Social Cognition and Social Thinking

● Thought is the internal language and symbols we use – it is often conscious, or at least
something we are or could be aware of.
● Cognition is broader; it also refers to mental processing that can be largely automatic. We
are unaware of it and only with some effort notice it, let alone capture it in language or
shared symbols.
○ Cognition acts a bit like a computer program or operating system: it operates
automatically in the background, running all the functions of the computer.
● Cognition and thought occur within the human mind. They are the mental activities that
mediate between the world out there and what people subsequently do. Their operation
can be inferred from what people do and say – from people’s actions, expressions, sayings
and writings.
● Social cognition is an approach in social psychology that focuses on how cognition is
affected by wider and more immediate social contexts and on how cognition affects our
social behaviour.
○ Social Cognition: Cognitive processes and structures that influence and are
influenced by social behaviour.

A Short History of Cognition in Social Psychology

● Wilhelm Wundt (1897) was one of the founders of modern empirical psychology. He
used self observation and introspection to gain an understanding of cognition (people’s
subjective experience), which he believed to be the main purpose of psychology.
● Because psychologists felt that theories should be based on publicly observable and
replicable data, there was a shift away from studying internal (cognitive) events towards
external, publicly observable events.
○ The ultimate expression of this change in emphasis was American behaviourism
of the early twentieth century (e.g. Skinner, 1963; Thorndike, 1940; Watson, 1930)
– cognition became a dirty word in psychology for almost half a century.
● Behaviourism: An emphasis on explaining observable behaviour in terms of
reinforcement schedules.
● By the 1960s, psychologists had begun to take a fresh interest in cognition. This was
partly because behaviourism seemed terribly cumbersome and inadequate as an
explanation of human language and communication.
Social Cognition and Social Thinking

● Drawing on Gestalt psychology, Lewin (1951) believed that social behaviour is most
usefully understood as a function of people’s perceptions of their world and their
manipulation of such perceptions. Cognition and thought were placed centre stage in
social psychology. The cognitive emphasis in social psychology has had at least four
guises (Jones, 1998; Taylor, 1998): cognitive consistency, naive scientist, cognitive miser
and motivated tactician.
○ Gestalt Psychology: Perspective in which the whole influences constituent parts
rather than vice versa.
○ Cognitive Consistency: A model of social cognition in which people try to
reduce inconsistency among their cognitions, because they find inconsistency
unpleasant.
○ Naive Psychologist (or scientist): Model of social cognition that characterises
people as using rational, scientific-like, cause–effect analyses to understand their
world.
○ Attribution: The process of assigning a cause to our own behaviour, and that of
others.
● In the late 1970s, however, it became clear that even in ideal circumstances people are
not very careful scientists at all. The ‘normal’ state of affairs is that people are limited in
their capacity to process information and take numerous cognitive short-cuts: they are
cognitive misers.
○ Cognitive Miser: A model of social cognition that characterises people as using
the least complex and demanding cognitions that are able to produce generally
adaptive behaviours.
● Motivation is almost completely absent from the cognitive miser perspective. However, as
this perspective has matured, the importance of motivation has again become evident
(Gollwitzer & Bargh, 1996; Showers & Cantor, 1985) – the social thinker has become
characterised as a motivated tactician:
○ A fully engaged thinker who has multiple cognitive strategies available and
chooses among them based on goals, motives, and needs. Sometimes the
motivated tactician chooses wisely, in the interests of adaptability and accuracy,
and sometimes . . . defensively, in the interests of speed or self-esteem.
Social Cognition and Social Thinking

○ Motivated Tactician: A model of social cognition that characterises people as

having multiple cognitive strategies available, which they choose among on the
basis of personal goals, motives and needs.
● The most recent development in social cognition is social neuroscience, sometimes
called cognitive neuroscience or social cognitive neuroscience.
○ Social Neuroscience: Exploration of brain activity associated with social
cognition and social psychological processes and phenomena.

