Psychological Perspective Essay

Socio-Cultural Perspective

"The sociocultural perspective suggests that human behavior is influenced by social context, environmental cues, social pressures, and cultural influences." (Major Perspectives in Psychology) Things that happen in our life, the environment we grow up in, the type of people we live around, and the ideas and beliefs we grow up with all shape and influence our ideals and how we think and behave. For example, living in America is different than living in China or Africa, which involve different cultures and beliefs. Being raised in poor, working class, or wealthy families affects the way we learn to live. The religious beliefs we grow up with shape what we believe is right or wrong. Whether we grow up with strict parents or parents that are lazier faire, help shape the morals we learn.

Memory is the persistence to learning. Overtime, our memory encodes environmental information, stores it by retention, and retrieves it at different times. The way information gets encoded is how we remember events, people, and situations that affect values and morals we learn. The way we perceive things, is not always the way they really are or how they happen. If it is a traumatic situation, it usually gets perceived with a lot of fear. Fear, in turn, can distort facts. Regardless of the way it is perceived, it has shaped how we feel, how we think, and how we behave. Often times, the value and importance of people and events help to determine how well we remember them. That is how heroes come about in life.

The social interactions we have with others help form the meanings we come to form and understand.(Social-Cultural perspective) People we have bonded with in life, family for instance, help shape the meanings in our life. The language system we use effects how we see the world we live in. I contains cultural views in how view the world around us. The collective identity of the culture is part of what tells us who we are. Demographic characteristics, as well as the belief and value systems are a part of that as well. The extent of the social interactions, how much time we spend with someone, determines the importance of the beliefs and values. In some cultures, there are a lot of symbolic communications that help shape who that person becomes or is.

The social cognitive perspective focuses on the study of motivations, emotions, cognitions, social reinforcement, vicarious reinforcement, vicarious emotional arousal, semantic generalization, and rule-based learning. (Social Learning & Social Cognitive Perspectives on Personality) Our cognitive abilities, the way we perceive, what we remember, how we learn to judge, and the reasoning we develop, all come from social interactions with others. Motivations come from rewards, such as hugs, approval, interest, attention, praise, and punishments, such as loss of rewards. Social interactions also produce the things we observe with….....