ABSTRACT
Cognitive style has long been implicated as a risk factor for depression and suicidal behaviour. The concept refers to the way people search for, acquire, interpret, categorize, remember and retrieve information in making decisions and solving problems. The significance of understanding how information is processed and evaluated is perhaps best captured by Jung’s (1923) theory of psychological types. Jung suggests that people are either ‘sensing’ or ‘intuitive’. Sensing individuals prefer to gather information from their environment, focus on immediate experience and demonstrate acute powers of observation and memory for detail. Intuitive people prefer to focus on possibilities, meanings, and relationships by way of insight and deductive thinking. They tend to engage in more abstract thinking with a bias towards future orientation. Thus, people are either ‘thinking’ or ‘feeling’ oriented. ‘Thinking individuals’ rely on principles of cause and effect and they make decisions analytically. This is somewhat analogous to Lazarus and Folkman’s (1984) problem-focused coping style. ‘Feeling individuals’ prefer to weigh the relative merits of an issue and to rely on an understanding of personal and group values in their decision-making. They prefer to rely on affect over cognition and tend to use logic to support feelings. This is analogous to emotionfocused coping. Clues to a person’s cognitive style can be communicated in different ways. Some people may talk about how they spend a lot of time ruminating on what they should or should not have done or said. Others may indicate their agitation when people seem to jump from topic to topic in a conversation. Myers (1962) extended Jung’s theory by proposing a further distinction between a preference for information-processing and information evaluation. According to Myers (1962), perceptive individuals prefer to collect rather than evaluate information, to remain flexible and to keep their options open. Evaluators prefer to assess and judge information and demonstrate a preference for order and control.