Forming Impressions of Other People

● We are very quick to use personality traits when we describe other people, even those
whom we have just met.
● We form impressions of the people we meet, have described to us or encounter in the
media.
● We communicate these impressions to others, and we use them as bases for deciding
how we will feel and act.
○ Impression formation and person perception are important aspects of social
cognition
What information is important?
● According to Solomon Asch’s (1946) configural model, in forming first impressions we
latch on to certain pieces of information, called central traits, which have a
disproportionate influence over the final impression. Other pieces of information, called
peripheral traits, have much less influence.
● Central and peripheral traits are ones that are more or less intrinsically correlated with
other traits, and therefore more or less useful in constructing an integrated impression of
a person.
● Central traits influence the meanings of other traits and the perceived relationship
among traits; that is, they are responsible for the integrated configuration of the impression.
○ Configural Model: Asch’s Gestalt-based model of impression formation, in
which central traits play a disproportionate role in configuring the final
impression.
○ Central Traits: Traits that have a disproportionate influence on the
configuration of final impressions, in Asch’s configural model of impression
formation.
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○ Peripheral Traits: Traits that have an insignificant influence on the

configuration of final impressions, in Asch’s configural model of impression
formation.
Biases in Forming Impressions
Primacy and Recency
● Asch found a primacy effect: the traits presented first disproportionately influenced the
final impression, so that the person was evaluated more favourably when positive
information was presented first than when negative information was presented first.
○ Primacy: An order of presentation effect in which earlier presented information
has a disproportionate influence on social cognition.
● A recency effect can also emerge, where later information has more impact than earlier
information. This might happen when you are distracted (e.g. overworked, bombarded
with stimuli, tired) or when you have little motivation to attend to someone.
○ Recency: An order of presentation effect in which later presented information
has a disproportionate influence on social cognition.
Positivity and Negativity
● In the absence of information to the contrary, people tend to assume the best of others and
form a positive impression (Sears, 1983). However, any negative information attracts our
attention and looms large in our subsequent impression – we are biased towards negativity
(Fiske, 1980).
● We may be particularly sensitive to negative information for two reasons:
○ The information is unusual and distinctive – unusual, distinctive or extreme
information attracts attention.
○ The information indirectly signifies potential danger, so its detection has survival
value for the individual and ultimately the species.
Personal Constructs and Implicit Personality Theories
● George Kelly (1955) has suggested that individuals develop their own idiosyncratic ways
of characterising people. These personal constructs can, for simplicity, be treated as
sets of bipolar dimensions. For example, I might consider humour the single most
important organising principle for forming impressions of people, while you might
prefer intelligence.
○ Personal Constructs: Idiosyncratic and personal ways of characterising other
people.
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● We also develop our own implicit personality theories, lay theories of personality or
philosophies of human nature. These are general principles concerning what sorts of
characteristics go together to form certain types of personality.
○ Implicit Personality Theories: Idiosyncratic and personal ways of characterising
other people and explaining their behaviour.
Physical Appearance Counts
● Physical appearance is often the first information we have about people, and it is highly
influential in first impressions and enduring impressions. This can be surprisingly
accurate, as appearance-based impressions can be surprisingly accurate. One of the most
immediate appearance-based judgments we make is whether we find someone physically
attractive or not. Research confirms that we tend to assume that physically attractive
people are 'good', such as interesting, warm, outgoing, socially skilled, and possessing an
'interior beauty, a spiritual and moral beauty'.
● Physical attractiveness has a significant impact on affiliation, attraction, love, and can
also affect people's careers. For example, attractive male executives are considered more
able than less attractive male executives, while attractive female executives are
considered less able. In most Western countries, taller men and lighter women are
considered more attractive. A meta-analysis of forty-five studies involving 8,500 British
and American participants found that someone who is 6 feet (1.83 m) tall earns nearly
$166,000 more during a thirty-year career than someone who is 5 feet 5 inches (1.65 m).
Another study found that as a woman's weight increased, her income decreased, while
for men, the relationship was the other way around.
Stereotypes
● Impressions of people are also strongly influenced by widely shared assumptions about
the personalities, attitudes and behaviours of people based on group membership; for
example, ethnicity, nationality, sex, race and class. These are stereotypes.
○ Stereotype: Widely shared and simplified evaluative image of a social group and
its members.
Social Judgeability
● People form impressions to make judgements about other people: whether they are mean,
friendly, intelligent, helpful and so forth. People are unlikely to form impressions and
make judgements if the target is deemed not to be socially judgeable in the specific
Social Cognition and Social Thinking

