In the 1950's a new trend of psychology sprung forth that look at the human mind at a a series of mental processes. It looks at thoughts, feelings, leanrning, remembering, making decisons and judgements and any other process that the human mind can be held accountable for. Cognitive psychologistsare very fascinated by the way people percieve, interpret , store and retreive information. It is aalso known for the similarities it believes that the human mind has with the comuputers that we yhave invented. Such contributers to this approach are Gerage Kelly, Albert Ellis, Noam Chomsky, Walter Mischel
George Kelly contibution to cognitive psychology would be his personal construct theory. He felt that people think like scientists. That we take a situation and we attempt to make sense of the world. No people use the same construct because we all lead different lives and due to that we all construct the world differently. An example would be,what make a good friend? Does a friend need to be intelligent. Now a construct could be, would you think a "friend applicant" should be booksmart-streetsmart. Then after that is this person booksmart in an academic sense- or current events and this process will continue until as the scientist we are are satisfied.
Walter Mischel a known critic of the trait approach found an accord with the cognitive approach. he introduced cognitive-affective units to determine our behavior. These units are encoding, expectations and beliefs, affects, goals and values, and compentencies and self-regulatory plans.