not. As the experience of many students who have struggled through math classes can attest, algorithms can be extremely difficult to use, even when the problem solver knows which algorithm is supposed to work in solving the problem. In problems outside of math class, we often do not even know if an algorithm is available. It is probably fair to say, then, that algorithms are rarely used when people try to solve problems.

Because algorithms are so difficult to use, people often pass up the opportunity to guarantee a correct solution in favor of a strategy that is much easier to use and yields a reasonable chance of coming up with a correct solution. These strategies are called problem solving heuristics . Similar to what you saw in section 6.2 with reasoning heuristics, a problem solving heuristic is a shortcut strategy that people use when trying to solve problems. It usually works pretty well, but does not guarantee a correct solution to the problem. For example, one problem solving heuristic might be “always move toward the goal” (so when trying to get to school when your regular route is blocked, you would always turn in the direction you think the school is). A heuristic that people might use when doing math homework is “use the same solution strategy that you just used for the previous problem.”

By the way, we hope these last two paragraphs feel familiar to you. They seem to parallel a distinction that you recently learned. Indeed, algorithms and problem-solving heuristics are another example of the distinction between Type 1 thinking and Type 2 thinking.

Although it is probably not worth describing a large number of specific heuristics, two observations about heuristics are worth mentioning. First, heuristics can be very general or they can be very specific, pertaining to a particular type of problem only. For example, “always move toward the goal” is a general strategy that you can apply to countless problem situations. On the other hand, “when you are lost without a functioning gps, pick the most expensive car you can see and follow it” is specific to the problem of being lost. Second, all heuristics are not equally useful. One heuristic that many students know is “when in doubt, choose c for a question on a multiple-choice exam.” This is a dreadful strategy because many instructors intentionally randomize the order of answer choices. Another test-taking heuristic, somewhat more useful, is “look for the answer to one question somewhere else on the exam.”

You really should pay attention to the application of heuristics to test taking. Imagine that while reviewing your answers for a multiple-choice exam before turning it in, you come across a question for which you originally thought the answer was c. Upon reflection, you now think that the answer might be b. Should you change the answer to b, or should you stick with your first impression? Most people will apply the heuristic strategy to “stick with your first impression.” What they do not realize, of course, is that this is a very poor strategy (Lilienfeld et al, 2009). Most of the errors on exams come on questions that were answered wrong originally and were not changed (so they remain wrong). There are many fewer errors where we change a correct answer to an incorrect answer. And, of course, sometimes we change an incorrect answer to a correct answer. In fact, research has shown that it is more common to change a wrong answer to a right answer than vice versa (Bruno, 2001).

The belief in this poor test-taking strategy (stick with your first impression) is based on the confirmation bias (Nickerson, 1998; Wason, 1960). You first saw the confirmation bias in Module 1, but because it is so important, we will repeat the information here. People have a bias, or tendency, to notice information that confirms what they already believe. Somebody at one time told you to stick with your first impression, so when you look at the results of an exam you have taken, you will tend to notice the cases that are consistent with that belief. That is, you will notice the cases in which you originally had an answer correct and changed it to the wrong answer. You tend not to notice the other two important (and more common) cases, changing an answer from wrong to right, and leaving a wrong answer unchanged.

Because heuristics by definition do not guarantee a correct solution to a problem, mistakes are bound to occur when we employ them. A poor choice of a specific heuristic will lead to an even higher likelihood of making an error.

algorithm : a step-by-step procedure that guarantees a correct solution to a problem

problem solving heuristic : a shortcut strategy that we use to solve problems. Although they are easy to use, they do not guarantee correct judgments and solutions

confirmation bias : people’s tendency to notice information that confirms what they already believe

An Effective Problem-Solving Sequence

You may be left with a big question: If algorithms are hard to use and heuristics often don’t work, how am I supposed to solve problems? Robert Sternberg (1996), as part of his theory of what makes people successfully intelligent (Module 8) described a problem-solving sequence that has been shown to work rather well:

Identify the existence of a problem. In school, problem identification is often easy; problems that you encounter in math classes, for example, are conveniently labeled as problems for you. Outside of school, however, realizing that you have a problem is a key difficulty that you must get past in order to begin solving it. You must be very sensitive to the symptoms that indicate a problem.
Define the problem. Suppose you realize that you have been having many headaches recently. Very likely, you would identify this as a problem. If you define the problem as “headaches,” the solution would probably be to take aspirin or ibuprofen or some other anti-inflammatory medication. If the headaches keep returning, however, you have not really solved the problem—likely because you have mistaken a symptom for the problem itself. Instead, you must find the root cause of the headaches. Stress might be the real problem. For you to successfully solve many problems it may be necessary for you to overcome your fixations and represent the problems differently. One specific strategy that you might find useful is to try to define the problem from someone else’s perspective. How would your parents, spouse, significant other, doctor, etc. define the problem? Somewhere in these different perspectives may lurk the key definition that will allow you to find an easier and permanent solution.
Formulate strategy. Now it is time to begin planning exactly how the problem will be solved. Is there an algorithm or heuristic available for you to use? Remember, heuristics by their very nature guarantee that occasionally you will not be able to solve the problem. One point to keep in mind is that you should look for long-range solutions, which are more likely to address the root cause of a problem than short-range solutions.
Represent and organize information. Similar to the way that the problem itself can be defined, or represented in multiple ways, information within the problem is open to different interpretations. Suppose you are studying for a big exam. You have chapters from a textbook and from a supplemental reader, along with lecture notes that all need to be studied. How should you (represent and) organize these materials? Should you separate them by type of material (text versus reader versus lecture notes), or should you separate them by topic? To solve problems effectively, you must learn to find the most useful representation and organization of information.
Allocate resources. This is perhaps the simplest principle of the problem solving sequence, but it is extremely difficult for many people. First, you must decide whether time, money, skills, effort, goodwill, or some other resource would help to solve the problem Then, you must make the hard choice of deciding which resources to use, realizing that you cannot devote maximum resources to every problem. Very often, the solution to problem is simply to change how resources are allocated (for example, spending more time studying in order to improve grades).
Monitor and evaluate solutions. Pay attention to the solution strategy while you are applying it. If it is not working, you may be able to select another strategy. Another fact you should realize about problem solving is that it never does end. Solving one problem frequently brings up new ones. Good monitoring and evaluation of your problem solutions can help you to anticipate and get a jump on solving the inevitable new problems that will arise.

Please note that this as an effective problem-solving sequence, not the effective problem solving sequence. Just as you can become fixated and end up representing the problem incorrectly or trying an inefficient solution, you can become stuck applying the problem-solving sequence in an inflexible way. Clearly there are problem situations that can be solved without using these skills in this order.

Additionally, many real-world problems may require that you go back and redefine a problem several times as the situation changes (Sternberg et al. 2000). For example, consider the problem with Mary’s daughter one last time. At first, Mary did represent the problem as one of defiance. When her early strategy of pleading and threatening punishment was unsuccessful, Mary began to observe her daughter more carefully. She noticed that, indeed, her daughter’s attention would be drawn by an irresistible distraction or book. Fresh with a re-representation of the problem, she began a new solution strategy. She began to remind her daughter every few minutes to stay on task and remind her that if she is ready before it is time to leave, she may return to the book or other distracting object at that time. Fortunately, this strategy was successful, so Mary did not have to go back and redefine the problem again.

Pick one or two of the problems that you listed when you first started studying this section and try to work out the steps of Sternberg’s problem solving sequence for each one.

a mental representation of a category of things in the world

an assumption about the truth of something that is not stated. Inferences come from our prior knowledge and experience, and from logical reasoning

knowledge about one’s own cognitive processes; thinking about your thinking

individuals who are less competent tend to overestimate their abilities more than individuals who are more competent do

Thinking like a scientist in your everyday life for the purpose of drawing correct conclusions. It entails skepticism; an ability to identify biases, distortions, omissions, and assumptions; and excellent deductive and inductive reasoning, and problem solving skills.

a way of thinking in which you refrain from drawing a conclusion or changing your mind until good evidence has been provided

an inclination, tendency, leaning, or prejudice

a type of reasoning in which the conclusion is guaranteed to be true any time the statements leading up to it are true

a set of statements in which the beginning statements lead to a conclusion

an argument for which true beginning statements guarantee that the conclusion is true

a type of reasoning in which we make judgments about likelihood from sets of evidence

an inductive argument in which the beginning statements lead to a conclusion that is probably true

fast, automatic, and emotional thinking

slow, effortful, and logical thinking

a shortcut strategy that we use to make judgments and solve problems. Although they are easy to use, they do not guarantee correct judgments and solutions

udging the frequency or likelihood of some event type according to how easily examples of the event can be called to mind (i.e., how available they are to memory)

judging the likelihood that something is a member of a category on the basis of how much it resembles a typical category member (i.e., how representative it is of the category)

a situation in which we are in an initial state, have a desired goal state, and there is a number of possible intermediate states (i.e., there is no obvious way to get from the initial to the goal state)

noticing, comprehending and forming a mental conception of a problem

when a problem solver gets stuck looking at a problem a particular way and cannot change his or her representation of it (or his or her intended solution strategy)

a specific type of fixation in which a problem solver cannot think of a new use for an object that already has a function

a specific type of fixation in which a problem solver gets stuck using the same solution strategy that has been successful in the past

a sudden realization of a solution to a problem

a step-by-step procedure that guarantees a correct solution to a problem

The tendency to notice and pay attention to information that confirms your prior beliefs and to ignore information that disconfirms them.

a shortcut strategy that we use to solve problems. Although they are easy to use, they do not guarantee correct judgments and solutions

Introduction to Psychology Copyright © 2020 by Ken Gray; Elizabeth Arnott-Hill; and Or'Shaundra Benson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

10 Best Problem-Solving Therapy Worksheets & Activities

Cognitive science tells us that we regularly face not only well-defined problems but, importantly, many that are ill defined (Eysenck & Keane, 2015).

Sometimes, we find ourselves unable to overcome our daily problems or the inevitable (though hopefully infrequent) life traumas we face.

Problem-Solving Therapy aims to reduce the incidence and impact of mental health disorders and improve wellbeing by helping clients face life’s difficulties (Dobson, 2011).

This article introduces Problem-Solving Therapy and offers techniques, activities, and worksheets that mental health professionals can use with clients.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Positive Psychology Exercises for free . These science-based exercises explore fundamental aspects of positive psychology, including strengths, values, and self-compassion, and will give you the tools to enhance the wellbeing of your clients, students, or employees.

This Article Contains:

What is problem-solving therapy, 14 steps for problem-solving therapy, 3 best interventions and techniques, 7 activities and worksheets for your session, fascinating books on the topic, resources from positivepsychology.com, a take-home message.

Problem-Solving Therapy assumes that mental disorders arise in response to ineffective or maladaptive coping. By adopting a more realistic and optimistic view of coping, individuals can understand the role of emotions and develop actions to reduce distress and maintain mental wellbeing (Nezu & Nezu, 2009).

“Problem-solving therapy (PST) is a psychosocial intervention, generally considered to be under a cognitive-behavioral umbrella” (Nezu, Nezu, & D’Zurilla, 2013, p. ix). It aims to encourage the client to cope better with day-to-day problems and traumatic events and reduce their impact on mental and physical wellbeing.

Clinical research, counseling, and health psychology have shown PST to be highly effective in clients of all ages, ranging from children to the elderly, across multiple clinical settings, including schizophrenia, stress, and anxiety disorders (Dobson, 2011).

Can it help with depression?

PST appears particularly helpful in treating clients with depression. A recent analysis of 30 studies found that PST was an effective treatment with a similar degree of success as other successful therapies targeting depression (Cuijpers, Wit, Kleiboer, Karyotaki, & Ebert, 2020).

Other studies confirm the value of PST and its effectiveness at treating depression in multiple age groups and its capacity to combine with other therapies, including drug treatments (Dobson, 2011).

The major concepts

Effective coping varies depending on the situation, and treatment typically focuses on improving the environment and reducing emotional distress (Dobson, 2011).

PST is based on two overlapping models:

Social problem-solving model

This model focuses on solving the problem “as it occurs in the natural social environment,” combined with a general coping strategy and a method of self-control (Dobson, 2011, p. 198).

The model includes three central concepts:

Social problem-solving
The problem
The solution

The model is a “self-directed cognitive-behavioral process by which an individual, couple, or group attempts to identify or discover effective solutions for specific problems encountered in everyday living” (Dobson, 2011, p. 199).

Relational problem-solving model

The theory of PST is underpinned by a relational problem-solving model, whereby stress is viewed in terms of the relationships between three factors:

Stressful life events
Emotional distress and wellbeing
Problem-solving coping

Therefore, when a significant adverse life event occurs, it may require “sweeping readjustments in a person’s life” (Dobson, 2011, p. 202).

Enhance positive problem orientation
Decrease negative orientation
Foster ability to apply rational problem-solving skills
Reduce the tendency to avoid problem-solving
Minimize the tendency to be careless and impulsive

D’Zurilla’s and Nezu’s model includes (modified from Dobson, 2011):

Initial structuring Establish a positive therapeutic relationship that encourages optimism and explains the PST approach.
Assessment Formally and informally assess areas of stress in the client’s life and their problem-solving strengths and weaknesses.
Obstacles to effective problem-solving Explore typically human challenges to problem-solving, such as multitasking and the negative impact of stress. Introduce tools that can help, such as making lists, visualization, and breaking complex problems down.
Problem orientation – fostering self-efficacy Introduce the importance of a positive problem orientation, adopting tools, such as visualization, to promote self-efficacy.
Problem orientation – recognizing problems Help clients recognize issues as they occur and use problem checklists to ‘normalize’ the experience.
Problem orientation – seeing problems as challenges Encourage clients to break free of harmful and restricted ways of thinking while learning how to argue from another point of view.
Problem orientation – use and control emotions Help clients understand the role of emotions in problem-solving, including using feelings to inform the process and managing disruptive emotions (such as cognitive reframing and relaxation exercises).
Problem orientation – stop and think Teach clients how to reduce impulsive and avoidance tendencies (visualizing a stop sign or traffic light).
Problem definition and formulation Encourage an understanding of the nature of problems and set realistic goals and objectives.
Generation of alternatives Work with clients to help them recognize the wide range of potential solutions to each problem (for example, brainstorming).
Decision-making Encourage better decision-making through an improved understanding of the consequences of decisions and the value and likelihood of different outcomes.
Solution implementation and verification Foster the client’s ability to carry out a solution plan, monitor its outcome, evaluate its effectiveness, and use self-reinforcement to increase the chance of success.
Guided practice Encourage the application of problem-solving skills across multiple domains and future stressful problems.
Rapid problem-solving Teach clients how to apply problem-solving questions and guidelines quickly in any given situation.

Success in PST depends on the effectiveness of its implementation; using the right approach is crucial (Dobson, 2011).

Problem-solving therapy – Baycrest

The following interventions and techniques are helpful when implementing more effective problem-solving approaches in client’s lives.

First, it is essential to consider if PST is the best approach for the client, based on the problems they present.

Is PPT appropriate?

It is vital to consider whether PST is appropriate for the client’s situation. Therapists new to the approach may require additional guidance (Nezu et al., 2013).

Therapists should consider the following questions before beginning PST with a client (modified from Nezu et al., 2013):

Has PST proven effective in the past for the problem? For example, research has shown success with depression, generalized anxiety, back pain, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, and supporting caregivers (Nezu et al., 2013).
Is PST acceptable to the client?
Is the individual experiencing a significant mental or physical health problem?

All affirmative answers suggest that PST would be a helpful technique to apply in this instance.

Five problem-solving steps

The following five steps are valuable when working with clients to help them cope with and manage their environment (modified from Dobson, 2011).

Ask the client to consider the following points (forming the acronym ADAPT) when confronted by a problem:

Attitude Aim to adopt a positive, optimistic attitude to the problem and problem-solving process.
Define Obtain all required facts and details of potential obstacles to define the problem.
Alternatives Identify various alternative solutions and actions to overcome the obstacle and achieve the problem-solving goal.
Predict Predict each alternative’s positive and negative outcomes and choose the one most likely to achieve the goal and maximize the benefits.
Try out Once selected, try out the solution and monitor its effectiveness while engaging in self-reinforcement.

If the client is not satisfied with their solution, they can return to step ‘A’ and find a more appropriate solution.