context; that is, if there are social rules (norms, conventions, laws) that prescribe making
judgements.
○ Social Judgeability: Perception of whether it is socially acceptable to judge a
specific target.

Cognitive Algebra
● Impression formation involves the sequential integration of pieces of information about
a person (i.e. traits emerging over time) into a complete image. The image is generally
evaluative, and so are the pieces of information themselves.
○ Cognitive Algebra: Approach to the study of impression formation that focuses
on how people combine attributes that have valence into an overall positive or
negative impression.
Summation
● Summation refers to a process where the overall impression is the cumulative sum of
each piece of information.
○ Summation: A method of forming positive or negative impressions by summing
the valence of all the constituent person attributes.
Averaging
● Averaging is a process where the overall impression is the cumulative average of each
piece of information.
○ Averaging: A method of forming positive or negative impressions by averaging
the valence of all the constituent attributes.
Weighted Averaging
● Although research favours the averaging model, it has some limitations. The valence of
separate pieces of information may not be fixed but may depend on the context of the
impression formation task.
● Context may also influence the relative importance of pieces of information and thus
weigh them in different ways in the impression. These considerations led to the
development of a weighted averaging model.
○ Weighted Averaging: Method of forming positive or negative impressions by
first weighting and then averaging the valence of all the constituent person
attributes.
Social Cognition and Social Thinking

Social Schemas and Categories

● A schema is a ‘cognitive structure that represents knowledge about a concept or type of
stimulus, including its attributes and the relations among those attributes’.
● It is a set of interrelated cognitions (e.g. thoughts, beliefs, attitudes) that allows us quickly to
make sense of a person, situation, event or location on the basis of limited information.
Certain cues activate a schema. The schema then ‘fills in’ missing details.
○ Schema: Cognitive structure that represents knowledge about a concept or type
of stimulus, including its attributes and the relations among those attributes.
○ Script: A schema about an event.
● Once invoked, schemas facilitate top-down, concept-driven or theory-driven processing, as
opposed to bottom-up or data-driven processing. We tend to fill in gaps with prior
knowledge and preconceptions rather than seek information gleaned directly from the
immediate context.

Types of Schemas
● The most common schemas, some of which have been used as examples above, are
person schemas, role schemas, event schemas or scripts, content-free schemas and
self-schemas.
Person Schemas
● Person schemas are knowledge structures about specific individuals.
Role Schemas
● Role schemas are knowledge structures about role occupants: for example, airline pilots
(they fly the plane and should not be seen swigging whisky in the cabin) and doctors
(although often complete strangers, they are allowed to ask personal questions and get
you to undress).
○ Roles: Patterns of behaviour that distinguish between different activities within
the group, and that interrelate to one another for the greater good of the group.
Scripts
● Schemas about events are generally called scripts.
Content-free Schemas
● Content-free schemas do not contain rich information about a specific category but
rather a limited number of rules for processing information. Content-free schemas might
Social Cognition and Social Thinking

specify that if you like John and John likes Tom, then, in order to maintain balance, you
should also like Tom.
Self-schemas
● People have schemas about themselves. They represent and store information about
themselves in a similar but more complex and varied way than information about others.

Categories and Prototypes

● Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953), cognitive psychologists believe that people cognitively
represent categories as fuzzy sets of attributes called prototypes, and that instances of
the category have a family resemblance to one another and to the category prototype.
○ Fuzzy Sets: Categories are considered to be fuzzy sets of features organised
around a prototype.
○ Prototype: Cognitive representation of the typical/ideal defining features of a
category.
○ Family Resemblance: Defining property of category membership.

