SEE SHORT BLURB FOR ALTERNATE COPY... A complex, intriguing, and important verbal entity, the proverb has been the subject of a vast number of opinions, studies, and analyses. To accommodate the assorted possible audiences, this volume outlines seven views of the proverb -- personal, formal, religious, literary, practical, cultural, and cognitive. Because the author's goal is to provide a scientific understanding of proverb comprehension and production, he draws largely on scholarship stemming from the formal, cultural, and cognitive views.
The only book about proverbs that is written from the standpoint of cognitive science, cognitive psychology, and experimentalism, this text provides a larger, more interdisciplinary perspective on the proverb. It also gives a theoretically more integrated approach to proverb cognition. The conceptual base theory of proverb comprehension is extended via the "cognitive ideals hypothesis" so that the theory now addresses issues regarding the creation, production, and pragmatics of proverbs. This hypothesis also has strong implications for a taxonomy of proverbs, proverb comprehension, universal vs. culture-specific aspects of proverbs, and some structural aspects of proverbs.
In general, the book extends the challenge of proverb cognition by using much of what cognitive science has to offer. In so doing, the proverb is compared to other forms of figurative language, which is then discussed within the larger rubric of intelligence and the inclination for using indirect modes of communication. Child developmental and brain substrates are also discussed.

How is information represented in the nervous system? How is that information manipulated and processed? These are some of the more important and challenging questions for neuroscientists and psychologists today. Understanding brain functions, especially the neural mechanisms of higher cognitive processes such as thinking, reasoning, judging, and decision making, are the subjects covered by the research in the chapters of this book. They describe recent progress in four major research areas: visual functions, motor functions, memory functions, and prefrontal functions. Readers will obtain an excellent idea of how the nervous system internally represents the outer world, how the nervous system constructs images or schemas to perceive the outer world or react to the environment, and how the nervous system processes information using internal representations - topics that are at the forefront of brain science today.

My writing career has been, at least in this one respect, idiosyncratic: it had to mark and chart, step by step, its own peculiar champaign. My earliest papers, beginning in 1942, were technical articles in this or that domain of Uralic linguistics, ethnography, and folklore, with a sprinkling of contributions to North and South American linguistics. In 1954, my name became fecklessly associated with psycholinguistics, then, successively, with explorations in my thology, religious studies, and stylistic problems. It now takes special effort for me to even revive the circumstances under which I came to publish, in 1955, a hefty tome on the supernatural, another, in 1958, on games, and yet another, in 1961, utilizing a computer for extensive sorting of literary information. By 1962, I had edged my way into animal communication studies. Two years after that, I first whiffled through what Gavin Ewart evocatively called "the tulgey wood of semiotics." In 1966, I published three books which tem porarily bluffed some of my friends into conjecturing that I was about to meta morphose into a historiographer of linguistics. The topmost layer in my scholarly stratification dates from 1976, when I started to compile what eventually became my "semiotic tetralogy," of which this volume may supposably be the last. In the language of "Jabberwocky," the word "tulgey" is said to connote variability and evasiveness. This notwithstanding, the allusion seems to me apt."

Cognitive education brings together the disciplines of cognitive psychology and education. This book provides an accessible introduction to the field. It explains the concepts commonly found in the cognitive psychology and cognitive education literatures, theories and models of human thinking and intelligent behaviour, and how these have been applied to psychoeducational assessment, instruction, and the adaption of student behavior. The book includes numerous examples to explain the concepts, theories, and applications, and includes supplementary reading lists and study questions.

Cognitive education brings together the disciplines of cognitive psychology and education. This book provides an accessible introduction to the field. It explains the concepts commonly found in the cognitive psychology and cognitive education literatures, theories and models of human thinking and intelligent behaviour, and how these have been applied to psychoeducational assessment, instruction, and the adaption of student behavior. The book includes numerous examples to explain the concepts, theories, and applications, and includes supplementary reading lists and study questions.

