Human beings are an intrinsically gregarious species - our personal relationships are of immense interest to us and are a key factor in achieving happiness and well being. From the moment of birth, humans crave love and intimacy and we devote much energy to creating and maintaining successful personal relationships throughout our personal and our working lives. However, modern industrialized societies present a particularly challenging environment for sustaining rewarding personal relationships. Understanding how people initiate, develop, maintain, and terminate relationships is one of the core issues in psychology, and the subject matter of this book. Contributors to this volume are all leading researchers in relationship science, and they seek here to explore and integrate the subtle influence that evolutionary, socio-cultural, and intra-psychic (cognitive, affective and motivational) variables play in relationship processes. In addition to discussing the latest advances in areas of relationship research, they also advocate an expanded theoretical approach that incorporates many of the insights gained from evolutionary psychology, social cognition, and research on affect and motivation. The contributions should be highly relevant to researchers, teachers, students, laypersons and to everyone who is interested in the subtleties of human relationships. The book is also highly recommended to clinical, health, and relationship professionals who deal with relationship issues in their daily work.

Product Description: Based on twenty years of research on the social regulation of academic performances, this book offers theoretical and empirical arguments in favour of the inclusion of the social dimension of human beings as essential for their cognitive activities...read more

Product Description: This book sheds new light on the problem of how the human mind evolved. Harry Smit argues that current studies of this problem misguidedly try to solve it by using variants of the Cartesian conception of the mind, and shows that combining the Aristotelian conception with Darwin's theory provides us with far more interesting answers...read more

Product Description: Language is the essence of interpersonal behavior and social relationships, and it is social cognitive processes that determine how we produce and understand language. However, there has been surprisingly little interest in the past linking social cognition and communication...read more

Researchers are increasingly applying cognitive methods to investigate social psychological phenomena. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to widely used social cognitive methods and offers practical, nuts-and-bolts guidance for implementing them. Leading authorities present attentional paradigms, priming paradigms, and response interference tasks; psychobiological approaches, such as neuroimaging; applications of mathematical models; and other methods. Detailed procedural information helps researchers and students take their first steps in using these state-of-the-art tools. Each chapter is illustrated with recent research examples and includes helpful recommendations for further reading.

Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology: Intraindividual Processes

Product Description: In this unprecedented work, Juliann Cortese heightens our understanding of the learning process as it relates to information acquired through the Internet. Internet Learning and the Building of Knowledge shows us how design elements such as pop-up windows with augmented content and relational links influence knowledge structure as well as definitional and factual knowledge...read more

Product Description: What holds together the various fields that are supposed to consititute the general intellectual discipline that people now call cognitive science? In this book, Erneling and Johnson identify two problems with defining this discipline...read more

(view table of contents)

Product Description: A psychiatrist who has received international recognition for her research on the neural basis of primate social cognition, Leslie Brothers, M.D., offers here a major argument about the social dimension of the human brain, drawing on both her own work and a wealth of information from research laboratories, neurosurgical clinics, and psychiatric wards...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

(view table of contents)

Product Description: This book offers a comprehensive review and integration of the most recent research and theories on the role of affect in social cognition and features original contributions from leading researchers in the field. The applications of this work to areas such as clinical, organizational, forensic, health, marketing, and advertising psychology receive special emphasis throughout...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

(view table of contents)

Product Description: Hardbound. Human learning, reasoning and thinking, and the different sites in which these activities take place, are the focus of this book. It presents the results of research into the nature of learning and the influence of different contexts and factors within the context of learning, the constraints that contexts place on reasoning and learning, and the nature of learning when using the tools and artefacts...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Traditionally, human cognition has been seen and studied as existing solely "inside" a person, irrelevant to the social, physical, and artifactual context in which cognition takes place. This book reexamines the nature of cognition and proposes that a clearer understanding of human cognition would be achieved if it were conceptualized and studied as distributed among individuals; knowledge is socially constructed through collaborative efforts toward shared objectives within cultural surroundings, and that information is processed among individuals and the tools and artifacts provided by culture. The contributors to this thought-provoking text enhance their arguments by offering examples from daily life and educational activities. Researchers in a number of social and scientific fields will welcome this book. (view table of contents)

Product Description: This monograph addresses the worlds of social science theory and artificial intelligence AI. The book examines the interaction of individual cognitive factors and social influence on human action and discusses the implications for developments in artificial intelligence...read more

Product Description: Social cognition emerged as a dynamic new field in psychology in the late 1970s. Now, 15 years later, top researchers in this discipline are taking stock: How has social cognition affected social psychology as a whole? In what ways has social cognition proved a catalyst for new theory, methodology, and controversy? Such discussions are present in Social Cognition: Its Impact on Social Psychology...read more

In a book of intellectual breadth, James Wertsch not only offers a synthesis and critique of all Vygotsky's major ideas, but also presents a program for using Vygotskian theory as a guide to contemporary research in the social sciences and humanities. He draws extensively on all Vygotsky's works, both in Russian and in English, as well as on his own studies in the Soviet Union with colleagues and students of Vygotsky. Vygotsky's writings are an enormously rich source of ideas for those who seek an account of the mind as it relates to the social and physical world. Wertsch explores three central themes that run through Vygotsky's work: his insistence on using genetic, or developmental, analysis; his claim that higher mental functioning in the individual has social origins; and his beliefs about the role of tools and signs in human social and psychological activity Wertsch demonstrates how the notion of semiotic mediation is essential to understanding Vygotsky's unique contribution to the study of human consciousness. In the last four chapters Wertsch extends Vygotsky's claims in light of recent research in linguistics, semiotics, and literary theory. The focus on semiotic phenomena, especially human language, enables him to integrate findings from the wide variety of disciplines with which Vygotsky was concerned Wertsch shows how Vygotsky's approach provides a principled way to link the various strands of human science that seem more isolated than ever today.

(view table of contents)

Social psychology remains unbalanced as long as we study human behaviour exclusively ‘from the outside’, leaving out of account people’s own reasons for acting as they do. Originally published in 1982, the result of the author’s emphasis on the cognitive dimension is a much more complete and well-rounded textbook of social psychology than had previously been available. Beginning with an exploration of the various models that have been suggested to explain the whole range of social behaviour, the book goes on to argue that consistency – comparability, similarity, congruity – is the principle by which social behaviour can best be explained. It goes into the cognitive processes that determine social attitudes, ascription of certain characteristics to individuals, and the attraction we feel to some people but not others. It also shows how these processes can be extended and affected by group membership. Consistency is important, the author believes, because it allows the maximum prediction of others’ behaviour and guidance of our own. These functions are demonstrated by observing failures of consistency, such as occur in humour and in negative self-esteem, and the author examines these inconsistencies in a final chapter.