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Schema: the term was probably first used by the great German philosopher, Emmanuel Kant. Drawing upon the pioneering work of Jean Piaget, its use in modern Psychology comes from Frederic Bartlett. Schema means any cognitive structure or encoded packet of information in the mind-brain. That cognitive structure, according to Susan Fiske & Shelley Taylor, "contains knowledge about a thing, including its attributes and the relations among its attributes." Michael W Eysenck & Cara Flanagan identify different types of schema such as:-

• Script Schemas which guide us when performing commonplace activities - eg: how to order a meal in a restaurant
• Role Schemas - eg: lover, parent, friend, postman, scientist, refuse collector, police officer, etc - this ventures into Robert Dilts' neurological level of Identity
• Self-Schemas which embody our self-concept

Eysenck & Flanagan also say schemas - the plural is sometimes referenced as schemata -  are socially determined, learned and refined through social exchanges. When schemas are shared culturally in this way, they effectively function as memes.

 

Schizophrenia: a severe mental illness where contact with reality is impaired (psychosis) and the sufferer finds that thoughts and feelings often don't fit together. Symptoms commonly associated with this illness include bizarre delusions and auditory hallucinations (hearing voices); although neurocognitive defecits in memory, organisation and planning and language impairments (speech peculiarities) are also frequent.
There are considered to be 5 classifications of Schizophrenia:-

• Disorganised - characterised by delusions, hallucinations, incoherent speech and large mood swings
• Catatonic - where the 'patient' has periods of peculiar or very limited activity and mobility - to the point of being totally immobile and staring blankly for hours at a time
• Paranoid - characterised by various types of delusions, often related to suspicion and a sense of persecution
• Undifferentiated - the term is used when the patient can be considered 'schizophrenic' without the symptoms readily fitting into the other categories
• Residual - where the patient is only experiencing mild symptoms

Some psychiatrists and clinical psychologists consider that the classifications of Schizophrenia are really different illnesses.

 

Scientific Method:

Selective Pressure: in Evolutionary Psychology, the pressure of competition to survive and reproduce successfully when faced with limited resources. The most successful adaptive behaviours and the characteristics which result will then be passed on by the winners of the 'competition'.

 

Selfplex: the term coined by Susan Blackmore for the confluence of schemas which comprise an individual's sense of self. The very concept of 'self' is a memeplex which is transmitted culturally (memetically) - usually initatied by parents with infants. The selfplex is essentially a cognitive concept - ie: how I see myself - and, as such, stands above raw tempermental dispositions. However, most people have schematic representations of their temperament within their selfplex. Their selfplex may also include the schema that they have a 'spiritual self'.

 

Selfplex Defence Mechanisms:

 

Self-Actualisation: the idea was first used (under the term ‘self-realisation’) by Carl Gustav Jung. Kurt Goldstein was the first to use the term ‘self-actualisation’ but it was Abraham Maslow who really developed it as a concept. For many years Maslow put Self-Actualisation at the peak of the Hierarchy of Needs, as the ultimate fulfillment of an individual's potential - though he eventually acknowledged a state beyond which he dubbed 'Transcendence'. Maslow saw Self-Actualisers as rational, fear-free, self-analysing people able to differentiate between fantasy and reality.
They decide for themselves, want reasons, ask questions and do not necessarily wish to conform. However, they may accept the need for conformity most of the time in order to service their interests and are not selfish and ego-centred in ways which deny the scope for others to act in their own right. Maslow perceived 15 differentiators of Self-Actualisation:-

• more efficient perception of reality and more comfortable relations with it
• acceptance of self and others
• Spontaneity
• problem-orientation
• detachment - the need for privacy
• autonomy - independence of culture and environment
• continued freshness of appreciation
• mystic experience or oceanic feeling
• social interest
• interpersonal relations
• democratic behaviour
• discrimination between ends and means
• sense of humour
• Creativeness
• resistance to enculturation

Carl Rogers sometimes used the term 'Full Function' for Self-Actualisation. Clare W Graves equated it to his G-T level (YELLOW in Spiral Dynamics). Jane Loevinger termed this level 'Autonomous'.

 

Self-Disclosure: the revealing of personal and sensitive information about yourself to another as a key element in developing and maintaining intimacy in a relationship.

 

Self-Esteem:

Self-Efficacy: Albert Bandura coined this term to describe someone's belief in their abilities - as opposed to the abilities themselves. This influences critically their assessment of their ability to cope with a given situation.

Sensitivity Hypothesis: this is the idea put forward by Mary Ainsworth that the quality of infant attachment is primarily determined by the mother's responsiveness to her child's cries, gestures, body language, etc.

 

Sensitive Period:

 

Separation:

 

Separation Protest:

 

Serotonin: a neurotransmitter of the monoamine group. High levels are associated with sleep and reduced anxiety. Lower levels are associated with Depression and aggression.

 

Short-term Memory: memory for information that has received minimal processing or interpretation. According to George Miller, only 7+/-2 'chunks' of information can be held in this storage at any one time. The memory trace of each chunk will last between 10 and 30 seconds - depending on whose study you take into account! - unless rehearsed again. NLPers tend to think of short-term memory as ‘conscious mind’.

 

Sleep-Wake Cycle:

 

Social Constructionism: the view that reality is socially constructed - ie: that attitudes and behaviour are the results of cultural imperatives and need to be evaluated on that basis. In other words, there are no universal behaviours against which to measure objectively. For example, social constructionists would argue that what it means to be a 'woman', beyond the basic biological characteristics, is a product of social constructionism, varying from culture to culture and, indeed, from sub-culture to sub-culture.

