Control Motivation and Social Cognition

ISBN-13: 9781461383116 / Angielski / Miękka / 2012 / 344 str.

Gifford Weary; Faith Gleicher; Kerry L. Marsh

Opis

Over the past two decades theorists and researchers have given increasing attention to the effects, both beneficial and harmful, of various control related motivations and beliefs. People's notions of how much personal control they have or desire to have over important events in their lives have been used to explain a host of performance and adaptational outcomes, including motivational and performance deficits associated with learned helplessness (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978) and depression (Abramson, Metalsky, & Alloy, 1989), adaptation to aging (Baltes & Baltes, 1986; Rodin, 1986), cardiovascular disease (Matthews, 1982), cancer (Sklar & Anisman, 1979), increased reports of physical symptoms (Pennebaker, 1982), enhanced learning (Savage, Perlmutter, & Monty, 1979), achievement-related behaviors (Dweck & Licht, 1980; Ryckman, 1979), and post abortion adjustment (Mueller & Major, 1989). The notion that control motivation plays a fundamental role in a variety of basic, social psychological processes also has a long historical tradition. A number of theorists (Heider, 1958; Jones & Davis, 1965; Kelley, 1967), for example, have suggested that causal inferences arise from a desire to render the social world predictable and controllable. Similarly, control has been implicated as an important mediator of cognitive dissonance (Wicklund & Brehm, 1976) and attitude phenomena (Brehm & Brehm, 1981; Kiesler, Collins, & Miller, 1969). Despite the apparent centrality of control motivation to a variety of social psychological phenomena, until recently there has been relatively little research explicitly concerned with the effects of control motivation on the cognitive processes underlying such phenomena (cf."

Spis treści

Section I. Control Motivation: Theoretical Perspectives.- 1. Control, Its Loss, and Psychological Reactance.- Section II. Models of Perceived Control.- 2. Perceptions of Control: Determinants and Mechanisms.- 3. Naturally Occurring Perceptions of Control: A Model of Bounded Flexibility.- 4. The Primacy of Control in Causal Thinking and Attributional Style: An Attributional Functionalism Perspective.- 5. Uncertainty, Mental Models, and Learned Helplessness: An Anatomy of Control Loss.- Section III. Effects of Perceived Control on Social Cognition.- 6. Control Motivation and Attitude Change.- 7. Social Cognition and Power: Some Cognitive Consequences of Social Structure as a Source of Control Deprivation.- 8. Individual Differences in Control Motivation and Social Information Processing.- 9. Control Motivation and Self-Appraisal.- 10. Depression, Control Motivation, and the Processing of Information about Others.- Section IV. Conclusions and Commentary.- 11. The Warm Look in Control Motivation and Social Cognition.- Author Index.