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Books > Social sciences > Psychology > Cognition & cognitive psychology
Introduced one hundred years ago, film has since become part of our
lives. For the past century, however, the experience offered by
fiction films has remained a mystery. Questions such as why adult
viewers cry and shiver, and why they care at all about fictional
characters -- while aware that they contemplate an entirely staged
scene -- are still unresolved. In addition, it is unknown why
spectators find some film experiences entertaining that have a
clearly aversive nature outside the cinema. These and other
questions make the psychological status of "emotions" allegedly
induced by the fiction film highly problematic.
Earlier attempts to answer these questions have been limited to a
few genre studies. In recent years, film criticism and the theory
of film structure have made use of psychoanalytic concepts which
have proven insufficient in accounting for the diversity of film
induced affect. In contrast, academic psychology -- during the
century of its existence -- has made extensive study of emotional
responses provoked by viewing fiction film, but has taken the role
of film as a natural stimulus completely for granted. The present
volume bridges the gap between critical theories of film on the one
hand, and recent psychological theory and research of human emotion
on the other, in an attempt to explain the emotions provoked by
fiction film.
This book integrates insights on the narrative structure of
fiction film including its themes, plot structure, and characters
with recent knowledge on the cognitive processing of natural
events, and narrative and person information. It develops a
theoretical framework for systematically describing emotion in the
film viewer. The question whether or not film produces genuine
emotion is answered by comparing affect in the viewer with emotion
in the real world experienced by persons witnessing events that
have personal significance to them. Current understanding of the
psychology of emotions provides the basis for identifying critical
features of the fiction film that trigger the general emotion
system. Individual emotions are classified according to their
position in the affect structure of a film -- a larger system of
emotions produced by one particular film as a whole. Along the way,
a series of problematic issues is dealt with, notably the "reality"
of the emotional stimulus in film, the "identification" of the
viewer with protagonists on screen, and the necessity of the
viewer's cooperation in arriving at a genuine emotion. Finally, it
is argued that film-produced emotions are genuine emotions in
response to an artificial stimulus. Film can be regarded as a
fine-tuned machine for a continuous stream of emotions that are
entertaining after all.
The work paves the way for understanding and, in principle,
predicting emotions in the film viewer using existing psychological
instruments of investigation. Dealing with the problems of
film-induced affect and rendering them accessible to formal
modeling and experimental method serves a wider interest of
understanding aesthetic emotion -- the feelings that man-made
products, and especially works of art, can evoke in the
beholder.
Most research on children's lexical development has focused on
their acquisition of names for concrete objects. This is the first
edited volume to focus specifically on how children acquire their
early verbs. Verbs are an especially important part of the early
lexicon because of the role they play in children's emerging
grammatical competence. The contributors to this book investigate:
* children's earliest words for actions and events and the
cognitive structures that might underlie them,
* the possibility that the basic principles of word learning which
apply in the case of nouns might also apply in the case of verbs,
and
the role of linguistic context, especially argument structure, in
the acquisition of verbs.
A central theme in many of the chapters is the comparison of the
processes of noun and verb learning. Several contributors make
provocative suggestions for constructing theories of lexical
development that encompass the full range of lexical items that
children learn and use.
Musical Sense-Making: Enaction, Experience, and Computation
broadens the scope of musical sense-making from a disembodied
cognitivist approach to an experiential approach. Revolving around
the definition of music as a temporal and sounding art, it argues
for an interactional and experiential approach that brings together
the richness of sensory experience and principles of cognitive
economy. Starting from the major distinction between in-time and
outside-of-time processing of the sounds, this volume provides a
conceptual and operational framework for dealing with sounds in a
real-time listening situation, relying heavily on the theoretical
groundings of ecology, cybernetics, and systems theory, and
stressing the role of epistemic interactions with the sounds. These
interactions are considered from different perspectives, bringing
together insights from previous theoretical groundings and more
recent empirical research. The author's findings are framed within
the context of the broader field of enactive and embodied
cognition, recent action and perception studies, and the emerging
field of neurophenomenology and dynamical systems theory. This
volume will particularly appeal to scholars and researchers
interested in the intersection between music, philosophy, and/or
psychology.