Download 3 Free Positive Psychology Exercises (PDF)

Enhance wellbeing with these free, science-based exercises that draw on the latest insights from positive psychology.

Download 3 Free Positive Psychology Tools Pack (PDF)

By filling out your name and email address below.

Positive self-statements

When dealing with clients facing negative self-beliefs, it can be helpful for them to use positive self-statements.

Use the following (or add new) self-statements to replace harmful, negative thinking (modified from Dobson, 2011):

I can solve this problem; I’ve tackled similar ones before.
I can cope with this.
I just need to take a breath and relax.
Once I start, it will be easier.
It’s okay to look out for myself.
I can get help if needed.
Other people feel the same way I do.
I’ll take one piece of the problem at a time.
I can keep my fears in check.
I don’t need to please everyone.

World’s Largest Positive Psychology Resource

The Positive Psychology Toolkit© is a groundbreaking practitioner resource containing over 500 science-based exercises , activities, interventions, questionnaires, and assessments created by experts using the latest positive psychology research.

Updated monthly. 100% Science-based.

“The best positive psychology resource out there!” — Emiliya Zhivotovskaya , Flourishing Center CEO

PST practitioners have many different techniques available to support clients as they learn to tackle day-to-day or one-off trauma.

5 Worksheets and workbooks

Problem-solving self-monitoring form.

Ask the client to complete the following:

Describe the problem you are facing.
What is your goal?
What have you tried so far to solve the problem?
What was the outcome?

Reactions to Stress

It can be helpful for the client to recognize their own experiences of stress. Do they react angrily, withdraw, or give up (Dobson, 2011)?

The Reactions to Stress worksheet can be given to the client as homework to capture stressful events and their reactions. By recording how they felt, behaved, and thought, they can recognize repeating patterns.

What Are Your Unique Triggers?

Helping clients capture triggers for their stressful reactions can encourage emotional regulation.

When clients can identify triggers that may lead to a negative response, they can stop the experience or slow down their emotional reaction (Dobson, 2011).

The What Are Your Unique Triggers ? worksheet helps the client identify their triggers (e.g., conflict, relationships, physical environment, etc.).

Problem-Solving worksheet

Imagining an existing or potential problem and working through how to resolve it can be a powerful exercise for the client.

Use the Problem-Solving worksheet to state a problem and goal and consider the obstacles in the way. Then explore options for achieving the goal, along with their pros and cons, to assess the best action plan.

Getting the Facts

Clients can become better equipped to tackle problems and choose the right course of action by recognizing facts versus assumptions and gathering all the necessary information (Dobson, 2011).

Use the Getting the Facts worksheet to answer the following questions clearly and unambiguously:

Who is involved?
What did or did not happen, and how did it bother you?
Where did it happen?
When did it happen?
Why did it happen?
How did you respond?

2 Helpful Group Activities

While therapists can use the worksheets above in group situations, the following two interventions work particularly well with more than one person.

Generating Alternative Solutions and Better Decision-Making

A group setting can provide an ideal opportunity to share a problem and identify potential solutions arising from multiple perspectives.

Use the Generating Alternative Solutions and Better Decision-Making worksheet and ask the client to explain the situation or problem to the group and the obstacles in the way.

Once the approaches are captured and reviewed, the individual can share their decision-making process with the group if they want further feedback.

Visualization

Visualization can be performed with individuals or in a group setting to help clients solve problems in multiple ways, including (Dobson, 2011):

Clarifying the problem by looking at it from multiple perspectives
Rehearsing a solution in the mind to improve and get more practice
Visualizing a ‘safe place’ for relaxation, slowing down, and stress management

Guided imagery is particularly valuable for encouraging the group to take a ‘mental vacation’ and let go of stress.

Ask the group to begin with slow, deep breathing that fills the entire diaphragm. Then ask them to visualize a favorite scene (real or imagined) that makes them feel relaxed, perhaps beside a gently flowing river, a summer meadow, or at the beach.

The more the senses are engaged, the more real the experience. Ask the group to think about what they can hear, see, touch, smell, and even taste.

Encourage them to experience the situation as fully as possible, immersing themselves and enjoying their place of safety.

Such feelings of relaxation may be able to help clients fall asleep, relieve stress, and become more ready to solve problems.

We have included three of our favorite books on the subject of Problem-Solving Therapy below.

1. Problem-Solving Therapy: A Treatment Manual – Arthur Nezu, Christine Maguth Nezu, and Thomas D’Zurilla

This is an incredibly valuable book for anyone wishing to understand the principles and practice behind PST.

Written by the co-developers of PST, the manual provides powerful toolkits to overcome cognitive overload, emotional dysregulation, and the barriers to practical problem-solving.

Find the book on Amazon .

2. Emotion-Centered Problem-Solving Therapy: Treatment Guidelines – Arthur Nezu and Christine Maguth Nezu

Another, more recent, book from the creators of PST, this text includes important advances in neuroscience underpinning the role of emotion in behavioral treatment.

Along with clinical examples, the book also includes crucial toolkits that form part of a stepped model for the application of PST.

3. Handbook of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapies – Keith Dobson and David Dozois

This is the fourth edition of a hugely popular guide to Cognitive-Behavioral Therapies and includes a valuable and insightful section on Problem-Solving Therapy.

This is an important book for students and more experienced therapists wishing to form a high-level and in-depth understanding of the tools and techniques available to Cognitive-Behavioral Therapists.

For even more tools to help strengthen your clients’ problem-solving skills, check out the following free worksheets from our blog.

Case Formulation Worksheet This worksheet presents a four-step framework to help therapists and their clients come to a shared understanding of the client’s presenting problem.
Understanding Your Default Problem-Solving Approach This worksheet poses a series of questions helping clients reflect on their typical cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses to problems.
Social Problem Solving: Step by Step This worksheet presents a streamlined template to help clients define a problem, generate possible courses of action, and evaluate the effectiveness of an implemented solution.

If you’re looking for more science-based ways to help others enhance their wellbeing, check out this signature collection of 17 validated positive psychology tools for practitioners. Use them to help others flourish and thrive.

17 Top-Rated Positive Psychology Exercises for Practitioners

Expand your arsenal and impact with these 17 Positive Psychology Exercises [PDF] , scientifically designed to promote human flourishing, meaning, and wellbeing.

Created by Experts. 100% Science-based.

While we are born problem-solvers, facing an incredibly diverse set of challenges daily, we sometimes need support.

Problem-Solving Therapy aims to reduce stress and associated mental health disorders and improve wellbeing by improving our ability to cope. PST is valuable in diverse clinical settings, ranging from depression to schizophrenia, with research suggesting it as a highly effective treatment for teaching coping strategies and reducing emotional distress.

Many PST techniques are available to help improve clients’ positive outlook on obstacles while reducing avoidance of problem situations and the tendency to be careless and impulsive.

The PST model typically assesses the client’s strengths, weaknesses, and coping strategies when facing problems before encouraging a healthy experience of and relationship with problem-solving.

Why not use this article to explore the theory behind PST and try out some of our powerful tools and interventions with your clients to help them with their decision-making, coping, and problem-solving?

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Positive Psychology Exercises for free .

Cuijpers, P., Wit, L., Kleiboer, A., Karyotaki, E., & Ebert, D. (2020). Problem-solving therapy for adult depression: An updated meta-analysis. European P sychiatry , 48 (1), 27–37.
Dobson, K. S. (2011). Handbook of cognitive-behavioral therapies (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.
Dobson, K. S., & Dozois, D. J. A. (2021). Handbook of cognitive-behavioral therapies (4th ed.). Guilford Press.
Eysenck, M. W., & Keane, M. T. (2015). Cognitive psychology: A student’s handbook . Psychology Press.
Nezu, A. M., & Nezu, C. M. (2009). Problem-solving therapy DVD . Retrieved September 13, 2021, from https://www.apa.org/pubs/videos/4310852
Nezu, A. M., & Nezu, C. M. (2018). Emotion-centered problem-solving therapy: Treatment guidelines. Springer.
Nezu, A. M., Nezu, C. M., & D’Zurilla, T. J. (2013). Problem-solving therapy: A treatment manual . Springer.

Share this article:

Article feedback

What our readers think.

Thanks for your information given, it was helpful for me something new I learned

Let us know your thoughts Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

The Empty Chair Technique: How It Can Help Your Clients

Resolving ‘unfinished business’ is often an essential part of counseling. If left unresolved, it can contribute to depression, anxiety, and mental ill-health while damaging existing [...]

29 Best Group Therapy Activities for Supporting Adults

As humans, we are social creatures with personal histories based on the various groups that make up our lives. Childhood begins with a family of [...]

47 Free Therapy Resources to Help Kick-Start Your New Practice

Setting up a private practice in psychotherapy brings several challenges, including a considerable investment of time and money. You can reduce risks early on by [...]

Bipolar Disorder
Therapy Center
When To See a Therapist
Types of Therapy
Best Online Therapy
Best Couples Therapy
Managing Stress
Sleep and Dreaming
Understanding Emotions
Self-Improvement
Healthy Relationships
Student Resources
Personality Types
Sweepstakes
Guided Meditations
Verywell Mind Insights
2024 Verywell Mind 25
Mental Health in the Classroom
Editorial Process
Meet Our Review Board
Crisis Support

What Is Cognitive Psychology?

The Science of How We Think

Topics in Cognitive Psychology

Current Research
Cognitive Approach in Practice

Careers in Cognitive Psychology

How cognitive psychology differs from other branches of psychology, frequently asked questions.

Cognitive psychology is the study of internal mental processes—all of the workings inside your brain, including perception, thinking, memory, attention, language, problem-solving, and learning. Learning about how people think and process information helps researchers and psychologists understand the human brain and assist people with psychological difficulties.

This article discusses what cognitive psychology is—its history, current trends, practical applications, and career paths.

Findings from cognitive psychology help us understand how people think, including how they acquire and store memories. By knowing more about how these processes work, psychologists can develop new ways of helping people with cognitive problems.

Cognitive psychologists explore a wide variety of topics related to thinking processes. Some of these include:

Attention --our ability to process information in the environment while tuning out irrelevant details
Choice-based behavior --actions driven by a choice among other possibilities
Decision-making
Information processing
Language acquisition --how we learn to read, write, and express ourselves
Problem-solving
Speech perception -how we process what others are saying
Visual perception --how we see the physical world around us

History of Cognitive Psychology

Although it is a relatively young branch of psychology , it has quickly grown to become one of the most popular subfields. Cognitive psychology grew into prominence between the 1950s and 1970s.

Prior to this time, behaviorism was the dominant perspective in psychology. This theory holds that we learn all our behaviors from interacting with our environment. It focuses strictly on observable behavior, not thought and emotion. Then, researchers became more interested in the internal processes that affect behavior instead of just the behavior itself.

This shift is often referred to as the cognitive revolution in psychology. During this time, a great deal of research on topics including memory, attention, and language acquisition began to emerge.

In 1967, the psychologist Ulric Neisser introduced the term cognitive psychology, which he defined as the study of the processes behind the perception, transformation, storage, and recovery of information.

Cognitive psychology became more prominent after the 1950s as a result of the cognitive revolution.

Current Research in Cognitive Psychology

The field of cognitive psychology is both broad and diverse. It touches on many aspects of daily life. There are numerous practical applications for this research, such as providing help coping with memory disorders, making better decisions , recovering from brain injury, treating learning disorders, and structuring educational curricula to enhance learning.

Current research on cognitive psychology helps play a role in how professionals approach the treatment of mental illness, traumatic brain injury, and degenerative brain diseases.

Thanks to the work of cognitive psychologists, we can better pinpoint ways to measure human intellectual abilities, develop new strategies to combat memory problems, and decode the workings of the human brain—all of which ultimately have a powerful impact on how we treat cognitive disorders.

The field of cognitive psychology is a rapidly growing area that continues to add to our understanding of the many influences that mental processes have on our health and daily lives.

From understanding how cognitive processes change as a child develops to looking at how the brain transforms sensory inputs into perceptions, cognitive psychology has helped us gain a deeper and richer understanding of the many mental events that contribute to our daily existence and overall well-being.

The Cognitive Approach in Practice

In addition to adding to our understanding of how the human mind works, the field of cognitive psychology has also had an impact on approaches to mental health. Before the 1970s, many mental health treatments were focused more on psychoanalytic , behavioral , and humanistic approaches.

The so-called "cognitive revolution" put a greater emphasis on understanding the way people process information and how thinking patterns might contribute to psychological distress. Thanks to research in this area, new approaches to treatment were developed to help treat depression, anxiety, phobias, and other psychological disorders .

Cognitive behavioral therapy and rational emotive behavior therapy are two methods in which clients and therapists focus on the underlying cognitions, or thoughts, that contribute to psychological distress.

What Is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is an approach that helps clients identify irrational beliefs and other cognitive distortions that are in conflict with reality and then aid them in replacing such thoughts with more realistic, healthy beliefs.

If you are experiencing symptoms of a psychological disorder that would benefit from the use of cognitive approaches, you might see a psychologist who has specific training in these cognitive treatment methods.

These professionals frequently go by titles other than cognitive psychologists, such as psychiatrists, clinical psychologists , or counseling psychologists , but many of the strategies they use are rooted in the cognitive tradition.

Many cognitive psychologists specialize in research with universities or government agencies. Others take a clinical focus and work directly with people who are experiencing challenges related to mental processes. They work in hospitals, mental health clinics, and private practices.

Research psychologists in this area often concentrate on a particular topic, such as memory. Others work directly on health concerns related to cognition, such as degenerative brain disorders and brain injuries.

Treatments rooted in cognitive research focus on helping people replace negative thought patterns with more positive, realistic ones. With the help of cognitive psychologists, people are often able to find ways to cope and even overcome such difficulties.

Reasons to Consult a Cognitive Psychologist

Alzheimer's disease, dementia, or memory loss
Brain trauma treatment
Cognitive therapy for a mental health condition
Interventions for learning disabilities
Perceptual or sensory issues
Therapy for a speech or language disorder

Whereas behavioral and some other realms of psychology focus on actions--which are external and observable--cognitive psychology is instead concerned with the thought processes behind the behavior. Cognitive psychologists see the mind as if it were a computer, taking in and processing information, and seek to understand the various factors involved.

A Word From Verywell

Cognitive psychology plays an important role in understanding the processes of memory, attention, and learning. It can also provide insights into cognitive conditions that may affect how people function.

Being diagnosed with a brain or cognitive health problem can be daunting, but it is important to remember that you are not alone. Together with a healthcare provider, you can come up with an effective treatment plan to help address brain health and cognitive problems.

Your treatment may involve consulting with a cognitive psychologist who has a background in the specific area of concern that you are facing, or you may be referred to another mental health professional that has training and experience with your particular condition.

Ulric Neisser is considered the founder of cognitive psychology. He was the first to introduce the term and to define the field of cognitive psychology. His primary interests were in the areas of perception and memory, but he suggested that all aspects of human thought and behavior were relevant to the study of cognition.

A cognitive map refers to a mental representation of an environment. Such maps can be formed through observation as well as through trial and error. These cognitive maps allow people to orient themselves in their environment.

While they share some similarities, there are some important differences between cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology. While cognitive psychology focuses on thinking processes, cognitive neuroscience is focused on finding connections between thinking and specific brain activity. Cognitive neuroscience also looks at the underlying biology that influences how information is processed.

Cognitive psychology is a form of experimental psychology. Cognitive psychologists use experimental methods to study the internal mental processes that play a role in behavior.

Sternberg RJ, Sternberg K. Cognitive Psychology . Wadsworth/Cengage Learning.

Krapfl JE. Behaviorism and society . Behav Anal. 2016;39(1):123-9. doi:10.1007/s40614-016-0063-8

Cutting JE. Ulric Neisser (1928-2012) . Am Psychol . 2012;67(6):492. doi:10.1037/a0029351

Ruggiero GM, Spada MM, Caselli G, Sassaroli S. A historical and theoretical review of cognitive behavioral therapies: from structural self-knowledge to functional processes . J Ration Emot Cogn Behav Ther . 2018;36(4):378-403. doi:10.1007/s10942-018-0292-8

Parvin P. Ulric Neisser, cognitive psychology pioneer, dies . Emory News Center.

APA Dictionary of Psychology. Cognitive map . American Psychological Association.