● In addition to representing categories as abstractions (i.e. prototypes), people may

represent categories in terms of specific concrete instances they have encountered (i.e.
exemplars)
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○ Exemplars: Specific instances of a member of a category.

● As well as representing categories as prototypes or as exemplars, we can also represent
them as associative networks of attributes such as traits, beliefs or behaviour that are
linked emotionally, causally or by mere association.
○ Associative Network: Model of memory in which nodes or ideas are connected
by associative links along which cognitive activation can spread.

Categorization and Stereotyping

● Stereotypes are widely shared generalisations about members of a social group. They are
essentially schemas of social groups; simplified images that are often derogatory when
applied to outgroups and are often based on, or create, clearly visible differences
between groups (e.g. in terms of physical appearance).
● Decades of research on the content and form of stereotypes have produced a number of
clear findings:
○ People are remarkably ready to characterise large human groups in terms of a few
fairly crude common attributes.
○ Stereotypes are slow to change.
○ Stereotypes generally change in response to wider social, political or economic
changes.
○ Stereotypes are acquired at an early age, often before the child has any knowledge
about the groups that are being stereotyped (but other research suggests that
some stereotypes crystallise later in childhood, after age 10; Rutland, 1999).
○ Stereotypes become more pronounced and hostile when there is social tension
and conflict between groups, and then they are extremely difficult to modify.
○ Stereotypes are not inaccurate or wrong; rather, they serve to make sense of
particular intergroup relations.
Perceptual Accentuation
● Accentuation Principle: Categorization accentuates perceived similarities within and
differences between groups on dimensions that people believe are correlated with the
categorization. The effect is amplified where the categorization and/or dimension has
subjective importance, relevance or value.
Social Cognition and Social Thinking

● The accentuation principle lies at the core of Tajfel’s work on intergroup relations and
group membership, which has fed into the subsequent development by John Turner and
his associates of social identity theory and self-categorization theory.
○ Social Identity Theory: Theory of group membership and intergroup relations
based on self categorization, social comparison and the construction of a shared
self-definition in terms of ingroup-defining properties.
○ Self-categorization Theory Turner and associates’ theory of how the process of
categorizing oneself as a gr:oup member produces social identity and group and
intergroup behaviours.

How we Use, Acquire and Change Schemas

Using Schemas
● People rely on basic-level categories that are neither too inclusive nor too exclusive.
● They initially access subtypes rather than superordinate or subordinate categories.
● They access social stereotypes and role schemas rather than trait schemas.
● People are more likely to use schemas cued by easily detected features or features that
are distinctive in a particular context.
● Accessible schemas that are habitually used or salient in memory and relevant to oneself
in that context are more likely to be invoked.
● People tend to cue mood-congruent schemas and schemas based on earlier rather than
later information.
● There is a shift from theory-driven cognition towards data-driven cognition when people
need to use more accurate schemas.
● The costs of being wrong can be important where outcomes depend on the actions or
attitudes of others.
● Under these circumstances, people are more attentive to data and may use more accurate
schemas.
● If the costs of being indecisive are high, people tend to make quick decisions or form a
quick impression.
● Performance pressure can increase schema use.
● Distraction and anxiety can increase indecisiveness and schema processing.
● In formal presentations, clarity and organization are crucial, leading to schema reliance.
Social Cognition and Social Thinking

