PSY 343 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Conversion Disorder, Dream Interpretation, Reality Principle
1. Personality psychology: unit 3
The social cognitive approach to personality
1. How can we best know a person? If I were to use that McAdams phrase to sum
up the basic premise of the social cognitive approach, it would be:if you want
to know what’s important about a person, find out what she thinks about
herself and her social world.
2. Before looking at some of the critical questions people ask about themselves
and their social world, especially as they move from adolescence into young
adulthood, let’s look at some processes that underlie the ability to think this
way at all. To that end, let’s ponder the following:
3. yo, where’s the Teddy bear?
4. double yo – where’s Mommy?!
5. Is Mommy fair to me?
6. Am I fair to Mommy?
7. Do puppies pursue such questions?
8. The cognitive processes observed in human beings, if not altogether different
in quality then certainly in degree, make possible those critical questions
people ask about themselves and their social world:
1. 1. Who am I; what kind of person am I like?
1. a. what are my beliefs and my values?
2. b. do I like what I see when I look in the mirror?
2. 2. What are other people like?
1. a. why do people have such different reactions to things?
2. b. what people do I find myself attracted to and repelled by?
3. 3. What do I want out of life?
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1. a. what do I want to do, to have, and to be?
2. b. how would I like to be remembered?
9. To know a person’s answers to such questions is to go a long way in knowing
what she is “like as a person”! That is where we’re heading in this part of the
unit – how do people come to develop a sense of self and how does thinking
about oneself in certain ways influence our actions and experiences? To get
there, we first need to look at some basic ideas from cognitive psychology.
10. Some basic terms of the cognitively-oriented approach
1. A) Factual knowledge: declarative-semantic and declarative-episodic
1. 1) declarative-semantic – this refers to the “facts” you have stored in
memory about you and the world, information that you could access and
speak about (i.e., declare) – e.g., the capital of North Carolina is
________
2. 2) declarative-episodic– this contains concrete and specific
autobiographical memories of episodes from your life that you can access
– e.g., your first kiss (grandma or Aunt Susie doesn’t count!)
2. B) Schemas: going beyond the basic, isolated factsSchemas are mental
representations by which we distill and organize what we know about some
ongoing area of our experience. For example: The Blue (northerner) and The
Gray (southerner) OR Christmas (or Hanukkah or ........)
3. C) How is the information you associate with a given schema organized?
1. 1) set of defining features – a fuzzy set of characteristics that define the
“thing” in question—characteristics of birds
2. 2) exemplars – all representative members of the schema in question3)
prototypes – an idealized representative of the schema in question, often
serves as a “conceptual anchor”
4. So, when you encounter something novel and wonder, “what is it; where
does it belong.................for example!
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5. D) What functions do activated schemas serve? – once we’ve developed a
schema about some aspect of life, we no longer look at that part of life
directly or “purely.” Things are always filtered through our developed
schemas. They influence the way we process information about the world in
several ways:
1. 1) perception & selective attention (the input) – we are more likely to
notice and attend to those things for which we have schemas than those
for which we don't.
2. 2) memory (the throughput) – it is easier to store new information into
and later retrieve it out of LTM if we have an already established schema
for it.
3. 3) interpretation and decision-making (the output) – because life is often
less than crystal clear, we use our schemas to make interpretations and
draw conclusions that guide our actions. Schema that are
activated/primed impact our actions!
1. a) Melissa Chou
2. b) ...and her grandmother
11. II) From schemas in general to self-schemas
1. A. Self-schemas – refer to our organized mental representations about who
we are and what we are like. As with other schema, they are based on our
efforts to make sense of our repeated experience. It’s just that in thiscase,
the focus is on our repeated experience of ourselves. (Am I lazy? Am I hard-
working? Am I optimistic? Am I pessimistic?)
2. B. From self-concept to the self-schema system
1. 1. Is our sense of self unified, straightforward, and consistent...or
complex and replete with contradictions?
2. 2. One self or many selves?
3. (Let’s look at some of your possible “you’s”
4. possible self
5. undesired self
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