Forstmann BU, Wagenmakers EJ, Eichele T, Brown S, Serences JT. Reciprocal relations between cognitive neuroscience and formal cognitive models: opposites attract? . Trends Cogn Sci . 2011;15(6):272-279. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2011.04.002

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Thinking and Intelligence

Solving Problems

Learning objectives.

Describe problem solving strategies, including algorithms and heuristics

Problem-Solving Strategies

A problem-solving strategy is a plan of action used to find a solution. Different strategies have different action plans associated with them. For example, a well-known strategy is trial and error . The old adage, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” describes trial and error. In terms of your broken printer, you could try checking the ink levels, and if that doesn’t work, you could check to make sure the paper tray isn’t jammed. Or maybe the printer isn’t actually connected to your laptop. When using trial and error, you would continue to try different solutions until you solved your problem. Although trial and error is not typically one of the most time-efficient strategies, it is a commonly used one.

Table 1. Problem-Solving Strategies
Method	Description	Example
Trial and error	Continue trying different solutions until problem is solved	Restarting phone, turning off WiFi, turning off bluetooth in order to determine why your phone is malfunctioning
Algorithm	Step-by-step problem-solving formula	Instruction manual for installing new software on your computer
Heuristic	General problem-solving framework	Working backwards; breaking a task into steps

When one is faced with too much information
When the time to make a decision is limited
When the decision to be made is unimportant
When there is access to very little information to use in making the decision
When an appropriate heuristic happens to come to mind in the same moment

What problem-solving method could you use to solve Einstein’s famous riddle?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1rDVz_Fb6HQ%3Flist%3DPLUmyCeox8XCwB8FrEfDQtQZmCc2qYMS5a

You can view the transcript for “Can you solve “Einstein’s Riddle”? – Dan Van der Vieren” here (opens in new window) .

Everyday Connections: Solving Puzzles

Problem-solving abilities can improve with practice. Many people challenge themselves every day with puzzles and other mental exercises to sharpen their problem-solving skills. Sudoku puzzles appear daily in most newspapers. Typically, a sudoku puzzle is a 9×9 grid. The simple sudoku below (Figure 1) is a 4×4 grid. To solve the puzzle, fill in the empty boxes with a single digit: 1, 2, 3, or 4. Here are the rules: The numbers must total 10 in each bolded box, each row, and each column; however, each digit can only appear once in a bolded box, row, and column. Time yourself as you solve this puzzle and compare your time with a classmate.

Here is another popular type of puzzle that challenges your spatial reasoning skills. Connect all nine dots with four connecting straight lines without lifting your pencil from the paper:

Take a look at the “Puzzling Scales” logic puzzle below (Figure 3). Sam Loyd, a well-known puzzle master, created and refined countless puzzles throughout his lifetime (Cyclopedia of Puzzles, n.d.).

Were you able to determine how many marbles are needed to balance the scales in the Puzzling Scales? You need nine. Were you able to solve the other problems above? Here are the answers:

CC licensed content, Original

Modification and adaptation. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution

CC licensed content, Shared previously

Problem-Solving. Authored by : OpenStax College. Located at : https://openstax.org/books/psychology-2e/pages/7-3-problem-solving . License : CC BY: Attribution . License Terms : Download for free at https://openstax.org/books/psychology-2e/pages/1-introduction

Can you solve Einsteinu2019s Riddle? . Authored by : Dan Van der Vieren. Provided by : Ted-Ed. Located at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rDVz_Fb6HQ&index=3&list=PLUmyCeox8XCwB8FrEfDQtQZmCc2qYMS5a . License : Other . License Terms : Standard YouTube License

method for solving problems

problem-solving strategy in which multiple solutions are attempted until the correct one is found

problem-solving strategy characterized by a specific set of instructions

mental shortcut that saves time when solving a problem

heuristic in which you begin to solve a problem by focusing on the end result

Share This Book

History & Society
Science & Tech
Biographies
Animals & Nature
Geography & Travel
Arts & Culture
Games & Quizzes
On This Day
One Good Fact
New Articles
Lifestyles & Social Issues
Philosophy & Religion
Politics, Law & Government
World History
Health & Medicine
Browse Biographies
Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
Environment
Fossils & Geologic Time
Entertainment & Pop Culture
Sports & Recreation
Visual Arts
Demystified
Image Galleries
Infographics
Top Questions
Britannica Kids
Saving Earth
Space Next 50
Student Center

Small, white rat (genus Rattus) on a glass table. (rodent, laboratory, experiment)

problem solving

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

University of Texas at Arlington Pressbooks - What is Problem Solving?
Mathematics LibreTexts - Problem solving
Verywell Mind - Overview of the Problem-Solving Mental Process
The University of Hawaiʻi Pressbooks - Problem Solving
Massachusetts Institute of Technology - CCMIT - Introduction to Problem Solving Skills
University of Central Florida Pressbooks - General Psychology - Pitfalls to Problem Solving
The Balance - What are problem-solving skills?
College of DuPage Digital Press - Introduction to Psychology - Thinking, Reasoning, and Problem-Solving
National Center for Biotechnology Information - PubMed Central - The art of problem solving and its translation into practice
Open Text WSU - Introductory Psychology - Problem-Solving

problem solving , process involved in finding a solution to a problem. Many animals routinely solve problems of locomotion, food finding, and shelter through trial and error. Some higher animals, such as apes and cetaceans, have demonstrated more complex problem-solving abilities, including discrimination of abstract stimuli , rule learning , and application of language or languagelike operations. Humans use not only trial and error but also insight based on an understanding of principles, inductive and deductive reasoning , and critical or creative thinking . Problem-solving abilities and styles may vary considerably by individual.

Problem-Solving Therapy

Streaming options.

Description
Contributor bios
Suggested resources
Video details

In Problem-Solving Therapy , Drs. Arthur Nezu and Christine Maguth Nezu demonstrate their positive, goal-oriented approach to treatment. Problem-solving therapy is a cognitive–behavioral intervention geared to improve an individual's ability to cope with stressful life experiences. The underlying assumption of this approach is that symptoms of psychopathology can often be understood as the negative consequences of ineffective or maladaptive coping.

Problem-solving therapy aims to help individuals adopt a realistically optimistic view of coping, understand the role of emotions more effectively, and creatively develop an action plan geared to reduce psychological distress and enhance well-being. Interventions include psychoeducation, interactive problem-solving exercises, and motivational homework assignments.

In this session, Christine Maguth Nezu works with a woman in her 50s who is depressed and deeply concerned about her son's drug addiction. Dr. Nezu first assesses her strengths and weaknesses and then helps her to clarify the problem she is facing so she can begin to move toward a solution.

The overarching goal of problem-solving therapy (PST) is to enhance the individual's ability to cope with stressful life experiences and to foster general behavioral competence. The major assumption underlying this approach, which emanates from a cognitive–behavioral tradition, is that much of what is viewed as "psychopathology" can be understood as consequences of ineffective or maladaptive coping behaviors. In other words, failure to adequately resolve stressful problems in living can engender significant emotional and behavioral problems.

Such problems in living include major negative events (e.g., undergoing a divorce, dealing with the death of a spouse, getting fired from a job, experiencing a major medical illness), as well as recurrent daily problems (e.g., continued arguments with a coworker, limited financial resources, diminished social support). How people resolve or cope with such situations can, in part, determine the degree to which they will likely experience long-lasting psychopathology and behavioral problems (e.g., clinical depression, generalized anxiety, pain, anger, relationship difficulties).

For example, successfully dealing with stressful problems will likely lead to a reduction of immediate emotional distress and prevent long-term psychological problems from occurring. Alternatively, maladaptive or unsuccessful problem resolution, either due to the overwhelming nature of events (e.g., severe trauma) or as a function of ineffective coping attempts, will likely increase the probability that long-term negative affective states and behavioral difficulties will emerge.

Social Problem Solving and Psychopathology

According to this therapy approach, social problem solving (SPS) is considered a key set of coping abilities and skills. SPS is defined as the cognitive–behavioral process by which individuals attempt to identify or discover effective solutions for stressful problems in living. In doing so, they direct their problem-solving efforts at altering the stressful nature of a given situation, their reactions to such situations, or both. SPS refers more to the metaprocess of understanding, appraising, and adapting to stressful life events, rather than representing a single coping strategy or activity.

Problem-solving outcomes in the real world have been found to be determined by two general but partially independent processes—problem orientation and problem-solving style.

Problem orientation refers to the set of generalized thoughts and feelings a person has concerning problems in living, as well as his or her ability to successfully resolve them. It can either be positive (e.g., viewing problems as opportunities to benefit in some way, perceiving oneself as able to solve problems effectively), which serves to enhance subsequent problem-solving efforts, or negative (e.g.,viewing problems as a major threat to one's well-being, overreacting emotionally when problems occur), which functions to inhibit attempts to solve problems.

Problem-solving style refers to specific cognitive–behavioral activities aimed at coping with stressful problems. Such styles are either adaptive, leading to successful problem resolution, or dysfunctional, leading to ineffective coping, which then can generate myriad negative consequences, including emotional distress and behavioral problems. Rational problem solving is the constructive style geared to identify an effective solution to the problem and involves the systematic and planful application of specific problem-solving tasks. Dysfunctional problem-solving styles include (a) impulsivity/carelessness (i.e., impulsive, hurried, and incomplete attempts to solve a problem), and (b) avoidance (i.e.,avoiding problems, procrastinating, and depending on others to solve one's problems).

Important differences have been identified between individuals characterized as "effective" versus "ineffective" problem solvers. In general, when compared to effective problem solvers, persons characterized by ineffective problem solving report a greater number of life problems, more health and physical symptoms, more anxiety, more depression, and more psychological maladjustment. In addition, a negative problem orientation has been found to be associated with negative moods under both routine and stressful conditions, as well as pessimism, negative emotional experiences, and clinical depression. Further, persons with negative orientations tend to worry and complain more about their health.

Problem-Solving Therapy Goals

PST teaches individuals to apply adaptive coping skills to both prevent and cope with stressful life difficulties. Specific PST therapy objectives include

enhancing a person's positive orientation
fostering his or her application of specific rational problem-solving tasks (i.e., accurately identifying why a situation is a problem, generating solution alternatives, conducting a cost-benefit analysis in order to decide which ideas to choose to include as part of an overall solution plan, implementing the solution, monitoring its effects, and evaluating the outcome)
reducing his or her negative orientation
minimizing one's tendency to engage in dysfunctional problem-solving style activities (i.e., impulsively attempting to solve the problem or avoiding the problem)

PST interventions involve psychoeducation, interactive problem-solving training exercises, practice opportunities, and homework assignments intended to motivate patients to apply the problem-solving principles outside of the therapy sessions.

PST has been shown to be effective regarding a wide range of clinical populations, psychological problems, and the distress associated with chronic medical disorders. Scientific evaluations have focused on unipolar depression, geriatric depression, distressed primary-care patients, social phobia, agoraphobia, obesity, coronary heart disease, adult cancer patients, adults with schizophrenia, mentally retarded adults with concomitant psychiatric problems, HIV-risk behaviors, drug abuse, suicide, childhood aggression, and conduct disorder.

Moreover, PST is flexible with regard to treatment goals and methods of implementation. For example, it can be conducted in a group format, on an individual and couples basis, as part of a larger cognitive–behavioral treatment package, over the phone, as well as on the Internet. It can also be applied as a means of helping patients to overcome barriers associated with successful adherence to other medical or psychosocial treatment protocols (e.g., adhering to weight-loss programs, diabetes regulation).

Arthur M. Nezu, PhD, ABPP, is currently professor of psychology, medicine, and community health and prevention at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He is one of the codevelopers of a cognitive–behavioral approach to teaching social problem-solving skills and has conducted multiple RCTs testing its efficacy across a variety of populations. These populations include clinically depressed adults, depressed geriatric patients, adults with mental retardation and concomitant psychopathology, distressed cancer patients and their spousal caregivers, individuals in weight-loss programs, breast cancer patients, and adult sexual offenders.

Dr. Nezu has contributed to more than 175 professional and scientific publications, including the books Solving Life's Problems: A 5-Step Guide to Enhanced Well-Being , Helping Cancer Patients Cope: A Problem-Solving Approach , and Problem-Solving Therapy: A Positive Approach to Clinical Intervention . He also codeveloped the self-report measure Social Problem-Solving Inventory—Revised . Dr. Nezu is on numerous editorial boards of scientific and professional journals and a member of the Interventions Research Review Committee of the National Institute of Mental Health.

An award-winning psychologist, he was previously president of the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy, the Behavioral Psychology Specialty Council, the World Congress of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, and the American Board of Cognitive and Behavioral Psychology. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, the Society for Behavior Medicine, the Academy of Cognitive Therapy, and the Academy of Cognitive and Behavioral Psychology. Dr. Nezu was awarded the diplomate in Cognitive and Behavioral Psychology from the American Board of Professional Psychology and currently serves as a trustee of that board.

He has been in private practice for over 25 years, and is currently conducting outcome studies to evaluate the efficacy of problem-solving therapy to treat depression among adults with heart disease.

Christine Maguth Nezu, PhD, ABPP, is currently professor of psychology, associate professor of medicine, and director of the masters programs in psychology at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She previously served as director of the APA-accredited Internship/Residency in Clinical Psychology, as well as the Cognitive–Behavioral Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, at the Medical College of Pennsylvania/Hahnemann University.

She is the coauthor or editor of more than 100 scholarly publications, including 15 books. Her publications cover a wide range of topics in mental health and behavioral medicine, many of which have been translated into a variety of foreign languages.

Dr. Maguth Nezu is currently the president-elect of the American Board of Professional Psychology, on the board of directors for the American Board of Cognitive and Behavioral Psychology, and on the board of directors for the American Academy of Cognitive and Behavioral Psychology. She is the recipient of numerous grant awards supporting her research and program development, particularly in the area of clinical interventions. She serves as an accreditation site visitor for APA for clinical training programs and is on the editorial boards of several leading psychology and health journals.

Dr. Maguth Nezu has conducted workshops on clinical interventions and case formulation both nationally and internationally. She is currently the North American representative to the World Congress of Cognitive and Behavioral Therapies. She holds a diplomate in Cognitive and Behavioral Psychology from the American Board of Professional Psychology and has been active in private practice for more than 20 years.

Her current areas of interest include the treatment of depression in medical patients, the integration of cognitive and behavioral therapies with patients' spiritual beliefs and practices, interventions directed toward stress, coping, and health, and cognitive behavior therapy and problem-solving therapy for individuals with personality disorders.

D'Zurilla, T. J., & Nezu, A. M. (2007). Problem-solving therapy: A positive approach to clinical intervention (3rd ed.). New York: Springer Publishing Co.
D'Zurilla, T. J., Nezu, A. M., & Maydeu-Olivares, A. (2002). Social Problem-Solving Inventory—Revised (SPSI-R): Technical manual . North Tonawanda, NY: Multi-Health Systems.
Nezu, A. M. (2004). Problem solving and behavior therapy revisited. Behavior Therapy, 35 , 1–33.
Nezu, A. M., & Nezu, C. M. (in press). Problem-solving therapy. In S. Richards & M. G. Perri (Eds.), Relapse prevention for depression . Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Nezu, A. M., Nezu, C. M., & Clark, M. (in press). Problem solving as a risk factor for depression. In K. S. Dobson & D. Dozois (Eds.), Risk factors for depression . New York: Elsevier Science.
Nezu, A. M., Nezu, C. M., & Perri, M. G. (2006). Problem solving to promote treatment adherence. In W. T. O'Donohue & E. Livens (Eds.), Promoting treatment adherence: A practical handbook for health care providers (pp. 135–148). New York: Sage Publications.
Nezu, A. M., Nezu, C. M., & D'Zurilla, T. J. (2007). Solving life's problems: A 5-step guide to enhanced well-being . New York: Springer Publishing Co.
Nezu, A. M., Nezu, C. M., Friedman, S. H., Faddis, S., & Houts, P. S. (1998). Helping cancer patients cope: A problem-solving approach . Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Nezu, C. M., D'Zurilla, T. J., & Nezu, A. M. (2005). Problem-solving therapy: Theory, practice, and application to sex offenders. In M. McMurran & J. McGuire (Eds.), Social problem solving and offenders: Evidence, evaluation and evolution (pp. 103–123). Chichester, UK: Wiley.
Nezu, C. M., Palmatier, A., & Nezu, A. M. (2004). Social problem-solving training for caregivers. In E. C. Chang, T. J. D'Zurilla, & L. J. Sanna (Eds.), Social problem solving: Theory, research, and training (pp. 223–238). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Cognitive–Behavioral Relapse Prevention for Addictions G. Alan Marlatt
Cognitive–Behavioral Therapy With Donald Meichenbaum Donald Meichenbaum
Depression With Older Adults Peter A. Lichtenberg
Depression Michael D. Yapko
Emotion-Focused Therapy for Depression Leslie S. Greenberg
Relapse Prevention Over Time G. Alan Marlatt
Behavioral Interventions in Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Practical Guidance for Putting Theory Into Action, Second Edition Richard F. Farmer and Alexander L. Chapman
Experiences of Depression: Theoretical, Clinical, and Research Perspectives Sidney J. Blatt
Preventing Youth Substance Abuse: Science-Based Programs for Children and Adolescents Edited by Patrick Tolan, José Szapocznik, and Soledad Sambrano

Legal Notice

Not a mental health professional.