The past fifteen years have witnessed an increasing interest in the cognitive study of the bilingual. A major reason why psychologists, psycholinguists, applied linguists, neuropsychologists, and educators have pursued this topic at an accelerating pace presumably is the acknowledgment by increasingly large numbers of language researchers that the incidence of monolingualism in individual language users may be lower than that of bilingualism. This alleged numerical imbalance between monolinguals and bilinguals may be expected to become larger due to increasing international travel through, for instance, tourism and trade, to the growing use of international communication networks, and to the fact that in some parts of the world (i.e., Europe), the borders between countries are effectively disappearing.
In addition to the growing awareness that bilinguals are very common and may even outnumber monolinguals, there is the dawning understanding that the bilingual mind is not simply the sum of the cognitive processes associated with each of the two monolingual modes, and that the two languages of bilingual may interact with one another in complicated ways. To gain a genuinely universal account of human cognition will therefore require a detailed understanding of language use by both pure monolinguals as well as bilinguals, unbalanced and balanced, and of the representations and processes involved.
These two insights, that bilingualism is a common human condition and that it may influence cognition, were presumably instrumental in putting bilingualism on the agendas of many researchers of cognition and language in recent years. But other reasons may have played a role too: The study of bilingualism also provides a unique opportunity to study the relation between language and thought. A final reason for the growing interest in this area of research is the awareness that bilingualism may confer the benefit of broadening one's scope beyond the limits of one's own country and culture.
This book serves as an excellent introduction to the important topics in the psycholinguistic study of bilingualism. The chapters represent a comprehensive and interrelated set of topics that form the core of contemporary research on the psycholinguistics of bilingualism. The issues raised within this perspective not only increase our understanding of the nature of language and thought in bilinguals but also of the basic nature of the mental architecture that supports the ability to use more than one language.

Intuitive Imagery puts the discoveries of modern science to work through a
simple, proven technology to meet the challenges of our fast-paced changing world. This book shows you how to harness the wisdom of your inner images to achieve peak performance in both business and personal life. Results include greater creativity, better decision making, enhanced productivity, the unlocking of blocked potential, accelerated learning, increased success, and a sense of greater well-being. Learning to use intuitive imaging is like finding a new set of lenses through which to view the world. It helps us change our beliefs about how we know what we know so we can begin to restructure how we do what we do.
John B. Pehrson is president of Creative Change Technologies, a training and consulting firm to individuals and organizations focusing in the areas of creativity, deep team building, and executive coaching. John is a former executive with DuPont and has over 20 years of broad international business experience that includes business and technology management, strategic planning, product development, manufacturing, sales and marketing. He lives in Signal Mountain, TN.
Susan E. Mehrtons is president of The Potlatch Group, a research organization specializing in analysis of business trends related to global evolution and social change. Her clients range from Fortune 500 companies like AT&T, DuPont, General Motors, and Sears to smaller businesses, schools, and private foundations such as The Institute of Noetic Sciences and the World Business Academy. Sue is the co-author of Earthkeeping, an ecology text, and The Fourth Wave, a vision of business in the 21st century. She lives in Mineola, NY.
Grounded in the latest insights and discoveries in science.
Provides reliable, simple, and proven techniques.
Contains information that is practical and accessible.

Making Sense of Inner Sense
"'Terra cognita'" is "terra incognita." It is difficult to find someone not taken abackand fascinated by the incomprehensible but indisputable fact: there are material systems which are aware of themselves. Consciousness is self-cognizing code. During "homo sapiens's" relentness and often frustrated search for self-understanding various theories of consciousness have been and continue to be proposed. However, it remains unclear whether and at what level the problems of consciousness and intelligent thought can be resolved. Science's greatest challenge is to answer the fundamental question: what precisely does a cognitive state amount to in physical terms?
Albert Einstein insisted that the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple and can be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone. When one thinks about the complexities which present themselves in modern physics and even more so in the physics of life, one may wonder whether Einstein really meant what he said. Are we to consider the fundamental problem of the mind, whose understanding seems to lie outside the limits of the mind, to be essentially simple too? Knowledge is neither automatic nor universally deductive. Great new ideas are typically counterintuitive and outrageous, and connecting them by simple logical steps to existing knowledge is often a hard undertaking. The notion of a tensor was needed to provide the general theory of relativity; the notion of entropy had to be developed before we could get full insight into the laws of thermodynamics; the notice of information bit is crucial for communication theory, just as the concept of a Turing machine is instrumental in the deep understanding of a computer. To understand something, consciousness must reach an adequate intellectual level, even more so in order to understand itself. Reality is full of unending mysteries, the true explanation of which requires very technical knowledge, often involving notions not given directly to intuition. Even though the entire content and the results of this study are contained in the eight pages of the mathematical abstract, it would be unrealistic and impractical to suggest that anyone can gain full insight into the theory that presented here after just reading abstract.
In our quest for knowledge we are exploring the remotest areas of the macrocosm and probing the invisible particles of the microcosm, from tiny neutrinos and strange quarks to black holes and the Big Bang. But the greatest mystery is very close to home: the greatest mystery is human consciousness. The question before us is whether the logical brain has evolved to a conceptual level where it is able to understand itself.