● Schema processing can be inaccurate and potentially derogatory, especially for social
group schemas.
● Deliberate efforts to avoid schema over-reliance can be successful, but often
insignificant against the context of communication processes.
● However, there are some individual differences that may influence the degree and type of
schema use:
○ Attributional complexity – people vary in the complexity of their explanations of
other people.
○ Uncertainty orientation – people vary in their interest in gaining information
versus remaining uninformed but certain.
○ Need for cognition – people differ in how much they like to think deeply about
things.
○ Need for cognitive closure – people differ in how quickly they need to tidy up
cognitive loose ends and move to a decision or make a judgement.
○ Cognitive complexity – people differ in the complexity of their cognitive
processes and representations
● Individual differences in the chronic accessibility (i.e. frequent use, ease of
remembering) of schemas can also quite obviously impact schema use for perceiving
others.
○ Accessibility: Ease of recall of categories or schemas that we already have in
mind.
Acquiring Schemas
● We can acquire schemas second-hand: for example, you might have a lecturer schema
based only on what you have been told about lecturers.
● However, schemas are constructed, or at least modified, from encounters with category
instances (e.g. exposure to individual lecturers in literature, the media or face-to-face).
Schema acquisition and development involve a number of processes:
○ Schemas become more abstract, less tied to concrete instances, as more instances
are encountered.
○ Schemas become richer and more complex as more instances are encountered:
greater experience with a particular person or event produces a more complex
schema of that person or event.
Social Cognition and Social Thinking

○ With increasing complexity, schemas also become more tightly organised: there
are more and more complex links between schematic elements .
○ Increased organisation produces a more compact schema, one that resembles a
single mental construct that can be activated in an all-or-nothing manner.
○ Schemas become more resilient – they are better able to incorporate exceptions
rather than disregard them because they might threaten the validity of the
schema.
○ All things being equal, this entire process should make schemas generally more
accurate, in the sense of accurately mapping social reality.
Changing Schemas
● Bookkeeping: Gradual schema change through the accumulation of bits of schema
inconsistent information.
● Conversion: Sudden schema change as a consequence of gradual accumulation of
schema inconsistent information.
● Subtyping: Schema change as a consequence of schema inconsistent information,
causing the formation of subcategories.
○ Schema change may also depend on the extent to which schemas are either
logically or practically disconfirmable.

Social Encoding
● Social encoding refers to the way in which external social stimuli are represented in the
mind of the individual. There are at least four key stages:
○ Pre-attentive analysis – an automatic and non-conscious scanning of the
environment.
○ Focal attention – once noticed, stimuli are consciously identified and categorized.
○ Comprehension – stimuli are given meaning.
○ Elaborative reasoning – the stimulus is linked to other knowledge to allow for
complex inferences.
● Social encoding depends markedly on what captures our attention. In turn, attention is
influenced by salience, vividness and accessibility.
Salience
● Attention-capturing stimuli are salient stimuli.
Social Cognition and Social Thinking

○ Salience: Property of a stimulus that makes it stand out in relation to other

stimuli and attract attention.
Vividness
● While salience is a property of the stimulus in relation to other stimuli in a particular
context, vividness is an intrinsic property of the stimulus itself.
○ Vividness: An intrinsic property of a stimulus on its own that makes it stand out
and attract attention.
Accessibility
● Attention is often directed not so much by stimulus properties ‘out there’ but by the
accessibility, or ease of recall, of categories or schemas that we already have in our heads.
● Priming occurs when we become conscious of features of a stimulus domain that are
highly accessible in memory; they come easily to mind and are useful in making sense of
the intrinsically ambiguous nature of social information.
○ Priming: Activation of accessible categories or schemas in memory that
influence how we process new information.

Memory for People

● Social behaviour is influenced by how we store and remember information about others.
● Social psychological approaches to person memory use cognitive psychological theories
of memory.
● The associative network or propositional model of memory is used.
● Propositions are stored as nodes or ideas linked by relationships.
● Associative links become stronger with cognitive rehearsal and different links to a
specific idea.
● Recall is a process where nodes become activated and the activation spreads to other
nodes along established associative links.
● Long-term memory is the vast store of information that can be brought to mind, while
short-term memory is the smaller amount of information in consciousness.

Contents of Person Memory

● Understanding Personality Traits and Memory
● Personality traits include likes, dislikes, attitudes, beliefs, values, personality traits,
actions, appearance, and location.
Social Cognition and Social Thinking

● Traits are stored in propositional form but are based on inferences from behavior and
situations.
● The storage of trait information is organized based on social desirability and
competence.
● Behaviour is usually perceived as purposeful action, so memory for behaviour may be
organized with respect to people’s goals.
● Memory for appearance is usually based on directly observable concrete information and
stored as an analogue rather than a proposition.
● We are highly accurate at remembering faces, but less accurate at recognising faces of
people of different races.
● We are also remarkably inaccurate at remembering appearances in natural contexts
where eyewitness testimony is required, such as identifying or describing a stranger we
saw commit a crime.

