Schema (psychology) - Self-schemata

Self-schemata

Schemata about oneself are considered to be grounded in the present and based on past experiences. Memories, as mentioned, are framed in the light of one's self-conception. For example, people who have positive self-schemas (i.e. most people) selectively attend to flattering information and selectively ignore unflattering information, with the consequence that flattering information is subject to deeper encoding, and therefore superior recall. Even when encoding is equally strong for positive and negative feedback, positive feedback is more likely to be recalled. Moreover, memories may even be distorted to become more favourable-people typically remember exam grades as having been better than they actually were. However, when people have negative self views, memories are generally biased in ways that validate the negative self-schema; People with low self-esteem, for instance, are prone to remember more negative information about themselves than positive information. Thus, memory tends to be biased in a way that validates the agent's pre-existing self-schema.

There are three major implications of self-schemata. First, information about oneself is processed faster and more efficiently, especially consistent information. Second, one retrieves and remembers information that is relevant to one's self-schema. Third, one will tend to resist information in the environment that is contradictory to one's self-schema. For instance, students with a particular self-schema prefer roommates whose view of them is consistent with that schema. Students who end up with roommates whose view of them is inconsistent with their self-schema are more likely to try to find a new roommate, even if this view is positive. This is an example of self-verification.

As researched by Aaron Beck, automatically-activated negative self-schemas are a large contributor to depression. According to Cox, Abramson, Devine, and Hollon (2012), these self-schemas are essentially the same type of cognitive structure as stereotypes studied by prejudice researchers (e.g., they are both well-rehearsed, automatically activated, difficult to change, influential toward behavior, emotions, and judgments, and bias information processing).