Effects of Emotions on Schemas

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Essay #1 Information is stored in memory and is brought to bear in order to make sense of the world. According to the our text, the process by which different individuals makes sense of the world and construe their immediate reality, are based on emotional and behavioral reactions that as they unfold are influenced by the our mental representations, or schemas. Schemas allow individuals to organize, interpret and make sense of situations, themselves and access their own psychological states, and other people as well. Schemas allow us to categorize and group information about experiences ideas, people. It serves to organize and simplify vast amounts of information efficiently so that it can be used quickly to make inferences about people and decisions. Activation of Schemas is determined by the interplay of availability (whether such schema exist), accessibility (how easily accessible is, priming studies), applicability (situational cues) and salience (degree to which particular social object stands out as compared to others). Professor Andersen relates this process in terms of a proposed social-cognitive model of transference. Transference has been conceptualized through the notion of the relational self. Self knowledge (or self-schemas) develops as a way to make sense and understand the self, and when one develops new relationships with others transference readily occurs. The manner by which this holds true relates to the degree in which a newly encountered person activates a representation of a significant other in an individual’s memory. More or less, as a result of a new person bearing a minimal resemblance to a significant other, this activates the significant-other representation and indirectly the relational self. Saribay & Andersen take this notion of transference one step further and speculates that activating a significant-other representation in
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