View APA videos for the public

Reasoning & Problem Solving

Judith Ellen Fan

Tobias Gerstenberg

Noah Goodman

Hyowon Gweon

Mark Lepper

Jay McClelland

Barbara Tversky

Phd students.

Adani Abutto

Sean Anderson

Catherine Garton

Satchel Grant

Yuxuan (Effie) Li

Andrew (Joo Hun) Nam

Eric Neumann

Kate Petrova

Ben Prystawski

Peter Guandi Zhu

Research staff.

Kylie Yorke

Alien Hand Syndrome: The Mystery of Uncontrolled Movements

10 Traits of Introverted Leaders, According to Psychology

How Waiting Impacts Stress and Decision-Making
Mental Health and Satisfaction in Tribal Communities: A Contradictory Story of Resilience
How Brain Rot is silently ruining our lives: A Psychological Perspective

Your cart is empty

10 Subtle Signs that shows you are a Natural Problem Solver, According to Psychology

by Psychologs World
August 22, 2024
12 minutes read

Do you also have someone in your life that seems to have solution for every problem? You are feeling nauseous during traveling they have a tablet, relationship issue they have a solution, exams are near and your syllabus is not covered they will turn professor for the night.

It feels that they have a natural talent of solving any problems. We all have such kind of people around us, always solving our problems and sometimes we are that person. Problems started existing the moment mankind came in to existence. We all have problems – family problems, relationship problems, school problems, and all the other problems that exist. But have you noticed that there are some people around us that have the innate ability to solve problems. You will be stuck on an issue for a long time and these people will enter and Eureka! Magic happens and the problem is solved.

Natural problem solvers are the people who try to focus on finding a solution rather than complaining about the problem, they don’t react impulsively when faced with a challenge. They sit with the problem, think of all the logical explanations and then try to come up with an innovative and creative solution. There are certain traits that are associated with the person who is a natural problem solver.

10 traits of a Problem-Solver

1. You try finding Permanent/long term Solution

In this fast paced world, we need everything instantly. We try to find instant solutions for everything. Hungry? Food in 2 minutes, don’t know an answer? Google it. With everything available so easily, we wish to find the solutions for our problems just as instantly.

But that doesn’t work always. You cannot expect a deep cut to heal within 1 hour of putting a Band-Aid, you need to give it enough time to heal otherwise the pain will keep on coming back. If you keep on finding quick fix solutions for problems that happen constantly, the problem will keep on occurring again and again.

For example – Aakash worked in a library. He noticed that the work was done on paper which made it difficult to remind people to return the books on time. Now instead of going for a quick fix like making a new list, Aakash thought for a while. He created an excel sheet where he added the names of all the members, the books they had borrowed and the date on which they had to return the books. This made it easier to track the members and remind them beforehand to avoid late fee. Aakash found a permanent solution to the problem instead of finding shortcuts.

Natural problem solvers have the trait of trying to find a permanent fix to a problem. They understand the quick solutions are temporary and would not work long term.

2. You try to seek logical explanation

Problem solvers have a logical perspective for looking at problems. They do not react impulsively to issues. They try to find logical explanations for things.

For example – Kritika and her group had to make a model for the space day in the school. They were trying to build a space ship, but for some reason the space ship wasn’t standing, it kept falling back. Now instead of jumping to solutions and trying out 100 solutions Kritika took a break and started writing all the possible reasons for the problem. After careful contemplation she realized that since the space ship was made of paper it did Not have broad base that would help the ship to stand. Her logical approach to solving the problem instead of jumping straight to conclusion saved them unnecessary time and efforts.

Problem solvers do not get tangled in the web of problem. They try and keep an objective outlook, they do not let personal thoughts and biases come in between the solution. They look at the problem from the perspective of an outsider which helps them think of extremely critical and good solutions for the problems.

3. You don’t get Overwhelmed with Emotions

Emotions can cloud our judgement. They can overpower our logical thinking. Good problem solvers know and understand this power of emotions. Whenever any issue arises they try and keep their emotions in check.

Example – Arjun and Aashi had been together for more than 11 months. Other than little fights here and there, they had been strong, but now the challenging times were ahead of them. Arjun’s job had transferred him to Bangalore and Aashi did not want him to go.

As the fight kept intensifying between the two, Arjun took a step back. Instead of getting frustrated or Overwhelmed with emotions Arjun tried to understand Aashi’s point of view. He understood that she was not trying to stop him from progressing she was just getting insecure and needed some reassurance. Rather than mirroring Aashi’s emotions he kept calm and saved their relation.

When our emotions take charge of our thinking, our problem solving skills take a hit. When our mind is calm and composed then our thoughts becomes clearer.

Read More : Psychology Behind Emotional Regulation and Dysregulation

4. You are a Risk Taker

You might think that problem solving is only based on strategy and planning but that is not true. Risk taking is one of the traits of good problem solver.

Example – There was tense environment in the meeting room of Lighton Technologies. Since past few months there social media was not getting enough results. They had tried every solution available in the books of social media but still nothing seemed to work. Radha the social media head suddenly stood up.

She proposed that since it was March and women’s day was just round the corner they could do a series of posts on the stories of women working in the field of technology. This was not a conventional idea and had no guarantee of working but they decided to go with it. These posts became a game changer, there social media once again took off. If Radha had stuck to traditional ideas and not taken that risk maybe they would have not got such huge response.

One thing to remember is that risk taking does not mean reckless behaviour. It is the experimentation and innovative solutions that help in problem solving. You cannot walk the same path as others and expect different results.

Read More: The Psychology Behind Risk Taking

5. You are curious in general

The biggest quest to learn anything is curiosity. If you are curious about something, you will go and dig. Rakesh Jhunjhunwala

Have you ever met a child that keeps on asking questions all day long? They are experiencing the world for the first time, which makes them curious about everything around them. Natural problem solvers have the curiosity of toddlers. They keep on asking questions about all things, this makes them well informed about different topics. This knowledge comes in handy while solving problems.

Example – Aditi is the topper of 10th standard of Torna High school. It is not her academics that set her apart from everyone but whenever anyone talks with her she seems to know some or the other interesting fact about the topic of your interest. You want to talk about movies – she has a fact about the movie, you are interested in sports – she knows what is going on in the sports world, interested in politics – Aditi knows all about the current affairs.

The reason for all this interesting knowledge is her never ending curiosity. Whenever she sees something new she loves to dig deep about it to get more information. Her curiosity fuels her creativity. She comes up with creative and unique solutions to the problems. If you are naturally curious about things you will be more motivated and invested in solving problems.

Problem solving does not essentially need you to be extra-ordinarily talented, it just needs you to be determined enough and not give up easily.

6. You are Empathetic in nature

Empathy is the ability to understand the emotions of others. It is an effective skill which can come in use during problem solving.

Example – Kavya noticed that since past few months her friend Riya has not been the same. She was distant and was not responding to Kavya’s calls and messages. Instead of getting annoyed by Riya’s constant absence and ignoring her Kavya decided to go and meet her and sort out the issue. After meeting Riya she realized that Riya was dealing with family problems and wasn’t feeling good.

Kavya understood that she needed her support. Together both of them talked and Kavya encouraged Riya to visit a therapist. Rather than judging Riya for her actions Kavya tried to find the reason for her behaviour and supported her friend through dark times.

Empathy helps in seeing the world through the eyes of other people, it gives you new perspective. Empathy is also a valuable tool for communication. Empathy will help you in collaborating with different people and think of out of the box ideas.

7. You find patterns and meanings in things

Finding patterns and meanings in things is an asset in problem solving skill.

Example – Shyam had a catering business. He had the habit of keeping a note of any complaints that customers had in his personal diary. This helped him in improving the quality. One night as he was going through his diary he realized that a lot of customers have been complaining about the packaging of the food. He found that these complaints are repetitive and he needed to work on it as soon as possible. After understanding the pattern of the problem Shyam decided that he will change the packaging of the food from bags to tiffins. This will make it easy to carry from one place to another and avoid spilling of the food. Finding the pattern in the complaints and understanding the meaning behind it helped Shyam find a logical solution to the problem.

Recognizing hidden patterns and meanings helps in the discovery of solutions. It also helps us organize the information that we have in our hands about the problems. If we find out a pattern in the problem it will be easier to predict the occurrence of the problem and solve complex issues.

8. You take in to considerations different perspectives

Have you ever heard the story of three blind men and the elephant? According to the story once three blind men go to see an elephant, now since they couldn’t see the elephant they decided to touch it and imagine how it looks. All three of them touched different parts of the elephant and described it the way they felt.

The one who touched elephant’s leg described it as a pole, the one who touched it’s ears imagined the elephant to be like a big cone and the who touched its body said that the elephant was like a long, broad pipe. All three of them went to see the same elephant but imagined it to be something different. In the similar way, problem might be the same but everyone interprets it differently.

Example – The Psychology club of Kanha’s college is organizing an event for the world mental health week. As he is the head of the club he has to finalize on an idea. But he did not directly convey his idea as the final one to the committee; instead he called a meeting and asked everyone to brainstorm different ideas for the event. He considered everyone’s ideas before finalizing one for the main day. His consideration of different perspectives made everyone feel included and also helped in finding a creative and unique idea for world mental health day.

Everything has multiple interpretations. Understanding different perspectives help us better understand the issue and assist in coming to a creative and unique solutions.

Read More: Signs you are born to be a leader, According to Psychology

9. You let the information sink in

Has it ever happened to you that you are stuck on a problem since a long time and seem to not making any progress? So you decide to take a break and make yourself busy with some other work and then Eureka! Suddenly like a flash of light you find a solution. Solving an issue sometimes requires you to take a break to better understand the information. Problem solving requires clear thinking. If there is too much going on it is important to take a step back and let the information settle down. This helps in coming up with authentic and logical answers to the problem.

Example – Seema is a content writer for one of the leading fashion magazines of india. She submits her articles to her team leader who then suggests feedback in the article and approves them. Whenever feedback for article comes Seema does not immediately start working on the changes. She goes through the feedback and lets the information sink in.

This allows her to come up with better articles and include unique elements in her writing. Sometimes in the rush of emotions we might immediately react to the new information, which might not be the best choice. It is important to take in the new information, completely understand it and then try to find solutions for it.

10. You try to find opportunities in the problems

“If You Change the Way You Look At Things, the Things You Look At Change” – Wayner Dyer

Life is not always summer, you have to deal with the winters and rains. A good problem solver sees the problems as an opportunity to be creative and experiment.

Example – Saee is the founder of an event management company. Since it is just a start up at the moment, everything is trial and error for Saee. In one particular event which was managed by Saee’s company they came across an unexpected problem. It started raining in the middle of the birthday party. Since the event was outdoors, it seemed like a total fiasco. Saee did not get caught up in emotions and thought that all is lost; instead she saw it as an opportunity.

She converted the birthday party into a holi themed birthday party. She arranged for colours and all different toys for children. Everyone loved the idea and enjoyed a lot. When everyone was enjoying the rain party she arranged the food inside. If she kept on complaining about the problems she would not have come up with such a innovative idea.

Read More: 10 Subtle Signs of Highly Creative People, According to Psychology

Everyone has problems it is your perspective that matters. Some see the glass empty while some have the vision to look at the glass half full. If you start seeing your problems as an opportunity to be creative, your problems would not seem so big and bad. You just have to keep in mind that things change when the way you look at them changes.

Problem solving is more of a skill than a inbuilt talent. You can try and inculcate the traits like finding permanent solutions rather than quick fixes, taking into consideration different perspectives, being empathetic, etc. to develop good problem solving ability. Problems seem like a ocean that has no end but if you learn to surf on the waves of the oceans it is a very adventurous and enjoyable ride. Remember, there is no problem in the world that does not have a solution. You just need to be resolute and persistent enough.

Share This Post:

50 conversation starters to fill awkward silences, addiction vs compulsion, leave feedback about this cancel reply.

Rating 5 4 3 2 1

10-traits-of-introverted-leaders-according-to-psychology

Scully Effect: Why Representation Matters?

10 Effective Time Management Techniques, According to Psychology

10 Characteristics of Adaptable and Happy People, According

10 Characteristics of High Achievers, According to Psychology

Saved searches

Use saved searches to filter your results more quickly.

To see all available qualifiers, see our documentation .

Notifications You must be signed in to change notification settings

NPTEL Assignment Answers and Solutions 2024 (July-Dec). Get Answers of Week 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 8 10 11 12 for all courses. This guide offers clear and accurate answers for your all assignments across various NPTEL courses

progiez/nptel-assignment-answers

Folders and files.

Name		Name
164 Commits

Repository files navigation

Nptel assignment answers 2024 with solutions (july-dec), how to use this repo to see nptel assignment answers and solutions 2024.

If you're here to find answers for specific NPTEL courses, follow these steps:

Access the Course Folder:

Navigate to the folder of the course you are interested in. Each course has its own folder named accordingly, such as cloud-computing or computer-architecture .

Locate the Weekly Assignment Files:

Inside the course folder, you will find files named week-01.md , week-02.md , and so on up to week-12.md . These files contain the assignment answers for each respective week.

Select the Week File:

Click on the file corresponding to the week you are interested in. For example, if you need answers for Week 3, open the week-03.md file.

Review the Answers:

Each week-XX.md file provides detailed solutions and explanations for that week’s assignments. Review these files to find the information you need.

By following these steps, you can easily locate and use the assignment answers and solutions for the NPTEL courses provided in this repository. We hope this resource assists you in your studies!

List of Courses

Here's a list of courses currently available in this repository:

Artificial Intelligence Search Methods for Problem Solving
Cloud Computing
Computer Architecture
Cyber Security and Privacy
Data Science for Engineers
Data Structure and Algorithms Using Java
Database Management System
Deep Learning for Computer Vision
Deep Learning IIT Ropar
Digital Circuits
Ethical Hacking
Introduction to Industry 4.0 and Industrial IoT
Introduction to Internet of Things
Introduction to Machine Learning IIT KGP
Introduction to Machine Learning
Introduction to Operating Systems
ML and Deep Learning Fundamentals and Applications
Problem Solving Through Programming in C
Programming DSA Using Python
Programming in Java
Programming in Modern C
Python for Data Science
Soft Skill Development
Soft Skills
Software Engineering
Software Testing
The Joy of Computation Using Python
Theory of Computation

Note: This repository is intended for educational purposes only. Please use the provided answers as a guide to better understand the course material.

📧 Contact Us

For any queries or support, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected] .

🌐 Connect with Progiez

⭐️ Follow Us

Stay updated with our latest content and updates by following us on our social media platforms!

🚀 About Progiez

Progiez is an online educational platform aimed at providing solutions to various online courses offered by NPTEL, Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, and more. Explore our resources for detailed answers and solutions to enhance your learning experience.

Disclaimer: This repository is intended for educational purposes only. All content is provided for reference and should not be submitted as your own work.

Contributors 3

12 Ways to Cope With Frustration: How Effective Are Yours?

Goal-oriented stressful obstacles are inevitable. are you ready to tackle them.

