Affective Scripts as Organizers of Personal Experience

Abstract

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 affective 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.

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