Organisation of Person Memory

● Social memory can be organized by person or by group.
● Person-based organization is preferred due to richer, more accurate person memories.
● Group-based organisation is common in first encounters with strangers, where the
person is described and stored in terms of stereotypical attributes.
● Over time, the organisation may change to one based on the person.
● An alternative perspective suggests that person-based and group-based person memory
can coexist as distinct forms of representation.
● These distinct forms of representation may be associated with different types of identity
based on interpersonal relationships or group memberships.
● This aligns with social identity theory, which views group behavior as distinct from
interpersonal behavior.

Using Person Memory

● Social judgements often rely on person memory, with some people forming impressions
online.
● There's little correlation between memory and judgement, but when people do, there's a
stronger correlation.
Social Cognition and Social Thinking

● The effectiveness of judgements is influenced by people's goals and purposes in the

interaction or judgement task.
● Recall of information about others improves as the interaction becomes more
psychologically engaging and less superficial.
● Psychologically engaging interactions involve deeper information processing, leading to
more integrated memory.
● Instructions to memorize another person are less effective than asking someone to form
an impression or empathize.

Social Inference
● Social inference is, in many respects, the core of social cognition. It addresses the
inferential processes (which can be quite formal and abstract, or intuitive and concrete)
that we use to identify, sample and combine information to form impressions and make
judgments. There are two distinct ways in which we process social information:
○ (a) we can rely automatically on general schemas or stereotypes in a top-down
deductive fashion; or
○ (b) we can deliberately rely on specific instances in a bottom-up inductive
fashion.
● Generally, social cognition researchers have studied inferential processes in comparison
with ideal processes, called normative models, which produce the best possible
inferences. Collectively, these normative models are known as behavioural decision
theory.
○ Normative Models: Ideal processes for making accurate social inferences.
○ Behavioural Decision Theory: Set of normative models (ideal processes) for
making accurate social inferences.

Departures From Normality

● If we rely too heavily on schemas, we may ignore interesting details, attend too closely to
misleading information, or even worse!
Gathering and sampling social information
● Data gathering and sampling are crucial in inference making.
● Over-reliance on schemas can lead to overlooking useful information or exaggerating
misleading information.
Social Cognition and Social Thinking

● 'Clinical judgement', a reliance on person schemas, can produce suboptimal inferences.

● Extreme examples and small samples can influence inferences.
● Biases in samples and typicality of a sample can be overlooked.
● For instance, media coverage of hate speech by radical Islamists can lead to inferences
about all Muslims, but this is flawed as it presents extreme cases.
Regression
● Individual instances are often more extreme than the average of the population from
which they are drawn: over a number of instances, there is a regression to the population
mean.
○ Regression: Tendency for initial observations of instances from a category to be
more extreme than subsequent observations.
Base-rate Information
● Base-rate information is general information, usually factual and statistical, about an
entire class of events.
Covariation and Illusory Correlation
● Judgements of covariation are judgements of how strongly two things are related. They
are essential to social inference and form the basis of schemas.
○ Illusory Correlation: Cognitive exaggeration of the degree of co-occurrence of
two stimuli or events, or the perception of a co-occurrence where none exists.
○ Associative Meaning: Illusory correlation in which items are seen as belonging
together because they ‘ought’ to, on the basis of prior expectations.
○ Paired Distinctiveness: Illusory correlation in which items are seen as belonging
together because they share some unusual feature.
● However, in making covariation judgements, people fall far short of normative
prescriptions. In general, this is because they are influenced by prior assumptions (i.e.
schemas) and tend to search for or recognise only schema-consistent information: people
are generally not interested in disconfirming their cherished schemas.

