Schema in psychology

 

In psychology, a schema is a mental structure that helps organize and interpret information. Schemas represent some aspect of the world and allow us to take shortcuts in processing vast amounts of information.

Schemas are built from our experiences and memories, and they help us understand and predict the world around us. For example, a child might have a schema for a cat that includes characteristics like having four legs, fur, and a tail. When they encounter a new animal that fits this schema, they might initially identify it as a cat until they learn more specific details.

An organized collection of schemas represent the components of a worldview.

Schemas can be beneficial because they help us quickly process and categorize information. However, they can also lead to biases and stereotypes, because we might ignore information that doesn’t fit our existing schemas.

Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist, was instrumental in developing the concept of schemas in his theory of cognitive development. He believed that schemas are both the categories of knowledge and the processes of acquiring that knowledge, and they are constantly being adapted as we encounter new information.

A self-schema is a concept, which refers to our organization about ourselves, which is modified throughout our life. Depending on the author, the concept, self-schema may be the same as the concept, self-concept.

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Norbert M. Seel (2012) offers the following definition (pp. 2936-2939)

Schemas are acquired and constructed through experiences with specific instances. Physiologically speaking, they start as simple networks and develop into more complex structures. From the perspective of psychology, the development of schemas starts with the construction of simple behavioral action schemas, which are learned through organizational socialization and concrete experiences, and proceeds to cognitive schemas by means of the functional incorporation of the regular structure of actions into the memory.

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 References

Seel, N.M. (2012). Schema Development. In: Seel, N.M. (eds) Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1428-6_365

 

 Geoffrey W. Sutton, PhD is Emeritus Professor of Psychology. He retired from a clinical practice and was credentialed in clinical neuropsychology and psychopharmacology. His website is  www.suttong.com

 

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Affordance in psychology

"An affordance is a possibility for action provided to an organism by things and creatures in its environmental niche, given the organism’s particular sensorimotor, perceptual, and cognitive abilities..."

(Taves et al., 2018, p. 208)

The general language is inclusive of human beings and other creatures. I use the word lifeform below. Affordances may be viewed as important to the development of worldviews.

An environmental niche refers to all of the affordances available to a population in a specific environmental setting. This has been called the landscape of affordances by Ramstead et al. (2016).

Two types of affordances

Natural affordances are those possibilities that a lifeform can act on given its abilities and environment. Example, nuts afford eating for squirrels.

Conventional affordances depend on possibilities to act according to one's cultural expectations. Cultural schemas include expectations about relating to people, places, object, and events.

References

Ramstead, M. J., Veissière, S. P., & Kirmayer, L. J. (2016). Cultural affordances: Scaffolding local worlds through shared intentionality and regimes of attention. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1090. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01090



Taves, A., Asprem, E., & Ihm, E. (2018). Psychology, meaning making, and the study of worldviews: Beyond religion and non-religion. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 10(3), 207–217. https://doi.org/10.1037/rel0000201

Geoffrey W. Sutton, PhD is Emeritus Professor of Psychology. He retired from a clinical practice and was credentialed in clinical neuropsychology and psychopharmacology. His website is  www.suttong.com

 

See Geoffrey Sutton’s books on   AMAZON       or  GOOGLE STORE

Follow on    FACEBOOK   Geoff W. Sutton    

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Dr. Sutton’s posts are for educational purposes only. See a licensed mental health provider for diagnoses, treatment, and consultation. 

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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Terror Management Theory

Terror Management Theory (TMT) was proposed by psychological scientists Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski. 

The theory posits that people manage the terror inherent in their awareness of their own death by investing in that which is more durable. They experience conflict between the instinctual urge to live and the reality of death.

Research findings indicate that when people are reminded of their mortality (Mortality Salience, MS), they create or use an anxiety buffer. Becoming a part of a meaningful group helps cope with death awareness.

Many religious teachings guide people to "life after life," which in itself is a phrase that omits the more common, "life after death." Others find meaning in their children and grandchildren, the possessions they leave behind, and contributions to their nations.

Terror Management Theory is related to self-esteem. Many people assess their self-esteem or self-worth by a comparison to their culture's way of defining worth.

Here is a quote from the theorists' 2015 summary of research.


Terror management theory posits that human awareness of the inevitability of death exerts a profound influence on diverse aspects of human thought, emotion, motivation, and behavior. People manage the potential for anxiety that results from this awareness by maintaining: (1) faith in the absolute validity of their cultural worldviews and (2) self-esteem by living up to the standards of value that are part of their worldviews. In this chapter, we take stock of the past 30 years of research and conceptual development inspired by this theory. After a brief review of evidence supporting the theory's fundamental propositions, we discuss extensions of the theory to shed light on: (1) the psychological mechanisms through which thoughts of death affect subsequent thought and behavior; (2) how the anxiety-buffering systems develop over childhood and beyond; (3) how awareness of death influenced the evolution of mind, culture, morality, and religion; (4) how death concerns lead people to distance from their physical bodies and seek solace in concepts of mind and spirit; and (5) the role of death concerns in maladaptive and pathological behavior. (Abstract)


One recent root of TMT can be found in the book, The Denial of Death by cultural anthropologist, Ernest Becker. Becker draws on earlier work about death anxiety. See my review (Sutton, 2015) for quotes from Becker's book and applications to religion.

Related posts

Worldview

References

Pyszczynski, T., Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., Arndt, J., & Schimel, J. (2004). Why Do People Need Self-Esteem? A Theoretical and Empirical Review. Psychological Bulletin, 130(3), 435–468. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.130.3.435

Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S. & Greenberg, J. (2015). Thirty Years of Terror

Management Theory: From Genesis to Revelation. In J. M. Olson & M. P. Zarna (Eds). Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 52, 1-70. 

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