This volume presents different perspectives on a dual model of impression formation -- a theory about how people form impressions about other people by combining information about a person with prior knowledge found in long-term memory. This information is of real importance to graduate students and advanced undergraduates in cognitive and social psychology, experimental psychology, social cognition and perception. Each volume in the series will contain a target article on a recent theoretical development pertinent to current study followed by critical commentaries offering varying theoretical viewpoints. This productive dialogue concludes with a reply by the target article author. The first volume of the series presents an evaluation of theoretical advances in social cognition and information processing from new and different perspectives. Volume 2 presents a new conceptualization of personality and social cognition by Cantor and Kihlstrom which addresses both new and old issues. The volumes in this series will interest and enlighten graduate and advanced undergraduates in cognitive and social psychology, experimental psychology, social cognition and perception. The first volume of the series presents an evaluation of theoretical advances in social cognition and information processing from new and different perspectives. Each volume in the series will contain a target article on a recent theoretical development pertinent to current study followed by critical commentaries offering varying theoretical viewpoints. This productive dialog concludes with a reply by the target article author. The information provided in Volume 1 promises to enrich graduate and advanced undergraduates in cognitive and social psychology, experimental psychology, social cognition and perception. This first volume of the series evaluates the theoretical advances made in social cognition and information processing from new and different perspectives. This unique and lively interchange between the target article author and the critics will enrich and enlighten psychologists from many disciplines. Each volume in the series will contain a target article on a recent theoretical development pertinent to current study followed by critical commentaries offering varying theoretical viewpoints. This productive dialog concludes with a reply by the target article author. The first volume of the series presents an evaluation of theoretical advances in social cognition and information processing from new and different perspectives. Volume 2 presents a new conceptualization of personality and social cognition by Cantor and Kihlstrom which addresses both new and old issues. All volumes in this series will interest and enlighten graduate and advanced undergraduates in cognitive and social psychology, experimental psychology, social cognition and perception.

Until recently, most theory and research in social information processing has focused attention on the cognitive activity that underlies responses to stimulus information presented in the immediate situation being investigated. In contrast, people's thoughts outside the laboratory often concern life events that either have occurred in the past or are likely to occur in the future. Thoughts about such past and future events can be spontaneous and, once elicited, can affect the ability to respond effectively to the demands of the present situation with which one is confronted. This ninth volume in this series focuses on this type of cognitive activity and examines both its determinants and consequences. The lead article, by Leonard Martin and Abraham Tesser, develops a theoretical formulation of ruminative thinking that conceptualizes rumination as a class of conscious thought with a common instrumental theme that recurs in the absence of immediate environmental demands. The authors also give particular attention to the ways in which perceptions of the consequences of past and present events for long-range goal attainment affect both controlled and uncontrolled thinking about these events. They also examine the implications of their theory for the ability to suppress unwanted thoughts, the interplay of emotion and cognition, and the cognitive consequences or rumination for the performance of daily life activities. The entire formulation integrates a number of cognitive phenomena that are not usually considered within a single theoretical framework. The companion chapters, many written by the field's foremost contributors to the literature on emotion and cognition, suggest important refinements and extensions of the conceptualization proposed in the target article. They also make important conceptual contributions in their own right, covering topics that include the role of mental models in cognitive functioning, the dynamics of thought suppression and attentional inhibition, stress and coping, personality correlates of ruminative thought, and attitudes and persuasion. As a result, this volume makes a valuable contribution to research and theory not only in social cognition but also in numerous other areas.

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 book's companion chapters. Written by researchers whose work focuses on both social cognition and emotion, these articles provide important insights and possible extensions of the "cognitive-neoassociationistic" conceptualization developed in the target article. Although each chapter is a valuable contribution in its own right, this volume, taken as a whole, is a timely and important contribution both to social cognition and to research and theory on emotion per se.

Narrative forms of mental representation and their influence on comprehension, communication and judgment, have rapidly become one of the main foci of research and theory in not only psychology but also other disciplines, including linguistics, sociology, and anthropology. No one has been more responsible for the awakening of interest in this area than Roger Schank and Bob Abelson. In their target article, they argue that narrative forms of mental representation, or "stories," are the basic ingredients of social knowledge that play a fundamental role in the comprehension of information conveyed in a social context, the storage of this information in memory, and the later communication of it to others. After explicating the cognitive processes that underlie the construction of narratives and their use in comprehension, memory and communication, the chapter authors consider the influence of stories on a number of more specific phenomena, including political judgment, marital relations and memory distortions that underlie errors in eyewitness testimony. The provocativeness of the target chapter is matched by that of the companion articles, each of which not only provides an important commentary on Schank and Abelson's conceptualization, but also makes an important contribution to knowledge in its own right. The diversity of perspectives reflected in these articles, whose authors include researchers in linguistics, memory and comprehension, social inference, cognitive development, social judgment, close relationships, and social ecology, testifies to the breadth of theoretical and empirical issues to which the target chapter is potentially relevant. This volume is a timely and important contribution to research and theory not only in social cognition but in many other areas as well.

This volume continues the tradition of the series with a substantive theoretical treatise and commentaries from leading scholars throughout social psychology. For all social cognition researchers and others interested in behavior regulation.

The use of social sterotypes as a basis for judgments and behavioral decisions has been a major focus of social psychological theory and research since the field began. Although motivational and cognitive influences on stereotyping have been considered, these two general types of influence have rarely been conceptually integrated within a common theoretical framework. Nevertheless, almost every area of theoretical and empirical concern in social cognition--areas such as the interpretation of new information, memory and retrieval processes, impression formation, the use of heuristic vs. analytic processing strategies, the role of affect in information processing, and self-esteem maintenance--has implications for this important social phenomenon. This volume's target article brings together the research of Galen Bodenhausen, Neil Macrae, and others within a theoretical framework that accounts for the processes that underlie both the activation of stereotypes and attempts to suppress their influence. They consider several stages of processing, including: *the categorization of a stimulus person; *the influence of this categorization on the interpretation of information about the stimulus person; and *the social judgments and behavioral decisions that are ultimately made. The stereotype activation and suppression mechanisms that the target article authors consider operate at all of these stages. Their conceptualization provides a framework within which the interrelatedness of processing at these stages can be understood. The 11th in the series, this volume includes companion articles that help to refine and extend the target article's conceptualization and make important theoretical contributions in their own right. They are written by prominent researchers in cognitive and social psychology, many of whom are active contributors to research and theory on stereotyping. They address the following topics: * the role of power and control in stereotype-based information processing; * the influence of prejudice; * self-regulatory processes; * social categorization; * the correction processes that result from perceptions of bias; and * the conceptualization of stereotypes themselves.

The Advances in Experimental Social Psychology series is the premier outlet for reviews of mature, high-impact research programs in social psychology. Contributions to the series provide defining pieces of established research programs, reviewing and integrating thematically related findings by individual scholars or research groups. Topics discussed in Volume 61 include Worldview Conflict and Prejudice, Money and Happiness, Attitude Representation, Emotion Regulation, and Social Perception.