ABSTRACT
Social interaction is a major influence on the formation of the self-concept. Earlier in the history of psychology, it was thought that the self-concept develops through observing how other people behave towards the reader; when the people develop a looking-glass self. Bern's self-perception theory argued that the people only have weak and ambiguous information about their internal states. In order to know how they feel or what they think about a social object, the people have to interpret these ambiguous signals, and they do this by applying the cognitive processes of causal attribution, just as the people do in understanding others. In the second half of the 20th century, however, in common with other areas of psychology, cognitive approaches started to appear in the study of emotion. One, stemming from the work of Richard Lazarus in the 1970s, describes emotions as arising from particular patterns of appraisal of environmental stimuli.
