A social-cognitive account of the self's development
pp. 30-42
in: Daniel K. Lapsley, F. C. Power (eds), Self, ego, and identity, Berlin, Springer, 1988Abstract
Reviewing recent social psychological literature on the self, Greenwald and Pratkanis (1984) concluded that the (adult) self is "a complex, person-specific, central, attitudinal schema." In this description, the self is characterized as complex because it incorporates a great variety of knowledge; as person-specific because it is an idiosyncratic knowledge structure; as central because it is a major (perhaps the major) structure of personality; as attitudinal because it is invested with the affect that is associated with one's sense of self-worth; and, most importantly, the self is identified as a schema because it is an organized structure of knowledge.