Updated August 7, 2024 | Reviewed by Davia Sills

What Does "Self Help" Mean?
Take our Self-Esteem Test
Find a therapist near me
Even when someone thinks they understand an issue well enough to resolve it, it often can defy solutions.
Many solutions for frustrations have downsides not immediately apparent that are later recognized as harmful.
Ignoring distress or relying on procrastination to indefinitely evade it won’t make the issue go away.
When one has a growth mindset, problem-solving is the single most important step in resolving frustrations.

Frustration and Its Many Discontents

How many times have you, anxious to remedy a perplexing problem, encountered so many obstacles that you threw up your hands in defeat? And when you readied yourself for another chance to resolve it, how did it go?

Sad to say, like everyone else, you will confront situations that bedevil you because they turn out to be more complicated and difficult than you could have imagined.

Even when you believe you understand the matter in question well enough to deal with it successfully, all too often, it will begin to aggravate you.

It hardly matters whether the particular subject is political, cultural, religious, literary, or anything else: like your computer seemingly laughing at you for your futile efforts to implement something that worked just fine when you did it in the past.

Following are 12 methods that people frequently use to cope with adverse circumstances, which, given their assumptions and expectations, cause them considerable frustration.

I’ll start with the least helpful approaches so you can estimate how often you may unwittingly have defaulted to them.

Then, I’ll enumerate more positive ways of dealing with bothersome problems. That is, ways that likely would work better for you, especially because they avoid the various downsides of what in the moment might seem to work but later turn out to hurt you (and your relationships).

Least Effective Ways of Coping With Frustrations

1. Anger and Aggression : I list this maladaptive track first because when people are frustrated, they feel out of control. Here, anger is an immediate, ready-made (pseudo-)solution for restoring control. For you’re blaming another person for your burdensome feelings.

In so doing, you’re proclaiming that your frustration doesn’t have anything to do with your inadequacy or incompetence, but theirs.

Plus, however short-lived, vengefully acting out against others provides you with a handy, self-confirming sense of interpersonal power. But—as in revenge begets revenge—such retaliation endangers relationships. So this is hardly the way to go.

2. Avoidance: Perhaps the single most common escape route from the vexing feeling of not knowing how to handle something effectively is to avoid it entirely—to put it out of your mind; to “exile” it.

In fact, virtually all the adverse ways of dealing with frustration can be viewed as avoidance-motivated.

Yet ignoring your distress or relying on procrastination to evade it indefinitely will not make the issue go away. Over time, such avoidance will probably make things worse, exacerbating the frustration you experienced originally.

3. Abusing Substances or Activities: Whether it’s seeking to revivify your comfort level through drinking, drugs, emotional (i.e., not hunger-related) eating, misusing any other potentially detrimental substance, or engaging in physically distracting activities—from sports to (excessive) shopping to gambling—these all-too-convenient “frustration detours” will eventually prove toxic to you.

For one thing, you can become addicted to anything you use repeatedly to evade coping directly with what’s frustrating you. And for another, as you increasingly depend on these escapist ways of liberating yourself from unpleasant emotions, your health—mental as well as physical—will suffer.

Your life will become unbalanced and overloaded with unresolved annoyances, worries, and hang-ups.

4. Withdrawal From Others: If your frustrations concern relationships, it’s natural to be tempted to retreat from those who have caused them.

But while it may offer some relief from interpersonal frustration, such isolation (whether from friends or family) is also likely to augment whatever anger, depression , or anxiety you experienced with them earlier.

Moreover, the loneliness that will likely ensue from this social flight will probably feel more painful than whatever precipitated your disengagement earlier.

More Effective Ways of Coping With Frustrations.

1. Mindfulness : Practicing mindfulness is about focusing on the present, moment to moment, nonjudgmentally observing your feelings without falling victim to them. Being mindful endows you with more clarity about present-day circumstances and will accurately align your behaviors with your sense of purpose.

2. Various Self-Calming, Emotional Detachment Techniques: Meditation , deep breathing, visualization , guided imagery, and other beneficial relaxation methods can reduce the heightened stress levels linked to personal frustrations.

You’ll cope with your indecisiveness and inner travails much better when you can reduce a level of emotional arousal that may have left you feeling muddled and disorganized.

3. Exercise and Physical Activity Generally: Before exploring the deeper roots of your frustrations and reasoning your way through their thickets, you need to get yourself into the right frame of mind.

You’ll manage your frustrations more effectively when you can lift your spirits through movement. And it may not matter whether that movement comes from yoga, bicycling, running, dancing, or even gardening.

It’s often noted that getting physical releases feel-good chemicals. And biochemically, these endorphins can prompt you to take resolute action to settle what’s been so unsettling.

4. Activating Your Support Network: When you feel unsteady or discombobulated, you may be overreacting to a minor situation, exaggerating its relevance or importance to your welfare.

Sharing your concerns with a friend who knows you well, or with a therapist can offer you a revised and far less negative perspective on what’s causing you frustration, so you’re better prepared to handle it.

Hence, don’t hesitate to avail yourself of the more measured insights that another, less emotionally involved individual might provide you.

5. Journaling: Writing down worrisome thoughts and feelings is another way to clarify whether your viewpoint may be incongruous with the actual facts of the situation.

Similar to external support, it can also be a valuable tension reliever.

6. Cultivating an Attitude of Gratitude : Overly focusing on unresolved frustrations makes them harder to address logically.

On the contrary, temporarily redirecting your attention to more favorable aspects of your life can foster a more lucid mindset, which then can facilitate developing a more objective appreciation of what’s troubling you. That way, you’re empowered to return to your dilemma with more understanding and openness .

7. Reexamining Your Goals : It may be that your feelings of overwhelm are mostly related to the goals you’ve set yourself. These goals may be too ambitious, too daunting, and unrealizable. Therefore, consider revising these goals to make them more modest and, thus, more achievable.

8. Problem-Solving: Obviously, this is the single, most important step in resolving your frustrations. Everything I’ve discussed so far is to assist you in tackling this final step with maximum confidence and minimal self-doubt.

You may need to (a) “chunk” large tasks into smaller ones so they feel more manageable, (b) brainstorm, (c) systematically evaluate potential solutions, and (d) revise parts of your plan as you recognize their deficits.

Cultivating the healthiest possible attitude toward what’s been keeping you stuck will enable you to finally move beyond the impasse that’s so agitated you.

Approaching your frustrations proactively and with (unsentimental) optimism almost guarantees that you’ll discover the most tenable solution for them.

And remember, not all problems are resolvable—so, ironically, your ultimate solution could be accepting what, practically, is unchangeable.

Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D. , is the author of Paradoxical Strategies in Psychotherapy and The Vision of Melville and Conrad . He holds doctorates in English and Psychology. As of mid-July 2024, Dr. Seltzer has published some 590 posts, which have received over 54 million views.

Find a Therapist
Find a Treatment Center
Find a Psychiatrist
Find a Support Group
Find Online Therapy
United States
Brooklyn, NY
Chicago, IL
Houston, TX
Los Angeles, CA
New York, NY
Portland, OR
San Diego, CA
San Francisco, CA
Seattle, WA
Washington, DC
Asperger's
Bipolar Disorder
Chronic Pain
Eating Disorders
Passive Aggression
Personality
Goal Setting
Positive Psychology
Stopping Smoking
Low Sexual Desire
Relationships
Child Development
Self Tests NEW
Therapy Center
Diagnosis Dictionary
Types of Therapy

Sticking up for yourself is no easy task. But there are concrete skills you can use to hone your assertiveness and advocate for yourself.

Emotional Intelligence
Gaslighting
Affective Forecasting
Neuroscience

Maladaptive daydreaming as emotion regulation strategy: exploring the association with emotion regulation, psychological symptoms, and negative problem-solving orientation

Open access
Published: 23 August 2024

Cite this article

You have full access to this open access article

Elisa Mancinelli ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2089-3507 1 , 2 ,
Sara Spisto ORCID: orcid.org/0009-0008-8824-4152 1 , 3 ,
Vinay Jagdish Sukhija ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2155-6940 1 , 4 &
Silvia Salcuni ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1798-5761 1

112 Accesses

Explore all metrics

Maladaptive Daydreaming (MD) is a dysfunctional mental activity characterized by an excessive immersion in fantasy, whose function is being increasingly discussed and investigated. Accordingly, this study aims to examine its function as an emotion regulation strategy among MDers by evaluating the pattern of associations among MD, emotion regulation (ER) difficulties, anxiety, depression, stress symptoms, and negative problem-solving orientation. The mediating role of MD level in the association between difficulties in ER and both the psychological distress variables and negative problem-solving orientation was evaluated. N = 252 MDers, aged 18–70 years (M age = 30.63, SD = 11.40, 84.1% females), participated in the study and completed self-report measures. Some unexpected results emerged: among difficulties in ER’s dimensions, only lack of emotional self-awareness negatively and significantly associated with all symptom variables; solely difficulty pursuing goals when experiencing negative emotions and reduced trust in one’s capacity to self-regulate positively and significantly correlated with MD. MD negatively correlated with depression, anxiety, and negative problem-solving orientation. Three mediation models showed the mediating role of MD in reducing the negative effect of difficulty pursuing goals when experiencing negative emotions on both anxiety and negative problem-solving orientation and of trust in one’s capacity to self-regulate on negative problem-solving orientation. Overall, findings seem to point to functional peculiarities among MDers and support the view of MD as an emotion regulation strategy allowing the management and reduction of negative emotions and negative perceptions of problem situations. Notwithstanding, further research evaluating the potential moderating role of MD-specific fantasies is warranted. Unexpected findings are discussed.

The role of MD level in the association between anxiety, depression, stress, and negative problem-solving orientation, and ER difficulties.

Among ER dimensions, only Difficulty pursuing Goals and No Trust in Strategy selection show a relevant positive association with MD.

MD negatively correlates with depression, anxiety, and negative problem-solving orientation.

MD reduces the impact of Difficulty pursuing Goals when feeling negative emotions on anxiety symptoms and negative problem-solving orientation.

MD reduces the impact of No trust in Strategy selection on negative problem-solving orientation.

MD seems to function as an ER strategy; however, its effect might be only short-term.

Beliefs About Emotions, Negative Meta-emotions, and Perceived Emotional Control During an Emotionally Salient Situation in Individuals with Emotional Disorders

Spontaneous and instructed emotion regulation in dysphoria: Effects on emotion experience and use of other emotion regulation strategies

Which Emotion Regulation Strategies are Most Associated with Trait Emotion Dysregulation? A Transdiagnostic Examination

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Introduction

Maladaptive daydreaming

Literature suggests that individuals use daydreaming as a coping strategy for stress (Winnicott, 1971 ). For example, Singer ( 1975 ) viewed daydreaming as a typical cognitive activity used to develop daily planning skills, manage emotions better, and integrate different life experiences. Several studies have been conducted on the cognitive activity of daydreaming, including the possibility that it could become pathological (Mooneyham & Schooler, 2013 ; Singer, 1975 ). This pathological form of daydreaming, better known as Maladaptive Daydreaming (MD) was first coined by Somer ( 2002 ). He defined MD as an “extensive fantasy activity that replaces human interactions and/or interferes with the individual’s academic, interpersonal or vocational functioning” (Somer, 2002 , p. 199). The characteristics of MD that differentiate it from typical daydreaming are (a) constant craving for fantasies, (b) high levels of experienced presence, (c) stereotypical and repetitive movements (e.g., swinging, walking), and (d) to get absorbed into and sustain one’s fantasy (Schimmenti et al., 2020 ; Soffer-Dudek et al., 2020 ; Somer et al., 2016a ).

Various hypotheses have been proposed regarding the origin of this phenomenon. Initially, Somer ( 2002 ) believed it could stem from traumatic events, suggesting that instead of creating an imaginary friend, the person generates an alternative, safer, and controllable world. Shortly thereafter, Somer et al. ( 2016a ) found that while traumatic experiences may contribute to MD, not all subjects have experienced a direct traumatic event. This led to the hypothesis that MD results from a more complex framework and not just a single cause (Somer et al., 2016a ). Several scientific studies have reported the presence of an absorptive component that appears to be closely associated with MD (Somer & Herscu, 2017 ). At the same time, many studies suggest that MD comprises a dissociative component (Pietkiewicz et al., 2018 ; Ross et al., 2020 ; Soffer-Dudek & Somer, 2023 ; Somer, 2002 ), particularly in terms of the ability to “absorb” into another reality and the presence of different “alter-egos” represented by other versions of themselves and by characters within complicated stories. In line with this, a recent proposal called for viewing MD as an “absorption disorder” (Soffer-Dudek & Somer, 2023 ). The authors suggested that MD should be seen as existing on a continuum. At one extreme are normal or less severe forms of dissociation-like states, such as externalizing thoughts and creative writing. At the other extreme are severe dissociative conditions, including dissociative identity disorder (DID). Thus, MD would be considered a less severe dissociative disorder, positioned just before the DID category on this continuum (Soffer-Dudek & Somer, 2023 ). Other authors, such as Bigelsen et al., ( 2016 ), have stressed that Maladaptive Daydreamers (MDers) feel an increasing urge to fantasize upon awakening and immediately after being interrupted, highlighting salient features such as mood modification, tolerance, relapse, and withdrawal. These features led researchers to conceptualize and investigate MD as a potential behavioral addiction (Bigelsen et al., 2016 ; Griffiths, 2005 ; Pietkiewicz et al., 2018 ). Although these different conceptualizations exist, it is necessary to acknowledge that MD is not yet recognized within diagnostic manuals.

Notwithstanding, growing evidence points to the potential for including MD as a psychological disorder (Soffer-Dudek & Theodor-Katz, 2022 ). Multiple research studies have reported associations between MD and symptoms such as depression and anxiety (Chirico et al., 2022 ; Musetti et al., 2021 ; Soffer-Dudek & Somer, 2018 ), with high comorbidity rates for these disorders at 66.7% and 71.8% respectively (Salomon-Small et al., 2021 ; Somer et al., 2017a , b ). The literature has indeed underlined the complexity of the psychopathological landscape of MD, recognizing the impairment and distress experienced by individuals engaging in MD (Somer et al., 2017a , b ). To deepen understanding of MD, scholars have delved into the investigation of the function that MD might play, pointing at an escapist function that allows one to avoid and/or evade distressing states (Somer, 2002 ). Accordingly, it was not long before researchers attempted to study the relationship between MD and emotional regulation (ER), a transdiagnostic process that underlies the development and maintenance of multiple clinical conditions (Cludius et al., 2020 ; Sloan et al., 2017 ).

Maladaptive daydreaming and emotional regulation

Multiple studies have found intriguing connections and associations between MD and ER (Pyszkowska et al., 2023 ; Sándor et al., 2023 ; West & Somer, 2020 ). ER is the process by which individuals process and manage their emotional states and associated behavioral responses; maladaptive responses to distressing feelings are regarded as emotion dysregulation (Gratz & Roemer, 2004 ; Gross, 2013 ). From a multidimensional perspective, this intricate process encompasses an individual’s self-awareness and ability to recognize and accept emotions. It also involves the capacity for impulse and behavioral control when experiencing negative emotions, along with one’s overall sense of efficacy in managing emotions and selecting appropriate ER strategies (Gratz & Roemer, 2004 ). In this context, past studies have reported an association between MD and all of the above-mentioned ER dimensions (Pyszkowska et al., 2023 ; Sándor et al., 2023 ; Thomson & Jaque, 2023 ; West & Somer, 2020 ), showing that greater difficulties in all dimensions were associated with increased MD. Indeed, research indicates that people with MD have greater difficulty in managing negative emotions, which includes an inability to mobilize emotional management strategies, greater difficulty in accepting negative feelings, difficulty in controlling impulse-driven behavior, and greater difficulty in engaging in goal-directed behavior (Pyszkowska et al., 2023 ; Thomson & Jaque, 2023 ). West and Somer ( 2020 ) further found that both immersive daydreaming and MD were associated with difficulties in ER, leading them to conclude that any form of exaggerated daydreaming may provide temporary relief from negative emotions. As such, it has been hypothesized that daydreaming may serve as a form of ER strategy, with the effectiveness varying based on the level of distress experienced (Somer et al., 2019 ).

