In Volume 3, Eliot R. Smith of Purdue University proposes that social cognition theorists have placed excessive emphasis on the role of schemata, prototypes, and various other types of abstractions. This has affected both the methodologies they use and the type of theories they construct. What has not been adequately appreciated is the storage and retrieval of specific episodes, especially those with idiosyncratic features. This volume s designed as a required text for those studying personality, experimental and consumer psychology, cognitive science, and communications.

If anyone deserves the title father of social cognition, it is William J. McGuire who, along with his wife and colleague Claire V. McGuire, has written the target article for this volume. The culmination of many years of work, the article discusses their highly developed theory of human thought systems, and establishes many new directions for theoretical and empirical inquiry. Equally important, however, are the chapters -- written from many different theoretical and empirical perspectives -- that challenge various assumptions underlying the McGuires' work. In addition to examining...

This second volume in a two volume set, provides discussions of the role of information processing in specific areas, such as stereotyping, communication and persuasion, political judgement, close relationships, organizational, clinical and health psychology, and consumer behaviour.

Presents a series of studies assessing whether people recruit specific exemplars or abstract trait summaries when making trait judgments about themselves. The limitations of social cognition paradigms, as methods for studying the representation of long-term social knowledge, are discussed.

If there is one topic on which we all are experts, it is ourselves. Psychologists depend upon this expertise, as asking people questions about themselves is an important means by which they gather the data that provide much of the evidence for psychological theory. Personal recollections play an important role in clinical theorizing; people's thoughts, feelings, and beliefs provide the principal data for attitudinal research; and judgments of one's traits and descriptions of one's goals and motivations are essential for the study of personality. Yet despite their long dependence on...

In this volume, Berkowitz develops the argument that experiential and behavioral components of an emotional state are affected by many processes: some are highly cognitive in nature; others are automatic and involuntary. Cognitive and associative mechanisms theoretically come into play at different times in the emotion-cognition sequence. The model he proposes, therefore, integrates theoretical positions that previously have been artificially segregated in much of the emotion-cognition literature. The breadth of the implications of Berkowitz's theory is also reflected in the diversity of this...

The first comprehensive theoretical formulation of the way people use information they receive about their social environments to make judgments and behavioral decisions, this volume focuses on the cognitive processes that underlie the use of social information. These include initial interpretation, the representations used to make inferences, and the transformation of these subjective inferences into overt judgment and behavior. In addition, it specifies the role of affect and emotion in information processing, and the role of self-knowledge at different stages of processing.

The...