PSY 343 Study Guide - Final Guide: Psychological Horror, Parenting Styles, Conversion Disorder
Personality Psychology Final Essay Notes:
QUESTION 1:
Some basic terms of the cognitively-oriented approach
In the social-cognitive view, our lives are centered on the pursuit of our basically positive
goals and desires. In the Freudian view, we try not to be overpowered by our primitive and
potentially destructive desires.
View of human condition from this theory is basically positive and hopeful. People are
motivated to pursue that they desire in life and though this isn’t always easy, people often
succeed.
Even when a person experiences failure in self-regulation- the missteps are seen as
unfortunate and avoidable. The fundamental dynamics remain rational.
A) Factual knowledge: declarative-semantic and declarative-episodic
o1) 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 ________
o2) 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!)
B) Schemas: going beyond the basic, isolated facts
oSchemas are mental representations by which we distill and organize what we know
about some ongoing area of our experience.
oEX: The Blue and The Gray /// Christmas (or Hanukkah or ........)
C) Information associated with a schema is organized by:
o1) set of defining features – a fuzzy set of characteristics that define the “thing” in
question
o2) exemplars – all representative members of the schema in question
o3) prototypes – an idealized representative of the schema in question, often serves
as a “conceptual anchor”
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oSo, when you encounter something novel and wonder, “what is it; where does it
belong.................for example!
D) Functions of Schemas
oonce 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) 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) 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) 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!
a) Melissa Chou
b) ...and her grandmother
II) Self-schemas
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.
o(Am I lazy? Am I hard-working? Am I optimistic? Am I pessimistic?)
B. Self-concept to the Self-schema system
o1. Is our sense of self unified, straightforward, and consistent...or complex and
replete with contradictions?
o2. One self or many selves?
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oBecause we can and do hold a wide range of mental representations of self, our
current experience of selfhood is understood against the backdrop of who we might
have been and who we might yet become. Indeed, I would argue that your felt
experience of yourself is more a function of the “what if” than the “what is.”
are you happy with your current romantic relationship? or job?
is there anything in your past about which you feel regret?
as you think about the world you will live in – that children of yours, if you
have any, will live in – about what are you most hopeful? and most fearful?
o3. Given that in any single moment you cannot keep all the ways you might be able
to think of yourself in mind, we need to ask why at any given moment one self-
representation is in awareness rather than another?(FYI – Markus and Nurius use
the term working or dynamic self-concept to label the specific self that is currently
“active” in mind.)
o4. Self-discrepancy theory: One example of a modern “many selves” theory
oThough
similar to
Markus and
Nurius in
viewing
alternative
selves as
critical,
Higgins provides a modern theory with very particular self-schema in mind:
specific discrepancies are theorized to engender specific negative emotions
dejection [sadness, shame]; agitation [guilt, fear]
oOne value of Higgins’ self-discrepancy theory is to highlight the idea that our self-
understandings include both a knowledge component (schema concerning what I
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Document Summary
In the social-cognitive view, our lives are centered on the pursuit of our basically positive goals and desires. In the freudian view, we try not to be overpowered by our primitive and potentially destructive desires. View of human condition from this theory is basically positive and hopeful. People are motivated to pursue that they desire in life and though this isn"t always easy, people often succeed. Even when a person experiences failure in self-regulation- the missteps are seen as unfortunate and avoidable. A) factual knowledge: declarative-semantic and declarative-episodic: 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) 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!)
