Social psychology is an interdisciplinary area of study on how social conditions affect human beings. The focus from the psychological perspective is explaining the influence of interaction (whether actual, imagined or implied) with others on an individual's thoughts, feelings and behaviors. It tackled the intrapersonal phenomena of attitudes, persuasion, social cognition, self-concept and cognitive dissonance and interpersonal phenomena such as social influence, group dynamics, relations with others and interpersonal attraction (Allport, 1985). The emphasis from the sociological view is the behavior of groups with respect to micro-level interactions and exchanges and macro-level group dynamics and crowds. It has three known schools of thought: symbolic interactionism, social cognition and social exchange (House, 1977).
[...] Social psychologists, in their pursuit of further understanding the personhood of human beings, try to express a personhood with language. In doing so, the symbiotic relationship of the person to the existing language community must be respected and that life forms that may be disturbed or destroyed by embarking in this endeavor must also be respected. As a consequence of being a textual being, there are four main grammars that shape the verbal intercourse of conscious persons. These are: Soul or S-grammar which focuses on concepts such as God, soul, sin and redemption; Person or P-grammar which emphasizes persons as basic components and sources of activity; Organism or O-grammar which takes organisms as the basic particulars and active beings; and Molecular or M-grammar wherein molecules are the basic units and sources of activity (Harre, n.d.). [...]
[...] House, J. S. (1977). The three faces of social psychology. Sociometry 161-177. Burr, V. (1995). An Introduction to Social Constructionism, London: Routledge. Locke, J. (1690). An essay concerning human understanding. Nixon, G. (n.d.). Excavating the cultural construction of personhood. Retrieved 15 May 2007 from Prescott College Website: < http:> Edelman, G. (1992). Bright air, Brilliant fire: On the matter [...]
[...] Narrative of memory and self in interaction is important in the birth of one's own ego. Self-narration is important and will likely determine our personhood. Losing this ability to create and interpret our personal narratives is tantamount to losing our identity. Language can be viewed in two ways based on social constructionism. One is in terms of the typological alternatives given by language. It is a grammatical system that provides different ways for the speaking subject to include self and others into the discourse (Budwig, n.d.). [...]
[...] In the romantic period of the 19th century, the focus of psychology was on the medieval reality of the deep interior with literary, musical, architectural and artistic works of the period contributing to define personhood in terms of a force often equated to the soul and based on both spiritual and natural world (Gergen, 1998). This changed with the modernism of the 20th century wherein there was a focus on the Enlightenment assumptions of human functioning. The deep interior has been replaced by more accessible processes of observation and reason. [...]
[...] This is a social construct because it varies from culture to culture throughout the world. For instance, the Indo-European systems adopt the first person as the indexical of speaker as morally responsible for his words. This is very different in the case of the Japanese because their first-person indexical of the relevant is used instead of the speaker as an individual. It can also be perceived in terms of discursive action. The perception of language in which positioning is to be seen is the immanentist view in which language exists only as concrete occasions of language in use. [...]
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