Motivation for Attention - Cognitive Psychology - Mind Scape Today
Motivators are important for identity and relationships. They are formed by personal schemas, scripts, and unconscious intentions, as well as conscious decisions. People are inclined to activate schemas that support a positive and coherent sense of self. They are motivated to avoid awareness of self as negative, chaotic, or incompetent, and to seek future escape from present or past states that have negative identity and relationship experiences. Some people activate bad self-concepts in order to avoid the experience of chaotic states involving self-fragmentation.
People also seek good relationships and want to avoid bad ones. Their schemas inform them how to approach these goals. A desired role relationship model can be activated to evoke a positive mood. But the same acts that could begin a desired relationship could also begin a dreaded relationship. Motivational pressure might bring forth a dilemma between wish and fear. Defensive compromises could be used to avoid entering into states that are organized by dreaded schemas.
For example, Judy, a college student, was attracted to a man in her study group who also lived in her dormitory. She wanted to ask him out for coffee. She hoped he would be interested in dating her, but she also anticipated his scornful rejection. That, she believed, would humiliate her. So inviting him out could lead to either a desired state of mutual interest or the dreaded humiliation. Judy adopted a defensive stance: she decided to study with him, without engaging in any courtship behavior.
The dynamic interplay between wishes, fears, and defenses usually operates at preconscious levels, which are close to awareness but still unconscious. In order to modify the outcome of these nonconscious processes, people can use reflective consciousness to gain insight. They can then reach new decisions on how to revise knowledge, correct errors of belief, and improve their circumstances. The new decisions usually lead to new behaviors, Repetitions of thought and behavior increase certain associational network patterns. Such repetitions are a way that people can slowly schematize a revised or better-integrated sense of identity. The college student might come to realize that she does not have to anticipate humiliation even if her overtures are rejected, so she might decide to take the risk.
In psychotherapy, patients often enter a state of obscurity, doubt, confusion, and avoidance when asked what they think is their best possible future. This is because placing the self in a desired future, although important, is nearly emotionally conflictual. In very conflicted individuals, the fantasy of a desired future is linked tightly to a fantasy of a dreaded future. Wishes, if represented, can lead to the representation of dire consequences. With increased awareness and reduced confusion, patients can speak more comfortably about their wish-fear dilemmas. To gain awareness and insight and make new decisions about dilemmas, the psychotherapist may encourage reflective conscious awareness. Such awareness occurs in several ways. Visual images and bodily sensations, for example, can activate emotional reactions: psychotherapy seldom proceeds on words alone.
Modes of representation
Conscious thoughts require different models of representation for expressing the full picture of a person’s thoughts and feelings. The representations, and flows of representation, are organized by schemas. Bruner (1964) and Horowitz (1970) described three major categories of representation: body inactions, mental images, and mental words, as outlined table. (c.f.Bucci; 1985; Hunt, 1995; paivio, 1989)
Many states have a seamless blend of representation. In the figure is down, these blends of meaning are called integrated attention. What is consciously represented in one mode usually seems translated freely and effortlessly into other modes of representation. A person can verbalize the images of a dream while using appropriate body language and facial expressions. However, despite the seamless blend of many experiences in reflective consciousness, the construction of meanings into expressions is modular (Fodor, 1983).