How do young children bridge the gap between "writing" a story with
pictures and writing with words? How children learn to use written
words to tell a story is a topic important to both cognitive
development and early literacy instruction. Using the theoretical
framework developed by Vygotsky, the behavior of a group of
prekindergarten children as they author two consecutive pieces of
writing is analyzed. The children tell their stories at first with
spoken words and pictures. As they discuss their work-in-progress
in public conferences, they discover how to build on and combine
existing skills to produce a new skill -- telling stories with
written words.
Current descriptive and theoretical perspectives on beginning
writing are presented in this volume, with a particular focus on
Vygotsky's concept of the "zone of proximal development," a period
of sensitivity in which learning advances. The proposed mechanism
of change is "verbal mediation" -- talk among peers and teachers as
they discuss work-in-progress -- which moves the children through
the zone of proximal development.
An open, whole-language approach to literacy instruction makes the
classroom in this book an ideal arena in which to observe verbal
mediation in operation. Children are free to question, criticize
and argue; and in the process they collectively advance their
developing ability to use written language.
The work is unique in that the rich and comprehensive data record
is reproduced in its entirety. More than 400 illustrations of the
children's products -- two "books" apiece, pictured before and
after the children's revisions -- are included, along with
transcripts of the conferences about each of the pages, permitting
direct observation of the effects of verbal mediation. This dynamic
study documents change during a period of time when specific
learning is occurring, and provides strong support for the value
and power of Vygotsky's theoretical framework.
This volume is a direct result of an international conference that
brought together a number of scholars from Europe and the United
States to discuss their ideas and research about cognitive and
instructional processes in history and the social sciences. As
such, it fills a major gap in the study of how people learn and
reason in the context of particular subject matter domains and how
instruction can be improved in order to facilitate better learning
and reasoning. Previous cognitive work on subject matter learning
has been focused primarily upon mathematics and physics; the
present effort provides the first such venture examining the
history and social science domains from a cognitive perspective.
The different sections of the book cover topics related to
comprehension, learning, and instruction of history and the social
sciences, including:
*the development of some social sciences concepts,
*the teaching of social sciences -- problems and questions arising
from this cognitive perspective of learning,
*the comprehension and learning from historical texts,
*how people and students understand historical causality and
provide explanations of historical events, and
*the deduction processes involved in reasoning about social
sciences contents.
This volume will be useful for primary and secondary school
teachers and for cognitive and instructional researchers interested
in problem solving and reasoning, text comprehension,
domain-specific knowledge acquisition and concept
development.
This book provides the latest information about the development of
intersensory perception -- a topic which has recently begun to
receive a great deal of attention from researchers studying the
general problem of perceptual development. This interest was
inspired after the realization that unimodal perception of sensory
information is only the first stage of perceptual processing. Under
normal conditions, an organism is faced with multiple, multisensory
sources of information and its task is to either select a single
relevant source of information or select several sources of
information and integrate them. In general, perception and action
on the basis of multiple sources of information is more efficient
and effective. Before greater efficiency and effectiveness can be
achieved, however, the organism must be able to integrate the
multiple sources of information. By doing so, the organism can then
achieve a coherent and unified percept of the world.
The various chapters in this book examine the developmental
origins of intersensory perceptual capacities by presenting the
latest research on the development of intersensory perceptual
skills in a variety of different species. By adopting a comparative
approach to this problem, this volume as a whole helps uncover
similarities as well as differences in the mechanisms underlying
the development of intersensory integration. In addition, it shows
that there is no longer any doubt that intersensory interactions
occur right from the beginning of the developmental process, that
the nature of these intersensory interactions changes as
development progresses, and that early experience contributes in
important ways to these changes.
Designed for professionals and graduate students in the
personality/social, military, and educational psychology, and
assessment/evaluation communities, this volume explores the state
of the art in motivational research for individuals and teams from
multiple theoretical viewpoints as well as their effects in both
schools and training environments.