Integrating groundbreaking research on neuroplasticity, brain development and therapeutic change, this book details a novel neurobiological and psychotherapeutic paradigm-and reveals how therapists can use this paradigm for more precise and successful treatment. Clients arrive to therapy troubled by deeply ingrained neural circuits and emotional habits, such as "I am unlovable and incapable of love". The authors illustrate how integrating self-affirming, nonconscious emotional resources-or brain systems-changes rigid, maladaptive neural circuits. New, adaptive circuits inhibit toxic, dysfunctional patterns, releasing nonconscious emotions, such as fear, grief, guilt and shame. This allows the emergence of more complex and flexible mental functioning and produces more successful psychotherapeutic outcomes. Developed by two psychotherapists, with more than six collective decades of experience, this model reveals treatment strategies and procedures that harness the power of neuroplasticity, enabling the patient's mind to change the structure of their brain.

One of the most profound insights of the dynamic systems perspective is that new structures resulting from the developmental process do not need to be planned in advance, nor is it necessary to have these structures represented in genetic or neurological templates prior to their emergence. Rather, new structures can emerge as components of the individual and the environment self-organize; that is, as they mutually constrain each other's actions, new patterns and structures may arise. This theoretical possibility brings into developmental theory the important concept of indeterminism--the possibility that developmental outcomes may not be predictable in any simple linear causal way from their antecedents.
This is the first book to take a critical and serious look at the role of indeterminism in psychological and behavioral development.
* What is the source of this indeterminism?
* What is its role in developmental change?
* Is it merely the result of incomplete observational data or error in measurement?
It reviews the concepts of indeterminism and determinism in their historical, philosophical, and theoretical perspectives--particularly in relation to dynamic systems thinking--and applies these general ideas to systems of nonverbal communication. Stressing the indeterminacy inherent to symbols and meaning making in social systems, several chapters address the issue of indeterminism from metaphorical, modeling, and narrative perspectives. Others discuss those indeterministic processes within the individual related to emotional, social, and cognitive development.

Recently, there has been a renewal of interest in the broad and loosely bounded range of phenomena called deception and self-deception. This volume addresses this interest shared by philosophers, social and clinical psychologists, and more recently, neuroscientists and cognitive scientists. Expert contributors provide timely, reliable, and insightful coverage of the normal range of errors in perception, memory, and behavior. They place these phenomena on a continuum with various syndromes and neuropsychiatric diseases where falsehood in perception, self-perception, cognition, and behaviors are a peculiar sign. Leading authorities examine the various forms of "mythomania," deception, and self-deception ranging from the mundane to the bizarre such as imposture, confabulations, minimization of symptomatology, denial, and anosognosia. Although the many diverse phenomena discussed here share a family resemblance, they are unlikely to have a common neurological machinery. In order to reach an explanation for these phenomena, a reliable pattern of lawful behavior must be delineated. It would then be possible to develop reasonable explanations based upon the underlying neurobiological processes that give rise to deficiencies designated as the mythomanias. The chapters herein begin to provide an outline of such a development. Taken as a whole, the collection is consistent with the emerging gospel indicating that neither the machinery of "nature" nor the forces of "nurture" taken alone are capable of explaining what makes cognition and behaviors aberrant.

Psychophysical theory exists in two distinct forms -- one ascribes the explanation of phenomena and empirical laws to sensory processes. Context effects arising through the use of particular methods are an unwanted nuisance whose influence must be eliminated so that one isolates the "true" sensory scale. The other considers psychophysics only in terms of cognitive variables such as the judgment strategies induced by instructions and response biases. Sensory factors play a minor role in cognitive approaches.
This work admits the validity of both forms of theory by arguing that the same empirical phenomena should be conceptualized in two alternative, apparently contradictory, ways. This acceptance of opposites is necessary because some empirical phenomena are best explained in terms of sensory processes, while others are best ascribed to central causes.
The complementarity theory stresses the "mutually completing" nature of two distinct models. The first assigns importance to populations of sensory neurons acting in the aggregate and is formulated to deal with sensory effects. The second assigns importance to judgment uncertainty and to the subject strategies induced by experimental procedures. This model is formulated to explain context effects. Throughout the text, the exposition is interlaced with mathematics, graphs, and computer simulations designed to reveal the complementary nature of psychophysical explanations.

