Most Developed Field Of Social Cognitive Psychology

As discussed in lecture, social cognitive psychology is one of the most recently developed field of psychology, which focuses on how individuals mentally represent knowledge that is acquired during interactions with surroundings and use them to establish impressions on self and others (Przybylinski, Oct 19). Rather than complying with behaviorists’ focuses on predicting human behavior by analyzing stimulus conditioning, social cognitive psychologists propose that human behaviors could be predicted more accurately by studying one’s mental interpretations on social stimulus and situations as one interact with them.
Walter Mischel, one of the most renowned social cognitive psychologists in the field, developed Cognitive–Affective Personality

When one’s relational schema is triggered, one will engage and apply the information stored in the relational schema on the new person. This process, known as transference, was explained in her Social-Cognitive Model of Transference after undergoing a two-sessions experiment (Przybylinski, Oct 24). Before the experiment started, Anderson postulated that transference only occurs when an unfamiliar person possesses high resemblance to one’s own relational self and not other’s relational self. There is one experimental group and one control group in this experiment. For the experimental group, participants were asked to name, complete sentences about their own significant others, rank descriptive importance of sentence about each significant other, and select adjectives that are irrelevant to the significant others during their first visit to the lab. After two weeks, these participants were asked to come back to the lab and learn about a fictional character by viewing statement about the character. Some of the statements about the character were mixed with the sentences that the participants wrote about their significant others. Then these participants will complete recognition memory measures, including items does not represent by the fictional character but represented by participants’ significant others. For the control group, the participants underwent the same procedures as in the experimental group except that some items in the recognition memory measures represented others’ significant others instead of their own significant others. The result of the experiment showed that participants in the experimental group mistakenly recognized items that represented their own