The great majority of education and training R&D is focused on
the cognitive dimensions of learning, for instance, the acquisition
and retention of knowledge and skills. Less attention has been
given in the literature and in the design of education and training
itself to motivational variables and their influence on
performance. As such, this book is unique in the following montage
of factors:
* a focus on motivation of teams or groups as well as
individuals;
* an examination of the impact of motivation on performance (and,
thus, also on cognition) rather than only on motivation
itself;
* research in training as well as educational settings.
The data reported were collected in various venues including
schools, laboratories and field settings. The chapter authors are
the researchers that, in many cases, have defined the state of the
art in motivation.
This volume investigates our ability to capture, and then apply,
expertise. In recent years, expertise has come to be regarded as an
increasingly valuable and surprisingly elusive resource. Experts,
who were the sole active dispensers of certain kinds of knowledge
in the days before AI, have themselves become the objects of
empirical inquiry, in which their knowledge is elicited and studied
-- by knowledge engineers, experimental psychologists, applied
psychologists, or other experts -- involved in the development of
expert systems. This book achieves a marriage between
experimentalists, applied scientists, and theoreticians who deal
with expertise. It envisions the benefits to society of an advanced
technology for capturing and disseminating the knowledge and skills
of the best corporate managers, the most seasoned pilots, and the
most renowned medical diagnosticians. This book should be of
interest to psychologists as well as to knowledge engineers who are
"out in the trenches" developing expert systems, and anyone
pondering the nature of expertise and the question of how it can be
elicited and studied scientifically. The book's scope and the
pivotal concepts that it elucidates and appraises, as well as the
extensive categorized bibliographies it includes, make this volume
a landmark in the field of expert systems and AI as well as the
field of applied experimental psychology.
Understanding how young children begin to make sense out of the
social world has become a major concern within developmental
psychology. Over the last 25 years research in this area has raised
a number of questions which mirror the confluence of interests from
cognitive-developmental and social-developmental psychology. The
aims of this book are to consider critically the major themes and
findings within this growing social-cognitive developmental
research, and to present a new theoretical framework for
investigating children's social cognitive skills. Beyond being the
first major review of the literature in this area, this synopsis
articulates why contemporary theoretical ideas (e.g. information
processing, Piagetian and social interactionist) are unlikely ever
to provide the conceptual basis for understanding children's
participative skills. Building upon ideas both within and beyond
mainstream developmental psychology, the "eco-structural" approach
advocated seeks to draw together the advantages of the ecological
approach in perceptual psychology with the considerable insights of
the conversational analysts, child language researchers and
Goffman's analysis of social interaction. This convergence is
centred around the dynamic and participatory realities of engaging
in conversational contexts, the locus for acquiring social
cognitive skills. The framework provides the building blocks for
models of developmental social cognition which can accommodate
dynamic aspects of children's conversational skills. This book then
is a review of an important area of developmental psychology, a new
perspective on how we can study children's participatory
social-cognitive skills and a summary of supporting research for
the framework advocated.
Individual Differences in Imaging contains several suggestions for
research and how it can be conducted. This book is useful for
people with an interest in the nature and functions of mental
imagery.
Contents: P. Mitchell, C. Lewis, Critical Issues in Children's Early Understanding of Mind. Part I: Ontogenesis of an Understanding of Mind. P. Mitchell, Realism and Early Conception of Mind: A Synthesis of Phylogenetic and Ontogenetic Issues. A. Whiten, Grades of Mindreading. R.P. Hobson, Perceiving Attitudes, Conceiving Minds. N.H. Freeman, Associations and Dissociations in Theories of Mind. Part II: Attention, Perception and Cognition: The Legacy of Infancy. G. Butterworth, Theory of Mind and the Facts of Embodiment. D.A. Baldwin, L.J. Moses, Early Understanding of Referential Intent and Attentional Focus: Evidence from Language and Emotion. A. Gopnik, V. Slaughter, A. Meltzoff, Changing Your Views: How Understanding Visual Perception Can Lead to a New Theory of the Mind. S. Baron?Cohen, H. Ring, A Model of the Mindreading System: Neuropsychological and Neurobiological Perspectives. Part III: The Role of Pretence. A. Lillard, Making Sense of Pretence. P.L. Harris, Understanding Pretence. J. Perner, S. Baker, D. Hutton, Prelief: The Conceptual Origins of Belief and Pretence. A. Lillard, P. Harris, J. Perner, Commentary: Triangulating Pretence and Belief. Part IV: The Role of Communication. J. Dunn, Changing Minds and Changing Relationships. M. Shatz, Theory of Mind and the Development of Social?linguistic Intelligence in Early Childhood. H.M. Wellman, K. Bartsch, Before Belief: Children's Early Psychological Theory. E.J. Robinson, What People Say, What They Think, and What Is Really the Case: Children's Understanding of Utterances as Sources of Knowledge. Part V: Misrepresentation. B. Sodian, Early Deception and the Conceptual Continuity Claim. M. Chandler, S. Hala, The Role of Personal Involvement in the Assessment of Early False Belief Skills. M. Siegal, C.C. Peterson, Children's Theory of Mind and the Conversational Territory of Cognitive Development. C. Lewis, Episodes, Events and Narratives in the Child's Understanding of Mind.