In this respect, the literature suggests that MD might serve as a means to avoid unpleasant memories and/or emotions, offering respite and soothing effects (Somer, 2002 ), by using immersion in fantasy to seek emotional support from imaginary characters and/or to avoid negative emotions (Somer et al., 2016a , b ). However, a recent longitudinal study (Soffer-Dudek & Somer, 2018 ) investigating the relationship between MD and emotional experience observed that negative emotions and depression symptoms followed, yet did not proceed, to more intense and prolonged MD, and were associated with reduced positive emotions. This led the authors to hypothesize that the pleasure associated with MD might be short-term, thus providing only a brief momentary relief; as such, it does not favor lasting positive emotions and may lead to increased negative ones. The negative emotionality linked to increased and more intense MD (Soffer-Dudek & Somer, 2018 ) aligns with evidence reporting that what MDers perceive as most distressing is the difficulty in stopping or impeding MD (Greene et al., 2020 ; Schimmenti et al., 2020 ), thus stressing the maladaptive nature of MD (Soffer-Dudek & Somer, 2018 ).

The present study: aim and hypotheses

Given the conflicting evidence and discourses reported in the literature, the goal of this study is to further the investigation of MD’s function as an ER strategy (Somer et al., 2019 ). More specifically, previous research (Somer, 2002 ; Somer et al., 2016a , b ; Thomson & Jaque, 2023 ) has conceptualized daydreaming as a strategy adopted by individuals to cope with difficult experiences and/or overwhelming emotions. Its use as a form of escape from negative emotions and/or to search for positive emotions, even if generated by immersion in fantasy, may be one of the reasons why individuals who can fantasize in an immersive manner begin to overuse it, to the point of becoming maladaptive. However, although some reported positive feelings following MD (Somer, 2002 ), thus justifying increased reliance on it, others reported the opposite (Soffer-Dudek & Somer, 2018 ), thereby stressing the maladaptive nature of MD. Notwithstanding, although on the rise, literature specifically dedicated to investigating MD as an ER strategy remains limited. As such, adding to the available literature, the present study examines the pattern of associations between MD level, difficulties in ER, and symptoms of anxiety, depression, and stress within a sample of individuals experiencing MD. Furthermore, in line with existing evidence that portrays MD as a mode to evade reality and deal with challenging situations (Somer, 2002 ; Somer, et al., 2016a ), its association with negative problem-solving orientation will also be evaluated. To present knowledge, no previous study has included this construct when investigating MD. It encompasses cognitive components relevant to interpreting problematic events as threatening, perceiving low self-efficacy, believing in inadequate problem-solving abilities, and maintaining pessimism about the outcomes of problem-solving (Bottesi & Ghisi, 2017 ). Therefore, evaluating how MD might influence such negative problem-solving orientation in MDers is expected to provide insights into how their immersion in fantasy might alter their perception of problematic situations and thus its use as a regulation strategy. We expect to find significant positive associations between MD and difficulties in ER (Pyszkowska et al., 2023 ; Sándor et al., 2023 ; Thomson & Jaque, 2023 ; West & Somer, 2020 ), while the association between MD and negative problem-solving-orientation will be exploratively evaluated. Ultimately, to evaluate further the process whereby MD might function as an ER strategy, mediation models will be performed. More specifically, this study hypothesizes a positive association between difficulties in ER and both the psychological symptoms considered (Everaert & Joormann, 2019 ; Schäfer et al., 2017 ) and negative problem-solving orientation (Belavkin, 2001 ; Malmivuori, 2006 ), and investigates the mediating role of MD in these associations.

Participants and procedure

Data were collected through an elaborate Google Form questionnaire that was prepared and shared via various social media platforms (e.g., Facebook) in MD-related channels. Anonymity for all participants was guaranteed and informed consent, included within the survey link, was collected before the administration of the surveys. Participation was voluntary and participants were informed that they could withdraw from the study at any moment without incurring any repercussions and ensuring the non-use of their data. Thus, the data was collected through snowball sampling and our initial sample size was N = 312 participants; 60 participants were then excluded since they did not reach the cut-off level needed to be classified as MDers (Maladaptive Daydreaming Scale-16, MDS-16 ≥ 51; Schimmenti et al., 2020 ). The final sample size thus included N = 252 participants aged between 18 and 70 years (M = 30.63; SD = 11.40) with females forming a majority of the sample at 84.1%.

Measurement instrument

Maladaptive daydreaming scale-16.

The MDS-16 (Italian validation; Schimmenti et al., 2020 ) is a self-report questionnaire consisting of 16 items scored on a scale ranging from 0 to 100% with 10% intervals (0% = Never to 100% = All the time ). The two subscales that this questionnaire measures are the level of somatosensory retreat and the level of interference with life. Combining the scores on the two subscales allows us to arrive at a total score indicating the severity of MD. A total score ≥ 51 suggests the presence of probable MD (Schimmenti et al., 2020 ). In the present study the total score showed a highly satisfactory internal consistency: α = 0.90. An example item is “When you get up in the morning, how strong is your urge to start daydreaming immediately?” (Item 13).

Difficulties in emotion regulation- short form

The Difficulties in Emotion Regulation- Short Form (DERS-SF; Italian validation; Rossi et al., 2023 ) is an 18-item short-form scale derived from the DERS which is a scale commonly used to assess difficulties in ER (Gratz & Roemer, 2004 ). This scale contains 6 domains; (a) lack of emotional awareness, (b) lack of emotional clarity, (c) difficulties engaging in goal-directed behavior, (d) lack of trust in one’s capacities to select adaptive ER strategies, (e) impulse control difficulties and (f) non-acceptance of emotional responses. This scale is measured on a 5-point Likert Scale (1 = almost never , 5 = almost always ), with higher scores indicating a heightened difficulty in regulating one’s emotions. In the present study, the six sub-scales were considered, all showing a satisfactory internal consistency: Non-acceptance of Emotions α = 0.64; Difficulty pursuing Goals α = 0.81; No trust in Strategy selection α = 0.50; Difficulty in Impulse control α = 0.73; Lack of Clarity α = 0.60; Lack of Awareness α = 0.61. An example of an item is “When I am upset, I am embarrassed to feel this way” (Item 12).

Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale

The Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale (DASS; Italian validation Bottesi et al., 2015 ) is a 21-item self-report instrument that measures levels of anxiety, stress, and depression. Each item is measured on a 4-point Likert Scale (0 = Never happened , 3 = Happens almost always ); participants are asked to answer each item considering the previous seven days. The instrument provides three different measures for anxiety, depression, stress symptoms level, and an overall distress score. In the present study, the three sub-scales were considered, all showing a satisfactory internal consistency: Depression symptoms α = 0.70; Anxiety symptoms α = 0.73; Stress symptoms α = 0.67. An example item is “I have felt that life is meaningless” (Item 21).

Negative problem orientation questionnaire-revised

The Negative Problem Orientation Questionnaire-Revised (NPOQ-R; Italian validation Bottesi & Ghisi, 2017 ) is a self-report measure designed to evaluate the cognitive component of negative problem orientation. More specifically, it evaluates the attitude toward problem-solving as regards the interpretation of problematic events as threatening, the perception of low self-efficacy, and the belief of possessing inadequate problem-solving abilities, combined with pessimism about the outcomes of problem-solving that ultimately contribute to a state of low frustration tolerance. The instrument consists of 12 items measured on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = Completely disagree to 5 = Completely agree ) where a high total score indicates a negative orientation to problem-solving. This instrument showed satisfactory internal consistency (α = 0.77); an example item is “I often see problems as bigger than they are” (Item 10).

Data analysis

Analyses were performed using RStudio and SPSS. After assessing demographic information and descriptive statistics (categorical variables: N, %; continuous variables: M, SD), bi-variate Pearson’s r correlations were computed ( p < 0.05) and interpreted when r ≥ 0.20 (r ≥ 0.30 medium effect; r ≥ 0.50 = large effect; Cohen, 1988 ). Based on the correlational results obtained simple mediational models were calculated through SPSS PROCESS Macro (Model 4, Fig. 1 ; Hayes, 2022 ) including MD level as mediator; the sample’s age was included as a covariate. Slopes (i.e., β) were not standardized. For hypothesis testing, the bootstrapping method – a high-power non-parametric test – was employed by applying 5000 bootstraps. The obtained bootstrap 95% confidence interval is considered significant when it does not include 0, thereby indicating significant associations.

Mediation Models (PROCESS Model 4): The mediating role of MD in the association between Difficulties pursuing Goals on Anxiety symptoms ( a ) and Negative Problem-Solving orientation ( b ) and in the association between No trust in Strategy selection and Negative Problem-Solving orientation ( c ). Note . Slopes are not standardized; * p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001

Demographic information is reported in Table 1 and descriptive statistics in Table 2 .

Correlations

Pearson’s r bi-variate correlations are shown in Table 3 . Results highlighted that MD only showed a significant and positive medium effect size correlation with the Difficulty pursuing Goals dimension of difficulties in ER. A further significant positive correlation emerged with the No trust in Strategy selection dimension, yet with a slightly smaller effect size. MD then significantly and negatively correlated with Depression and Anxiety symptoms as well as Negative Problem-Solving orientation. Negative Problem-Solving orientation also negatively and significantly correlated with the Difficulty pursuing Goals and No trust in Strategy selection dimensions. Among the difficulties in ER dimensions, only Lack of Awareness is negatively and significantly associated with all three symptom variables (i.e., Depression, Anxiety as well as Stress symptoms). Nonetheless, Difficulty pursuing Goals is also negatively and significantly associated with Anxiety symptoms. Instead, Stress symptoms positively and significantly correlated with Difficulty in Impulse control. Among each other, the dimensions of difficulties in ER were minimally correlated, with only Difficulty pursuing Goals and No trust in Strategy showing a significant positive medium effect size correlation.

Mediational models

The mediational models calculated are shown in Fig. 1 and were performed in line with the correlational results presented above. As such, only three models were calculated. MD was included as the mediator in all three models; in models a) and b) the Difficulty pursuing Goals (when experiencing negative emotions) dimension was included as an independent variable, while in model c) it was the No trust in Strategy selection dimensions. Finally, in model a) the Anxiety symptoms variable was included as a criterion variable, while in both models b) and c) it was Negative Problem-Solving orientation.

In both models a) and b) the significant and positive association between the Difficulty pursuing Goals dimension and MD has emerged (For both models: β = 7.07; SE = 1.43; t = 4.94; 95% CI = 4.25, 9.90; R 2 = 13.07%) as well as the significant direct negative effect of the former on Anxiety symptoms (β = -0.12; SE = 0.04; t = -3.14; 95% CI = -0.19, -0.04) and Negative Problem-Solving orientation (β = -1.12; SE = 0.45; t = -2.48; 95% CI = -2.02, -0.23). No trust in Strategy selection also positively and significantly associated with MD (β = 7.22; SE = 1.71; t = 4.22; 95% CI = 3.85, 10.59; R 2 = 10.93%), and showed a direct significant negative effect on Negative Problem-Solving orientation (β = -2.05; SE = 0.52; t = -3.96; 95% CI = -3.07, -1.03).

MD negatively and significantly associated with Anxiety symptoms (β = -0.004; SE = 0.002; t = -2.56; 95% CI = -0.007, -0.0009) as well as Negative Problem-Solving orientation (Model b: β = -0.05; SE = 0.02; t = -2.40; 95% CI = -0.08, -0.008; Model c: β = -0.04; SE = 0.02; t = -2.22; 95% CI = -0.08, -0.01). Accordingly, all indirect effects were significant. More specifically, the indirect effect of Difficulty pursuing Goals on Anxiety symptoms as mediated by MD was observed (β = -0.03; SE = 0.01; 95% CI = -0.05, -0.006); the model’s R 2 for Anxiety symptoms was 8.64%. In model b as well the indirect effect of Difficulty pursuing Goals on Negative Problem-Solving orientation as mediated by MD was observed (β = -0.33; SE = 0.16; 95% CI = -0.68, -0.06); Model b’s R 2 for Negative Problem-Solving orientation was 8.57%. The sample’s Age, as a covariate, in models a) and b) was significant only for the association between Difficulty pursuing Goals and MD Interference with life (For both models: β = -0.44; SE = 0.15 t = -2.98; 95% CI = -0.73, -0.15).

Finally, also the indirect effect of No trust in Strategy selection on Negative Problem-Solving orientation as mediated by MD was observed (β = -0.30; SE = 0.14; 95% CI = -0.61, -0.04). In this model as well, the sample’s Age, as covariate, was significant only for the association between No trust in Strategy selection and MD (β = -0.47; SE = 0.15 t = -3.11; 95% CI = -0.76, -0.17); model c’s R 2 for Negative Problem-Solving orientation was 11.81%.

The present study aimed at deepening the understanding of MD as a form of ER strategy. We did so by exploring the association between MD level, difficulties in ER’s dimensions as well as depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms in an MDers sample. Furthermore, we explored the association between MD level and MDers’ attitude toward negative problem-solving orientation, which subsumes the cognitive components relevant to the interpretation of problematic events as threatening the perception of low self-efficacy, and the belief of possessing inadequate problem-solving abilities with pessimism about outcomes of problem-solving.

Overall, contrary to expectations from the broader literature, our data revealed minimal associations among the different ER dimensions (Gratz & Roemer, 2004 ; Moreira et al., 2022 ; Rossi et al., 2023 ), as well as between the latter and MD (Pyszkowska et al., 2023 ; Sándor et al., 2023 ; Thomson & Jaque, 2023 ; West & Somer, 2020 ) and the symptom variables considered (Everaert & Joormann, 2019 ; Schäfer et al., 2017 ). These results suggest that among MDers, these dimensions of ER might hold a different quality as compared to normative samples. On a similar note, in a previous study comparing MDers and Non-MDers (Chirico et al., 2022 ), it was noted that the ER strategy of reappraisal, which significantly contributed to the pattern of association with psychopathological symptoms among Non-MDers, played a marginal role among MDers. This led the authors (Chirico et al., 2022 ) to suggest the presence of significant functional differences between individuals with MD and those without it, implying that ER dimensions may acquire qualitatively different nuances among MDers. In this context, it is noteworthy that only heightened Difficulties in Impulse control during negative emotional experiences were associated with increased stress symptoms, which aligns with expectations. This seems consistent with evidence highlighting distress among MDers when feeling unable to stop the urge to daydream (Greene et al., 2020 ), which may contribute to elevated stress symptoms. Differently, the ER dimension regarding the Lack of Emotional Self-awareness exhibited a significant association with depression, anxiety, as well as stress symptoms. However, such association was negative, suggesting that greater emotional self-awareness, among individuals experiencing MD, is linked to increased psychological symptoms. Emotional self-awareness involves recognizing, distinguishing, and modulating emotional states, shaped by interactions with one’s environment (Levenson, 1994 ), thus necessitating continuous balanced monitoring of oneself and one’s surroundings. It is worth noting that previous research has highlighted MDers’ tendency to exhibit overexcitability (Thomson & Jaque, 2023 ) while simultaneously adopting self-suppression escapism strategies to deal with problematic situations (Pyszkowska et al., 2023 ). Indeed, MD has been proposed as an avoidance-based strategy, serving as an escapist approach to detach oneself from life experiences and emotions (Pyszkowska et al., 2023 ). Given that emotional self-awareness involves processing a multitude of internal and external stimuli, MDers might find it particularly challenging to suppress their emotions. Consequently, they may experience heightened awareness as overwhelming, leading to an increase in distress. Interestingly, contrary to past evidence (Somer et al., 2017a , b ), our findings suggest that among MDers, increased MD is associated with reduced depression and anxiety symptoms, as well as a decrease in negative attitudes toward problem-solving. This supports the mentioned escapist function of MD, working as a buffer against negative emotional states related to depression and anxiety symptoms; furthermore, cognitively, it may provide a sense of enhanced efficacy and possibility to cope with life problems, aligning with evidence emphasizing MD’s function in allowing disengagement from stressful situations by favoring mood enhancement (Somer, 2002 ). Adding to the above, our results further highlighted that the reduced trust in one’s capacity to adaptively self-regulate and increased difficulties in deploying attention from negative emotions are associated with an increase in MD. This is in line with past propositions hypothesizing that a potential mechanism underlining the association between MD and difficulties in ER could be related to MDers’ difficulty in disengaging thoughts and redirecting their attention due to deficits in cognitive control (Chirico et al., 2022 ; Greene et al., 2020 ). Cognitive control is a neuro-cognitive construct that involves the capacity to select, based on the task at hand and the context, appropriate emotions, thoughts, and behaviors, while simultaneously suppressing habitual actions that are not suitable (Miller & Cohen, 2001 ). This description echoes the defining characteristics of MD, where individuals become increasingly absorbed in fantasy to the extent that they find it particularly difficult, or even impossible, to stop such mental activity, as well as the associated stereotypical and repetitive movements and behaviors enacted during fantasy immersion (Schimmenti et al., 2020 ; Soffer-Dudek et al., 2020 ; Somer, 2002 ; Somer et al., 2016a ). As such, in line with the above-mentioned escapist function of MD (Somer, 2002 ), our data seem to suggest the presence of a vicious cycle, whereby as individuals experience increased difficulty disengaging from negative emotions, their cognitive control over their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors diminishes. However, subsequently, because MDers often experience distress associated with this loss of control (Greene et al., 2020 ), their confidence in their ability to self-regulate may diminish, making it harder for them to find alternative self-regulation strategies. In other words, they might experience difficulties in disengaging attention from both negative emotions and MD which could then further reduce their perceived efficacy as regards the selection and employment of more adaptive ER strategies.