Metacognition is a term that spans many sub-areas in psychology and means different things to different people. A dominant view has been that metacognition involves the monitoring of performance in order to control cognition; however, it seems reasonable that much of this control runs implicitly (i.e., without awareness). Newer still is the field of implicit memory, and it has different connotations to different sub-groups as well. The editor of this volume takes it to mean that a prior experience affects behavior without the individual's appreciation (ability to report) of this influence.
Implicit memory and metacognition seem to be at two opposite ends of the spectrum -- one seemingly conscious and control-oriented, the other occurring without subjects' awareness. Do these processes relate to each other in interesting ways, or do they operate independently without reference to each other? The relatively novel conjecture that much of the control of cognition operates at an implicit level sparked Reder's desire to explore the interrelationship between the two fields.
Developed within the last two decades, both fields are very new and generate a great deal of excitement and research interest. Hundreds of articles have been written about metacognition and about implicit memory, but little if any material has been published about the two areas in combination. In other words, "Metacognition and Implicit Memory" is the first book attempting to integrate what should be closely linked efforts in the study of cognitive science.

Living with Robots: Emerging Issues on the Psychological and Social Implications of Robotics focuses on the issues that come to bear when humans interact and collaborate with robots. The book dives deeply into critical factors that impact how individuals interact with robots at home, work and play. It includes topics ranging from robot anthropomorphic design, degree of autonomy, trust, individual differences and machine learning. While other books focus on engineering capabilities or the highly conceptual, philosophical issues of human-robot interaction, this resource tackles the human elements at play in these interactions, which are essential if humans and robots are to coexist and collaborate effectively. Authored by key psychology robotics researchers, the book limits its focus to specifically those robots who are intended to interact with people, including technology such as drones, self-driving cars, and humanoid robots. Forward-looking, the book examines robots not as the novelty they used to be, but rather the practical idea of robots participating in our everyday lives.

The association between parents' behaviour and children's cognitive development is at the meeting place of several prominent theories of psychological development and a range of complex methodological and conceptual issues. On the one hand there are theories which argue that the impetus of development is within the child and is largely unaffected by his or her experience of social interaction: on the other are the commonsense experience of parents and educators, and the body of neo-Vygotskian theory, which would see the child's development as profoundly affected by social interaction or even constituted by it. The purpose of this book is to examine theories and evidence carefully in order to assess the causal links between parent behaviour and children's cognitive development.
There is a considerable amount of evidence that suggests an association between parents' behaviour and their children's cognitive development; but there are many possible explanations for this association, including direct effects of parental teaching styles on the children's learning and motivation, differential social class practices and opportunities, genetic resemblances, and methodological artifacts. A close and critical look at a wide range of research and of theory is necessary if the causal questions are to be clarified.
This book develops the current arguments about the nature and causes of cognitive development, providing a critical discussion of the available research and relating it to psychological theory. It is suitable for advanced students of psychology and education.

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The term "skill" encompasses an array of topics and issues. For example, individuals are skilled in a variety of domains such as chess, typing, air traffic control, or knitting; researchers study skill in a variety of ways, including speed of acquisition, accuracy of performance, and retention over time; and there are a variety of approaches to the study of skill such as computer modeling or experimental analysis. Contributing to the understanding of whether, how, when, and why skills may decline as a function of age is the goal of this volume.
This book is based on the Aging and Skill Conference sponsored by the Center for Applied Cognitive Research on Aging. The broad focus of the conference was to discuss cognitive theories underlying age-related skill acquisition, transfer, and retention and to discuss applications of these theories to such issues as age-adaptive training, compensatory strategies and devices, and utilization of new and existing technology. The contributors were asked to discuss the cognitive theory relevant to their topic, explain how the theory informs the field about aging, examine where gaps exist among general cognitive theory in this area and theories of aging, and demonstrate the practical relevance of the theory to enhancing or enabling activities of daily living--for work, home, or leisure--for older adults.
This is the first book to focus exclusively on aging and skill. It covers a range of abilities, provides the theoretical basis for the current status of age-related differences in skill, and offers direct evidence of the applicability of research on proficiency to aspects of daily living. Each chapter was written either by an expert in the field of aging, or by an expert in the field of skill--many expert in both areas.