How does brain activity give rise to sleep, dreams, learning,
memory, and language? Do drugs like cocaine and heroin tap into the
same neurochemical systems that evolved for life's natural rewards?
What are the powerful new tools of molecular biology that are
revolutionizing neuroscience? This undergraduate textbook explores
the relation between brain, mind, and behavior. It clears away the
extraneous detail that so often impedes learning, and describes
critical concepts step by step, in straightforward language. Rich
illustrations and thought-provoking review questions further
illuminate the relations between biological, behavioral, and mental
phenomena. With writing that is focused and engaging, even the more
challenging topics of neurotransmission and neuroplasticity become
enjoyable to learn. While this textbook filters out non-critical
details, it includes all key information, allowing readers to
remain focused and enjoy the feeling of mastery that comes from a
grounded understanding of a topic, from its fundamentals to its
implications.
During the past two or three decades, research in cognitive science
and psychology has yielded an improved understanding of the
fundamental psychological nature of knowledge and cognitive skills
that psychological testing attempts to measure. These theories have
reached sufficient maturity, making it reasonable to look upon them
to provide a sound theoretical foundation for assessment,
particulary for the content of assessments. This fact, combined
with much discontentedness over current testing practices, has
inspired efforts to bring testing and cognitive theory together to
create a new theoretical framework for psychological testing -- a
framework developed for diagnosing learners' differences rather
than for ranking learners based on their differences.
This volume presents some initial accomplishments in the effort to
bring testing and cognitive theory together. Contributors originate
from both of the relevant research communities -- cognitive
research and psychometric theory. Some represent collaborations
between representatives of the two communities; others are efforts
to reach out in the direction of the other community. Taking
fundamentally different forms, psychometric test theory assumes
that knowledge can be represented in terms of one or at most a few
dimensions, whereas modern cognitive theory typically represents
knowledge in networks -- either networks of conceptual
relationships or the transition networks of production systems.
Cognitively diagnostic assessment is a new enterprise and it is
evident that many challenging problems remain to be addressed.
Still, it is already possible to develop highly productive
interactions between assessment and instruction in both automated
tutoring systems and more conventional classrooms. The editors hope
that the chapters presented here show how the reform of assessment
can take a rigorous path.
This edition of the "Handbook" follows the first edition by 10
years. The earlier edition was a promissory note, presaging the
directions in which the then-emerging field of social cognition was
likely to move. The field was then in its infancy and the areas of
research and theory that came to dominate the field during the next
decade were only beginning to surface. The concepts and methods
used had frequently been borrowed from cognitive psychology and had
been applied to phenomena in a very limited number of areas.
Nevertheless, social cognition promised to develop rapidly into an
important area of psychological inquiry that would ultimately have
an impact on not only several areas of psychology but other fields
as well.
The promises made by the earlier edition have generally been
fulfilled. Since its publication, social cognition has become one
of the most active areas of research in the entire field of
psychology; its influence has extended to health and clinical
psychology, and personality, as well as to political science,
organizational behavior, and marketing and consumer behavior. The
impact of social cognition theory and research within a very short
period of time is incontrovertible. The present volumes provide a
comprehensive and detailed review of the theoretical and empirical
work that has been performed during these years, and of its
implications for information processing in a wide variety of
domains.
