cognitive

• schemas and relationships

  Dion et al halo effect

  Attractive people have attractive personalities

  Self schema important in relationship as we are attracted to those who we deem to match us in terms of physical attraction
• Assumption: schemas

  organised packets of info built up through experience and stored in LTM.

  Derived from pst experience but refined through social interaction

  Do not represent reality as built through social exchange
• Internal mental processes and relationships

  Essential. How we perceive people determines whether we want to enter a relationship with them

  Importance of first impressions

  Pos memories if past relationships drive us to form new ones

  Neg memories of past relationship, reluctant to pursue in fear of getting hurt
• assumption: computer analogy

  mind is computer software cognitive processes are software

  Input= take in information

  Process= change and store

  Output= recall
• multi store model

  input through senses moves to STM store, then to LTM store the. is retrieved when needed
• assumption: internal mental processes 


  essential cognitive processes work together so we can make sense of the world

  perception, attention, memory, language
• Wundt introspection


  gave research assistants stimulus and asked how it made them feel
• Griffiths and gambling


  Explored thought process of gamblers

  assumed thought process would be irrational

  Pps asked to think out loud

  Gamblers had more irrational verbalisations
• strength: scientific

  likely to be believed as research investigates

  research in labs- brain scans

  cognitive neuroscience-> pinpoint exact biological mechanisms in cognitive processes to understand what brain does at rest

  causal relationships between emotion, cognition and predicted behaviour
• strength: meditational processes


  focus on process between stimulus and response

  how perception and memory affect response to world

  explains practical element of human behaviour

  cognitive psychologists look at improving memory w retrieval cues
• strength: application 


  process principles are correct and therapy helps

  Piaget suggests children 8-9 cannot think in abstract and need to see things in a more concrete form, influence on primary education

  memory in EWT easily distorted, influence police interviewing
• weakness: mechanistic


  compares human behaviour to a machine

  raises philosophical issues-> could computers behave like human brain

  ignores social and emotional factors, changing thinking patterns may help but it won’t change the environment that caused thought
• Weakness determinist

  Underestimates uniqueness of humans and freedom to choose own destiny

  Removes responsibility

  Acquiring schemas through social interaction means we acquire stereotypes about demographics influencing how we interpret certain situations
• Weakness: nurture

  Ignores significant factors in development of behaviour -> genetics ,social and cultural factors

  Piaget failed to see role of culture and gender in childhood development