Taken together, our results strengthen the above discourse, which is reflected in the results obtained from the mediational models performed. Against expectations (Everaert & Joormann, 2019 ; Schäfer et al., 2017 ), results showed that, among probable MDers, greater difficulties in deploying attention from negative emotions are associated with reduced anxiety symptoms. Furthermore, heightened difficulties in redirecting attention from negative emotions and diminished trust in one’s capacity to adaptively self-regulate were both associated with a reduced negative orientation towards problem resolution. Importantly, in all three models, the mediating effect of MD between these associations emerged, indicating the presence of the previously discussed process. In other words, as individuals experiencing MD perceive themselves as less proficient in self-regulation and face increased difficulty detaching themselves from negative emotions, the inclination to engage in fantasies intensifies (Greene et al., 2020 ); this ultimately enables them to alleviate their feelings of anxiety. Simultaneously, this inclination toward engaging in fantasies, as seen in individuals experiencing MD, could potentially lead to an improvement in their attitude toward the problems at hand (Somer, 2002 ). Alternatively, it may allow them to disengage from the demands of problem-solving altogether. Based on these results, evidence seems to suggest similarities between the function played by MD and the principles of exposure therapy, a well-documented strategy that aims to expose individuals to objects they fear within safe and controlled environments (Telch et al., 2014 ). One aspect of exposure therapy is imaginal exposure where individuals are made to vividly imagine the feared situations or objects (Arntz et al., 2007 ). It is plausible that MD could work as a type of imaginal exposure where individuals immerse themselves in anxiety-eliciting daydreams that over time have the potential to reduce anxiety and negative feelings at large by allowing a vivid – yet safer – context for emotional processing. Indeed, a previous study showed that a more positive MD was associated with greater emotional clarity (Greene et al., 2020 ). However, aligning with past evidence (Soffer-Dudek & Somer, 2018 ) pointing to the seemingly short-term benefit of MD, our findings should be interpreted with caution until replication. Notwithstanding, this is noteworthy considering the evidence discussing the addictive components of MD (Pietkiewicz et al., 2018 ; Somer, 2018 ), whereby the short-term positive feelings experienced through increased fantasy immersion might result from its usually rewarding nature (Somer et al., 2016b ), which then might lead to an increasing crave for it (Bigelsen et al., 2016 ). Such an increasing need to fantasize aligns with the concept of tolerance, untimely fostering the frequency and intensity of the behavior to continue experiencing that short-lived sense of reward (Griffiths, 2005 ; Pietkiewicz et al., 2018 ; Somer et al., 2016a ). Instead, another valuable perspective we could refer to is that of the expectation fulfillment theory (Griffin & Tyrrell, 2014 ). This theory posits that the main function of dreams is to engage with emotional arousals that were not acted out in the previous day. Accordingly, in line with previous propositions from the literature (Greene et al., 2020 ; Somer, 2002 ), this seems to support the view that as a response to increased ER-related difficulties, MDers use MD as a form of need fulfillment. However, it is reasonable to anticipate that different themes of fantasies among MDers might moderate the understanding of the function of MD, reflecting varying needs among this population (Somer, 2002 ).

Notwithstanding, is noteworthy that the direct negative effects of the two dimensions of ER on anxiety and negative problem-solving orientation were significant even when accounting for MD. This aspect remains an open question that warrants future investigation; however, a potential moderator of such an association could be related to the perceived enjoyability of MD. Specifically, beyond deficits in cognitive control contributing to increased and intensified MD, if fantasies are perceived as enjoyable and need-fulfilling (Greene et al., 2020 ; Somer, 2002 ), difficulties in ER might serve as a maladaptive driving force, furthering the inclination to immerse oneself in the safe space of fantasy. Fantasy immersion could thus allow for a freer and consequence-free emotional expression, ultimately leading to a more positive emotional state. While these ideas are speculative, this evidence underscores important functional peculiarities among individuals experiencing MD.

Limitations and considerations for future research

Some limitations should be considered for a comprehensive interpretation of our study results. Firstly, although the overall sample size was satisfactory, it should be noted that most of our sample consisted of females and a significant portion were students, which represents a limitation in terms of the finding’s generalizability. Accordingly, future studies should investigate the associations observed in the present study relying on more diverse samples, in terms of age, gender, and overall cultural background. Furthermore, the adoption of self-reports at large and their adoption to evaluate MD specifically, including the classification of participants as MDers, introduces potential biases due to their single-informant nature. Future studies should adopt a more robust approach, possibly incorporating the Structured Clinical Interview for Maladaptive Daydreaming (SCIMD; Somer et al., 2017a , b ). However, the measure used in our study (MDS-16; Somer et al., 2016a ) has proven effective in distinguishing self-identified MDers vs. Non-MDers, with previous research reporting excellent agreement between the SCIMD and MDS-16 (Somer et al., 2017a , b ). In this regard, while excluding the minority of participants not meeting the criteria for probable MD is a methodological strength of our study, since it allowed us to perform analysis on a more homogenous sample as regards the evaluation of MD’s function, it nonetheless prevented a comparison between MDers and Non-MDers; this represents a limitation of the study. Additionally, we did not assess the content of participants’ fantasies, limiting a deeper understanding of how and why MD might function as a regulation strategy. Future studies should collect such data to explore the influence and potential differences in ER and psychological symptoms in association with the content and themes of MDers’ fantasies (Brenner et al., 2022 ). As last, the cross-sectional nature of this study should be duly acknowledged, due to which no causal connections between variables can be assumed. Nonetheless, following Hayes’ approach (Hayes, 2022 ), since analysis relies on the Ordinary Least Squared (OLS) regression method, the multivariate regressions creating the mediation model serve to assess the association of a criterion variable with the dependent one while controlling for the impact of all others. This approach aids in controlling for the shared variance among the independent variables in the models, allowing for the evaluation of the distinct contribution of each to the dependent one, without implying causal relationships among them. Notwithstanding, longitudinal studies are warranted to deepen the understanding of the temporal association between the investigated dimensions, thus investigating the long-term interplay between MD and both ER and psychological symptoms and well-being. In this regard, the results obtained from the present study, which relied on quite a large sample size (> 200), strengthen and open up the dialogue on MD as a strategy for ER. Accordingly, future researchers could widen the scope of this dialogue by considering in detail the different fantasies that MDers engage in as well as the level of enjoyability and lack of it associated with MD. They could also make appropriate comparisons between MDers and non-MDers across different psychopathological variables to further the investigation of the discussed functional differences (Chirico et al., 2022 ). In line with this, future research is warranted to investigate the association between ER dimensions—specifically, the difficulty in disengaging attention from negative emotions and the lack of trust in one’s capacity to adaptively self-regulate, which echoes the construct of cognitive control—and MD among MDers. Greater investigation into the interplay between these dimensions and the function of MD could provide valuable insights into the neuro-cognitive-affective mechanisms responsible for the emergence and maintenance of MD. Such insights would hold significant informative value for clinical practice, potentially guiding the development of more effective interventions and therapeutic strategies for individuals struggling with MD. In this regard, future research should also evaluate the efficacy and effectiveness of these interventions, thereby assessing if interventions targeting ER processes can aid in reducing MD and ultimately MDers psychological symptoms.

Implications and conclusions

Albeit the present study findings should be considered tentative waiting for future research to support them, the current study nonetheless holds the potential to be informative and instructive to practitioners for a variety of reasons. Firstly, although MD could be associated with a reduction in negative emotions and psychological symptoms, these effects don’t need to sustain themselves over a long period (Soffer-Dudek & Somer, 2018 ). Indeed, while MD may bring about a reduction in symptomology while providing a safer context for problems’ evaluation in the short term, it is important to remember that the underlying emotional difficulties persist, with the risk of leading to a long-term rebound effect where symptomology could worsen over time. Practitioners could therefore acknowledge this benefit while also elaborating on the potential for long-term adversity when working with MDers. Moreover, by understanding how the escapism-driven avoidant mechanisms could work for MDers, practitioners could work on substituting this with durable and adaptive ER strategies to provide some long-term benefits to MDers, with the intent of improving treatment outcomes and facilitating more durable and long-term symptom management.

This study therefore adds to an increasing body of literature on MD and puts forth an interesting set of findings that merit further discussion and research from academicians working within this domain. Although our findings don’t fully align with previous research depicting comorbidity, it is important to acknowledge that this field of study is only just emerging, and it is only with ample amounts of research that we will be able to arrive at a holistic understanding of MD and its function.

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are not publicly available; however, they can be available upon reasonable request to the corresponding author.

Abbreviations

Dissociative Identity Disorder.

Emotion regulation.

Maladaptive Daydreaming.

Maladaptive Daydreamer/s (people with MD)

Arntz, A., Tiesema, M., & Kindt, M. (2007). Treatment of PTSD: A comparison of imaginal exposure with and without imagery rescripting. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 38 (4), 345–370. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbtep.2007.10.006

Article PubMed Google Scholar

Belavkin, R. V. (2001). In The role of emotion in problem solving (pp. 49–57). C. Johnson.

Bigelsen, J., Lehrfeld, J. M., Jopp, D. S., & Somer, E. (2016). Maladaptive daydreaming: Evidence for an under-researched mental health disorder. Consciousness and Cognition, 42 , 254–266. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.03.017

Bottesi, G., & Ghisi, M. (2017). La valutazione dell’orientamento negativo al problema: Validazione italiana del Negative Problem Orientation Questionnaire. [Evaluating negative problem orientation: Italian validation of the Negative Problem Orientation Questionnaire]. Psicoterapia Cognitiva e Comportamentale, 23 (3), 275–290.

Google Scholar

Bottesi, G., Ghisi, M., Altoè, G., Conforti, E., Melli, G., & Sica, C. (2015). The Italian version of the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales-21: Factor structure and psychometric properties on community and clinical samples. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 60 , 170–181. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comppsych.2015.04.005

Brenner, R., Somer, E., & Abu-Rayya, H. M. (2022). Personality traits and maladaptive daydreaming: Fantasy functions and themes in a multi-country sample. Personality and Individual Differences, 184 , 111194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2021.111194

Article Google Scholar

Chirico, I., Volpato, E., Landi, G., Bassi, G., Mancinelli, E., Gagliardini, G., Gemignani, M., Gizzi, G., Manari, T., Moretta, T., Rellini, E., Saltarelli, B., Mariani, R., & Musetti, A. (2022). Maladaptive daydreaming and its relationship with psychopathological symptoms, emotion regulation, and problematic social networking sites use: A network analysis approach. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction . https://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-022-00938-3

Cludius, B., Mennin, D., & Ehring, T. (2020). Emotion regulation as a transdiagnostic process. Emotion, 20 (1), 37–42. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000646.supp

Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed). L. Erlbaum Associates.

Everaert, J., & Joormann, J. (2019). Emotion regulation difficulties related to depression and anxiety: A network approach to model relations among symptoms, positive reappraisal, and repetitive negative thinking. Clinical Psychological Science, 7 (6), 1304–1318. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702619859342

Gratz, K. L., & Roemer, L. (2004). Multidimensional assessment of emotion regulation and dysregulation: Development, factor structure, and initial validation of the difficulties in emotion regulation scale. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 26 (1), 41–54. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:JOBA.0000007455.08539.94

Greene, T., West, M., & Somer, E. (2020). Maladaptive daydreaming and emotional regulation difficulties: A network analysis. Psychiatry Research, 285 , 112799. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2020.112799

Griffin, J., & Tyrrell, I. (2014). Why we dream: The definitive answer: how dreaming keeps us sane or can drive us mad . HG Publishing.

Griffiths, M. (2005). A ‘components’ model of addiction within a biopsychosocial framework. Journal of Substance Use, 10 (4), 191–197. https://doi.org/10.1080/14659890500114359

Gross, J. J. (2013). Emotion regulation: Taking stock and moving forward. Emotion, 13 (3), 359–365. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0032135

Hayes, A. F. (2022). Introduction to mediation, moderation, and conditional process analysis: A regression-based approach (3rd ed.). The Guilford Press.

Levenson, R. W. (1994). Human emotions: A functional view. In P. Ekman & R. J. Davidson (Eds.), The nature of emotion: Fundamental questions (pp. 123–126). Oxford University Press.

Malmivuori, M.-L. (2006). Affect and self-regulation. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 63 (2), 149–164.

Miller, E. K., & Cohen, J. D. (2001). An integrative theory of prefrontal cortex function. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 24 , 167–202. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.neuro.24.1.167

Mooneyham, B. W., & Schooler, J. W. (2013). The costs and benefits of mind-wandering: A review. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue Canadienne de Psychologie Expérimentale, 67 (1), 11–18. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0031569

Moreira, H., Gouveia, M. J., & Canavarro, M. C. (2022). A bifactor analysis of the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale—Short Form (DERS-SF) in a sample of adolescents and adults. Current Psychology, 41 (2), 757–782. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-00602-5

Musetti, A., Franceschini, C., Pingani, L., Freda, M. F., Saita, E., Vegni, E., Zenesini, C., Quattropani, M. C., Lenzo, V., Margherita, G., Lemmo, D., Corsano, P., Borghi, L., Cattivelli, R., Plazzi, G., Castelnuovo, G., Somer, E., & Schimmenti, A. (2021). Maladaptive daydreaming in an adult Italian population during the COVID-19 lockdown. Frontiers in Psychology, 12 , 631979. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.631979

Article PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar

Pietkiewicz, I. J., Nęcki, S., Bańbura, A., & Tomalski, R. (2018). Maladaptive daydreaming is a new form of behavioral addiction. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 7 (3), 838–843. https://doi.org/10.1556/2006.7.2018.95

Pyszkowska, A., Celban, J., Nowacki, A., & Dubiel, I. (2023). Maladaptive daydreaming, emotional dysregulation, affect and internalized stigma in persons with borderline personality disorder and depression disorder: A network analysis. Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy, 30 (6), 1246–1255. https://doi.org/10.1002/cpp.2923

Ross, C. A., Ridgway, J., & George, N. (2020). Maladaptive daydreaming, dissociation, and the dissociative disorders. Psychiatric Research and Clinical Practice, 2 (2), 53–61. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.prcp.20190050

Rossi, A. A., Panzeri, A., & Mannarini, S. (2023). The Italian Version of the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale– Short Form (IT-DERS-SF): A two-step validation study. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 45 (2), 572–590. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-022-10006-8

Salomon-Small, G., Somer, E., Harel-Schwarzmann, M., & Soffer-Dudek, N. (2021). Maladaptive daydreaming and obsessive-compulsive symptoms: A confirmatory and exploratory investigation of shared mechanisms. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 136 , 343–350. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychires.2021.02.017

Sándor, A., Bugán, A., Nagy, A., Bogdán, L. S., & Molnár, J. (2023). Attachment characteristics and emotion regulation difficulties among maladaptive and normal daydreamers. Current Psychology, 42 (2), 1617–1634. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-01546-5

Schäfer, J. Ö., Naumann, E., Holmes, E. A., Tuschen-Caffier, B., & Samson, A. C. (2017). Emotion regulation strategies in depressive and anxiety symptoms in youth: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 46 (2), 261–276. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-016-0585-0

Schimmenti, A., Sideli, L., La Marca, L., Gori, A., & Terrone, G. (2020). Reliability, validity, and factor structure of the Maladaptive Daydreaming Scale (MDS–16) in an Italian sample. Journal of Personality Assessment, 102 (5), 689–701. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223891.2019.1594240

Singer, J. L. (1975). The inner world of daydreaming (1st ed). Harper & Row.

