Experience with application of theory - Essay Example

Indeed, it is known in psychology that most people believe in their own personal experience so much that they ignore findings of research, even if the underlying scientific evidence is very compelling (Knapp 1999, p.ix). But after all, this is not always a bad thing that we channel all events in our lives through our personal psychological filters, if we can use this term. What is important, though, that we do not lose the ability to see connections between our experiences and the strict psychological theories that attempt to structure and categorize different elements of our everyday goings-on.

In this light, I will try to see how a real-life communication event that I have experienced can be interpreted and analyzed using such aspects of communication theory pertaining to interpersonal communication as the cognitive processing and mechanisms related to the psychological influence. The event that I am about to deal with is the story of friendship between me and my boyfriend Greg, and our friends Andrea and Dany, who have been themselves a couple. In fact, before we met with Greg, Dany had been his good friend, and I, in my turn, had been friends with Andrea.

Perhaps it was not really surprising that after I and Greg started going out with each other, it was not long before Andrea and Dany also got acquainted. Soon, they became a couple too, and our friendship obtained a kind of a social symmetry, and perhaps due to that fact grew so that we were spending more time together that we had used to before. As I can clearly see now, by that moment our perception of each other changed and I stopped thinking of Andrea and Dany as of friends who were not completely fitting the lifestyle of me and Greg, for example because before I tended to be worried to let Greg and Dany go out together to some parties because I knew that Dany could be provoking Greg for, well, some bachelor deeds.

On the other hand, I suspect that when I wanted to spend some time with Andrea Greg could be a bit jealous that he was not always able to share the interest in topics which were of concern to us. Now, it does not mean that the mentioned factors completely disappeared after the relationship between Andrea and Dany started. But since that time I began to perceive Dany as a responsible person, and Greg, in his turn, became apparently much more easy about the time that I was spending without him with Andrea.

The mentioned changes in attitudes that occurred in me, in my boyfriend, and in our friends already testify to the validity of one of the psychological mechanisms that acts during interpersonal communication and is described by the psychological approach termed constructivism. In general, constructivism belongs to the realm of study of cognitive processing that in psychology investigates information processing as a phenomenon underlying our psychological mechanisms and functions. In its turn, constructivism advances some concepts about the way people learn something and internalize new knowledge on basis of their experiences.

One of the plausible mechanisms of learning is enabled by accommodation and assimilation. Assimilation takes place in situations when experiences of people coincide with their internal perception of the world, and therefore new experiences fit into our existing world views. Accommodation happens when there