The handbook is divided into two volumes. The first provides an
overview of basic research and theory in social information
processing, covering the automatic and controlled processing of
information and its implications for how information is encoded and
stored in memory, the mental representation of persons -- including
oneself -- and events, the role of procedural knowledge in
information processing, inference processes, and response
processes. Special attention is given to the cognitive determinants
and consequences of affect and emotion. The second book provides
detailed discussions of the role of information processing in
specific areas such as stereotyping; communication and persuasion;
political judgment; close relationships; organizational, clinical
and health psychology; and consumer behavior.
The contributors are theorists and researchers who have themselves
carried out important studies in the areas to which their chapters
pertain. In combination, the contents of this two-volume set
provide a sophisticated and in-depth treatment of both theory and
research in this major area of psychological inquiry and the
directions in which it is likely to proceed in the future.
Q: Why do organisms need cognition?
A: To get information about their environments.
Q: Why such information?
A: Because organisms need to guide their behaviors to goals.
Q: Why guidance?
A: Because it leads to goal satisfaction.
Q: Why goals?
Cognition is a naturally selected response by genetic programs to
the evolutionary pressure of guiding behaviors to goals. Organisms
are material systems that maintain and replicate themselves by
engaging their world in goal-directed ways. This is how guidance of
behavior to goal grounds and explains cognition and the main forms
in which it manages information. Guidance to goal also makes a
difference to the understanding of human cognition. Simpler forms
of cognition evolve to handle fixed informational transactions with
the world, whereas human cognition evolves the abilities to script
flexible goal situations that fit specific contexts of behavior.
This teleoevolutionary approach has important implications for
cognitive science, two of which are programmatic. One is that
information that guides to goal is not exclusively cognitive;
guidance is also affected by ecological facts and regularities as
well as by design assumptions about them. The other implication is
that the functional analyses dominant in cognitive science and
philosophy of mind are incomplete and weak. They are incomplete in
that they focus only on the explicitly encoded cognitive
information and its behavioral consequences, thus ignoring the
larger guidance arrangements; and weak because causal and
functional relations implement but underdetermine goal-directed and
goal-guided procesess.
A work dealing expressly with the foundations of cognitive
science, this book addresses basic but seldom-asked questions about
the evolutionary rationale of cognition and the way this rationale
has shaped the major types of cognition. It also provides a
teleological answer to these basic questions in terms of goal
directedness and particularly guidance of behavior to goal. In so
doing, the work defends the scientific respectability and the
explanatory necessity of teleology by showing that goal
directedness characterizes the work of genetic programs.
The educational use of television, film, and related media has
increased significantly in recent years, but our fundamental
understanding of how media communicate information and which
instructional purposes they best serve has grown very little. In
this book, the author advances an empirically based theory relating
media's most basic mode of presentation -- their symbol systems --
to common thought processes and to learning. Drawing on research in
semiotics, cognition and cognitive development, psycholinguistics,
and mass communication, the author offers a number of propositions
concerning the particular kinds of mental processes required by,
and the specific mental skills enhanced by, different symbol
systems. He then describes a series of controlled experiments and
field and cross-cultural studies designed to test these
propositions. Based primarily on the symbol system elements of
television and film, these studies illustrate under what
circumstances and with what types of learners certain kinds of
learning and mental skill development occur. These findings are
incorporated into a general scheme of reciprocal interactions among
symbol systems, learners' cognitions, and their mental activities;
and the implications of these relationships for the design and use
of instructional materials are explored.
