https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307%2F3343168.pdf

Development as Freedom

Attachment--and loss.

Psychology of Learning and Motivation publishes empirical and theoretical contributions in cognitive and experimental psychology, ranging from classical and instrumental conditioning to complex learning and problem solving. Each chapter thoughtfully integrates the writings of leading contributors, who present and discuss significant bodies of research relevant to their discipline. Volume 62 includes chapters on such varied topics as automatic logic and effortful beliefs, complex learning and development, bias detection and heuristics thinking, perceiving scale in real and virtual environments, using multidimensional encoding and retrieval contexts to enhance our understanding of source memory, causes and consequences of forgetting in thinking and remembering and people as contexts in conversation. * Volume 62 of the highly regarded Psychology of Learning and Motivation series* An essential reference for researchers and academics in cognitive science* Relevant to both applied concerns and basic research

The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Advances in Research and Theory

A review is presented of the book “Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment,” edited by Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin, and Daniel Kahneman.

Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment

Gender schema theory proposes that the phenomenon of sex typing derives, in part, from gender-based schematic processing, from a generalized readiness to process information on the basis of the sex-linked associations that constitute the gender schema. In particular, the theory proposes that sex typing results from the fact that the self-concept itself gets assimilated to the gender schema. Several studies are described which demonstrate that sex-typed individuals do, in fact, have a greater readiness to process information—including information about the self—in terms of the gender schema. It is speculated that such gender-based schematic processing derives, in part, from the society's ubiquitous insistence on the functional importance of the gender dichotomy. The political implications of gender schema theory are discussed, as is the relationship of the theory to the concept of androgyny. The distinction between male and female serves as a basic organizing principle for every human culture. Although societies differ in the specific tasks they assign to the two sexes, all societies allocate adult roles on the basis of sex and anticipate this allocation in the socialization of their children. Not only are boys and girls expected to acquire sex-specific skills, they are also expected to have or to acquire sex-specific self

Gender schema theory: A cognitive account of sex typing.

The authors propose an interpersonal social– cognitive theory of the self and personality, the relational self, in which knowledge about the self is linked with knowledge about significant others, and each linkage embodies a self– other relationship. Mental representations of significant others are activated and used in interpersonal encounters in the social– cognitive phenomenon of transference (S. M. Andersen & N. S. Glassman, 1996), and this evokes the relational self. Variability in relational selves depends on interpersonal contextual cues, whereas stability derives from the chronic accessibility of significant-other representations. Relational selves function in if–then terms (W. Mischel & Y. Shoda, 1995), in which ifs are situations triggering transference, and thens are relational selves. An individual’s repertoire of relational selves is a source of interpersonal patterns involving affect, motivation, self-evaluation, and self-regulation. The nature of the self has long perplexed and intrigued scholars across a broad spectrum of academic disciplines. In psychology alone, well over a century of inquiry has translated into a virtual explosion of theory and research in recent decades, especially in social psychology, all aiming to chart the contours of the self. Sharing this aim, we propose an interpersonal social– cognitive theory of the self that draws on theory and research in social cognition, personality psychology, and clinical psychology. Our central argument is that the self is relational— or even entangled— with significant others and that this has implications for selfdefinition, self-evaluation, self-regulation, and, most broadly, for personality functioning, expressed in relation to others. The theory clearly subscribes to the long-standing view that the self is fundamentally interpersonal (e.g., James, 1890). Indeed, we maintain that an individual’s overall repertoire of relational selves, stemming from all his or her relationships, is a major source of the interpersonal patterns that the individual enacts and experiences in the course of everyday interpersonal life—whether at work, at play, or in therapy. The proposed theory focuses on the ways in which the self is related to specific other individuals—namely, the significant oth

The Relational Self: An Interpersonal Social-Cognitive Theory

This research used an idiographic method to examine the proposition that significant others are mentally represented as well-organized person categories that can influence social perception even more than representations of nonsignificant others, stereotypes, or traits. Together, Studies 1 and 2 showed that significant-other representations are richer, more distinctive, and more cognitively accessible than the other categories. Study 3 replicated the accessibility data and gauged inferential power by indirectly activating each category in a learning trial about a fictional person and then testing recognition memory. The results showed that participants made more category-consistent false-positive errors about targets who activated significant others vs. any other category. This constitutes the first experimental demonstration of transference and has implications both for social categorization and for basic personality processes.

"Do I know you?" The role of significant others in general social perception.

Self-knowledge and social inference: I. The impact of cognitive/affective and behavioral data.

Based on an information-processing model of transference and a recent experimental demonstration of transference, defined in terms of “biased inference and memory” (Andersen & Cole, 1990), the present research examined the transfer of affective responses to a new individual, as in schema-triggered affect (Fiske, 1982). Using idiographic stimulus-generation procedures and a nomothetic experimental design, we exposed subjects to a description of a new, unknown person, allegedly seated next door. The description resembled either a positively or negatively toned significant other from the subject's own life or from another subject's life. As predicted, and replicating previous work, subjects misremembered the target person as having more representation-consistent features when the target resembled their own significant other rather than someone else's. Moreover, and also as predicted, subjects transferred more representation-consistent affect to this same target person. The data are discussed in terms of conceptions of transference and basic aspects of social cognition.

