Meaning of this sentence- URGENT

What does this sentence mean?

"An individual's cognitive and affective domains are at the centre of his or her personality."

Can anyone please help me with the meaning of this phrase?

Put in everyday language, the sentence means roughly "The way you get to know the world and the way you feel about it are central to your self".

Maybe it is more exact to start my sentence above like this: "Your way of thinking and your emotional life..."

Cognitive is intelligence and Easterner is right about affective being emotional, so the sentence says that your personality depends on your intelligence and your emotional abilities...

I’m quite sure this is not an English sentence otherwise it’s bad English. So the best thing to do is to skip it. Often the most complicated sentences are those that convey no sense.

I think it is an English sentence, but with a serious "semantic" blunder in it - a kind of Newspeak designed to avoid speaking straight. Such sentences are typical to certain types of "academic" writing, and often result in something next to complete nonsense. I encountered a load of them during my university studies. The remedy for that would be to cultivate an academic style that would be closer to plain, everyday English.

In this case the terminology is specialized jargon that pertains to a particular field, and not simply a contrived academic writing style.

http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/domains.htm

Hi Deborah,

Thank you for the link, that makes some difference now. However, I still find some semantic fault with the original sentence. It is all right with "cognitive and affective domain", because the meaning of these two concepts depends on how we define them. My problem is with these two domains being "at the centre of his or her personality" - I understand the meaning, but this blending with the concrete and the abstract is somewhat clumsy. It would have been better to put it as "One's personality is largely defined by one's cognitive and affective domains", or better still, "one's intellectual and emotional characteristics", although the latter would bring a slight change of meaning.

I have to admit that I am a little negatively biased towards this type of theoretical jargon, even if I am aware that this bias is strictly personal. This stems from having read (during my studies of pedagogy) loads of texts like the following:

„Self-regulatory learning is a complex, interactive process, which entails motivational as well as cognitive self-regulation. ... When a learner is confronted with a learning task, he or she will interpret his or her competence of problem solving and the chances of solving the task depending on his or her individual characteristics, self-image, level of anxiety, goal orientation or performance motivation. The conception of one’s own abilities will greatly affect the consideration of the level of difficulty of the given task, which in turn will affect the process of learning or problem-solving. The learner therefore, when confronted with a task, will first of all consider his or her own competence, and only after having done this will he or she compare this putative or actual competence with the estimated level of difficulty, complexity and unexpectedness of the given task (this comparison being affected by the individual learner’s psychological characteristics, positive or negative self-image, level of anxiety, personal insecurity, performance motivation or failure avoidance, and internal or external control). … Self-regulation , i.e. the independent realisation of.one’s personal interests and desires is in a positive correlative relationship with intrinsic motivation, as well as with comfortable emotional feelings [sic!] and with metacognitive regulatory processes. Thus we can understand that there is a connection between learning efforts and learning performance on the one hand, and with metacognitive regulatory abilities on the other, while these in turn are connected to the motivational or emotional variables.” (Translated from Hungarian).

Of course the use of this jargon is all right when it is restricted to the communication of theoretical experts between themselves, but what is the use of it for future teachers, who need paractical answers to practical questions? Such texts were compulsory reading for our pedagogy exams... :)

Just to make it plain: it is not the ideas expressed in the above text that I am at odds with, but the unnecessary accumulation of jargon which sometimes leads to an over-complicated way of expression.