Focusing on the application of human factors and ergonomics in the design of alarm systems, this book brings together all the disparate areas in a single volume.; The aim of the book is to present current human factor issues regarding alarm design in a variety of settings, such as industrial alarm systems in process industries, aviation, automobiles and intensive care. It argues that the severe shortcomings of alarm systems can be overcome through the use of human factors evaluation and design integration techniques. Contributors cover the areas of HCI, task analysis, training, personnel selection, and design and human behaviour in an emergency, which of course, can be influenced positively and negatively by the design and deployment of alarm systems. eBook available with sample pages: 0203481712
Examining the current state of the research in perception stressing
contributions in visual information processing, this volume
provides an original and timely account of recent results obtained
in this and other related areas of cognitive psychology. The scope
of the book is intended to be broad, featuring state-of-the-art
contributions from a number of outstanding researchers from
different parts of the world -- the United States, Europe, and
Australia. The intention is to update areas of considerable
theoretical implications and active experimental investigation in
this broad field called the "psychology of perception." This
volume's main purpose is to highlight, from a cognitive position, a
selected number of important theoretical and empirical topics which
deal with critical issues in perception and other high level,
related cognitive processes such as attention, mental
representation, memory, word naming and semantic categorization.
The studies reported were designed to answer many far-reaching
questions including:
* Is the global precedence effect due to low or high level
processing?
* Can veridical and illusory perception be explained by the same
theory?
* What is the relationship between attention and perception?
* Is perception "direct" or an inferential process?
* What mechanisms are involved in picture and word naming and
categorization?
* How can word and picture processing be modeled?
The answers to these questions seek to unite theoretical
perspectives on very important areas of cognitive psychology such
as attention, perception, representation of visual objects and
words, and human memory.
This book presents a new approach to understanding the family unit
and how and why it functions as it does. The approach focuses on
the cognitions of family members and how these, in turn, shape
individuals' behavior and the functioning of the family system.
The use of the cognitive-behavioral perspective in family science
has gained a quick and broad acceptance among social scientists and
practitioners during the past decade. One reason for its success is
that the basics of the approach are easy to learn and apply.
Specifically, the approach maintains that a person who believes
that he or she is a failure will -- because of this cognition --
act in certain self-defeating ways and have various
self-deprecating feelings.
The wide acceptance of the cognitive-behavioral approach rests on
more than its simplicity: the approach has repeatedly proven itself
in the laboratory and in the clinic. The knowledge readers of this
volume will gain about the cognitive-behavioral approach provides
them with tools that they can use to better understand not only the
family interactions, but the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of
individuals -- including themselves -- in the family setting.
This volume is based on a conference held to examine what is known
about cognitive behaviors and brain structure and function in three
syndromes and to evaluate the usefulness of such models. The goal
of this endeavor is to add to the knowledge base of cognitive
neuroscience within a developmental framework. Most of what is
known about the neurological basis of cognitive function in humans
has been learned from studies of central nervous system trauma or
disease in adults. Certain neurodevelopmental disorders affect the
central nervous system in unique ways by producing specific as
opposed to generalized cognitive deficit. Studies of these
disorders using neurobiological and behavioral techniques can yield
new insights into the localization of cognitive function and the
developmental course of atypical cognitive profiles.
The focus of this book is a discussion of the multidisciplinary
research findings from studies of autism, and Williams and Turner
syndromes. The approaches, methods, techniques, and findings
reported are at the cutting edge of neuroscience research on
complex behavior patterns and their neural substrates. Each
disorder is accompanied by some degree of general cognitive
impairment or mental retardation. Of greater interest are the
atypical deficits in which a cognitive function is spared, such as
language in Williams syndrome, or is disproportionately depressed
as are spatial discrimination skills and visual-motor coordination
in Turner syndrome. Drastically reduced or seemingly absent
language capabilities and little interaction with other people
characterize the core autism syndrome. A comprehensive and critical
discussion of appropriate statistical techniques is made vivid by
examples given from studies of small groups or single subjects in
neurolinguistics and related fields.
Do general-purpose creative-thinking skills -- skills like
divergent thinking, which is touted as an important component of
creative thinking no matter what the task domain -- actually make
much of a contribution to creative performance? Although much
recent research argues against such domain-transcending skills --
including several new studies reported in this book -- the appeal
of such general skills remains strong, probably because of the
theoretical economy and power such skills would provide. Divergent
thinking, in particular, has had an incredible staying power.
