Affective Scripts as Organizers of Personal Experience

Abstract

Tomkins's "script theory" was employed for personological inquiry into the ways that individuals organize their experience. This theory posits that individuals' experiences are organized by ideo-affective construals or "scripts." This thesis was examined by first extracting emotional incidents or "scenes" from the autobiographical reports of 10 individuals, and then deriving from these scenes the abstract sequential rules or "scripts" for handling scenes. One month following this assessment, the individuals were asked to create stories to aifective stimuli in order to assess whether the scripts derived from this source would be parallel to those generated in the autobiographical memories. A matching task determined that the individuals' ways of interpreting the affective stimuli indeed reflected the same scripts as those which appeared in their autobiographical memories. While particular script elements appeared to be person-specific, the general parameters of scripts were sometimes shared by various individuals. Avenues for future methodological developments and theoretical inquiries are discussed.The study of personality has suffered two forms of attack in the past 20 years. The first attack resulted from an empirical analysis, the second from a theoretical analysis. The research-based critique is best identified in Mischel's 1968 book on personality. In this work, Mischel argued that a survey of the empirical research on personality reveals that

What Do We Know When We Know a Person?

“…To know a person well, it is not necessary to have information about all of the different personal scripts and conditional patterns that prevail in all of the different behavioral settings he or she will encounter. Instead, the personologist should seek information on the most salient settings and environments that make up the ecology of a person's life and investigate the most infiuential, most common, or most problematic personal scripts and conditional patterns that appear within that ecology (Demorest & Alexander, 1992).…”

The Self and Autobiographical Memory: Correspondence and Coherence

“…For example, McAdams et al (2001) studied contamination scripts (where positive affect is followed by a negative affective outcome) and redemption scripts (where negative affect is followed by a positive affective outcome). More generally, several different investigators have provided empirical support for both the concept of scripts and the process of psychological magnification (Carlson & Carlson, 1984;Demorest, 1995;Demorest & Alexander, 1992;McAdams, Reynolds, Lewis, Patten, & Bowman, 2001;Thorne, 1995), while clinical case studies have also demonstrated the utility of the theory (Carlson, 1981;Magai, 1996 . According to script theory, SDMs are memorial representations that ground narrative sequences of actions, affects, and outcomes in specific autobiographical memories.…”

“…In an earlier study, Demorest and Alexander (1992) had raters code individuals' significant personal memories for overarching interpersonal scripts. A month later, these same individuals generated a set of fictional scenarios.…”

The Role of Scripts in Personal Consistency and Individual Differences

“…These findings indicate that, as with other types of schemas, personally and emotionally significant scripts influence how newly met experiences are processed. In a previous study, Demorest and Alexander (1992) found this using an idiographic method of script assessment. In their study, participants first wrote autobiographical memories and 1 month later wrote creative stories to a projective task.…”