Mentalscape- Psychology Concept

 

Mentalscape refers to the cognitions present in mind as described by a person as if they were describing what they are watching in a short video. 

In the context of a meaningful conversation, a person might ask another what they are thinking. The response reveals their mentalscape. A lengthy response might be more like the description of a video instead of a still image. Mentalscapes are more like paintings or creative videos than those taken by a camera because the person describing the scene interprets their world based on their memories, experiences, cognitive biases and so forth. Memory is dynamic. We interact with our memories. When we speak about them, they are created works albeit often, but not always, based on real life experiences.

The mentalscape reveals the patterns of thought. The patterns are schemes or schemata that organize categories of information or concepts and the relationships among them. 

In psychotherapy, a clinician may ask a client to describe an experience. That experience becomes present in the mind and becomes the current mentalscape. The memory is viewed in the present as if the client were describing a scene, but neither the clinician nor the client has direct access to the original, untouched, external event.

Memories, Mentalscape, scheme

Meaning Maintenance Model MMM Psychological Science

The Meaning Maintenance Model (MMM) hypothesizes that people are motivated to respond to experiences that violate their expectations by restoring meaning. MMM is associated with Heine, Proulx, and Vohs (2006).

Meaning occurs when people connect their experiences in memory. We understand the concept of a healthy meal when we mentally connect the various foods that our culture teaches us belong together to form a healthy meal. We may laugh when a cartoonist violates the concept of a healthy meal by picturing different kinds of chocolates. The concept, healthy meal, is a unit of meaning. Psychologists have referred to these mental concepts as schema.

The concept of meaning may be traced to existential philosophers such as Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Albert Camus. Psychological scientists examine meaning by looking at the way people link experiences.  Frederic Bartlett (1886-1969) was an English psychologist at Cambridge University who developed schema theory. Schema are mental organizations of knowledge gained from experience within one's culture. 

Larger organizational sets are called worldviews. Worldviews organize many schema into an orientation to life. Some writers refer to worldviews as meaning frameworks. Outside of psychology, some disciplines write about seeing the world through different lenses.

Meaning can be violated when a new experience cannot be explained or understood as a part of a person's existing schema. On a larger scale, the experience does not make sense in terms of a person's worldview. When faced with experiences that do not "make sense," people work to restore meaning. Sometimes this work can impact other aspects of thinking, which seem unrelated to the experience.

Examples

For years, Europeans only saw white swans, but black swans exist. An easy modification of a schema for "swan" adds the knowledge that swans can be either black or white. 

Some cultures have schema for the way women and men ought to dress and behave. When people violate the expectations, those with traditional schema work to make sense of the new experience. 

A common example of a worldview is a person's religion, which includes a large set of schema about God or supernatural beings and how the supernatural and natural worlds interact. When significant experiences violate one's understanding of the way the world works, people seek answers from their religious leaders, modify their beliefs, change their religion, or give up on religion altogether.

Following is a quote from the abstract by Heine and his colleagues (2006). See their article for details on the model.

"The meaning maintenance model (MMM) proposes that people have a need for meaning; that is, a need to perceive events through a prism of mental representations of expected relations that organizes their perceptions of the world. When people's sense of meaning is threatened, they reaffirm alternative representations as a way to regain meaning-a process termed fluid compensation. According to the model, people can reaffirm meaning in domains that are different from the domain in which the threat occurred. Evidence for fluid compensation can be observed following a variety of psychological threats, including most especially threats to the self, such as self-esteem threats, feelings of uncertainty, interpersonal rejection, and mortality salience. People respond to these diverse threats in highly similar ways, which suggests that a range of psychological motivations are expressions of a singular impulse to generate and maintain a sense of meaning."

The Meaning Maintenance Model has been proposed as an alternative to Terror Management Theory.

Heine, S., Proulx, T., & Vohs, K. (2006). The Meaning Maintenance Model: On the coherence of social motivation. Personality and Social Psychological Review, 10, 88-111.

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