The term self-schema refers to the beliefs and ideas people have about themselves. These beliefs are used to guide and organize information processing, especially when the information is significant to the self. Self-schemas are important to a person's overall self-concept.

PropertyValue
dbpprop:abstract
  • The term self-schema refers to the beliefs and ideas people have about themselves. These beliefs are used to guide and organize information processing, especially when the information is significant to the self. Self-schemas are important to a person's overall self-concept. Once we have developed a schema about ourselves there is a strong tendency for that schema to be maintained by a bias in what we attend to, a bias in what we remember, and a bias in what we are prepared to accept as true about ourselves. In other words our self-schema becomes self-perpetuating. The self-schema is then stored in long-term memory and both facilitates and biases the processing of personally relevant information. Self-schemas vary from person to person because each individual has very different social and cultural life experiences. A few examples of self-schemas are; exciting/ dull, quiet/ loud, healthy/ sickly, athletic/ nonathletic, lazy/ active, and geek/ jock. If a person has a schema for geek/ jock, for example, he might think of himself as a bit of a computer geek and so he would possess a lot of information about that trait. Because of this he would probably interpret a lot of situations based on their relevance to being a geek. For another example consider the healthy/ sickly schema. A person with this schema might consider herself a very health conscious person. Her concern with being healthy would then affect every day decisions like what to buy at the grocery store, what restaurant to eat out at, or how much exercise she should get daily. Women who are schematic on appearance exhibited lower body image, lower self-esteem, and more negative mood than did those who are aschematic on appearance.
rdfs:comment
  • The term self-schema refers to the beliefs and ideas people have about themselves. These beliefs are used to guide and organize information processing, especially when the information is significant to the self. Self-schemas are important to a person's overall self-concept.
rdfs:label
  • Self-Schema
owl:sameAs
skos:subject
foaf:page
is dbpprop:redirect of