Transference in Interpersonal Relations: Inferences and Affect Based on Significant‐Other Representations

A theoretical distinction is made between trait categorization in person perception and categoriza-tion by means of well-articulated, concrete social stereotypes. Three studies test the prediction thatsocial stereotypes are both more associatively rich and more distinctive than are trait-defined catego-ries. In Study I, subjects sorted adjectives related to extroversion and introversion. A cluster analysisusing similarity measures derived from the sorting indicated that distinct social stereotypes wereassociated with each trait. This supports and extends earlier findings (Cantor & Mischel, 1979). InStudy 2, subjects generated attributes of the trait categories and stereotypes that emerged in Study1. More nonredundant attributes, especially visible features, were listed for the stereotypes than forthe trait categories. Study 3 elicited the explicit associative structure of traits and related stereotypesby having subjects rate the association between a series of attributes (derived from the responses inStudy 2) and each category label. Results showed that social stereotypes have distinctive featuresthat are not shared with the related trait category, whereas trait categories share virtually all oftheir features with related stereotypes. The implications of the trait/stereotype distinction for socialinformation processing are discussed.Substantial research has shown that the layperson assignsother individuals to social categories by means of implicit theo-ries of personality and uses these categories to predict potentialbehaviors, emotional reactions, personality attributes, atti-tudes, and values (Cantor & Mischel, 1979; Rosenberg & Sed-lack, 1972; Schneider, 1973; Wegner& Vallacher, 1977). In thisresearch, we contrast two types of representations used in socialcategorization, both of which can be observed in everyday life.First, people frequently use trait concepts to describe the essen-tial qualities of others. They may characterize people as tough,emotional, bright, or boring, for example, and in so doing as-sume that these traits have predictive power. In a second formof social categorization, people may explicitly categorize othersby thinking of them as members of a larger group. Such groupsoften bear a specific, socially shared label, such as redneck ordo-gooder, and they may be based on a number of features, in-cluding occupations and belief systems, as well as personalitytraits. These concepts are essentially well-articulated social ste-reotypes that are associated with a variety of highly visible char-acteristics, such as physical features, typical overt behaviors,and demographic identifications, in addition to relatively invisi-ble characteristics such as beliefs and internal experiences.Trait terms, in principle, designate single attributes that vari-ous kinds of people may possess. We propose on this basis that,considered in isolation, a given trait concept should not be veryWe would like to thank Deanna Bernstein, *Valerie Cathcart, and Su-sanna Perkins for their help in conducting this research.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to SusanM. Andersen, who is now at the Department of Psychology, New TforkUniversity, 6 Washington Place, 4th Floor, New York, New York 10003,or to Roberta L. Klatzky, Department of Psychology, University of Cali-fornia, Santa Barbara, California 93106.predictive because the individuals with this attribute may varyin a number of predictively important ways. By contrast, a per-son category representing a group of people who share manyattributes, behaviors, and attitudes should be predictive of thosevery features. In other words, trait categories should be sparsean d nonpredictive, wherea s social stereotype shoul be infor-mative and rich.Our view of trait-defined categories and social stereotypescan be undersood within the context of network approaches toknowledge representation (Anderson & Bower; 1972; Collins Q Higgins, Rholes, & Jones, 1977; Srull & Wyer,1980; 'Wyer & Carlston, 1979). In a network model, conceptualrepresentations, or nodes, are connected to one another bymeans of associative links, including connections between attri-butes and objects (e.g., soft-bed). In this terminology, we sug-gest that traits are linked by attribute-objective links to a num-ber of distinct stereotypes (and to a number of distinct individu-als). By contrast, stereotypes have object-attribute links notonly to traits but to many other types of features, includingovert behaviors and physical characteristics. Retrieval of a ste-reotype provides access to these features for purposes of socialprediction. Retrieval of a trait, on the other hand, is less predic-tive, both because its connections to other attributes are indi-rect and because the stereotypes with which it is linked are di-verse.Support for the notion that social stereotypes carry the bur-den of social prediction comes from a number of studies outsideof the trait domain. For example, it has been suggested that ste-reotypes such as housewife, mother, or temptress are embeddedwithin the category defined by woman (Ashmore & DelBoca,1979; Deaux & Lewis, 1984) and that a category defined onlyby sex may be too inclusive and abstract to be truly effective insocial prediction (e.g., Deaux & Lewis, 1984; Hamilton, 1981;235

Susan M. Andersen

Papers

The Relational Self: An Interpersonal Social-Cognitive Theory

"Do I know you?" The role of significant others in general social perception.

Self-knowledge and social inference: I. The impact of cognitive/affective and behavioral data.

Transference in Interpersonal Relations: Inferences and Affect Based on Significant‐Other Representations

Traits and social stereotypes: Levels of categorization in person perception.