Social Desirability Bias: the tendency of people responding in interviews or to questionnaires to give answers they think will be socially acceptable and thus portray them in a 'better light'.

 

Social Exchange Theory: an explanation of relationships in terms of perceived/anticipated costs and rewards, comparisons with those of the partner(s) (dubbed 'Comparison Level') and possible alternatives ('Comparison Level Alternative'). Developed by John Thibaut & Harold Kelley, it is an approach to relationships more likely to be favoured by those whose thinking is dominated by self-expressive vMEMES. Equity Theory, as applied to personal relationships, is an extension of the Social Exchange idea.

Social Learning Theory: developed by Albert Bandura in the 1960s, working on the notion put forward by Edward C Tolman that, in many instances, there is a cognitive mediator between stimulus and response (which the Behaviourists generally ignored).
From studying how young children model adults, Bandura introduced the concept of Vicarious (Indirect) Reinforcement whereby seeing others rewarded for behaviours leads to imitation. Seeing others punished for behaviours deters imitation. This identification with the person being rewarded or punished clearly involves cognitive processes and so enables the linking of the concepts of Behaviourism to developments in Cognitive Psychology and Spiral Dynamics. Indeed, Bandura tried retitling his concept 'Social Cognitive Theory' in the 1980s - though this largely failed to catch on. Social Learning Theory is sometimes treated as a psychological paradigm in its own right but more often is seen as a (critical) modification of Behaviourism.

 

Social Psychology: the study of social behaviour - ie: how people interact and influence each other.

 

Social Releasers:

 

Social Representation:

Socialisation: the process by which individuals learn the social behaviours of their culture - incorporating morals, socials skills, norms, language, etc.

 

Sociobiology: an approach to explaining social behaviour in terms of biological processes. To a considerable extent it has become tied in with Evolutionary Psychology to focus on the imperative to reproduce one's genes.

 

Sociology: the study of the development, organisation, functioning and classification of human societies.

 

Somatic Nervous System:

 

Spinal Cord: the long column of neural tissue running through the spinal canal from the 2nd lumbar vertebra in the spinal column up to the medulla.

 

Spiral Dynamics: the 'build' on the work of Clare W Graves created by Don Beck & Chris Cowan which links Graves' work to Memetics. The model is so powerful that it sits at the core of Integrated SocioPsychology.

 

Spiral Dynamics-integral: Don Beck's meshing of Spiral Dynamics with the Integral All Quadrants/All Levels philosophical approach of Ken Wilber. This has produced the powerful 4Q/8L application.

Spiral Wizard: the term used by Don Beck & Chris Cowan to describe those people with thinking sophisticated enough to understand and deal with all the 1st Tier levels in Spiral Dynamics. The presumption is that someone needs to have reached the 2nd Tier in much of their thinking to have developed that capacity for such understanding.

 

Stages of Moral Development:

Standard Deviation: see Measures of Dispersion.

State: the condition we experience personally. The quality of the elements comprising our state may vary and accordingly our state varies. Much thinking in Psychology and Philosophy about the concept of 'state' comes from the work of the Russian philosopher George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. In the basic version of his model what we think cognitively, how we feel and what we do are all bound up symbiotically. Change in one domain will inevitably influence change in the other two. This concept of state has led to the Mercedes Model in NLP.

 

Statistical Significance:

 

Strange Situation: a sequence of procedures devised by Mary Ainsworth & B A Wittig to test the emotional reactions of infants as a way of typing their mode of attachment to their mothers or other significant persons (eg: fathers). The process involves observation of the infant's behaviour and emotional reactions to being in a strange room with toys with varying combinations of mother and stranger.

 

Stratified Democracy: the approach developed by Don Beck that the form of governance (Lower Right in 4Q/8L) of a culture or sub-culture should reflect the traditions and patterns of thinking in that grouping (Lower Left). Eg: if the PURPLE vMEME dominated in a tribal-type situation, the tribal elders (or equivalents) making the decisions for that grouping would be more appropriate than introducing modern Western one person, one vote democracy.

Stress: a state of physiological arousal produced in response to the (perceived) demands of the environment (stressors). The term is often used negatively because, as Hans Selye first demonstrated scientifically and outlined in his General Adaptation Syndrome, high levels of stress for an elongated period of time can have truly-damaging effects on both mental and physical health. See also Eustress.

 

Structural Functionalism:

Structuralism: the term has been used for several approaches with nothing more in common than a concern with the structure or organisation of those phenomena under consideration.

• In the late 19th Century Edward B Titchener used 'structuralism' as a label for his concept that all mental experience, no matter how complex, could be viewed as blends or combinations of simple processes or elements
• The term was applied to Jean Piaget's sequence of stages of mental operations which a child progresses through to reach a formal operatory level.
• 'Structuralism' is also used to describe sociological/anthropological approaches, such as that of Claude Levi-Strauss where the focus is on social organisation and societal structures and how they are learned and reacted to by members of that society.

 

Submodality: a characteristic of the information processed by a modality - eg: brightness and motion in visual representations; loudness and tone in auditory representations.
Many NLP therapies involve submodality exercises.

Sub-culture: a group of people with a distinct identity based on factors such as morals, attitudes, rules, practices, etc, yet who also appear to be a part of or within a larger grouping.

 

Superego: see Psychoanalytic Theory.

 

Suprachiasmatic Neucleus:

 

Symbolic Interactionism:

 

Synapse:

Systematic Desensitisation: a form of Behavioural therapy for the treatment of phobias.The strategy is to replace the fear response to the threatening stimulus with a different response such as muscle relaxation.