Recognizing the characteristics of children with learning disabilities and deciding how to help them is a problem faced by schools all over the world. Although some disorders are fairly easily recognizable (e.g., mental retardation) or very specific to single components of performance and quite rare (e.g., developmental dyscalculia), schools must consider much larger populations of children with learning difficulties who cannot always be readily classified. These children present high-level learning difficulties that affect their performance on a variety of school tasks, but the underlying problem is often their difficulty in understanding written text. In many instances, despite good intellectual abilities and a superficial ability to cope with written texts and to use language appropriately, some children do not seem to grasp the most important elements, or cannot find the pieces of information they are looking for. Sometimes these difficulties are not immediately detected by the teacher in the early school years. They may be hidden because the most obvious early indicators of reading progress in the teacher's eyes do not involve comprehension of written texts or because the first texts a child encounters are quite simple and reflect only the difficulty level of the oral messages (sentences, short stories, etc.) with which the child is already familiar. However, as years go by and texts get more complex, comprehension difficulties will become increasingly apparent and increasingly detrimental to effective school learning. In turn, studying, assimilating new information, and many other situations requiring text comprehension -- from problem solving to reasoning with linguistic contents -- could be affected.
Problems with decoding, dyslexia, and language disorders have attracted more interest from researchers than have specific comprehension problems and have occupied more room in specialized journals. Normal reading comprehension has also been a favorite with researchers. However, scarce interest has been paid to subjects who have comprehension difficulties. This book is an attempt to remedy this situation. In so doing, this volume answers the following questions:
* Does a reading comprehension problem exist in schools?
* How important and widespread is the problem?
* Is the problem specific?
* How can a reading comprehension difficulty be defined and identified?
* Does the "syndrome" have a single pattern or can different subtypes be identified?
* What are the main characteristics associated with a reading comprehension difficulty?
* When can other well-identified problems add to our understanding of reading comprehension difficulties?
* Which educational strategies are effective in preventing and treating reading comprehension difficulties?
* What supplementary information can we get from an international perspective?

Concern with stress and coping has a long history in biomedical, psychological and sociological research. The inadequacy of simplistic models linking stressful life events and adverse physical and psychological outcomes was pointed out in the early 1980s in a series of seminal papers and books. The issues and theoretical models discussed in this work shaped much of the subsequent research on this topic and are reflected in the papers in this volume. The shift has been away from identifying associations between risks and outcomes to a focus on factors and processes that contribute to diversity in response to risks. Based on the Family Research Consortium's fifth summer institute, this volume focuses on stress and adaptability in families and family members. The papers explore not only how a variety of stresses influence family functioning but also how family process moderates and mediates the contribution of individual and environmental risk and protective factors to personal adjustment. They reveal the complexity of current theoretical models, research strategies and analytic approaches to the study of risk, resiliency and vulnerability along with the central role risk, family process and adaptability play in both normal development and childhood psychopathology.

Early emotional development, emotional regulation, and the links between emotion and social or cognitive functioning in atypically developing children have not received much attention. This lack is due in part to the priorities given to the educational and therapeutic needs of these children. Yet an understanding of the basic emotional processes in children with atypical development can only serve to promote more effective strategies for teaching and intervening in the lives of these children and their families and may contribute to our understanding of basic emotional processes as well.
When referring to "emotions," the editors mean some complex set of processes or abilities, whether or not the topic is normal or atypical development. Specifically, they use the term "emotion" to refer to at least three things -- emotional expressions, emotional states, and emotional experiences. The focus of this volume, these three aspects of emotional life are affected by socialization practices, maturational change, and individual biological differences including, in this case, differences in children as a function of disability. Contributors examine the development of emotions in children with organic or psychological disorders as well as those in compromised social contexts making this volume of prime importance to developmental, clinical, and social psychologists, educators, and child mental health experts.