Despite its many flaws, divergent thinking remains the most
frequently used indicator of creativity in both creativity research
and educational practice, and divergent thinking theory has a
strong hold on everyday conceptions of what it means to be
creative. Reviewing the available research on divergent thinking,
this book presents a framework for understanding other major
theories of creativity, including Mednick's associative theory and
a possible connectionist approach of creativity. It reports a
series of studies (including the study that won APA's 1992 Berlyne
Prize) that demonstrate the absence of effects of general
creative-thinking skills across a range of creativity-relevant
tasks, but indicate that training in divergent thinking does in
fact improve creative performance across diverse task domains. The
book then ties these findings together with a multi-level theory,
in which a task-specific approach to creativity is strengthened by
recasting some divergent-thinking concepts into domain- and
task-specific forms. This book fills the gap between
divergent-thinking theory and more recent, modular conceptions of
creativity. Rather than advocate that we simply discard divergent
thinking -- an approach that hasn't worked, or at least hasn't
happened, because of many attacks on its validity and usefulness --
this book shows how to separate what is useful in
divergent-thinking theory and practice from what is not. It shows
that divergent-thinking training can be valuable, although often
not for the reasons trainers think it works. And it offers specific
suggestions about the kinds of creativity research most needed
today.
This edition of the "Handbook" follows the first edition by 10
years. The earlier edition was a promissory note, presaging the
directions in which the then-emerging field of social cognition was
likely to move. The field was then in its infancy and the areas of
research and theory that came to dominate the field during the next
decade were only beginning to surface. The concepts and methods
used had frequently been borrowed from cognitive psychology and had
been applied to phenomena in a very limited number of areas.
Nevertheless, social cognition promised to develop rapidly into an
important area of psychological inquiry that would ultimately have
an impact on not only several areas of psychology but other fields
as well.
The promises made by the earlier edition have generally been
fulfilled. Since its publication, social cognition has become one
of the most active areas of research in the entire field of
psychology; its influence has extended to health and clinical
psychology, and personality, as well as to political science,
organizational behavior, and marketing and consumer behavior. The
impact of social cognition theory and research within a very short
period of time is incontrovertible. The present volumes provide a
comprehensive and detailed review of the theoretical and empirical
work that has been performed during these years, and of its
implications for information processing in a wide variety of
domains.
The handbook is divided into two volumes. The first provides an
overview of basic research and theory in social information
processing, covering the automatic and controlled processing of
information and its implications for how information is encoded and
stored in memory, the mental representation of persons -- including
oneself -- and events, the role of procedural knowledge in
information processing, inference processes, and response
processes. Special attention is given to the cognitive determinants
and consequences of affect and emotion. The second book provides
detailed discussions of the role of information processing in
specific areas such as stereotyping; communication and persuasion;
political judgment; close relationships; organizational, clinical
and health psychology; and consumer behavior.
The contributors are theorists and researchers who have themselves
carried out important studies in the areas to which their chapters
pertain. In combination, the contents of this two-volume set
provide a sophisticated and in-depth treatment of both theory and
research in this major area of psychological inquiry and the
directions in which it is likely to proceed in the future.
"The book draws on a lot of research, is friendly to the reader,
and will be of good value to teachers."
Paul Nation, Victoria University of Wellington, Australia
This comprehensive, up-to-date, and accessible text on idiom
use, learning, and teaching approaches the topic with a balance of
sound theory and extensive research in cognitive linguistics,
psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and sociolinguistics
combined with informed teaching practices. Idioms is organized in
three parts:
- Part I includes discussion of idiom definition, classification,
usage patterns, and functions.
- Part II investigates the process involved in the comprehension
of idioms and the factors that influence individuals? understanding
and use of idioms in both L1 and L2.
- Part III explores idiom acquisition and the teaching and
learning of idioms, focusing especially on the strategies and
techniques used to help students learn idioms.
To assist the reader in grasping the key issues, study questions
are provided at the end of each chapter. The text also includes a
glossary of special terms and an annotated list of selective idiom
reference books and student textbooks.
Idioms is designed to serve either as a textbook for ESL/applied
linguistics teacher education courses or as a reference book. No
matter how the book is used, it will equip an ESL/applied
linguistics students and professionals with a solid understanding
of various issues related to idioms and the learning of them.
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