Heuristics
● Heuristics: Cognitive short-cuts that provide adequately accurate inferences for most of
us most of the time.
Representativeness Heuristic
Social Cognition and Social Thinking

● The representativeness heuristic is a relevance judgement that disregards base-rate

information, sample size, quality of information and other normative principles.
○ Representativeness Heuristic: A cognitive short-cut in which instances are
assigned to categories or types on the basis of overall similarity or resemblance to
the category.
Availability Heuristic
● The availability heuristic is used to infer the frequency or likelihood of an event on the
basis of how quickly instances or associations come to mind.
○ Availability Heuristic: A cognitive short-cut in which the frequency or
likelihood of an event is based on how quickly instances or associations come to
mind.
Anchoring and Adjustment
● Anchoring and adjustment is a heuristic that ties inferences to initial standards. So, for
example, inferences about other people are often anchored in beliefs about ourselves: we
decide how intelligent, artistic or kind someone else is with reference to our own
self-schema.
○ Anchoring and Adjustment: A cognitive short-cut in which inferences are tied
to initial standards or schemas.

Affect and Emotion

● Social cognition focuses on thinking, not feeling.
● Recent years have seen an 'affective revolution'.
● Research explores how feelings influence and are influenced by social cognition.
● In absence of strong emotion-evoking events, people generally feel mildly good and
happy.
● Emotions change when more marked emotion-evoking events occur.
● Different situations evoke different emotions, and the same situation can evoke different
emotions in different people.
Antecedents of Affect
● Cognitive appraisals are based on information about situations and individuals' hopes,
desires, and abilities.
● Affective reactions and physiological responses follow these cognitive appraisals.
● The appraisal process is continuous and largely automatic.
Social Cognition and Social Thinking

● Primary appraisals occur in the amygdala, responsible for fast, autonomic emotional
reactions.
● Primary appraisals generate emotions blindly quickly, well before conscious recognition
of the target.
● Secondary appraisals generate more complex emotions and slower.
○ For example, envy is a complex emotion where we feel we missed out on
something pleasant and valuable.
● A biopsychosocial model of arousal regulation describes how challenge and threat
motivate performance and create approach and avoidance-related emotions.
Consequences of Affect
● The affect-infusion model explains how mood influences thinking, judgement, and
behavior.
○ It predicts that affect infusion occurs when people process information openly
and constructively.
● Four ways people process information about each other: direct access, motivated
processing, heuristic processing, and substantive processing.
● Current mood states do not influence judgements involving direct access or motivated
processing, but affect affects judgements involving heuristic processing or substantive
processing.
● Affect influences social memory and judgement, with people recalling mood-congruent
information more readily and judging others and themselves more positively.
● The effect of mood on self-perception is greater for peripheral aspects of self, requiring
more elaboration and construction.
● Stereotyping is also affected by mood, with positive mood increasing reliance on
stereotypes and negative affect encouraging corrective evaluations of outgroups.
● Emotions help decision-making by prioritizing attention and setting behavioral goals.
● Each emotion is distinctive, with different cognitive components representing meaning
and embodied goals that specify and motivate action.
Emotion Regulation
● Emotional expression can vary across cultures, with collectivist societies often
disapproving of overt expression.
● Studies show Chinese athletes express less pride when they outperform non-Chinese,
while Americans always express pride regardless of their performance.
Social Cognition and Social Thinking

● Emotion regulation is crucial to achieving personal goals, such as coping with situations
or feeling happy.
● Webb and colleagues' action control perspective emphasizes self-regulation,
highlighting difficulties in identifying the need to regulate emotions.
● Overcoming these difficulties can be achieved through 'ifthen' planning or forming
implementation intentions.

Personal Insights:
From this chapter I have a deeper understanding on how each of us individuals are able to
socialize with other people. There are many factors that weigh in to us personally when we
interact with other individuals such as our first impression with them and biases that we already
have which is basically built on our built up schemas due to our experiences in socializing.
Moreover, schemas play an important for our behavior as it is a basis for us on how we should
approach a person and how we would socialize towards them.