Social Cognition

This exciting new version of the classic text,Social Cognition, describes the increasingly complete link between neuroscience and culture. Highlighting the cutting-edge research in social neuropsychology, mainstream experimental social-cognitive psychology, and cultural psychology, it retains the authors’ unique ability to be both scholarly and entertaining. Reader-friendly style and concise summaries combine with the authors’ engaging perspectives on this flourishing field. Comprehensive without being overwhelming, this new standard for the field brings with it a new organization reflecting current consensus open issues of the field, and its trajectory into the future.

Social cognition is an approach to understanding how people think about people and events. We are constantly processing information to navigate the world we live in. The authors will guide your students, using examples and up-to-date studies, through this approach; from explaining the processes themselves right through to demonstrating the role cognitive processes play in our social lives. With chapters on the following processes: · Memory · Judgement · Attention · Attribution · Evaluation · Automatic processing. This book will provide your students with a framework for understanding the most common areas of interest for Social Cognition, such as perception, attitudes and stereotyping.

The social world is complicated and our minds are limited, so we take shortcuts. You have to make quick decisions – this person is dangerous, this one is not. The shortcuts we take mostly work well enough, because, after all, we survive. But some are deeply unjust, including racial or social class categories or other unfair stereotypes. This book will help you understand how these shortcuts work, why they exist, and how they are changing. There are examples in each chapter which * Show applications in the real world to help with your understanding * Highlight significant pieces of research to help you demonstrate knowledge of a wide range of sources * Explain researching in social cognition to improve your skills and give ideas for your own research. Check out the accompanying online resources for more.

How do people think about the world? How do individuals make sense of their complex social environment? What are the underlying mechanisms that determine our understanding of the social world? Social cognition - the study of the specific cognitive processes that are involved when we think about the social world - attempts to answer these questions. Social cognition is an increasingly important and influential area of social psychology, impacting on areas such as attitude change and person perception. This introductory textbook provides the student with comprehensive coverage of the core topics in the field: how social information is encoded, stored and retrieved from memory; how social knowledge is structured and represented; and what processes are involved when individuals form judgements and make decisions. The overall aim is to highlight the main concepts and how they interrelate, providing the student with an insight into the whole social cognition framework. With this in mind, the first two chapters provide an overview of the sequence of information processing and outline general principles. Subsequent chapters build on these foundations by providing more in-depth discussion of memory, judgemental heuristics, the use of information, hypothesis-testing in social interaction and the interplay of affect and cognition. Social Cognition will be essential reading for students and researchers in psychology, communication studies, and sociology.

An ideal text for undergraduate- and graduate-level courses, this accessible yet authoritative volume examines how people come to know themselves and understand the behavior of others. Core social-psychological questions are addressed as students gain an understanding of the mental processes involved in perceiving, attending to, remembering, thinking about, and responding to the people in our social world. Particular attention is given to how we know what we know: the often hidden ways in which our perceptions are shaped by contextual factors and personal and cultural biases. While the text's coverage is sophisticated and comprehensive, synthesizing decades of research in this dynamic field, every chapter brings theories and findings down to earth with lively, easy-to-grasp examples.

This exciting new version of the classic text, Social Cognition, describes the increasingly complete link between neuroscience and culture. Highlighting the cutting-edge research in social neuropsychology, mainstream experimental social-cognitive psychology, and cultural psychology, it retains the authors’ unique ability to be both scholarly and entertaining. Reader-friendly style and concise summaries combine with the authors’ engaging perspectives on this flourishing field. Comprehensive without being overwhelming, this new standard for the field brings with it a new organization reflecting current consensus open issues of the field, and its trajectory into the future.

Social cognition is an area of social psychology that has been flourishing over the past two decades. It has harnessed basic concepts from cognitive psychology and developed and refined them to explain human thinking, feeling, and acting in a social context. Moreover, social cognition has integrated emotional influences and unconscious processes to reach a more complete understanding of social psychological phenomena. In this volume, the reader will find a representative sample of outstanding research in the field of social cognition. The chapters address its central themes, roughly organized along the temporal axis of information processing. They include basic operations like perception, categorization, representation, and judgmental inferences. Other chapters focus on issues like social comparison, emotion, language and culture. All of the contributors are internationally-renowned experts who share with the reader their accounts of the research experience in each of their domains. Social Cognition: The Basis of Human Interaction is an invaluable resource for researchers requiring a comprehensive, yet concise, overview of the field, and may also be used by intermediate and advanced students of social cognition.

Individuals with schizophrenia and related disorders experience significant functioning deficits in the community. The study of social cognition in schizophrenia has grown rapidly over the past decade, and a consensus has developed among researchers that dysfunction in social cognition may contribute to the severe interpersonal problems that are a hallmark of schizophrenia. This has generated hope that treatments which improve social cognition in this illness may enhance an individual's ability to live a socially engaged and rewarding life. Social Cognition in Schizophrenia: From Evidence to Treatment provides a firm grounding in the theory and research of normal social cognition, builds on this base to describe how social cognition appears to be dysfunctional in schizophrenia, and explains how this dysfunction might be ameliorated. Composed of contributed chapters written by the top experts in the field, the volume is divided into three parts to address each of these areas. Part I, Foundations of Human Social Cognition, explores normal social cognition in childhood development, adulthood, and across cultures, as well the brain-bases of social cognition and clinical social cognition research. Part II, Social Cognition in Schizophrenia: Descriptive and Experimental Research, discusses social cognition and functional outcome, emotion processing, Theory of Mind, paranoid ideation, social cognition in early psychosis, and the social cognitive neuroscience of schizophrenia. Part III, Social Cognition in Schizophrenia: Treatment Approaches, focuses on findings from current treatment outcome research as well as several leading social cognitive intervention approaches-Integrated Neurocognitive Therapy (INT), Cognitive Enhancement Therapy (CET), Metacognitive Training (MCT), and Social Cognition and Interaction Training (SCIT). This comprehensive, accessible volume will be invaluable to researchers studying social cognition and psychosocial treatment development in schizophrenia, clinicians working with this patient population, students in social and clinical psychology, nursing, social work and occupational therapy, and medical students.