Recently, research on the ways in which goals, affect, and self-regulation influence one another has enjoyed an upsurge. New findings are being published and new theories are being developed to integrate these findings. This volume reports on the latest of this work, including a substantial amount of data and theory that has not yet been published. Emanating from a conference exploring affect as both a cause and effect in various social contexts, this book examines some of the complex and reciprocal relationships among goals, self structures, feelings, thoughts, and behavior. The chapters address:
*the effects of intrinsic versus extrinsic goals;
*the different effects of approach versus avoidance goals;
*the role of awareness in goal pursuit and affective states;
*the meaning of affective states in relation to goal attainment;
*the impact of hedonistic concerns as motivational factors;
*how people regulate their moods; and
*the role of the self in affective experiences.

The recent evolution of western societies has been characterized by an increasing emphasis on information and communication. As the amount of available information increases, however, the user -- worker, student, citizen -- faces a new problem: selecting and accessing relevant information. More than ever it is crucial to find efficient ways for users to interact with information systems in a way that prevents them from being overwhelmed or simply missing their targets. As a result, hypertext systems have been developed as a means of facilitating the interactions between readers and text. In hypertext, information is organized as a network in which nodes are text chunks (e.g., lists of items, paragraphs, pages) and links are relationships between the nodes (e.g., semantic associations, expansions, definitions, examples -- virtually any kind of relation that can be imagined between two text passages). Unfortunately, the many ways in which these hypertext interfaces can be designed has caused a complexity that extends far beyond the processing abilities of regular users. Therefore, it has become widely recognized that a more rational approach based on a thorough analysis of information users' needs, capacities, capabilities, and skills is needed. This volume seeks to meet that need.
From a user-centered perspective -- between systems and users -- this volume presents theoretical and empirical research on the cognitive processes involved in using hypertext. In so doing, it illustrates three main approaches to the design of hypertext systems:
*cognitive, which examines how users process multilayered hypertext structures;
*ergonomical, which explores how users interact with the design characteristics of hardware and software; and
*educational, which studies the learning objectives, frequency and duration of hypertext sessions, type of reading activity, and the user's learning characteristics.
This volume also tries to provide answers for the questions that have plagued hypertext research:
*What is hypertext good for?
*Who is hypertext good for?
*If it is useful for learning and instruction, then what type?
*What particular cognitive skills are needed to interact successfully with a hypertext system? Anyone interested in the fields of computer science, linguistics, psychology, education, and graphic design will find this volume intriguing, informative, and a definitive starting point for future research in the field of hypertext.

Focusing on the principles and applications of chaotic thinking, this text seeks to promote a more general understanding and acceptance of this cognitive style. It may help people deal more effectively with chaotic situations, such as economic crises, career changes, and relationship skills.

How are we to understand the complex forces that shape human behav ior? A variety of diverse perspectives, drawing on studies of human behavioral ontogeny, as well as humanity's evolutionary heritage, seem to provide the best likelihood of success. It is in an attempt to synthesize such potentially disparate approaches to human development into an integrated whole that we undertake this series on the genesis of beh- ior. In many respects, the incredible burgeoning of research in child development over the last two decades or so seems like a thousand lines of inquiry spreading outward in an incoherent starburst of effort. The need exists to provide, on an ongoing basis, an arena of discourse within which the threads of continuity among those diverse lines of research on human development can be woven into a fabric of meaning and under standing. Scientists, scholars, and those who attempt to translate their efforts into the practical realities of the care and guidance of infants and children are the audience that we seek to reach. Each requires the oppor tunity to see-to the degree that our knowledge in given areas per mits-various aspects of development in a coherent, integrated fashion. It is hoped that this series-which brings together research on infant biology, developing infant capacities, animal models, and impact of so cial, cultural, and familial forces on development, and the distorted products of such forces under certain circumstances-serves these important social and scientific needs."

Thirty-three of the top scholars in this fast moving domain present a picture of work at the cusp in social psychology -- work that deals with cognition and affect in close relationships. The present volume contains a wealth of research findings and influential theoretical accounts that spring as much from indigenous work in the close relationship field as from purebred social cognition. The chapters introduce theories and research programs concerned with the role of individual and couple differences in close relationship knowledge structures. They deal with the role of emotion and affect in close relationships. And they discuss the function of cognition and knowledge structures in relation to the developmental course of close relationships. Each section is accompanied by a critical review written by an expert in the field.
This volume is a must for any close relationship scholar interested in the latest research and theorizing about close relationships that adopt a social psychological perspective. It will also be of interest to scholars and students working in clinical psychology, social cognition, communication, individual differences, and family studies.

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.