Sloan, E., Hall, K., Moulding, R., Bryce, S., Mildred, H., & Staiger, P. K. (2017). Emotion regulation as a transdiagnostic treatment construct across anxiety, depression, substance, eating and borderline personality disorders: A systematic review. Clinical Psychology Review, 57 , 141–163. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2017.09.002

Soffer-Dudek, N., & Theodor-Katz, N. (2022). Maladaptive daydreaming: Epidemiological data on a newly identified syndrome. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 13 , 871041. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.871041

Soffer-Dudek, N., & Somer, E. (2018). Trapped in a daydream: Daily elevations in maladaptive daydreaming are associated with daily psychopathological symptoms. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 9 , 194. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2018.00194

Soffer-Dudek, N., & Somer, E. (2023). Maladaptive daydreaming is a dissociative disorder: Supporting evidence and theory. In M. J. Dorachi, S. N. Gold, & J. A. O'Neil (Eds.), Dissociation and the dissociative disorders: Past, present, future (2nd ed., pp. 547–563). Routledge.

Soffer-Dudek, N., Somer, E., Abu-Rayya, H. M., Metin, B., & Schimmenti, A. (2020). Different cultures, similar daydream addiction? An examination of the cross-cultural measurement equivalence of the Maladaptive Daydreaming Scale. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 9 (4), 1056–1067. https://doi.org/10.1556/2006.2020.00080

Somer, E. (2002). Maladaptive daydreaming: A qualitative inquiry. Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, 32 (2/3), 197–212. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1020597026919

Somer, E. (2018). Maladaptive daydreaming: Ontological analysis, treatment rationale; a pilot case report. Frontiers in the Psychotherapy of Trauma and Dissociation, 1 , 1–22.

Somer, E., & Herscu, O. (2017). Childhood trauma, social anxiety, absorption and fantasy dependence: Two potential mediated pathways to maladaptive daydreaming. Journal of Addictive Behaviors, Therapy & Rehabilitation, 06 . https://doi.org/10.4172/2324-9005.1000170

Somer, E., Lehrfeld, J., Bigelsen, J., & Jopp, D. S. (2016a). Development and validation of the Maladaptive Daydreaming Scale (MDS). Consciousness and Cognition, 39 , 77–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2015.12.001

Somer, E., Somer, L., & Jopp, D. S. (2016b). Childhood antecedents and maintaining factors in maladaptive daydreaming. Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease, 204 (6), 471–478. https://doi.org/10.1097/NMD.0000000000000507

Somer, E., Soffer-Dudek, N., & Ross, C. A. (2017a). The comorbidity of daydreaming disorder (maladaptive daydreaming). Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease, 205 (7), 525–530. https://doi.org/10.1097/NMD.0000000000000685

Somer, E., Soffer-Dudek, N., Ross, C. A., & Halpern, N. (2017b). Maladaptive daydreaming: Proposed diagnostic criteria and their assessment with a structured clinical interview. Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, 4 (2), 176–189. https://doi.org/10.1037/cns0000114

Somer, E., Abu-Raya, H. M., & NsairySimaan, Z. (2019). Maladaptive daydreaming among recovering substance use disorder patients: Prevalence and mediation of the relationship between childhood trauma and dissociation. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 17 (2), 206–216. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-018-0011-9

Telch, M. J., Cobb, A. R., & Lancaster, C. L. (2014). Exposure therapy. In P. Emmelkamp & T. Ehring (Eds.), The Wiley Handbook of Anxiety Disorders (1st ed., pp. 715–756). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118775349.ch35

Thomson, P., & Jaque, V. (2023). Maladaptive daydreaming, overexcitability, and emotion regulation. Roeper Review, 45 (3), 195–205. https://doi.org/10.1080/02783193.2023.2212634

West, M. J., & Somer, E. (2020). Empathy, emotion regulation, and creativity in immersive and maladaptive daydreaming. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 39 (4), 358–373. https://doi.org/10.1177/0276236619864277

Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality . Routledge.

Download references

Open access funding provided by Università degli Studi di Padova within the CRUI-CARE Agreement. The study received no funding.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Developmental and Socialization Psychology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy

Elisa Mancinelli, Sara Spisto, Vinay Jagdish Sukhija & Silvia Salcuni

Digital Health Lab, Centre for Digital Health and Wellbeing, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy

Elisa Mancinelli

APS Maladaptive Daydreaming Italia, Vicenza, Italy

Sara Spisto

Department of Surgery, Medicine, Dentistry and Morphological Sciences with Transplant Surgery, Oncology and Regenerative Medicine Relevance, University of Modena & Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy

Vinay Jagdish Sukhija

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

Conceptualization: Sara Spisto, Elisa Mancinelli, Silvia Salcuni; Data Collection: Sara Spisto; Methodology: Elisa Mancinelli; Formal analysis: Elisa Mancinelli; Writing—original draft preparation: Sara Spisto, Vinay Jagdish Sukhija; Writing—review and editing: Vinay Jagdish Sukhija, Elisa Mancinelli; Supervision: Silvia Salcuni.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Elisa Mancinelli .

Ethics declarations

Informed consent.

Participants were informed that participation was voluntary, and data were collected autonomously. They were also informed that they could withdraw from the study at any moment, without providing an explanation for it and without incurring in any type of consequence.

Research involving human participants

The study was conducted in compliance with the Declaration of Helsinki and was approved by the Interdepartmental Ethical Committee of the University of Padova (No. 4778/2022).

Conflicts of interest

None to disclose.

Additional information

Publisher's note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Mancinelli, E., Spisto, S., Sukhija, V.J. et al. Maladaptive daydreaming as emotion regulation strategy: exploring the association with emotion regulation, psychological symptoms, and negative problem-solving orientation. Curr Psychol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-06487-3

Download citation

Accepted : 26 July 2024

Published : 23 August 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-06487-3

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Emotion regulation
Anxiety symptoms
Depression symptoms
Negative problem-solving orientation
Find a journal
Publish with us
Track your research

IMAGES

How psychology does define problem solving?
Problem-Solving Therapy: Definition, Techniques, and Efficacy
Psychological Steps Involved in Problem Solving
39 Best Problem-Solving Examples (2024)
The 5 Steps of Problem Solving
Problem Solving Cycle

COMMENTS

The Problem-Solving Process
Problem-solving is a mental process that involves discovering, analyzing, and solving problems. The ultimate goal of problem-solving is to overcome obstacles and find a solution that best resolves the issue. The best strategy for solving a problem depends largely on the unique situation. In some cases, people are better off learning everything ...
Problem-Solving Strategies and Obstacles
Problem-solving is a vital skill for coping with various challenges in life. This webpage explains the different strategies and obstacles that can affect how you solve problems, and offers tips on how to improve your problem-solving skills. Learn how to identify, analyze, and overcome problems with Verywell Mind.
7.3 Problem-Solving
Additional Problem Solving Strategies:. Abstraction - refers to solving the problem within a model of the situation before applying it to reality.; Analogy - is using a solution that solves a similar problem.; Brainstorming - refers to collecting an analyzing a large amount of solutions, especially within a group of people, to combine the solutions and developing them until an optimal ...
Problem-Solving Strategies: Definition and 5 Techniques to Try
In insight problem-solving, the cognitive processes that help you solve a problem happen outside your conscious awareness. 4. Working backward. Working backward is a problem-solving approach often ...
Problem Solving and Decision Making
The current bibliography first outlines some general resources on the psychology of problem solving and decision making before examining each of these topics in detail. Specifically, this review covers cognitive, neuroscientific, and computational approaches to problem solving, as well as decision making models and cognitive heuristics and biases.
Solving Problems the Cognitive-Behavioral Way
Key points. Problem-solving is one technique used on the behavioral side of cognitive-behavioral therapy. The problem-solving technique is an iterative, five-step process that requires one to ...
Problem Solving
Cognitive—Problem solving occurs within the problem solver's cognitive system and can only be inferred indirectly from the problem solver's behavior (including biological changes, introspections, and actions during problem solving).. Process—Problem solving involves mental computations in which some operation is applied to a mental representation, sometimes resulting in the creation of ...
7.3 Problem Solving
Solving Puzzles. Problem-solving abilities can improve with practice. Many people challenge themselves every day with puzzles and other mental exercises to sharpen their problem-solving skills. Sudoku puzzles appear daily in most newspapers. Typically, a sudoku puzzle is a 9×9 grid. The simple sudoku below is a 4×4 grid. To solve the puzzle ...
Problem Solving
Problem-solving abilities can improve with practice. Many people challenge themselves every day with puzzles and other mental exercises to sharpen their problem-solving skills. Sudoku puzzles appear daily in most newspapers. Typically, a sudoku puzzle is a 9×9 grid. The simple sudoku below ( Figure LI.7) is a 4×4 grid.
Teaching of General Psychology: Problem Solving
The nature of human problem solving has been studied by psychologists for the past hundred years. Early conceptual work of German Gestalt psychologists (e.g., Duncker, 1935; Wertheimer, 1959) and experimental research on problem solving in the 1960s and 1970s typically operated with relatively simple, laboratory tasks (e.g., Duncker's famous "X-ray" problem; Ewert and Lambert's 1932 ...
Thinking, Language, and Problem Solving
Cognitive psychology is the field of psychology dedicated to examining how people think. It attempts to explain how and why we think the way we do by studying the interactions among human thinking, emotion, creativity, language, and problem solving, in addition to other cognitive processes. Cognitive psychologists strive to determine and ...
7 Module 7: Thinking, Reasoning, and Problem-Solving
Module 7: Thinking, Reasoning, and Problem-Solving. This module is about how a solid working knowledge of psychological principles can help you to think more effectively, so you can succeed in school and life. You might be inclined to believe that—because you have been thinking for as long as you can remember, because you are able to figure ...
10 Best Problem-Solving Therapy Worksheets & Activities
We have included three of our favorite books on the subject of Problem-Solving Therapy below. 1. Problem-Solving Therapy: A Treatment Manual - Arthur Nezu, Christine Maguth Nezu, and Thomas D'Zurilla. This is an incredibly valuable book for anyone wishing to understand the principles and practice behind PST.
How to Build Your Problem-Solving Skills
Block out time in your calendar to get curious, either in isolation or with others. Ponder and expose yourself to how people from an opposing viewpoint see a topic. Ask others their opinion or ...
Cognitive Psychology: The Science of How We Think
Cognitive psychology is the study of internal mental processes—all of the workings inside your brain, including perception, thinking, memory, attention, language, problem-solving, and learning. Learning about how people think and process information helps researchers and psychologists understand the human brain and assist people with ...
15 Provocative Questions for Creative Problem-Solving
These questions are designed to provoke thought, challenge assumptions, and inspire creative thinking, fostering a mindset that can lead to innovative solutions and effective problem-solving. In ...
Solving Problems
A heuristic is another type of problem solving strategy. While an algorithm must be followed exactly to produce a correct result, a heuristic is a general problem-solving framework (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). You can think of these as mental shortcuts that are used to solve problems. A "rule of thumb" is an example of a heuristic.
Problem Solving Packet
worksheet. Guide your clients and groups through the problem solving process with the help of the Problem Solving Packet. Each page covers one of five problem solving steps with a rationale, tips, and questions. The steps include defining the problem, generating solutions, choosing one solution, implementing the solution, and reviewing the ...
Problem solving
College of DuPage Digital Press - Introduction to Psychology - Thinking, Reasoning, and Problem-Solving National Center for Biotechnology Information - PubMed Central - The art of problem solving and its translation into practice
Problem-Solving Therapy
Topics in Psychology. Explore how scientific research by psychologists can inform our professional lives, family and community relationships, emotional wellness, and more. ... In Problem-Solving Therapy, Drs. Arthur Nezu and Christine Maguth Nezu demonstrate their positive, goal-oriented approach to treatment. Problem-solving therapy is a ...
Reasoning & Problem Solving
450 Jane Stanford Way Building 420 Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305 Campus Map
10 Subtle Signs that shows you are a Natural Problem Solver, According
When our emotions take charge of our thinking, our problem solving skills take a hit. When our mind is calm and composed then our thoughts becomes clearer. Read More : Psychology Behind Emotional Regulation and Dysregulation. 4. You are a Risk Taker. You might think that problem solving is only based on strategy and planning but that is not true.
NPTEL Assignment Answers 2024 with Solutions (July-Dec)
artificial-intelligence-search-methods-for-problem-solving ... Topics. nptel nptel-solutions nptel-assignments nptel-courses nptel-assignment-answers Resources. Readme Activity. Custom properties. Stars. 11 stars Watchers. 0 watching Forks. 0 forks Report repository Releases No releases published.
12 Ways to Cope With Frustration: How Effective Are Yours?
Problem-Solving: Obviously, this is the single, most important step in resolving your frustrations. Everything I've discussed so far is to assist you in tackling this final step with maximum ...
Maladaptive daydreaming as emotion regulation strategy ...
Maladaptive Daydreaming (MD) is a dysfunctional mental activity characterized by an excessive immersion in fantasy, whose function is being increasingly discussed and investigated. Accordingly, this study aims to examine its function as an emotion regulation strategy among MDers by evaluating the pattern of associations among MD, emotion regulation (ER) difficulties, anxiety, depression ...

7.3 Problem-Solving

PROBLEM-SOLVING STRATEGIES

Additional Problem Solving Strategies :

Figure 7.02. Steps for solving the Tower of Hanoi in the minimum number of moves when there are 3 disks.

Figure 7.03. Graphical representation of nodes (circles) and moves (lines) of Tower of Hanoi.

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY AND PROBLEM SOLVING

How long did it take you to solve this sudoku puzzle? (You can see the answer at the end of this section.)

Did you figure it out? (The answer is at the end of this section.) Once you understand how to crack this puzzle, you won’t forget.

What steps did you take to solve this puzzle? You can read the solution at the end of this section.

Answers to Exercises

Share This Book

How to Subscribe

In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Problem Solving and Decision Making

Related Articles Expand or collapse the "related articles" section about

Other Subject Areas

Problem Solving and Decision Making by Emily G. Nielsen , John Paul Minda LAST REVIEWED: 26 June 2019 LAST MODIFIED: 26 June 2019 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199828340-0246

General Overviews

7.3 Problem Solving

Problem-Solving Strategies

Everyday Connection

Pitfalls to Problem Solving

Link to Learning

64 Problem Solving

Problem-Solving Strategies

Solving Puzzles

Pitfalls to Problem Solving

Inductive vs Deductive Reasoning

Share This Book

7 Thinking, Language, and Problem Solving

Table of Contents

7.1 What is Cognition?

Concepts and Prototypes

Natural and Artificial Concepts

7.2 LAnguage

Components of Language

Language Development

DIG DEEPER: The Case of Genie

Language and Thought

WHAT DO YOU THINK? The Meaning of Language

7.3 Problem Solving

Problem-Solving Strategies

EVERYDAY CONNECTION: Solving Puzzles

Chapter Summary

7.2 Language

Share This Book

7 Module 7: Thinking, Reasoning, and Problem-Solving

READING WITH PURPOSE

Analyze, Evaluate, and Create

7.1. Different kinds of thought and knowledge

Factual and conceptual knowledge

Procedural knowledge

Metacognitive knowledge

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

Critical thinking

A Critical Thinker’s Toolkit

7.2 Reasoning and Judgment

Deductive reasoning

Inductive reasoning and judgment

7.3 Problem Solving

Defining and Mentally Representing Problems in Order to Solve Them

Solving Problems by Trial and Error

Solving Problems with Algorithms and Heuristics

An Effective Problem-Solving Sequence

Share This Book

10 Best Problem-Solving Therapy Worksheets & Activities

This Article Contains:

Can it help with depression?

The major concepts

Social problem-solving model

Relational problem-solving model

Problem-solving therapy – Baycrest

Is PPT appropriate?

Five problem-solving steps

Download 3 Free Positive Psychology Exercises (PDF)

Download 3 Free Positive Psychology Tools Pack (PDF)

Positive self-statements

World’s Largest Positive Psychology Resource

5 Worksheets and workbooks

Reactions to Stress

What Are Your Unique Triggers?